House of Frankenstein
Reviewed by Edward Larsen Terkelsen

USA, NR, 71 m, 1944
Directed by Erle C. Kenton. Stars Boris Karloff, Lon Chaney, Jr., John Carradine, et al.

If I were to carry on about how “The Dynamic Scooby-Doo Affair” lacks the gravity and artistic boldness of The Dark Knight, you’d probably assume that my mind has been scorched by Joker venom. Well, I can’t help but think that a similar fate has bechanced those Frankenphiles who piss and moan about how House of Frankenstein isn’t in the same league as The Bride of Frankenstein. It’s nuts to weigh one against the other: The Bride of Frankenstein is an exemplary cinematic achievement on the order of Citizen Kane or A Woman of Paris, whereas House of Frankenstein is a B-grade monster rally—the stuff of Saturday matinees. Granted, both titles belong to a series that came out during Universal’s golden age of horror, and while there’s an effort—however slight—to uphold continuity, the films’ objectives are so clearly different that only a saphead could get them mixed up. If you take House of Frankenstein on its own silly terms, it’s a lot of fun, but if you’re expecting something evocative of James Whale’s grand productive days, you’re bound to go off like ol’ Bolt Neck when somebody waves a torch in front of his face.

House of Frankenstein picks up where Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man left off and ends where House of Dracula begins. Boris Karloff, who played the monster in the first three Universal Frankenstein pictures, at long last returns to the franchise, but this time as the mad, mad, mad, mad scientist, Dr. Gustav Niemann. Doing time for attempting to transplant a human brain into a dog’s head, Niemann is fortuitously sprung from Neustadt Prison after a crack of lightning somehow reduces the walls around him to so much rubble. With his hunchbacked helper, Daniel (J. Carroll Naish), in tow, Niemann heads for Reigelberg, home of Vogel Hussman (Sig Ruman), one of three former colleagues whose testimonies were instrumental in sending Niemann up the river. As they brave their way through a furious downpour, Niemann and Daniel come upon Professor Lampini’s Chamber of Horrors, a sort of traveling freak show, which has skated into a ditch. After helping Lampini (George Zucco) literally get his show back on the road, the waterlogged creeps are given a ride and treated to a look-see at Lampini’s most prized possession: the skeletal remains of Count Dracula. When it’s discovered that Lampini’s tour doesn’t stop off in Reigelberg, Niemann orders Daniel to put the professor in the ground and redirect the caravan. My friends, this ain’t no upwardly mobile freeway; this is the road to hell. (On my mother’s eyes, I’ll never reference a Chris Rhea song again.)

Taking on the part of Lampini’s brother, Niemann has a grand time wowing Reigelberg’s resident chumps with his ill-gotten menagerie of creepy whatsits. Then he catches sight of Hussman (who’s now serving as the town’s burgomaster) and gets an idea: He’ll free Dracula from “the limbo of eternal waiting” and use him to slurp the life out of the snitch’s neck. (You might be thrown at first by the sight of John Carradine emerging from the coffin instead of Bela Lugosi, but Carradine brings his own style of sexy malevolence to the doings.) The gory (and cleverly staged) hit on Hussman puts the count in Dutch with Inspector Arnz (Lionel Atwill, who seems to have forgotten that his character had a prosthetic arm in Son of Frankenstein), and this leads to an exciting carriage race through the foggy woods. But as is the lot of all wayward vampires who stay out past their bedtime, the sun sneaks up on Dracula and reduces him once again to a pile of bones. Dracula’s untimely exit will disappoint some; he’s never given a chance to cross paths with the Wolf Man or Frankenstein’s monster. But House of Frankenstein isn’t so much a monster mash-up as it is an anthology. I, for one, dig the episodic structure here; it permits each horror icon to have his moment in the sun (though admittedly that doesn’t work out so well for our favorite Transylvanian bloodsucker). Niemann’s town to town search of the men that did him wrong is House of Frankenstein’s wraparound story—its connective tissue, if you will.

Hoping to claim the late Dr. Frankenstein’s account on how he brought the dead back to life, Niemann and Daniel venture to what’s left of Frankenstein’s castle. There, beneath the ruins in an icy cavern, they discover the frozen bodies of the Wolf Man/Larry Talbot (Lon Chaney, Jr.) and Frankenstein’s monster (Glenn Strange). Niemann somehow gets it in his head that a slavering werewolf and an imbecilic hulk would be just the right candidates to help him locate Frankenstein’s records, so he and Daniel put together a bonfire and thaw them out. But when the Wolf Man melts away and his long-suffering human host reemerges (in clothes that are inexplicably dry and fussily pressed), Talbot curses Niemann for releasing him from his frosty tomb. (It is a rare actor who can play a tortured soul as well as Chaney.) So, Niemann, that scheming crud, promises to take away Talbot’s need to bark at the moon by fixing him up with a new brain, but only on the condition that he tells him where Frankenstein’s files are hidden. Talbot must be too anxious to rid himself of his inner beast to stop and realize that if Niemann replaces his brain, he’ll cease to be Larry Talbot. Needless to say, the science in this flick is as sloppy as a gaggle of Huts at an all-you-can-eat buffet. And as if there wasn’t already enough lunacy on parade here, Daniel falls hump over heels for a lovely gypsy girl (shades of The Hunchback of Notre Dame), but she has eyes for Talbot, leading to one of the oddest love triangles this side of Mia and Woody and Soon-Yi.

The final stop on Niemann’s long day’s journey into fright (my feeble nod to Cryptie) is the town of Visaria. There he plans to square things with Strauss (Michael Mark) and Ullman (Frank Reicher), both of whom served as witnesses for the prosecution at his trial, by using their body parts in a recreation of Frankenstein’s most infamous experiment. One look at Niemann’s to-do list confirms that he’s as crazy as a shithouse rat: 1) Take Ullman’s brain and put it in the Frankenstein monster (which means nothing can stop Ullman from squashing Niemann like a bug); 2) Take the Wolf Man’s brain and put it in Strauss (which means Talbot will be free of his body but not of his curse, and considering Strauss’s age, he’ll be a far less sprightly werewolf); 3) Take the monster’s brain and put it in Talbot (which means the monster will still be as dumb as a post, but as long as he keeps his yap shut, he’ll be able to knock boots with the gypsy girl). What’s even more galling than House of Frankenstein’s flagrant disregard for logic is that Frankenstein’s monster isn’t allowed to start busting things up until the last five minutes of the show. Of course, he and everybody else have their toes turned up before the curtain falls, but that doesn’t stop them from reuniting in House of Dracula. (Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein would follow that one up a few years later, but with Lugosi finally reprising his role as Dracula.) 

Erle C. Kenton, who also helmed the equally underrated Ghost of Frankenstein, directs this ghoulish get-together with surprising panache. He gets a lot of help from George Robinson’s black-and-white photography, which is absolutely first-rate. Robinson’s use of light not only intensifies the exquisiteness of John B. Goodman and Martin Obzina’s set designs (particularly that arctic cave), but it adds depth to scenes that often don’t have any. I think the only thing that keeps House of Frankenstein from becoming as revered as its prequels is Edward T. Lowe’s needlessly busy script—there’s enough stuff in it for two or three films. Still, this is one house party that no horror fan should skip.   

September 3, 2009

© Copyright 2009 by Edward Larsen Terkelsen. All rights reserved.