Sunday, June 14, 2020

The Midnight Horror Review - Frankenstein and the Monster From Hell (1974)



There’s nothing better to do on a Saturday night than watching a Hammer Horror flick!

I fell in love with the world of Hammer when I was a teenager in the mid-1990s, a time when TNT and AMC aired classic movies. I’m not 100% for sure what was my first Hammer movie, but my two favorite series were Dracula and Frankenstein

Between 1957 and 1974, Hammer Films made seven Frankenstein feature-films with six starring the great Peter Cushing as Baron Victor Frankenstein, a mad doctor determined to create 'life' by piecing together corpses. Frankenstein and the Monster From Hell marked the last installment. It ignored the previous entry, The Horror of Frankenstein, which is a remake of The Curse of Frankenstein.

Frankenstein and the Monster From Hell centers on Simon Helder (played by Shane Briant), a young doctor who gets arrested and sentenced to five years in an insane asylum for stealing corpses. Upon his arrival, he meets the asylum’s doctor - Dr. Carl Victor (played by Cushing), who looks oddly similar to the supposedly dead Baron Frankenstein. 

Spoiler Warning: It turns out Dr. Victor is Dr. Frankenstein. He had escaped death (again) at the end of Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed and somehow convinced the perverted asylum director to let him continue his experiments. After learning of Simon's surgical talents, Frankenstein enlists his help in transplanting a professor's brain into the grotesque body of a killer (played by David Prowse).


Final Thoughts

Hunting for something to review for tonight's post, I stumbled upon Frankenstein and the Monster From Hell on Hulu. I haven't seen the film in nearly twenty years. The plot follows the basic Frankenstein formula. This is one of the last good Hammer flicks before their quick downturn in the late 1970s.

The acting from the entire cast is topnotch. For me, the standout is the gorgeous Madeline Smith, who plays Angel.

The outstanding sets give the film that classic Hammer gothic vibe. The creature effects are weird. The makeup for the creature's face is great, but you can easily tell the body is just a suit that resembles a sasquatch instead of a man. Yes, it's goofy, but it's also creepy.

Overall, I had a blast re-visiting Frankenstein and the Monster From Hell.

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