It's Monday Halloween Countdown Mayhem 2013 with Tabonga, here at The Dungeon!.. What a killer feature this was in 1957, kickin' butt with Christopher Lee in a seminal Frankenstein monster role and Peter Cushing as Frankenstein himself, and, written by my favorite horror writer, Jimmy Sangster. Jimmy had just written X: THE UNKNOWN and would go on to pen HORROR OF DRACULA, THE REVENGE OF FRANKENSTEIN, BLOOD OF THE VAMPIRE, THE CRAWLING EYE, JACK THE RIPPER, THE MAN WHO COULD CHEAT DEATH, THE MUMMY, THE BRIDES OF DRACULA, THE NANNY and many more...
Eegah!! sent over a soundclip from this great flick for us,
sooooo, you can push the big red
'GO' button there next to the eyeballs in a jar,
NOW, Ralphie The Tarantula! Here's our audio offering for...
THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN!
The story begins with Victor Frankenstein close to being executed for murder, he wants the priest to listen to his story about what led to his predicament...
It all started when he was just a little guy, and, how he met his mentor in medicine, Paul Krempe. He goes on to tell about the time they paid grave robbers to steal a body for them...
Victor's all grown up now and likes the pleasures of the flesh, indeed. That's Valerie (HORROR OF DRACULA) Gaunt in the top still and Hazel (DR. BLOOD'S COFFIN) Court at bottom.
To aquire a brain for his monster, Victor pushes his friend Professor Bernstein through the rail where he lands head first on the floor! No matter how many time I watch this scene, I cannot figure out how they did it because it looks so damn real!!
Victor can't stop his infernal calculating, now, he must figure out exactly how to get his hands on that brain!
Unfortunately, the professor harbors some intense ill will towards the doctor!
After a brain adjustment, the monster escapes into the countryside where he murders an old blind man who taunts him with a stick. Victor and Paul catch up to the thing...
The monster's all messed up now and Victor's great triumph is a miserable failure!
Victor has to take the rap for his monster when Paul denies his story, cleverly leaving Victor just a madman to all the others!
So, this is his reward, his legacy goes to the grave with him!
4 comments:
more cushing for the pushing!
What always gets me about Frankenstein pushing the professor off a balcony is that he does it to steal his brilliant brain for the monster. You'd think, if the brain was what he wanted, that he'd have tried a method of murder not involving massive brain damage. Suffocation? Strangulation? Stabbing through the heart? But no, he bashed in his brain. Later, when the monster turns out to be brain damaged, he blames his assistant for smashing the glass jar it was in and getting glass slivers into the brain. "That's your handiwork, Paul." I'm sure the glass slivers didn't do the brain any good, but that brain was useless as soon as it crashed head-first into a marble floor and got smushed.
And then there's this: He's telling the story to try to prove he's innocent and shouldn't have his head chopped off. (Another better way to kill someone whose brain you want to steal.) But his story includes him confessing to murdering the professor. As exculpatory evidence, it's a woeful farce.
"I didn't kill the maid I knocked up. I killed the professor. Get a clue, Father. I merely locked Justine in a room with a homicidal monster so it would kill her for me and get the bitch off my case. (Probably after it raped her.) Is killing an inconveniently pregnant girl friend a crime now too? Oh. It is? Oops. Okay, Chop off my head."
I have to agree with Zillagord, because for a movie so many of us are very attached to, it does have a lot of "plot holes" (we just don't seem to care).
One of my problems isn't actually a plot hole, but I've never liked the cold way the priest talks to Victor. Maybe he isn't actually a prison chaplain and isn't used to sitting in cells with convicts, but I always wish he HAD been like one of those "warm" prison chaplains you see in a lot of other movies.
This was the first horror movie Da-da saw as a kid where he really felt sorry for the monster; Christopher Lee does an *awesome* acting job with no lines, a testament to his talent.
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