Director: Erle C. Kenton
Cast: Boris Karloff, Lon Chaney, Jr., John Carradine, J. Carroll Naish
Have I Seen it Before: As with nearly the entire canon of Universal Monsters, I marched through an entire box set of the films a number of years ago, just before I started these reviews.
Did I Like It: There’s a pulpy quality to these later Universal horror films whose charms can’t quite be denied. It also gives the pretext for what would one day become Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948), one of the great films not just of the series, but of all time. Each of the individual properties in the Universal Horror canon have maybe grown beyond the point where they could sustain their own films, so we engage in big-time meetups. At the time, it was the province of B-movies. Now, it’s one of the governing commercial principles of the movies.
This film is slight, befitting its status, but there are charms beyond just the the idea of a monster mashup which keep this individual film lively. Karloff is here, which is good, but he’s sadly (if understandably) not playing Frankenstein’s Monster. The most ubiquitous version of the monster is not actually from Karloff’s depiction of the character in Frankenstein (1931), Bride of Frankenstein (1935), or Son of Frankenstein (1939), but instead Glenn Strange’s portrayal here and throughout the rest of the series. It’s one of those strange bummers of film history—and this film in particular— which I wished I didn’t know.
Oddly enough, the cell-animated bats used for one of Dracula’s (Carradine*) other forms are—while not good—somehow better than the dangling puppets used all-too regularly during Lugosi’s original film.
*We thankfully don’t have to suffer through Chaney’s mumbling attempts at the Count from Son of Dracula (1943) from a year prior. Chaney sticks to The Wolf Man, what he does best.