Director: Terence Fisher
Date Watched: 10-15-2024
Where: Alamo Drafthouse Lakeline, Austin, TX
Rating: 6/10
I grew up in the days before cable TV or VCRs, or at least before we poor folks could afford such luxuries, which meant our TV had 5 channels to choose from. One of them, the local non-network station, ran a show called Creature Features every Friday night, and I watched it religiously. The fare was hit or miss, and whenever a Frankenstein or Dracula movie was scheduled, it was always a disappointment when it was one of the Hammer films rather than the Universal originals.
I last saw The Curse of Frankenstein on Creature Features sometime in the late ’70s, when I was around 7 or 8 years old. Watching tonight, with my sons, ages 6 and 8, was fun. I noticed that they weren’t as engrossed in the film as they had been when they saw the Karloff Frankenstein films, but the scene where Christopher Lee tears off his bandages and throttles Peter Cushing did cause the 6-year-old to leap from his seat and bound into my lap in fear. I don’t think anything in the Universal films frightened him nearly that much.
The films, I must say, still fail to live up to the quality of their American predecessors. The Eastmancolor is vivid and gorgeous, and the film is bloodier and scarier, but its less…. atmospheric? It’s as hard now as it was when I was a child to put my finger on it, but it falls short, and isn’t as memorable, or as eerie. It’s certainly not bad by any stretch. It held my interest, and that of my sons. It’s just not as good.
Cushing’s Dr. Frankenstein is far more immoral than was Colin Clive’s. Where Clive was fascinated by the science, and acted out of a sense of wonder tempered by horror at what he’d done, Cushing is just plain evil. He murders people without a thought in order to pursue his experiments, and seems to have no moral compass whatsoever. He’s a full-on psychopath, which detracts from the film. His monster, meanwhile, is a cypher. We feel nothing for him. He’s there to attack, and to be killed. Missing is the pathos that made Karloff’s creature so fascinating. Both the doctor and his monster are without remorse, and the audience is left with no one to really root for. The best we have are Paul and Elizabeth, neither of whom is at all fleshed out or interesting.
In the end, it’s little more than bloody mayhem, but still somewhat fun bloody mayhem.
