My Review of House Of Frankenstein (1944)

 

Written by Edward T. Lowe

Directed by Erle C. Kenton 

Larry (re Frankenstein's Monster): "He wanted life and strength. I wanted only death. Yet, here we are."

For Halloween, I'm giving a double bill of crossover events from the Universal Monsters and I'll admit, while they're not among the best movies in the bunch, they're also not lacking their moments. 

The funny thing was that both movies seemingly put a certain monster centre but the monster in question didn't have as much screentime as you'd hope for them to have. In fact, Frankenstein's monster (Glenn Strange) only popped up towards the second of this film.

The first half focused on mad scientist Dr. Gustav Niemann (Boris Karloff) and his hunchback henchman, Daniel (J. Carrol Naish). They managed to escape from a prison and then found themselves assisting a travelling freak show. The real show being led by Professor Lampini (George Zucco). It didn't take long for Niemann to betray Lampini either.

On top of that, Niemann also managed to revive Dracula (John Carradine) in order to get revenge on Burgomaster Hussman (Sig Runan). Dracula however found himself fixated on Hussman's granddaughter-in-law Rita (Anne Gwynne), much to her husband, Carl's (Peter Coe) displeasure. Throw in some death and the Dracula bit was hastily paused to get to the rest of the story.

Niemann and Daniel encountered gypsies with the latter being smitten by Ilonka (Elena Verdugo) but she didn't reciprocate his feelings. Instead she was in love with the new unfrozen Wolf Man (Lon Chaney Jr) as the latter found himself drawn into Niemann's schemes.

As for Frankenstein's monster, he got revived very late in the movie, killed Daniel after the latter attempted to murder Niemann and then walked into quicksand. There's a tragic romance/mutual killing between Ilonka and the Wolf Man but it's rather unsatisfactory in it's execution.

- A sequel, titled House Of Dracula was released several months after this movie. Most of the cast in this returned for it.

- I got to admire that Lon Chaney Jr consistently played the Wolf Man while Dracula and Frankenstein's monster actors kept changing.

- Edward T. Lowe previously wrote the scripts for The Hunchback Of Notre Dame (1923) and The Vampire Batman (1933).

- Chronology: Mostly taking place in Visaria, following the events of Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man. 

House Of Frankenstein isn't a bad start to the two part crossover events but it may disappoint you if you were hoping for more of Frankenstein's monster or even Dracula, who was killed off midway through. It also didn't really do anything new with the Wolf Man and neither will the next one.

Rating: 6 out of 10