If you want to be a stickler for details, technically, this isn’t the fifth Frankenstein movie. And by “technically” I mean absolutely, factually, the fifth. It’s the sixth. But #5 was Frankenstein vs. Wolfman, and for this sequence I chose to do the first 5 classic Universals that just had Frankenstein in the title.
Which is a weasely way of saying I messed up, but I thought the vs. cop-out came later. Ah well. This one has Boris Karloff, but he doesn’t play the Monster; he’s a Mad Scientist who’s escaped from jail with his assistant, who naturally has a hunchback. It was the law in those days. (If you weren’t Mad, but merely Peeved or perhaps an Irritable Scientist, you could get someone who stood erect but tended to slouch.) The Dr. and his Hunch come across a traveling show that just happens to have this item in its catalog of horrors:
Naturally, it’s the real thing; could there be any doubt? The owner of the bones is swiftly killed for his prize, and – well, maybe swiftly isn’t word for it.
Talk about telegraphing your strangulating.
The Dr. and Hunch take on the guise of the traveling showmen, with Hunch acting all miserable about his costume:
It’s so you! NO IT’S NOT YOU’RE JUST HUMORING ME MASTER
It’s only a matter of time before they bring Dracula back to life. Having been asleep for a while, Dracula did not know they cancelled Firefly and does not take the news well:
It’s John Carradine, and he has the exact expression of a guy who was in the next door room over in college, and had a king-hell acid freakout:
Doesn’t take long to get Drac off the stage, though; he’s hunted and exposed to the sun, and it’s crackle crackle scream for him. On to the next batch of monsters, then! This is a Frankenstein movie, after all. Dr. and Hunch find an ice cave -
and like all ice caves in the Carpathian mountains, it contains the entombed bodies of Frankenstein AND the Wolfman. It’s BOGO day in Monsterland. They’re unthawed, and the mad Dr. sets about doing . . . .something or other. Your basic terrorizing / experimenting / tempting God routine. I’ll be honest: this isn’t the scariest Frankenstein ever. There’s a touch of Herman Munster in him:
Meanwhile, the Wolfman goes on a killing spree, annnnnd . . . . cue the villagers!
Universal must have had these guys on retainer. The Hunch gets peeved at the Dr for not giving him a non-hunch body – yeah, like that was going to happen; ever read the union rules? – and the Monster watches their fight in alarm:
Stop! I hate when you guys fight!
Eventually he throws the Hunch out the window and takes the doctor to the swamps, where his lack of knowledge about the terrain leads him straight into a bog. Glub, glub, aw crap, glub glub.
You’d think the villagers would haul the Monster out of the bog, shoot him, saw him into pieces, burn them and mix the ashes with concrete, but no. Well, that’s the last we’ll see of him, as we said five times before!
I’m leaving out a subplot about a gypsy girl who falls in love with the Wolfman, and the anguish this causes Hunch. But the Hunch is great – in fact everyone’s pretty good, except for Lon Cheney, who expresses sorrow and despair by looking slightly less wooden than previously. Even though it throws all the lads into the mix, and seems confused about having a coherent plot, it’s fun, and has more crackle and skill than “Ghost Of.”
