The Curse of Frankenstein Review

The Curse of Frankenstein Review

Medium: Movie

Release date: 5/2/1957

Review date: 9/24/2024

Score: 5/10

When the superhero movie genre exploded in popularity in the early 2010s and went on to singularly dominate the blockbuster cinema experience for multiple years, the previous two film genres critics pointed to as having gone through similar boom and bust popularity cycles were cowboy westerns, and monster horror movies. Inspired by the success of 1931’s “Dracula” film, a flood of other “monster movies” made their way into cheap cinemas worldwide, with many of those films being produced by the British Hammer Films Production, a production company founded in 1934 that released a number of films in multiple genres before pivoting hard to horror movies after the success of their 1955 picture “The Quatermass Xperiment.” Produced for a fraction of the budget that their Universal Studios’ counterparts were and written to be technically legally distinct, Hammer Horror (as they’d go on to be known) films represented “another” horror option for the discerning fan, even if that option sometimes wasn’t particularly memorable, which can be seen clearly here in their film, “The Curse of Frankenstein.”

Is “The Curse of Frankenstein” good? No. Is “The Curse of Frankenstein” bad? Also no. A retelling of Mary Shelly’s horror classic, the film follows the protagonist Baron Victor Frankenstein and his tutor/friend/employee/father-figure Paul Krempe as they develop a method to bring living things back from the dead. Paul wants to end the experiments there, but Victor keeps pushing, with his next goal being to create life from a sewn together corpse. Victor’s obsession with this artificial man, and its creation at any cost, lead our film down its predictably dark path of science and madness. While adapting some quite exciting source material, “The Curse of Frankenstein” ends up feeling rather flat, as the most exotic looking (and really only exotic looking) locale in the whole movie is Victor’s lab. Most of the scenes are characters just standing around and talking, and even the scenes with the Monster lack a certain terror, or even energy to them (I found the Monster makeup and design in particular to be rather too minimal) - I distinctly noted at multiple parts of the movie the lack of a score and how audibly missing it felt. Honestly the film is probably best known at all just for being the actor Peter Cushing’s first leading movie role, along with the actor Christopher Lee being cast as the film’s Monster, rather than any of its own cinematic achievements. Because outside of the casting, “The Curse of Frankenstein” is a rather tame and forgettable experience, with there being better old monster films to dig up and resurrect for your pleasure.