Monster March: She-Wolf of London (1946)

When in doubt, the Universal Classic Monsters had a formula – “son of,” “daughter of,” or “bride of.” We’ve seen diminishing returns on that front, though occasionally shaking up the gender of the main monster has been grounds for cinematic gold. When I planned out Monster March, I assumed from the title that the last film on the docket would be more of that same sequel reinvention, that She-Wolf of London might as well be the story of Lorena Talbot or something like that. Imagine my surprise, then, to find out that She-Wolf of London is instead another example of something else the Universal Monsters often did well: false advertising.

Phyllis Allenby (June Lockhart) is set to marry well-to-do barrister Barry Lanfield (Don Porter), but a rash of brutal murders have led her to suspect that she has fallen victim to the legendary Allenby curse of werewolfism. Her aunt Martha (Sara Haden) dismisses these ideas as superstition but all the same asks her to keep this notion a secret from Phyllis’s cousin Carol (Jan Wiley), who is herself betrothed to starving artist Dwight Severn (Martin Koslack). As Phyllis’s wedding approaches, Scotland Yard draws a tighter dragnet until inspectors are knocking on the Allenby front door.

 

I can’t talk about She-Wolf of London without talking about the ending, so if there’s any part of you that might one day want to watch it unspoiled, thanks for joining us for Monster March, and have a pleasant tomorrow. I’ll note, however, that the twist ending to She-Wolf isn’t exactly hard to deduce; within the 61-minute runtime, a semi-conscious audience member can probably crack it in twenty. For those of you sticking around, you’ve probably made the right choice because this film doesn’t actually belong in Monster March. You see, there is no werewolf in She-Wolf of London. In fact, were it not included in my “Wolf Man” DVD box set, I wouldn’t be reviewing it. I had gently complained throughout See-Thru Thursdays that Universal’s “Invisible Man” franchise was barely a franchise, but She-Wolf goes one step further, actively arguing against being enrolled in the nascent cinematic universe.

 

I had said a few weeks ago that there might be a very interesting version of The Wolf Man where the werewolf might merely be in Lawrence Talbot’s mind, and it’s as though the makers of She-Wolf heard me – though She-Wolf ends up pushing the other extreme by creating a narrative in which the werewolf is definitively a product of the imagination. The film Gaslight was released two years earlier, and I have a strong suspicion that screenwriters George Bricker and Dwight V. Babcock had seen it. The twist that Phyllis is being gaslit by Aunt Martha is telegraphed pretty early on, especially when Martha explains to her daughter Carol all the misfortune that will befall the family if either of the impending marriages is allowed to transpire. And while the film tries to bait-and-switch you – first that Phyllis is the werewolf, then that Carol might be – Sara Haden plays Aunt Martha like the wicked stepmother in a Disney film. It’s a good thing the film is in black-and-white, because otherwise we’d see the technicolor glow of an enormous neon sign pointing “VILLAIN” at Martha.

 

It’s not that She-Wolf is badly made. I think, under any other circumstance, I’d have been more forgiving of its wolf-less plot. Certainly June Lockhart fits the bill for terrified protagonist; her wide-eyed pallor and fits of hysteria acquit her very well, especially for a filmgoer who only recognizes her as television moms on Lassie and Lost in Space. Once you notice, though, that the film is lacking in transformation scenes like the ones that let Jack Pierce work his magic on Lon Chaney Jr., you’re not long for solving the mystery. Still, one can’t help but wish Lockhart had gotten a better script, one that explains a bit more about the fabled Allenby curse or even why Phyllis has only just now gotten it into her head. There’s a brief nod toward Phyllis turning an ear to local superstition, though I wish the film had explored that angle less perfunctorily. There’s also some business about whether Aunt Martha is actually an Allenby or not, a matter that clogs up her first scene in the film before the question is brushed aside entirely.

 

Or perhaps it’s too much to ask that She-Wolf of London has a werewolf in it. I hate to sound like an entitled moviegoer, because I’ll settle for Dracula not meeting the other monsters in a “monster mash.” But after living and breathing monster movies for an entire month, I can’t say that I’m entirely thrilled to be duped into watching a movie without a werewolf, and I’m a little sorry to have wasted your time. But maybe this is a good reminder that, despite what Van Helsing says, there is no such thing as vampires. It’s charming to think there might be, but the real world is terrifying enough without werewolves. Perhaps that’s why She-Wolf of London has me so down – because it denied me the very escapism for which I created Monster March. Like Henry Frankenstein, my creation has grown beyond my control. And like Phyllis Allenby, I’ve been kept up into the long hours of the night, thinking about werewolves and other unreal creatures. They’re not real, and they don’t exist.

 

Then again, as Ernest Hemingway put it, and as the entire dreamscape of cinema suggests over and over again, “Isn’t it pretty to think so?” 

She-Wolf of London is not rated. Directed by Jean Yarbrough. Written by George Bricker and Dwight V. Babcock. Starring June Lockhart, Don Porter, Sara Haden, Eily Malyon, and Jan Wiley.

Monster March: House of Dracula (1945)

As the third monster mash in an ostensible trilogy with Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man and House of Frankenstein, it’s hard for me to find a Marvel Cinematic Universe analogy to explain what House of Dracula contributes to the Universal Classic Monsters franchise. Instead, I find myself looking at House of Dracula like Return of the Jedi – a third installment that doesn’t really do anything wrong but neither does it quite excel. There are flashes of brilliance, but on the whole there’s nothing that we haven’t seen before.

Dr. Franz Edelmann (Onslow Stevens) receives a strange visitor just before sunrise – Count Dracula (John Carradine), seeking a cure for his vampirism. While the doctor prepares a blood transfusion to cure the count, who is himself conspiring to consume the doctor’s assistant Milizia (Martha O’Driscoll), Dr. Edelmann takes on another patient – Lawrence Talbot (Lon Chaney Jr.), who believes the doctor can rid him of the curse of the werewolf. Meanwhile, in the caves beneath Dr. Edelmann’s castle lies the lifeless body of the Frankenstein monster (Glenn Strange), and soon it will take all of Dr. Edelmann’s strength to keep these creatures from tearing down his home.

 

My chief complaint about House of Dracula carries over from House of Frankenstein – the monsters never truly meet. After seeing Chaney and Lugosi on screen together for much of Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, it’s a shame that Dracula, the Wolf Man, and Frankenstein’s monster are kept at arm’s length from each other. Talbot meets the other two, but it’s a far cry from the elegant way that Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein brought the same three monsters together into the same plot. 

 

Instead, what we get in House of Dracula is something akin to the setup for a joke – a vampire, a werewolf, and a Frankenstein walk into a doctor’s office. The plot then becomes a revolving door; when Dracula leaves the office, Talbot enters, and their treatments continue in alternating sequence. I had hoped that there might be some larger string that ties all this together, some way that it all related to a larger plot by Count Dracula, but again the filmmakers seem set on putting the monsters on the same bill without ever featuring them on the same screen. 

 

It's another cash-grab, to be sure, but there seemed to be something more genuine about it in House of Frankenstein. Perhaps it was the legitimating presence of Boris Karloff, who felt like an appropriate thread to unify the whole piece. I hope it’s no slight to Onslow Stevens to say that he’s no Boris Karloff, but there is something a little disingenuous about bringing the whole cinematic universe back together through an actor making his franchise debut in the role. Stevens is perfectly serviceable, at times recalling particularly in his voice a B-movie Orson Welles, but for the most part we’re left wondering what’s so special about this doctor. For one, I’m still not sure what sort of reputation a doctor might have to suggest he could cure both vampirism and lycanthropy, but Karloff never invited that question. Karloff had a presence and a history, but Stevens only has half of one of those. One almost wishes, based on the way the film develops, Dr. Edelmann had instead been Dr. Jekyll – that’d resolve a few of the film’s problems straight away.

There’s the problem of overwhelming coincidence in the film – why is all of this happening now, in this doctor’s office – but there’s a larger problem of continuity, which the Universal Monsters movies have usually been so careful to avoid. For starters, if House of Frankenstein is any indication, at least two of these monsters should be dead. Now I’ll grant you, “dead” is a relative term for this crew, but House of Dracula very carefully and deliberately acknowledges the fate of the Frankenstein monster from House of Frankenstein while glossing over where that film left Dracula and the Wolf Man. The net effect, then, of disregarding continuity – especially at this late date in the franchise, when this is effectively the conclusion of the series before the spoof era begins – is the feeling that none of this matters much, that all of this happened before, and that it was better that time around. There’s something a little cynical about the “do it again but differently” approach in House of Dracula, something that makes me a little sad this is the way it all ended.

That’s not to say, though, that there isn’t good material here. John Carradine acquits himself better as Dracula this time around, particularly in a scene where he seduces a nurse playing “Moonlight Sonata” on the piano – it’s an archetypal image that I’m retroactively surprised didn’t originate with Lugosi. Dracula’s motivations might not make much sense in this film (he wants to be healed, until he doesn’t, and why he leaves his coffin in direct sunlight is anyone’s guess), but at least his presence dials into what the film needs, even if I’m still not convinced he’s the Count Dracula. Indeed, his presence looms over the whole film, as it does on the poster, such that you’re always waiting for Dracula to reenter the picture. That he doesn’t – and that the titular house isn’t even his – is to the film’s discredit.

 

In their respective roles, Chaney and Strange appear, after several movies of doing decent work, to be phoning it in. Chaney is trying, but there’s a weariness in his performance, an overly familiar attitude like slipping into a pair of shoes just before you know they’re about to give out. Just about the only new thing this film adds to Lawrence Talbot is a mustache, along with the unusual revelation that lycanthropy is just a case of pressure on the brain that can be alleviated by fractionally enlarging the skull. As hokey as that sounds, it’s the kind of preposterous balderdash that usually makes these films fun, but when the rest of the film doesn’t hold up, that kind of hokum gets the scrutiny it doesn’t deserve and can’t withstand. Strange, meanwhile, has two settings in this film – comatose and raging – and so there’s little to say beyond his inclusion feeling perfunctory. The film plainly doesn’t know what to do with the Monster; he was at least a vessel for Dr. Niemann’s revenge in House of Frankenstein, but here he’s little more than an action figure pulled out of storage.

 

So falls the Universal Classic Monsters cinematic universe – in a sense, the House of Dracula, the house that Dracula built back in 1931. We might see this as a case of “how the mighty have fallen,” but on another level we might see that House of Dracula is the moment when these creatures escape the bounds of their respective franchises and enter the level of myth. Unburdened by continuity, these monsters are now free to go wherever the next generation of creators will take them; recall that the Abbott and Costello films made no pretense about being true sequels. Rather, the monsters became mythic nightmares, haunting phantoms from a bygone era that operated not on the level of narrative continuity but as freeze-frame images – a swirling cape or a glinting fang, a lumbering giant, or a primal evolutionary throwback. Maybe that’s what the House of Dracula has been all along: not a literal castle in which the vampire resides, but a conceptual wheelhouse of metaphors and filmic illusions not unlike a waxwork house of horrors. We’ve been tenants in that house for the past month; now maybe it’s time to build our own additions and rewrite our own nightmares. 

House of Dracula is not rated. Directed by Erle C. Kenton. Written by Edward T. Lowe. Starring Lon Chaney Jr., Martha O’Driscoll, John Carradine, Lionel Atwill, Onslow Stevens, Glenn Strange, and Jane Adams.  

Tune in tomorrow for Wolf Man Wednesday – the final installment in Monster March – with She-Wolf of London (1945) starring June Lockhart.

Monster March: House of Frankenstein (1944)

If we continue the cinematic universe metaphor, House of Frankenstein is inarguably the Universal Monsters’ version of The Avengers. Although it’s a bit of false advertising – Dracula never actually meets Frankenstein’s monster or the Wolf Man – House of Frankenstein is nevertheless surprisingly fun. The second “monster mash” movie and a direct sequel to Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, House of Frankenstein also finds a way to weave Count Dracula and Boris Karloff back into the mix. Though the plot is rickety and ramshackle, it’s an achievement all the same, the monster movie equivalent of simple and pure popcorn fun. 

Dr. Gustav Niemann (Boris Karloff) and his hunchbacked assistant Daniel (J. Carrol Naish, doing his best Peter Lorre) escape from prison and vow to continue the experiments of the late Henry Frankenstein. Through a series of untoward events, Niemann comes into possession of the bones of Count Dracula (John Carradine), who he reanimates in his quest for revenge on his jailers. And on the road to Visaria, Niemann also finds the frozen bodies of Frankenstein’s monster (Glenn Strange) and Lawrence Talbot (Lon Chaney Jr.), who have their own demands on the not-so-good doctor.

 

House of Frankenstein is really two different movies, and both of them are pretty fun. For the first act of its 71 minutes, House gives us the Boris Karloff and Dracula reunion we never truly got to see, yet it’s not Karloff’s Monster meeting Lugosi’s Dracula. That, I suspect, would have been an absolute winner. Instead, Karloff is crowbarred into the film (and I mean that in the nicest way possible) as an unrelated mad scientist with Frankensteinian proclivities, yet there is a warming charm just to see Karloff included again. At 57, he hadn’t played the Monster in five years, so his very presence is almost a legitimating one, with Karloff as the elder statesman of the Universal Classic Monsters universe. Karloff has tons of fun as Dr. Niemann, and there’s a fiery impish glint in his eyes as he plots his next move.

 

As Dracula, however, John Carradine is a touch underwhelming. His performance is exceptionally hammy, with large bulging eyes and vamping – pun intended – posture. Where there was a subtle seductive charm about Lugosi’s Dracula, Carradine plays the magnetic allure like literal hypnosis, and his skeletal appearance is a far cry from Lugosi’s full-bodied menace. In short, it’s hard to accept that this is the Count Dracula, up to and including the continuity error that his bones are said to be resting in his coffin after we saw Countess Zaleska cremate his body in Dracula’s Daughter. (Perhaps, though, the filmmakers were already perfecting the art of the retcon – which, in the case of Dracula’s Daughter, suits me just fine.)

 

Continuing the grand recast is Glenn Strange as Frankenstein’s monster. There’s a moment in Ed Wood when Bela Lugosi (played by Martin Landau) opines, “You think it takes talent to play Frankenstein?! It’s all make-up and grunting – mmrrrghh!” It’s a reductive comparison, one which the real Lugosi may or may not have believed, especially given that Lugosi had himself played the Monster in Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man. We know, however, that Karloff did so much more with the character in his three films, proving that he had left unfillably big shoes (in more ways than one). On the spectrum, Strange acquits himself better than Lon Chaney Jr. did, and the editors of House don’t cut his bulky feet out from under him as they did Lugosi. However, the fact remains that Strange isn’t given much to do beyond looking imposing, but he gets a few shining moments when he accesses the Monster’s twin childlike senses of wonder and terror at a world he cannot comprehend.

 

Finally, Lon Chaney Jr. is back as Lawrence “Wolf Man” Talbot, and every time I say a negative thing about Chaney in another monster role, he reminds just how reliably good he is as Talbot. From the moment Talbot thaws out of the ice, Chaney elevates the movie, giving another deeply human embodiment to a character that could just as easily have been a lame caricature of an idea. Although his plotline is largely a retread of Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man – Talbot feels guilty about his lycanthropic curse and wants to die – Chaney brings his trademark pathos to the role, especially in scenes with the Roma girl Ilonka (played with winsome charm by Elena Verdugo), who is herself encumbered by the question of whether she should help relieve the sympathetic Talbot of his burden.

 

All of this comes to a crescendo in an increasingly dramatic climax that includes electrocution, horse-whipping, and defenestration before the most abrupt ending I can recall seeing since White Heat. It’s the sort of ending that desperately leaves you wanting more, and indeed I was left fairly frothing at the mouth aching for more from House of Frankenstein – more Karloff, more monsters, more/any Lugosi, more of the characters bumping into each other. But it wasn’t a question of starvation; my desire for more was akin to hitting the bottom of the popcorn bucket and wanting a refill. Sure, it’s a campy cash-grab, and certainly it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but it tastes good and leaves you wanting more. Isn’t that the most we can ask of the Universal Classic Monsters?

 

House of Frankenstein is not rated. Directed by Erle C. Kenton. Written by Curt Siodmak and Edward T. Lowe. Starring Boris Karloff, Lon Chaney Jr., John Carradine, J. Carrol Naish, Glenn Strange, and Elena Verdugo.

Tune in tomorrow for See-Thru Thursday, with The Invisible Man’s Revenge (1944) starring Jon Hall.

Next week for Wolf Man Wednesday, it’s She-Wolf of London (1946), starring June Lockhart. For the continuing saga of Lawrence Talbot, though, join us next Tuesday for House of Dracula (1945).

Monster March: Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943)

If we’ve been thinking about the Universal Classic Monsters as the first cinematic universe, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man is undoubtedly the franchise’s Civil War moment. Though the Marvel Cinematic Universe had its heroes meet and clash long before Captain America: Civil War, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man begins to pull the universe together for “monster rallies” – though I much prefer the term “monster mash.” Indeed, Frankenstein does meet the Wolf Man and even befriends him before (naturally) coming to blows in the third act – incidentally, another parallel to Civil War. The film is full of surprises, not least of all the deep attention to continuity and the fact that the film is, after twelve years and seventeen monster movies, largely a success.

After grave robbers open the tomb of Lawrence Talbot (Lon Chaney Jr.), the Wolf Man rises from his grave, discovering that his curse extends to immortality. Talbot regains his memories in a sanitarium before seeking out Maleva (Maria Ouspenskaya), the old woman whose son transformed Talbot into a werewolf. Maleva promises to care for Talbot and help him to seek out the great Dr. Frankenstein, who might cure Talbot’s malady, but their arrival in Vasaria is far from warm, and Talbot discovers that Frankenstein’s monster (Bela Lugosi) is also something less than dead.

 

We won’t be reviewing The Ghost of Frankenstein for another week yet, so if you’re leery of spoilers – well, here be monsters. It’s a fair question how much of Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man is a sequel, because the two major plot twists from the end of that film – that The Monster is blind and is now voiced by Bela Lugosi – were both deleted from the final edit of this film. The casting of Lugosi remains, however, a nod in that direction, though the editing fairly makes mincemeat of Lugosi’s performance as a lumbering brute of a Monster. (Lugosi, though, would have the last laugh; the extended arms commonplace in any Frankenstein impression originated here, not with Karloff, as The Monster’s way of navigating blindly.)

 

Meets is also set largely in Vasaria, the setting for Ghost, while Ilona Massey portrays Elsa Frankenstein, a recast from Ghost’s Evelyn Ankers. It’s a shame that the film quickly shuffles Elsa out of range of the plot, because the idea of a female Dr. Frankenstein would have been a bold new step for the franchise. Instead, the film relegates the obligatory scientific psychosis onto Dr. Frank Mannering (Patric Knowles), Larry Talbot’s physician who becomes captivated by the thrall of manipulating life. That’s all the stuff of the film’s third act, which is, if I may be so blunt, ludicrous, a dim excuse to retread the same setpieces and plot beats you’d expect from a Franken-film.

 

The third act arrives with such narrative whiplash that you’ll be forgiven if you lose track of the plot, but for such a quick devolution into the realm of the nonsensical... I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t fun as all get-out. From the note-perfect mood setting that opens the film, with a pair of grave robbers defiling the Talbot crypt, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man knows exactly to which seats it needs to play. The old story goes that screenwriter Curt Siodmak, scribe of much of the Universal Monsters canon, needed a paycheck to buy a car, and so Meets would not appear to be a labor of love, but there’s such an unabashed and unmistakable love for the source materials that you can’t help but enjoy this riveting mash-up. There’s a moment of terrific cheer, for example, when Maria Ouspenskaya shows up again as Maleva; it’s an inevitable turn for Talbot, but there’s an undeniable touch of fan service in seeing such a familiar face.

 

Overall, perhaps the success of Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man is due to Lon Chaney Jr., who continues to be fantastic as Talbot. While Chaney had stepped into nearly every other Universal Monsters franchise at one point or another, the Wolf Man remains his uncontested best. Chaney leavens his performance with psychological realism in the form of Talbot’s heavy guilt complex – almost, one might wonder, a potential template for Bruce Banner’s relationship to his transformation into The Hulk. Frankenstein’s Monster doesn’t appear for about half of the film, but you almost don’t need him for how compelling Meets is as a sequel to The Wolf Man. I could have spent another few films with Lawrence Talbot before he meets up with the rest of the monsters, but perhaps it’s just as well that his character goes in a fun new direction rather than petering out like several of the other monsters before him had done.

 

One last Marvel metaphor before we go: the sequence in which Talbot finds The Monster interred in ice really felt like the secondary origin story for Captain America. Indeed, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man felt the most like a Marvel movie of any of the Universal Monsters movies I’ve watched thus far. It’s fun and playfully hokey, and even in its outlandish conclusion, you have to admire the earnestness with which Siodmak’s script finds an excuse for the two monsters to duke it out. There’s even a musical number, for those who like that sort of thing. It’s a collision of so many good things, like a bowl of Chex Mix – how could the whole not be as delightful as the sum of its parts?

 

Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man is not rated. Directed by Roy William Neill. Written by Curt Siodmak. Starring Lon Chaney Jr., Ilona Massey, Patric Knowles, Lionel Atwill, Bela Lugosi, and Maria Ouspenskaya. 

Tune in tomorrow for See-Thru Thursday, with Invisible Agent (1942) starring Jon Hall, Peter Lorre, and Sir Cedric Hardwicke.

Next week for Wolf Man Wednesday, the monster mash continues at the House of Frankenstein (1944), starring Boris Karloff, Lon Chaney Jr., John Carradine, and Glenn Strange.

Monster March: Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948)

Assigning yourself the task of watching thirty monster movies in a row can feel like a chore, especially toward the end of the assignment, when you’ve seen all the good monster movies and far too many of the bad ones. Within minutes of starting Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, though, I was smiling and laughing. Not five minutes went by without a good chuckle, and by the end of it I found myself thinking, “Was that so hard?” How it took a comedy duo to finally get the monster mash right, I’ll never know – but I’m very glad they did.

Chick Young and Wilbur Grey (Bud Abbott and Lou Costello) are baggage handlers on a routine delivery to McDougal’s House of Horrors. Against the advice of a phone call from Lawrence Talbot (Lon Chaney Jr.), Chick and Wilbur open the crates to discover the bodies of Count Dracula (Bela Lugosi) and Frankenstein’s monster (Glenn Strange). Wilbur suspects the bodies are still living, much to Chick’s chagrin – and Talbot’s arrival from London only complicates matters when the bodies disappear and the full moon rises...

 

I don’t want to spoil things too much for the coming weeks, but “monster rally” movies like House of Frankenstein and House of Dracula cheat a little bit by including all the monsters in the same movie without them ever sharing the screen together. Three/four years after those films, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein fixes that problem by embroiling the holy trinity of monsters in one unified plotline, and it’s frankly genius to pit Dracula and Frankenstein’s monster against the Wolf Man so that the monster mash becomes a proper monster smash by the third act. Funneled through the dynamic of Abbott-as-skeptic and Costello-as-rube, you have the perfect formula for hijinks. As an entry in the cinematic universe, it’s debatable whether this is a proper sequel or whether it’s merely a standalone riff. It’s not quite a horror film, but it is fairly spooky with an emphasis on zany, and that makes for a very fresh new take on characters that, quite frankly, had grown stale over twenty years.

 

Moving away from the horror and toward the comedic is a shift in tone that seems to anticipate the likes of Scooby-Doo, who debuted in 1969. Indeed, I’d venture to say that Scooby-Doo wouldn’t exist without this film’s blend of mystery, monsters, and slapstick comedy. The sequence in which all five main characters chase after each other through a hallway of doors, for instance, is exactly the kind of gag that the Scooby-Doo crew would make their signature gag years later, at times even with versions of the Universal Classic Monsters. (Of course, Abbott and Costello are lightyears funnier than anything the makers of Scooby-Doo could dream up; I defy you to find eight minutes of Scooby-Doo anywhere near “Who’s On First,” but that’s beside the point.) In fact, moving into the realm of parody/spoof is in a sense the natural evolution for the Universal Monsters; the two House movies, for example, have their tongues planted firmly in their metaphorical cheeks, so it’s a short putt to outright punchlines. 

 

As for the monsters, I can’t overstate how good it is to see Bela Lugosi back as Count Dracula; if it did nothing else, the film could ride that nostalgia wave for eighty minutes and still be a home run. We’ll see a number of vampires during Monster March – Carlos Villarías, Gloria Holden, John Carradine, even Lon Chaney Jr. himself – but Lugosi remains the gold standard. Even with seventeen years away from the role (and to be fair his age does show), Lugosi slinks right back into the character, and he is magnetic. Indeed, perhaps the film should have been called Abbott and Costello Meet Dracula because he’s the undeniable monster star of the film. As before, his hypnotic stare extends beyond the proscenium of the silver screen; with a waggle of his fingers and a glint in his eyes, he captivates the audience as well as the soft-minded Wilbur. (As for the fact that this Dracula casts a reflection in a mirror – well, let’s just pretend we didn’t see that, hmm?)

 

After not having much to do in his preceding outings, Glenn Strange gives what is probably his best performance as Frankenstein’s monster, though the make-up looks to be a closer cousin of Herman Munster (debut, 1964) than before. It’s also a relief to hear the Monster speak again, having fallen silent once more after Bride of Frankenstein in 1935. As iconic as Karloff remains, I couldn’t help feeling that a great deal of the modern idea of the Monster is encapsulated in Strange’s performance here – the stilted voice, the thudding walk, the arms outstretched (inherited from Lugosi). With this film becoming a legend almost overnight, one wonders how much this film cemented the common conception of the Monster, taking what all the other performers had done before and rolling it into one iconic interpretation.

 

And in his swan song as the Wolf Man – attaining the unusual status of being the only performer to play this particular monster – Lon Chaney Jr. remains compelling. His make-up seems bushier than before, and his proclivities are a bit bloodthirstier, but this is still Lawrence Talbot, the same good performance Chaney had given in the past. He’s in the odd place of being the “straight man” of the monsters, fighting against the other two, but that puts him on a path where Abbott and Costello are his best allies, and it’s a miracle he doesn’t get more frustrated with that turn of fate. Instead, he remains surprisingly patient, confident that these two buffoons are his best hope at saving the world from Count Dracula.

 

What makes Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein a hit is that it’s both a monster movie with comedy and a comedy film with monsters. Both tones are balanced with dexterity, and the comedy is especially funny after more than seventy years. Costello’s underhanded self-deprecation, Abbott’s quick wordplay, even the physical comedy that’s gratifyingly never at the expense of the monsters doing their spooky stuff – this film has it all. I’ve silently been keeping a note all throughout Monster March about which movies I never need to watch again, and Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein ain’t one of them. It’s so good, I might work it into an annual rotation for Halloween – that is, if I can’t get Monster March to stick. 

Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein is not rated. Directed by Charles T. Barton. Written by John Grant, Robert Lees, and Frederic I. Rinaldo. Starring Bud Abbott, Lou Costello, Lon Chaney Jr., Bela Lugosi, Glenn Strange, and Lenore Aubert. 

Tune in tomorrow for Mummy Monday, with The Mummy’s Tomb (1942) starring Lon Chaney Jr.

Next week, we’ll see what we can see when Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man (1951), starring Bud Abbott, Lou Costello, and Arthur Franz.

Monster March: Werewolf of London (1935)

Devotees of the Universal Monsters may be surprised (as I was) to know that Lon Chaney Jr.’s iconic Wolf Man was not the first werewolf movie assayed by Universal. No, as Yoda says, there is another, six years earlier and eclipsed by its franchised successor. Werewolf of London ought to be remembered for largely inventing the werewolf myth as we know it, though its middle is a bit baggy and saddled with discomfiting and ultimately irrelevant Orientalism.

Wilfred Glendon (Henry Hull) has just returned from Tibet, having successfully retrieved a sample of the phosphorescent moon flower. While secluding himself in his laboratory in an attempt to replicate the moonlight that makes the flower grow, Dr. Glendon is keeping a dangerous secret from his estranged wife Lisa (Valerie Hobson). In Tibet, Glendon was mauled by a mysterious wolf-like creature, and old acquaintance Dr. Yogami (Warner Oland) believes Glendon was bitten by a werewolf – a bite that will cause Glendon to mutate and murder that which he loves most.

 

We can speculate all day about why it was that Chaney’s Wolf Man became the third cornerstone of the Universal Monsters trinity (with Karloff’s Frankenstein and Lugosi’s Dracula) while Hull’s didn’t. Perhaps the standout feature for me came in discovering that there is very little sympathetic about Glendon, even before he mutates into a werewolf; he is neglectful of his wife, suspicious of her only friend in the film, and utterly consumed by his work. Yet where Colin Clive elicited some degree of sympathy as Henry Frankenstein, addicted to his scientific endeavors, Hull is entirely heartless and downright antisocial in his monomaniacal pursuit of the “mariphasa” flower.

 

That’s not to say, however, that Hull isn’t eminently watchable. Indeed, as a sneering cad, he gives a delightful character performance that leads me to wish we had seen more of him in the Universal Monsters canon. I feel similarly about Jack Pierce’s makeup effects; all too often, makeup artists were the unsung heroes of monster films, and Pierce’s work transforming Hull into a werewolf – recognizable as both man and wolf simultaneously – is the actual scene-stealer in the film. Under the slightly minimalist makeup, Hull gets to snarl and skulk his way through the film in a performance that practically screams how much fun he’s having.

 

In watching Werewolf of London, I was struck by how the film seems to anticipate the morality play aspects of later slasher films. We all know that when teen campers get handsy in their tents, the serial killer is most likely to strike, subtextually communicating the value of chastity to the audience. Werewolf of London, too, plays the same game; in one memorable sequence set in a zoo, Glendon’s victims discuss their intent to commit adultery without any subtlety. “I hadn’t ought to do this,” the man says, “me with a wife and kids.” His mistress replies, “But you don’t love your wife and your kids. You love me!” It’s so on the nose that a neon sign practically announces their imminent mortality, a delightfully unsubtle beat that reminds us how simple – or rather, how willfully uncomplicated – classic films could be. As much as we might love the Monsters, these films often take pains to show that good people (and usually, happily married ones) will always prevail.

 

Perhaps what Werewolf of London needed, then, is a clearer positioning of Glendon as the film’s antagonist. Instead, the film includes Dr. Yogami as his adversary, particularly in the pursuit of the mariphasa. Dr. Yogami is, in a sense, the elephant in the room, because it’s Warner Oland continuing to do his Charlie Chan routine, albeit as a villain this time. As retrospectively uneasy as Oland’s yellowface performance is, and over and against Oland’s own dubious claims to Mongolian ancestry, it can’t even be said to be in service of the character (as one might argue for Chan) because there’s no reason for Dr. Yogami to be Asian, aside from invoking “Yellow Peril” as shorthand for Yogami’s villainy. In fact, we know little about Dr. Yogami, how he came to need the mariphasa, or what he might do without it. He remains only an obstacle for Glendon to overcome, even though there might be an even more interesting story if Yogami were given any of the film’s attention.

 

Likewise, the film gets distracted from the much more interesting werewolf plotline by several subplots that never quite go anywhere. We’ve got Yogami, yes, but the film also pays a good amount of attention to a will-they/won’t-they between Glendon’s wife Lisa and her childhood friend, aviator Paul Ames (Lester Matthews). It’s interesting to watch the ways this plotline invokes Glendon’s ire and jealousy, but the film never pushes the relationship beyond what the Hays Code would allow. Moreover, the film ends with what is apparently Paul’s plane flying away from London – though why the film ends there is anyone’s guess. Elsewhere in the film, Glendon rents a room to isolate himself from his wife and thereby save her from his lycanthropic bloodthirst. Yet every time the film cuts away to Glendon, it first lingers with his landladies, two elderly drunkards who indulge in protracted bits of odd comedy that never quite lands. Maybe it’s the accents, maybe it’s the historical distance, but Mrs. Whack and Mrs. Moncaster are a far cry from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and I found myself begging for a full moon to clear them from the deck.

 

The lingering image I take from Werewolf of London, though, is its delightfully dapper werewolf, who makes certain to grab his coat and scarf before he goes on the prowl. No torn sleeves or muddy trousers for this beast – Glendon is a werewolf of class, and watching him carefully don his overcoat had me howling with delight. It’s this air of sophistication that makes him more Dracula than Frankenstein, proving that monsters with panache are just that much more intriguing. The furry beast that mauls Glendon in the first act is scary enough, but Glendon’s own refusal to lose his sophistication and humanity puts one very much in the mindset of Warren Zevon’s song of the same name. If only we’d gotten to see Glendon eat beef chow mein in the sequel!

 

Werewolf of London is not rated. Directed by Stuart Walker. Written by John Colton and Robert Harris. Starring Henry Hull, Warner Oland, Valerie Hobson, Lester Matthews, and Spring Byington. 

Tune in tomorrow for See-Thru Thursday, with The Invisible Man Returns (1940) starring Vincent Price and Sir Cedric Hardwicke.

Next week for Wolf Man Wednesday, worlds collide when Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943), starring Lon Chaney Jr. and Bela Lugosi. For bonus werewolf shenanigans, Silly Sunday has Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948), starring Bud Abbott, Lou Costello, Lon Chaney Jr., Bela Lugosi, and Glenn Strange.

Monster March: The Wolf Man (1941)

“Even a man who is pure in heart, and says his prayers by night / May become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms and the autumn moon is bright.” Half of the Universal Monsters had some sort of literary inspiration, but only The Wolf Man had his own rhyming couplet to sum up his tragic fate. It’s a clever little jingle that echoes through the film, haunting its protagonist – and the audience – until that moon shows itself and the curse manifests. Like the moon peeking out from behind the clouds, Lon Chaney Jr.’s debut as The Wolf Man proves that, after a decade of monster movies, Universal still had a few new tricks up its sleeve.

Larry Talbot (Lon Chaney Jr.) returns home to Wales after the death of his brother, hoping to rekindle his relationship with his father, Sir John Talbot (Claude Rains). Smitten with Gwen Conliffe (Evelyn Ankers), who runs the antique store in town, Larry squires her and her friend to a traveling group of gypsies to have their fortunes read. When one of the women is attacked by a wolf-like creature, Larry rushes to her defense but is mauled in the process. Gradually he begins to fear that the creature was a werewolf – and now he’s under the transformative spell.

 

It’s interesting to think back and reflect that the bulk of the Universal Classic Monsters were all introduced within two years – and that The Wolf Man made his debut a full decade after Dracula kicked things off in 1931. (A sixth and final, The Creature from the Black Lagoon, would not emerge until 1954.) At a time when monster sequels were starting to run stale (I’m thinking especially of The Mummy’s Hand and The Invisible Woman, which immediately preceded The Wolf Man), the introduction of the werewolf into the pantheon of monsters almost revivifies the genre. Indeed, the presence of the Wolf Man ends up serving as a kind of backdoor pilot to bring all the monsters together for the “monster mash” sub-genre – but that’s a story for later on in Monster March. Suffice it to say, though, that the advent of the Wolf Man feels a bit like the final piece of the puzzle.

 

Lon Chaney Jr.’s performance as Larry Talbot is really quite remarkable among the Universal Monsters canon because it’s the first bit of acting that feels human. We’ve had campy caricatures and stock archetypes, but I’ve never gotten the vibe that any of the performances before 1941 were of real people with natural emotions. It sounds like a low threshold – and it is – but Chaney’s Talbot is imbued with genuine humanity. He’s compassionate with his loved ones (though his pick-up skills could use a little work), and he’s compellingly fearful when he believes his life is at stake. Moreover, he’s concerned for the fate of his soul, and he evinces a deep pathos when he assumes the burden of guilt for what he’s become. Larry Talbot is almost more interesting than the Wolf Man himself, which is a definite and welcome change of pace for the genre.

 

Having said that, though, this is a Wolf Man movie, and the sequences where Talbot goes wild are the stuff of gleeful popcorn matinees. Chaney mugs for the camera, sniffing and snorting, such that his Wolf Man is almost more dog man. It’s a far cry from what we’ll see next week in Werewolf of London, with a carefully groomed wolf man; there is very little sophisticated about Talbot as the Wolf Man. It is a shame that we don’t see more of the Wolf Man in this film, though I suppose it follows the old maxim of “leave them wanting more.” Indeed, one could imagine a version of this movie that doesn’t show the Wolf Man at all, leaving room for the possibility that Talbot is merely going mad, that his lycanthropy is all in his mind.

 

The rest of the cast is engaging enough, though very few of them get much of anything to do. Claude Rains is magnificent (and, unlike in tomorrow’s film, entirely visible) as Talbot’s father, though one wonders what he might have done with a meatier role in the vein of what Anthony Hopkins achieves in the comparable role in the 2010 remake. Evelyn Ankers is suitably shrieky in the role of the distressed damsel, but I confess that many of the other supporting players – Warren William, Ralph Bellamy, Patrick Knowles – I would struggle to point out in a line-up. Instead, my focus was hypnotically drawn to Bela Lugosi, who I hadn’t expected to see in a werewolf movie (though his role as Ygor in a few Franken-films is delectably wolfish), and to Maria Ouspenskaya, who quietly steals the show with a gravitas-laden performance. I’m legitimately excited to see that Ouspenskaya will be back for Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man – as if that title weren’t enough to augur good things!

 

Chaney said that he regarded Talbot as “my baby.” Considering how often Universal recast or outright replaced its monsters, it’s remarkable that Chaney stayed in the role for as long as he did – which is to say, permanently, never being supplanted as Talbot. With a debut as strong as The Wolf Man, though, maybe it’s not that much of a surprise. Larry Talbot might be vulnerable to silver, but this reviewer is a sucker for cinematic gold. 

 

The Wolf Man is not rated. Directed by George Waggner. Written by Curt Siodmak. Starring Lon Chaney Jr., Claude Rains, Warren William, Ralph Bellamy, Evelyn Ankers, Patrick Knowles, Bela Lugosi, and Maria Ouspenskaya. 

Tune in tomorrow for See-Thru Thursday, with The Invisible Man (1933) starring Claude Rains.

Next week for Wolf Man Wednesday, we’ll get a big dish of beef chow mein with Werewolf of London (1935), starring Henry Hull and Warner Oland.

 

Dog Soldiers (2002)

After The Descent, director Neil Marshall earned a gold star from me for deft horror filmmaking. Unfortunately, his directorial debut is a tragic flop, the exact opposite of the sophomore slump - the filmic equivalent, I suppose, of the dreaded "freshman fifteen."

Kevin McKidd (of Rome and Grey's Anatomy fame) leads a cast of unknowns in this limp horror flick. Not much happens in the movie: an army platoon meets werewolves. Violence ensues.

I've been singing Marshall's praises ever since having the pants scared off of me by The Descent, but I'm going to have to reevaluate my perception of Marshall's canon. Dog Soldiers is, plain and simple, a mess that goes on too long without much ever happening. While I can appreciate a film that takes its time and is methodical about suspense, Dog Soldiers is painfully slow; the werewolves don't show up - indeed, aren't even mentioned - for about half an hour (excepting a brief and unsurprising precredits scene), leaving us with a cast of armymen who are neither very distinctive nor very interesting. Their crudeness is a poor substitute for character development, and the only reason we have to root for them is the fact that the lead soldier refused to kill a dog earlier. While The Descent had a similarly paced opening, those characters were more appearling and had personalities.

As for the werewolves, they're laughable. While I was expecting a bit of ingenuity in their presentation, it turns out that their bark was much worse than their bite. I liked the black-and-white POV shots that let us know where the werewolves are headed, but when the werewolves actually show up on screen, they're something much less than terrifying. In fact, they're absurd, quite obviously men in costumes with little mobility beyond slowly turning heads. They look more like claymation dogs than anything else, and it's difficult to be afraid of them when they shuffle like Betty White with overgrown fingernails.

And it's entirely predictable, breaking absolutely no new ground in a genre that so desperately needs creativity to do more than merely subsist. Horror films need to be innovative these days, particularly because I know I'm not alone in having outgrown the mindless slasher subgenre. Horror films can either refuse to take themselves seriously - Sam Raimi does a dynamite job doing that - or become extremely serious pieces with high production value, as The Descent did. Dog Soldiers does neither. It's entirely generic, predictable, and grounded by character types that we've all seen before. In a way, the ending is stolen wholesale from Tarantino's From Dusk Till Dawn, which is disappointing considering how well the earlier movie pulled off its climax.

I went into Dog Soldiers expecting chills and thrills, but what I got was gore and little more.


Dog Soldiers is rated R "for strong violence/gore and language." There's considerable bloody violence at play here, replete with werewolf ravaging and disemboweling, as well as a few instance of the F-bomb.