[Once
again I'm going to attempt to do a horror(ish) movie review a day for
the entire month of October. I've done this the last few years on The
Cleveland Movie Blog. Most of the time I succeeded (usually with the
help of a few other writers). Other times I didn't. We'll see if I can
pull it off this year.]
For a film titled THE
EVIL OF FRANKENSTEIN, Peter Cushing’s amoral Baron is uncharacteristically
heroic here. Apparently that’s because Hammer Films, the makers of the
Frankenstein films starring Cushing, had entered into a distribution deal with Universal
Pictures about this time. That allowed them to make a Frankenstein film more in
line with Universal’s classic take on the monster, right down to the props in
the Baron’s lab and a more Karloffian, square-headed monster.
That’s not to say the Baron is totally a nice guy here. The
film begins with a terrified young girl witnessing someone steal the body of a
dead relative. She then runs screaming into the woods where she runs smack dab
into Frankenstein, who evidently didn’t want to get his own hands dirty. He
doesn’t harm her, but it’s clear he could care less about any emotional
scarring he’s caused. His work is too important.
