I can understand wanting to raise cattle or hogs the size of houses – that would provide food for everyone including the undocumented workers we’d have to get to work at the ginormous meat packing plants. What struck me a bit as fuzzy science though was the point of testing this out on a tarantula.

Sure, the tarantula was only the size of large dog when the crazy lab assistant who’d injected himself with the serum busted up the joint and let Tarantula loose into the desert, but why would we need them even that big? Were we going to start ranching our mega-cattle while cowpokes sat majestically astride their eight-legged steeds?

Then there’s the whole “trying it out on humans” phase of the experiment that made even less sense. If we’re trying to combat a food shortage problem, should we really be inventing stuff to make us grow into the 50 Foot Woman in a week?

John Agar (The Mole People, Invisible Invaders) is country doctor Matt Hastings. He’s an affable chap kept busy by all the medical needs of his small desert community though he doesn’t really get on with the local mad scientist, Dr. Deemer, who has a lab at his house 20 miles outside of town.

Dr. Matt complains to the sheriff that when he first met the doctor, he just didn’t feel very welcome. Well, you ought to see how welcome he suddenly makes himself once the sexy lab assistant named Stephanie (she goes by Steve) moves in out there! Dr. Matt also finds the bizarre death of Deemer’s research partner from acromegaly (it causes deformities) to be a good excuse to harass Deemer.

Shortly thereafter, the old rancher Andy is having himself a whole mess a trouble down on the back forty!

Dr. Matt and the sheriff arrive on the scene to discover the bones of some cattle and a mysterious pool of white liquid nearby. No one has any answers until another similar incident occurs and Dr. Matt takes a sample of the white goo to analyze. Only after tasting some for himself of course! And who could blame him? Dang stuff looked like cream! But why was it so icky then? Because it was tarantula cream!

A quick plane ride to the university at Phoenix to consult with their mysterious liquid expert reveals the slop to be venom thus setting the stage for a confrontation of staggering proportions between Dr. Matt and Tarantula!

Dr. Matt gets himself ready for his upcoming bout with Tarantula by watching an informational film at the university about tarantulas. See, he’s not just going to get up in Tarantula’s multi-eyed face chucking dynamite at him, he’s going to learn everything he can about Tarantula and then chuck dynamite at him!

What we get is Tarantula’s highlight reel. There he is fighting off his only predator, the super evil spider-wasp. And then you’ve got him punching a rattlesnake in the face! The big finish is when he eats some kind of desert beetle. It’s clear he’s sending a message to Dr. Matt and that message is “I like the taste of desert beetles!”

For his part, Tarantula gives an excellent, nuanced performance in this one. While Giant Spider from Earth Vs. The Spider was all about gimmicks like spinning giant webs, playing possum in the school gym, and hogging as much camera time as he could, Tarantula smartly subscribes to the less is more philosophy of acting.

Tarantula keeps his screen time limited and when he’s on screen, he owns it. He knows the value of striking fearsome pose on top of a mountain a night, of pulling sneak attacks on humans like trying to bury Dr. Matt and Steve in a surprise landslide and peeping Steve in Deemer’s house as she was getting ready for bed! Can you imagine how big the pool of white venom was he left that time?

As capable as Dr. Matt is, when you see Tarantula striding down the highway directly toward everyone, you have no doubt that it’s going to take more than a wad of dynamite to make Tarantula back down. And when Tarantula walks nonplussed through the smoke from the explosion, you realize that when Tarantula was staring down Dr. Matt, his millions of scary eyes were seeing only thing – desert beetle on hind legs!

So with all appearing to be lost, who do you go to for back up? Tarantula, allow me to introduce you to the United States Air Force and their jets which are loaded with napalm. Oh yeah, I almost forgot. The lead pilot? Some guy named Clint Eastwood. And he just started his own giant bug dead pool and put you on it.

© 2011 MonsterHunter

Instead of an interesting rampaging monster epic though, you have a movie hampered by its silly premise. Even worse, the monster hardly rampaged at all, making only a few off screen appearances until the very end when a guy in caveman make up starting running around the woods, chucking axes at park rangers and causing pretty gals to faint dead away.

Dunsfield University is one of those decent types of colleges where people like the clean cut and handsome Troy Donahue go to school and help out their professors unloading giant fish, while walking their dogs.

Professor Donald Blake has somehow managed to get Dunsfield U to purchase a big, prehistoric fish from Madagascar. This fish is the coelacanth and is famous for being a “living fossil” because it is thought to have not really evolved over the course of its 400 million year history. In fact it was thought extinct until some yokel caught one with his Zebco back in 1938!

The fish is packed in ice and some of it melts leaving a bloody mess on the ground which Troy’s dog Sampson promptly licks up. The next thing you know, Sampson is going after Blake’s girlfriend so Troy and Blake tackle the dog with a blanket and haul it off to the vet. In the process, the dog also bites Blake.

Sampson is kept in the lab for observation and Blake observes that Sampson has grown really big teeth. He thinks this is odd, but he never stops to wonder if he himself will soon be growing those really bitching fangs.

Blake also cuts his hand on the fish’s teeth. Then he puts his wounded hand into the bloody water that still remains in the tub he’s hauling this thing around in. Now, instead of acting like a disinfectant as you might expect bloody fish water to do, it actually has a different effect. It makes Blake a little warm, a little weak, and a whole lot primitive!

Every scientist who studies old time fish knows what happens next: monster rampage ending with the death of a hot chick! Blake’s girlfriend then brings the law down on his place when she finds him out back with the corpse of Nurse Molly. You know how jealous broads can get!

The cops suspect Blake, but the physical evidence is confusing because instead of the business card with Blake’s name laying across the dead girl, they find large fingerprints and big nasty footprints. They also find Blake’s tie clasp, but no one pays that too much mind and immediately settle on the whole “someone is trying to kill Blake and/or frame him for murder” gag.

Back on campus Troy and his girlfriend are making out behind a tree when suddenly, they get chased by a gigantic dragonfly!

The dragonfly pursues them across campus right to Donnie’s lab. Donnie realizes what’s going on and he opens the window to let the dragonfly in. (He wants to study it you know.)

No one notices that some blood from the dragonfly drips into this his pipe. One murdered cop later and the movie really begins to reek like the fish it’s obsessed with. How else to explain the sequence involving Donnie calling Madagascar and the head of the university being outraged that he has spent all this department money on a long distance phone call?

The Dean stomps over to see Donnie and there’s a big pow wow where Donnie goes on and on about how something in the plasma of the fish causes evolutionary regression and that it affects the person doing all the killing because the fish was treated with gamma rays to preserve it.

The idea that something in the blood of this fish could make another species regress makes absolutely no sense, but since gamma rays were mentioned who knows what could happen, right?

Dubious scientific analysis aside, the movie completely tanks at the end (though I did like that dude getting an ax in the face) when Donnie goes up to the mountains to study the effects of the fish blood.

He injects himself once, goes on a rampage killing the park ranger and harassing his girlfriend, then when the cops show up, he’s back to normal and injects himself again so that the monster can be destroyed.

Here’s a idea, Donnie: if you never inject yourself again with this slop, you won’t ever turn into the monster again.

A completely ludicrous ending that one suspects was done merely because all these monster on the loose movies end like that. Laughable science and consistently dimwitted behavior of the main character prevent this movie from being much of anything other than a very brief and not too accurate educational lesson about ancient bugs and fish.

© 2010 MonsterHunter

Later that night, an ill-wind wind blows through San Angelo and causes one of those dang lab accidents that usually result in a caveman being thawed out or a guy getting infected so that he turns into a human alligator or something. This time, the incident is frighteningly innocuous as a beaker of water gets tipped over and spilled onto Ben’s pet rock!

Ben hears the commotion in his lab and fearing that his pet rock has gotten loose, goes to investigate. Congratulations Ben! You have the honor of the being first victim of the murderously malevolent Monolith Monsters!

But what are they? Where do they come from? What do they want? What can stop their terrifying power? What is their terrifying power?

And with Ben out of the picture can anyone halt the deadly space stones from doing whatever it is they do? Well you don’t expect that the sleepy little desert town of San Angelo went into all this without having a spare geologist hanging around, did you?

That’s right! The Department of the Interior was way overstaffed in the late fifties and thus San Angelo sports two scientists. I’m guessing that that was just some type of cold war backup plan. You never want your sleepy desert town to be without a geologist and thus be ripe for the Fifth Column’s pinko picking!

Grant Williams (The Incredible Shrinking Man) plays geologist Dave Miller. He doesn’t leave much of an impression since most of what passes for action in the film revolves around him sitting around the lab trying to figure out what do with all these killer rocks.

There is a big “blowing up the dam” scene at the end of the film, but he has uncredited extra Troy Donahue and some other guys do that while he’s safely hanging around Main Street radioing the “blow it!” order.

In any case, Ben is dead and no one seems to know why. He’s all hardened and fused together and even worse, the lab is a total wreck!

Marty finally has his big story, but he can’t print it because it would cause a panic. You know, the kind of panic we all go into when we hear that a local geologist died in his lab during a freak rock accident.

Meanwhile, Dave’s schoolteacher girlfriend Cathy has a student that picked up a rock on a field trip and Dave and Cathy realize that she might be in danger and boogie over to her place, but it’s too late!

The place has been reduced to rubble and there’s lots of big black rocks everywhere. They also find her student and her arm is turning all dark and hard.

Next stop is L.A. where the world’s foremost expert on diagnosing victims of close encounters with killer space rocks reside. Just as we thought! The kid’s had all her silicon drained out of her. That usually wouldn’t be too big problem for most women in L.A. since they have high concentrations of silicon (or am I thinking of silicone?) in them, but for a little kid from a sleepy desert town, it could be deadly!

Once the kid is saved through an infusion of silicon, it’s up to geologist Dave to save the day. He gets the recipe that the L.A. doctor used to save the kid and declares that if that formula is a way to cure people then it must also somehow contain the answer of how to defeat the Monolith Monsters!

Of course it doesn’t work. Finally, once geologist Dave tries everything he can think of, including throwing his pen in disgust, he has a breakthrough.

The saline solution that the formula was suspended in when the L.A. doctor concocted it must be the answer! Why? Beats me, I’m no geologist. If it made any sense to us regular folks, then you wouldn’t need a high school diploma to become a government geologist now would you? Besides, can you really argue with a plan that involves blowing up a dam to flood some salt flats?

The film follows that whole “1950s monster invasion movie” template so precisely that it fails to realize that sometimes the monster you’re battling doesn’t really lend itself well to that particular outline. Let’s face it – the Monolith Monsters are just a bunch of crummy rocks. They have no personality and aren’t particularly terrifying – they don’t touch on some primal fear we have like with spiders or paranoia like with pod people. They’re rocks.

Is there anyone that walks by a rock and shudders thinking “thank goodness those things are so small and so immobile! I can’t even imagine what would happen if the rocks came alive!”

My idea of scary and/or entertaining isn’t hanging out at the lab while Dave and his professor buddy babble endlessly about silica interspersed with shots of rocks just laying ominously around. There are also shots of the rocks growing out of the ground, but they get only so tall, then collapse into little pieces and eventually start growing again.

If I was geologist Dave, I would have just gotten out the Shop-Vac and sucked those little bastards up, but I’m probably just silicon deficient or something.

© 2010 MonsterHunter

Jud (Leave it to Beaver‘s Hugh Beaumont) and Roger (genre vet John Agar of Tarantula among others) are doing some archeology at a site in Asia and discover some stone tablets that have all sorts of back story about Sumerians and how they were flooded and had to take an ark to some place not so wet.

An unfortunate side effect of them learning this is that it causes an earthquake. Okay, I’m not sure the two events are related, but I think there was a warning label on one of the stone tablets.

The earthquake not only wrecks the camp, it also manages to unearth an artifact that leads our boys to a big hole in the earth that in turn leads down to a couple of piss poor matte paintings.

One of Jud and Roger’s co-workers accidentally locates this hole by falling down it. Jud, Roger and a third guy (the designated casualty for later in the movie) go climbing down this gaping chasm and we are treated to hours and hours of shots of these guys pounding in metal clamps, knotting ropes, lowering themselves, and sweating it out while the ropes strain under Jud’s memorable buttocks, all the while descending down what looks like a few prop rocks in front of a black curtain.

After wandering around the caverns for awhile, they decide to sack out for the night. The mole people then come up from the ground, put bags on Jud, Roger and Third Guy’s heads and pull them beneath the ground to certain doom!

And by certain doom, I mean of course, to a lost city ruled by Sumerian albinos who have set up a bizarre society where the mole people are used to harvest big mushrooms and herd sheep or goats or whatever it was that they kept down there. They also believe that the light infused surface world is heaven and it doesn’t take long for Jud and Roger to claim that they are gods sent by Ishtar to just check up on how things are going down there.

In the meantime, Third Guy has gotten himself killed by a mole man, so Jud and Roger briefly mention that Third Guy had pressing business back in heaven and went on ahead of them. Oh, and the chief reason that everyone believes they are gods is because of Roger’s flashlight.

Having established the flashlight as the ultimate weapon keeping Roger and Jud alive, the movie is then forced into trying to wring suspense out of scenes where one of the albinos tries to steal it as well as a particularly silly scene that has Roger attempting to hold back the various underground bad guys with his flashlight only to squeal “the button’s jammed!”

“The button’s jammed?” What kind of flashlight is that? Dead batteries I understand. Burnt out bulb I get. Jud putting the batteries in backwards I would expect. But a jammed button?

It isn’t a busted flashlight that causes the downfall of our heroes however but those poisoned mushrooms that Roger’s new girlfriend unwittingly serves him. This sets them up for some good old fashioned human sacrifice. We are “treated” to this ceremony ahead of time when the ruler has three broads sent through a door with a bright light on the other side to their deaths.

The real torment though was suffered by the viewer as there is a pre-sacrifice dance number performed by a gal who looked slightly like one of those carnival pinheads and jumped around with all the dexterity of one of the mole people. Like every dance scene in all lost civilization movies, it’s long, boring, and totally unnecessary.

If you think some bad mushrooms are going to keep our boys down, then you don’t know much about the mettle of American archaeologists, because not only do they manage to avoid getting sacrificed, but they also find time to instigate a revolt amongst the mole people against the albinos and escape back to the surface!

This is the sort of 1950s monster movie that is required viewing for any self-respecting fan. Whereas a film like The Monolith Monsters is purely optional since it strictly adheres to the form without any real memorable moments, The Mole People has guys in mole suits and Hugh Beaumont!

The scenes where people get pulled underground by the mole people are good and creepy and if you’ve got a fetish for guys with humpedbacks and wearing rubber monster masks getting whipped, you won’t go away unsatisfied.

Sure, the movie treads precariously close to imbecilic territory when it posits a world where people can domesticate and raise farm animals underground, weave burlap there, and smelt metal in the same cave system, not to mention using captured mole people to hunt mushrooms, but while the human brain can become irritated with one dumb idea, it becomes drunk with giddiness where, like here, it is presented with an entire cheese platter full of them. Wholeheartedly recommended. (Though albinos may want to give it a skip.)

© 2010 MonsterHunter

Sure enough, Scott hangs around topside and soaks up all the rich, shiny, sparkly radioactivity. Six months go by and we’re back home with the Careys and Scott is concerned because his pants don’t fit like they used to and his shirts are too big. Scott goes to his doctor to find out what the problem is.

The doctor attributes all his weight loss to stress, though Carey says he hasn’t been stressing about anything other than his weight loss. Then the horror begins!

The doctor also informs him that he is about five feet nine inches tall! Like most really short and insecure guys, Scott insists that he has always been a strapping and manly six foot one, not a paltry and sissy five foot nine!

As Scott grows smaller, his attitude goes straight into the crapper. He also loses his job since no one wants to do business with a guy they might accidentally step on. Of course, today, his employer would have to make accommodations like having an itty bitty desk and wee little laptop computer for him or he would be in violation of the Americans With Disabilities Act. So you can see that while in today’s world an Incredible Shrinking Man would be protected, back in the good old days when women still put on the pearls to vacuum the living room, he was screwed.

Scott is feeling about three feet high (because he is!) and since he lost his job, he had to sell his story to the media and he then gets hounded by them since the entire world knows about his plight. The movie is surprisingly current in its portrayal of the feeding frenzy that results when he goes public with his story.

Scott gets fed up with it all and decides to go out and get some air. What follows is the hokiest part of the movie. He goes down the street and runs smack dab into a carnival, complete with bearded lady, fat chick, and midgets!

He can’t take it so he goes to the local cafe and sits down at a really big table in front of a really big coffee cup. While he’s nursing his cup of joe, who should walk in but this midget chick named Clarice.

This is really lame because it’s obvious that she isn’t a midget, but just a regular woman sitting at a big table with Scott. They should have gotten a real dwarf or orc or to play this part.

It really reeks when they’re both sitting on an over-sized park bench and she’s trying to give him a pep talk about how great it is to be short. (When you trip, you don’t have as far to fall so you don’t get hurt as much!)

Scott continues to shrink and eventually is about two inches high. This is great and you can see that his relationship with Lou has suffered since he has moved out of their house and into a doll house in the living room!

The remainder of the film focuses on Scott’s efforts to stay alive and somehow get back to Lou. This involves outsmarting a cat, a mousetrap, using nails as swords as well as a private little war between Scott and a tarantula with the stakes being life and death (and a moldy piece of bread).

The ending is surprising for these kind of movies and I’m not sure if I understood what happened since my grasp of the metaphysical comes solely from watching Billy Jack. Still, it was a good change of pace from most of the sci-fi flicks of the era.

A very satisfying experience that doesn’t really lay on the whole “atomic radiation is bad” angle like a lot of these movies. There weren’t any stilted scenes where characters bemoan how man has tampered with some law of nature and that there are things man isn’t meant to know. Scott just gets smaller and smaller and he does what he can to survive.

Grant Williams does a nice job portraying Scott’s shift from having a normal life to desperation and finally acceptance of his fate in a believable and moving manner. Throw in the good effects, the fun scenes with him battling everyday creatures with oversized props, and you have a film that entertains from start to finish.

© 2009 MonsterHunter

Well, he was afflicted by some type of disease that made him bumpy and humpy (see the review of The Brute Man for all the icky details) and he also had no acting ability, no screen presence, or any way to say his lines so that you could understand him, let alone believe what he was saying.

Luckily, the filmmakers realized what a gem they had on their hands and limited Rondo’s dialogue to very short sentences and phrases. Even with this abbreviated speaking role, you quickly come to the conclusion that the Creeper would have been a much more effective villain if he had been The Mute Creeper.

Marcel de Lange is the name of this sculptor who lives hand to mouth, mainly because his pieces are dreadful. Marcel though is one of those guys who thinks that all he needs to do is sell a sculpture and then he will be set for life.

It just so happens that he has been working on a piece for some guy with more money than synapses and the dude is coming over this very night to pick it up and pay Marcel handsomely for it, but he brings an art critic who kills the deal with a bad review.

Marcel heads to the docks to pout and contemplate suicide or whatever it is that artists that overestimate their own talent do once they realize they should have taken that factory job right out of high school. He looks down into the swirling water and what does he see? A flashback!

And not just any flashback, but a flashback of the scene we just saw! It was great. In case you happened to miss the first five minutes of the movie, they were going to catch you all up in minute number six.

Finally, he sees a body in the water and pulls out Rondo Hatton! We know that Marcel is a demented artist at this point, because anyone else would have thrown it back into the water, but he takes Rondo home and nurses him back to health!

They become friends and Marcel mopes around at dinner complaining about the column that art critic Holmes Harmon wrote making fun of him and the next thing you know, Rondo is outside killing prostitutes. I guess that was just to get his sea legs back under him, because it isn’t too long before he’s skulking over to HH’s newspaper office in the middle of the night.

After the Creeper dispatches Harmon, an artist named Steven who Harmon also gave bad reviews to is implicated in the killing. The police arranges with a reporter to bait a trap for Steven.

The plan is that the reporter will write a mean column about Steven. The reporter will then wait in his house until Steven shows up to kill him. This admittedly ingenious plan goes off without a hitch and the cops even manage to catch Steven trying to wring his neck, but the plan goes awry because the reporter wrote in his column that Steven stunk just like this sculptor named Marcel. Oops!

The Creeper strikes yet again thus inadvertently clearing Steven. Well, except for the attempted murder which Steve did do of course!

Steven’s girlfriend begins sniffing around Marcel. After managing to kill the wrong woman, the Creeper overhears Marcel threatening to betray him which leads to a particularly ugly falling out between the Creeper and Marcel.

House Of Horrors gets a little credit for trying to build a story that has more to do than just Rondo running around snapping spines, but unfortunately we get the old tale of the artist getting revenge on his critics.

That’s okay, but what is the deal with the Creeper? Just because he got pulled out of the water and saved by this guy, he feels obligated to kill on his behalf? But only when he’s not killing hookers on his own?

Another problem is the utter lack of information about who the Creeper is. Since all that information would be revealed to a breathless world the next year in The Brute Man, anyone who went to this movie must have been thinking “what is going on here?”

How is anyone supposed to care enough to bother with House Of Horrors since there is nothing compelling about the Creeper as he is presented here? There’s no motivation attributed to the Creeper, no reason for his fury and rage.

The movie relies solely on Rondo’s looks (or lack thereof) to define its monster, but in doing so it sacrifices any depth in his character that would have made this film more than the forgettable “killer on the loose” movie it was.

© 2009 MonsterHunter

In this episode, there isn’t really any thing that the viewer would call “inspired” and you can’t help but cringe at the way characters appear and disappear with little regard for good pacing. Once again Dracula is dispatched way before the movie ends in fairly bland fashion. The Wolf Man totally disappears from the action for the middle part of the movie and the Frankenstein Monster is animated for all of about three minutes in the closing part of the film.

Dracula (John Carradine) shows up at this doctor’s office/castle and tells him that he needs his help. At first he pretends to be someone other than Dracula and actually uses that silly Baron Latos name he came up with in the previous year’s House Of Frankenstein. I was impressed that they could keep that bit of continuity, yet completely fail to explain how Dracula was revived, how the Monster and the Wolf Man survived and how they all managed to turn up at the same doctor’s office together. (How’d you like to be in that waiting room?)

Being the man of science that he is, Dr. Edelman is skeptical of Latos’s claims that he’s a vampire, at least until Latos takes him down into the basement and shows him the Dracula brand coffin he somehow snuck into the house. Suddenly, Edelman is a believer and gets to work on culturing some molds in an effort to fix Dracula’s blood. It involves introducing a parasite into the blood to fight off some other parasites and some other cutting edge stuff that made you wonder if Dracula’s Blue Cross would cover it.

Another prospective patient, a very cranky Larry Talbot, appears. Lon Chaney, Jr. has once again slicked his hair back and screwed up his face in that expression of pathetic whining that we’ve grown to love over the course of the previous films the Wolf Man appeared in. Larry is demanding to see the doctor, but the doctor can’t see Larry right away. Larry gets huffy and runs out. With no help from the doctor forthcoming, he turns himself into the authorities so that he can be locked up before the full moon.

Dr. Edelman goes to the jail to check Larry out at the request of the police and even though he has just run smack dab into Dracula in his basement, he refuses to believe that Larry Talbot is a werewolf. Even when the moon is full, and Larry changes before his eyes, he still tries to diagnose it as a hyperactive gland or something more akin to gout than to being a straight up legendary monster!

Following an unsatisfactory meeting with Edelman, Larry escapes and jumps off a cliff into the ocean! Edelman rescues him in a cave and also finds the Frankenstein Monster. As soon as the Monster is lugged back to the secret lab, Edelman immediately sets out revive the dang thing. His sweet-tempered hunchback nurse convinces him not to do it though and we are struck with the realization that hunchback nurses are meddling fools!

Recognizing that since the mad doctor is such a pussy and that he’ll have to turn things up a notch, Dracula pulls the old switcheroonie on Edelman, dumping all his yucky blood into Edelman when Edelman was supposed to giving his goody two shoes blood to the vampire count!

This probably could be considered a bit a backfire since as soon as Dracula hits the stanky pillow in his coffin, Edelman hauls the coffin into the sun, cracks it open, and Dracula melts away, stunned that he has fouled out before the end of the game for the second straight movie! Drac’s blood though starts giving Edelman the business and it isn’t long before the doctor turns ashen and has an annoying lack of reflection in mirrors.

The blood also causes him to have hallucinations about the Monster and other things, which allows the filmmakers to fill out the 67 minute running time with some footage from Bride Of Frankenstein. I can’t really blame them. With six other movies behind them, they’ve already committed something like 457 minutes (over 7 and a half hours!) of Frankenstein mayhem to celluloid and it’s understandable if they thought that maybe everything interesting and/or important had already been filmed.

Edelman decides he really owes it to the Monster to revive him once more so that he can stumble around and allow the audience to shake its collective head at how much this character has crapped out in the last 10 or so years. It’s up to Larry Talbot to play the part of the angry mob and dispatch both the Monster (through the use of the fiery ending scene from The Ghost of Frankenstein) and Edelman.

Nostalgia-wise, it’s nice to see everyone one last time and by golly if you don’t actually get a little closure with Larry Talbot finally being cured of his lycanthropy. Carradine again is a standout and you’re sorry to see his storyline abruptly cut off. I guess they never did figure out how to work all the monsters into the same story at the same time. The fact that the Monster gets almost no screen time, and the Wolf Man makes two very brief appearances attests to the fact that the whole team-up concept looks good on a movie poster, but is impossible to carry off in a satisfying way.

In fact both of this and House of Frankenstein focused on the mad scientist in each film and used the monsters as simply set decoration. That’s okay, but all the action with the monsters seems terribly forced from their unexplained resurrections in each movie, to miraculously being all drawn to the same place, and then basically playing out the same story (experiments to cure the Wolf Man, scientists who go nuts and revive the Monster). Worth watching for Carradine and to say that you saw Lon Chaney with a mustache and cured of his hairy back.

© 2009 MonsterHunter

In fact, the movie is more like two mini-movies. The first movie details the escape of Dr. Niemann and his use of Count Dracula (John Carradine) in eluding a passel of angry villagers. The second movie is about what happens when Niemann comes home to Vasaria where the Monster and the Wolf Man still lie frozen in the ruins of the old castle from the end of Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man.

Dr. Niemann spends his time in jail shaking down guards for chalk and writing crazy formulas all over his prison walls. He dreams of doing Frankenstein’s experiments in creating life, but he dreams of doing it right. He and his hunchback pal Daniel take advantage of a thunderstorm to break out and encounter the great Lampini. Lampini is a one man traveling house of horrors, carting around various scary souvenirs from hick town to hick town. The centerpiece of his collection is the skeleton of Count Dracula.

Recognizing an evil business opportunity when he sees one, Nieman disposes of Lampini and restores Dracula to life so that he can kill some people for him. This all ends very badly for the Count when he gets involved in a horse and buggy chase through the countryside when the police realize what he’s up to.

Niemann takes off, fearing that Dracula is going to lead the authorities to him. He also shows Dracula that no good deed goes unpunished when he has the hunchback dump Dracula’s coffin out the back of the wagon causing Dracula to wreck his buggy and go flying down an embankment. The sun comes up and the Count’s fate is sealed thus ending his brief stay in this movie. Niemann merrily rides off into the countryside. Next stop: the village of Frankenstein!

Once in Frankenstein, they run into some gypsies and the hunchback saves a gypsy hussy from her pimp. Danny is sweet on her and she seems to be warm to him until she gets a gander at the big hump on his back. It’s pretty effective when Danny realizes that she’s just as shallow as you or I would be if a hunchback ever hit on us.

Danny asks Niemann if he can fix his body so that he could be hunky instead of hunchy. Sure, sure, Niemann says, now let’s go find those monsters! Niemann hopes that the monsters might lead him to Frankenstein’s notes. Doesn’t anybody do any of their own work anymore? All these movies involve people trying to copy Henry’s homework.

The Wolf Man and the Monster get thawed out and before the Monster’s ill-fitting sport coat can dry, Larry Talbot (Lon Chaney, Jr.) begins whining about his terrible fate. Because of the movie’s brief running time, Larry’s whining has to be fast and furious and every scene he has dialogue in contains either a complaint, a demand, or a plea all accompanied by his hangdog face. The gypsy hussy is immediately attracted to him, since women find pouty cry-babies who turn into homicidal animals at night irresistible. This drives Danny nuts and gives the movie a layer that has been missing from the series – the love triangle!

Do you love brain transplants? If so, your hypothalamus will positively throb with delight with what follows. Niemann kidnaps a couple of enemies and plans to put one of their brains into the Wolf Man so that he will know what it’s like to be a perpetual whiner. Then he’s going to transplant the Monster’s brain into the other dude for reasons that escape me. Somewhere along the line, the hunchback was under the impression that his brain was going to be transplanted into Larry Talbot, but that’s not going to happen and he gets mad and whips the Monster for some reason. Really, what could possibly go wrong? Except everything you could possibly imagine!

This one was actually as fun as Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man was supposed to be. Karloff’s last run in the series highlights things, his performance a breathe of fresh air. We finally get a mad scientist who is nuts to begin with, not some nerd who is only persuaded to go mad when the plot demands it! J. Carrol Naish is also very good as the much put upon hunchback and you actually feel some sympathy for a character for the first time in about four movies.

Chaney and Glenn Strange as the Monster phone it in as you might expect, both creatures reduced to one note performances, eliciting yawns from the viewer as well as wishes that Carradine’s Dracula might have been around a little longer. Niemann’s complicated revenge scheme will make your head hurt if you try to sort it out and the fact that most of the characters from the first part of the movie, simply disappear once the Dracula angle is finished give the movie an odd structure. It also demonstrates that it was no small feat to wring anything remotely entertaining from a series that at this time was in its sixth chapter. Still, this is probably the best of the last half of the series and certainly better than the finale that would follow, House of Dracula.

© 2009 MonsterHunter

This is really a sequel to The Wolf Man and as far as the Frankenstein Monster goes, he’s merely a supporting character. This means you get lots of scenes of Chaney reprising the Larry Talbot gimmick, which involves a lot of sweaty hyper activity as he alternately tries to convince everyone that he is a werewolf and bitches and moans about how awful he has it and why won’t somebody kill him? I should also add that at times, Lon resembles Shemp Howard.

Since this is a Universal horror movie, everything starts out with a grave-robbing scene. Two guys brteak into the Talbot crypt and get into Larry’s coffin. One of the guys takes a ring form Larry, then Larry grabs the guy and won’t let go. Later, Talbot is found in the street sleeping off his Wolf Man bender and he is transported to the hospital.

It is there that we are introduced to Dr. Mannering, a psychiatrist (later, he inexplicably turns into a mad scientist) who checks out Talbot. Talbot tells them who he is and where he’s from, but the official information is that Talbot died four years ago. Following an attack on a police officer that no one believes Larry was involved with, he escapes and goes in search of Maleva, the old gypsy whose son bit him and turned him into a werewolf.

Maleva displays the sort of evil cunning you would expect of an old gypsy and tells him to seek out Dr. Frankenstein for help. Following yet another attack, Talbot falls into the snowy ruins of the Frankenstein estate and locates the Monster frozen in a wall of ice. Talbot frees the monster and tells him that he needs Frankenstein’s secret diary so that he can read the notes about the experiments and find a way to finally be dead for good.

Right away you can see that this movie ignores the Frankenstein films that have gone before. When last seen, the Monster had Ygor’s brain and could speak, just like Ygor. He also was blind because of a blood incompatibility between Ygor and the Monster. This Monster shows none of the intelligence that was transplanted into it with Ygor’s brain. He can’t talk and only is able to point a lot in between grunts and howls, but he can see just fine. Anyway, as you might expect, the whiney Larry Talbot and the dimwitted Monster are unable to locate the doctor’s diary.

Dr. Mannering reappears and agrees to a questionable experiment that will supposedly drain the life out of both the Monster and the Wolf Man. I really don’t recall why the Monster went along with all this since he seemed to have an aversion to being killed in at least some of the sequels.

The script takes several liberties with common sense in this portion of the film. For one thing, Mannering is doing the big experiment the evening of a full moon. Why wouldn’t he set his alarm clock about an hour earlier so that he could drain the juice from Larry before he turned into the Wolf Man? The other problem arises when Mannering has all the cables connected up. He decides at the last instant that he can’t destroy the Monster and wants to see what that baby can do when fully charged, so he reverses everything, throwing a bunch of power into the Monster. Based on everything we know about Dr. Mannering, there’s no reason for him to behave this way, except that it provides a reason for the Monster to break free and tangle with the Wolf Man.

The Monster busts loose, Talbot turns into the Wolf Man, they roll around on the floor together and surprisingly the Wolf Man is much more spry than Lon Chaney’s doughy body would indicate! One wad of dynamite chucked from a villager later and a model of a dam blows up sending cupfuls of water crashing into a model of the castle, burying the two monsters inside.

Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man further cements Bela Lugosi’s and the Monster’s reputations as has-beens with this unmemorably generic performance. That could have been anyone under that make-up stumbling around like he had a corn cob up his butt.

The Monster has been completely stripped of any of the depth that made him an interesting character and he does little other than stand awkwardly around, periodically swinging his arms menacingly like the dumbest of flesh eating zombies. At least Larry Talbot still resembles the character he was in The Wolf Man, his plight making the film a little more interesting than the green paint-by numbers affair of some of the other sequels. There’s no real character development with the Wolf Man though as Larry is still crying about what’s happened to him and begs everyone else to fix it.

After The Ghost of Frankenstein, this sufficiently reinvigorated the series for two more films. The only thing left to do following this one was to add more monsters to future films and hope that Universal wouldn’t run out of ticket buyers before they ran out of monsters.

© 2009 MonsterHunter

In Karloff’s place is The Wolf Man‘s Lon Chaney, Jr. Lon is one of those guys who’s got that kind of face that always looks like he’s been perpetually wounded by life. That works to good effect when he’s portraying Larry Talbot in those Wolf Man movies, but it doesn’t mean spit when you’re trapped underneath Jack Pierce’s increasingly bad make up jobs. This go around, the make-up looked like a glorified mask, bereft of any ability to allow whomever is wearing to it to communicate anything, but the sleepy-eyed, constipated look that Lon was forced to wear the entire movie.

The film opens with whining villagers moaning about how the Monster and those rotten Frankensteins have caused their lives to be ruined. Due to the various rampages, tourism is down, there’s a crappy harvest, the high school football team lost sectionals again to Transylvania North and they want something done about it. You have to understand that when an angry mob of villagers demands action, they aren’t looking for a committee to be formed or a study to be commissioned, they’re looking to storm whatever spooky castle lies on the outskirts of town and they want to storm it now!

Despite being shot several times at the end of Son Of Frankenstein, Ygor (Bela Lugosi) returns none the worse for wear (he must have taken all those bullets in his hunchback) and is camped out in the castle near the sulfur pits where the Monster was last seen taking the Nestea Plunge.

And as if to prove that this third sequel will be just as horrid as most third sequels are, Ygor is using a horn in an attempt to coax the Monster out of the sulfur pits. Later Ygor is able to control the action of the Monster by playing the horn which is a pretty nifty idea. If Ygor was a snake charmer and the Monster was a gigantic serpent.

Ygor and the Monster escape travel to the town where Ludwig Von Frankenstein (Sir Cedric Hardwicke) has a thriving brain transplant practice. After the Monster gets thrown in the county jail for a dust up with some villagers, Ygor heads over to Frankenstein’s clinic and threatens to tell his daughter and the village about Ludwig’s family history which Ludwig is keeping from everyone unless Ludwig keeps the Monster at his clinic.

Recounting the events that follow would merely reek of gleefully piling on, but suffice it to say things take a turn for the idiotic when the ghost of Henry Frankenstein appears and tells Ludwig that he should transplant the bad brain right out of the creature and to be a good boy and finish his father’s work.

Ygor strikes a bargain with Ludwig’s assistant Dr. Bohmer (Lionel Atwill) that will put Ygor’s brain into the monster in exchange for Dr. Bohmer getting all the fame and recognition he deserves once the Ygor-Monster hybrid takes over the world or something.

Against all odds and common sense, it happens and Ygor’s brain goes into the Monster which results in Bela Lugosi’s voice being dubbed whenever the Monster speaks. Ludwig is aghast, an angry mob is formed and you can guess the rest.

At sixty-eight minutes the movie strains to fit all of its ludicrous angles into the film. The only reason this film isn’t a completely forgettable Universal Horror effort like The Mummy’s Ghost or The Invisible Man’s Revenge is the cast. Lugosi is on fire as the scheming Ygor and Cedric Hardwicke brings some restrained class to Ludwig (after the comparative histrionics of Basil Rathbone’s Wolf in Son Of Frankenstein).

The story though is so silly, even a dependable assortment of Universal regulars can’t salvage it. How can anyone take things seriously when Ygor is running around demanding that his brain be put in the body of this rotting monster? And how could any doctor be so dumb as to believe that somehow he will finally get the recognition he deserves by putting the brain of a maniac inside the body of beast made out of corpses? And Ludwig seeing the ghost of his father? The less said about that, the better.

More problems: the Monster isn’t scary or sympathetic. He’s just a crabby, dumb jerk. And why should I care about another Frankenstein brother who is alternately aghast at his family’s heritage and then jumps into it with both feet once he has a hallucination in the lab?

As with Son of Frankenstein, only Bela Lugosi’s Ygor makes it worth your while, but he’s only a supporting player and stands out precisely because the rest of the film is such hoary collection of recycled elements from previous Frankenstein films. (Brain transplants! Little girls in danger! A Frankenstein brother haunted by his family’s past! The Monster and Ygor seemingly destroyed, then revived, then destroyed again! Starring all the same people from the rest of our monster movies!)

This series enters purely “programmer” status with this effort and marks the last time that the Monster would go it alone. The rest of the Frankenstein movies are those “monster team-up” affairs where Bela Lugosi finally gets to play the Monster, but not Dracula, if that tells you anything about what’s to come.

© 2009 MonsterHunter