FRANKENSTEIN MEETS THE WOLFMAN (1943)

THE CREEPING BRIDE:

FRANKENSTEIN MEETS THE WOLF MAN was re-released by Realart in 1949 and frequently ran in movie theaters right up until its appearance on TV as part of the SHOCK! program beginning in 1957. It was most often paired with DRACULA'S DAUGHTER, but it turned up as well alongside THE MAD GHOUL, THE MUMMY'S CURSE, and THE MUMMY'S GHOST. FRANKENSTEIN MEETS THE WOLF MAN was also a familiar offering in those years at cinemas that ran late-night spook shows and kiddie matinees.

Daily Times-News, Burlington, NC, April 28, 1951

Hamilton [OH] Daily News Journal, March 16, 1957
That's not a bad way to spend a quarter on a Saturday afternoon...

Like GODZILLA VS. KING KONG (1962), the title alone would be enough to drum up excited anticipation for FRANKENSTEIN MEETS THE WOLF MAN; the prospect of seeing Frankenstein's Monster and the Wolf Man whale the tar out of each other almost certainly sold a lot of tickets. Maybe seeing it in a movie theater with a lot of rambunctious kids hopped-up on refreshment-stand goodies on a Saturday afternoon or with nervously giggling popcorn-munching teenagers on a date-night makes all the difference with this movie, but watching it by yourself on television only emphasizes its faults.

Lima [OH] News, February 14, 1959

(...still, I'd rather watch FRANKENSTEIN MEETS THE WOLF MAN on WTOL-Toledo on Saturday night's Shock Theater than WTVN-Columbus' option of ENEMY AGENT. Channel 10's mystery movie WHO IS HOPE SCHUYLER? [1942] is not so bad, though... )

I'm not sure who to blame for this messy, de-centered movie-- Curt Siodmak's script is sloppy, but maybe producer George Waggner forced some last-minute changes that account for the biggest disappointments here. Tom Weaver and the Brunas brothers explain in Universal Horrors that one of the major changes was the excising of all the scenes of dialogue between Béla Lugosi's Monster and Lon Chaney, Jr.'s Larry Talbot; in so doing, a lot of plot exposition goes missing (I don't know how many times I had seen the movie before I realized that the Monster was supposed to be blind from the previous Frankenstein film). It also explains many of the odd aspects of Lugosi's performance as the Monster-- let's give the guy the benefit of the doubt and say that the edited-out dialogue would've made him appear less bizarre in his acting than he seems in the pantomime version that was released. Editing out those scenes make this already Wolf Man-centered film even more so, raising the question as to why this wasn't called THE WOLF MAN MEETS FRANKENSTEIN. (That this film is included in Universal's 2004 "Legacy Series" DVD set for the Wolf Man rather than Frankenstein underscores this.)

The germ of the idea that Talbot is searching the ruins of Frankenstein castle for the means of death after being buried alive for four years is good and grim, and this should give the movie a pop-existentialist tang. But that gets crowded out by all the other threads of the story, none of which are given much development, such as the changes that the Baroness Frankenstein (Ilona Massey) goes through in the course of the film and, even more mysterious, the motivations behind Dr. Frank Mannering's (Patric Knowles) actions. (What's more highly compressed in this movie? Mannering's decision to give up his post in a Cardiff hospital to chase Talbot? His switch to completely believing Talbot's "Oh, but I'm a werewolf!" story after all rather than continuing to insist that it is a lycanthropic delusion? His love affair with the Baroness? His decision to become a monster-maker?)

In addition to the holes and confusion within the story itself, there are also problems with FRANKENSTEIN MEETS THE WOLF MAN being able follow the larger story-line arcs laid out in FRANKENSTEIN, BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN, SON OF FRANKENSTEIN, and THE GHOST OF FRANKENSTEIN. But that's really not worth squabbling about-- a couple weeks back in comments to my post on THE MUMMY'S HAND, the argument came up that the non-chronological showing of films in the SHOCK! package meant that viewers experienced these films as discrete, stand-alone stories that couldn't be tied to any sort of narrative continuity that carried from one film in the series to the next. And that's probably the only way to view FRANKENSTEIN MEETS THE WOLF MAN in the end.

What works best about this movie for me, though, are some of the sets in FRANKENSTEIN MEETS THE WOLF MAN which create such an iconic monster-movie mood when I see them. For example, the Hollywood gothic Llanwelly cemetery might be the best graveyard scene in the Universal horror movie canon. (By the way, does anyone know how Talbot got from the cemetery to Cardiff and how he got that nasty head wound in the first place?) I also groove on the Frankenstein ice caves and the burned-out ruined cellar laboratory. And even though it is such a hokey-looking miniature, I still always love the castle at the foot of the dam-- just seeing it conjures up the sheer thrill of watching this movie on TV despite all of the disappointments.

*****

Trailer, more ads, etc.