‘The Revenge of Frankenstein’ or — Here’s Looking At You, Kid ?
It is 1860 and it seems that scientist Baron Victor Frankenstein has miraculously, and worryingly, escaped execution, a beheaded priest found in his coffin in the Baron’s place. Travelling to the town of Carlsbruck the Baron cleverly creates a new identity for himself, one that will fool everyone, by calling himself Dr Stein. Who would ever guess?
Although not everyone is fooled by this ingenious ruse of the Baron expertly dissecting his name in half and it’s not long before a young doctor, named Hans, is blackmailing Victor, not for money but to be trained as his apprentice. Before you know it they have a laboratory full of floating eyes, are transplanting brains and, quite handily, run a hospital for Carlsbruck’s poor thus giving them an almost unlimited supply of fresh body parts to work with. The Baron’s vision is to make a new creature but this one will not be deformed. Instead Victor will take the brain of his hunchback assistant, Karl, and give him a new and better body. So it’s all very altruistic and not mad and insane in the slightest.
However, once Hans discovers that the chimpanzee they’d tested the brain transplant procedure on has killed and eaten its mate the young doctor begins to suspect this plan might be lacking a little in the ethical and benevolence department. Maybe this isn’t a good idea after all? Undeterred Victor forges ahead, literally, and transplants the brains.
Will the experiment lead to a bright new dawn of scientific epiphanies and a deathless utopia for humanity or will it end in murder, violence and mayhem? Watch ‘The Revenge of Frankenstein’ (1958) and find out!
What’s really fun about ‘The Revenge of Frankenstein’ is how it completely and totally puts the Baron front and center as the villain. There’s no ambiguity as to Victor being misguided or a victim of his own creation — he’s an out and out psychopathic loony. This allows Peter Cushing the chance to revel in playing the bad guy (watching him here you can understand why George Lucas cast him as Tarkin) which he does with panache and a disconcerting charm. I’d also forgotten just how dashing Cushing was when he was younger as well as being a fantastic mover and knowing just how to carry himself for maximum effect.
Another element to ‘Revenge’s effectiveness are the undercurrents, although these are undercurrents gleefully flowing away at the surface, of sex, cannibalism and some truly brutal murder scenes (at one point a character is kicked and beaten to death). It’s a heady and potent mix highlighting why these Hammer films caused such a fuss back in the day. The British might’ve lacked some of the explicit excess of a lot of European horror films but those films followed on from the foundations Hammer laid down and all that hideous extravagance is pounding away here as much as in any of the more extreme fare that followed after. This is a surprisingly nasty little film and all the better for it.
The production design is excellent, wonderfully combining 19th Century Germanic period stylings with futuristic, brightly coloured, bonkers body-horror experiments which gives the movie a nicely unique look and feel. It also has a great ending that, without giving too much away, has one of the best moustache twirls I’ve seen. And does the Baron get away with all this madness? He seems not to and once again as finally met his death… although who is this Doctor Franck now practising in London’s Harley St?
‘The Revenge of Frankenstein’ is great. It’s got a genuinely fun story, is colourful as hell and gallops along at a brisk pace. Clasp your peepers on this one ASAP.
