Memorable as I found the last line of
Motel Hell - "I was brought up in that house. Kinda makes me glad I ran away from home" - I remember being pretty bored sitting through it to get to the supporting feature, Jonathan Demme's
Last Embrace, which despite an under the radar release critics singled out as the only reason to see the double-bill. That was the great thing about double-bills: even though the second feature was often an older movie rather than a US flop that would in later days become a straight to video title you could often offset a bad main feature with a supporting one that was worth the price of admission on its own so you wouldn't feel you'd wasted your time and money.
24 & 25
“He has a good brain and excellent eyes. I won’t tell you where I got them, but I assure you they’re perfect.”
The Evil of Frankenstein benefits from an excellent and subtle performance from Peter Cushing, playing the Baron for the third time, and Hammer’s ability to get the most out of their limited resources with fine production design and photography that ensured their horror films – at least in the 50s and 60s – looked better than their rivals’ even if their recycling of their sets makes it look like Frankenstein must have bought his château from previous owners Rasputin the Mad Monk and Dracula, Prince of Darkness and there’s a very dodgy mountaintop matte painting at the halfway point and a particularly bad bit of back projection near the finale. Yet despite a good use of colour and a keen eye for a good shot, after an atmospheric and imaginatively staged bit of pre-title body snatching cinematographer-turned-director Freddie Francis can’t prevent it from being a rather mundane affair, the Baron more aggrieved than evil as he returns to his old stamping ground only to find the locals have looted his house and the burgomaster has stolen his best furniture. Hiding out in a cave after a tussle with the local constabulary, he also finds the frozen body of his very first creature and tries to revive it only to find he needs the services of Peter Woodthorpe’s hypnotist Professor Zoltan to kickstart his brain with a bit of light catharsis. Despite the title, the sideshow performer turns out to be the really evil one – though The Evil of Professor Zoltan would have lost in box-office appeal what it gained in accuracy – and sets the creature to punish his enemies and make him rich in the process, with predictable results…
Thanks to going through Universal as distributors, for the only time in the Hammer Frankenstein series they’re allowed to use something like Jack Pierce’s iconic makeup for the Karloff version. Unfortunately in Roy Ashton’s hands it’s very bad makeup that doesn’t allow any personality to permeate its literally monolithic surface – this creature looks more like he’s been chiselled out of stone giving it a more brutalist sculpted look than stitched together from discarded body parts. (He’s not the only one to suffer from poor makeup design, with deaf mute Katy Wild’s at times unevenly applied corpse-like palor particularly misjudged.) On the plus side it’s interesting that almost every character in the village is despicable, surly or corrupt, making the Baron’s disdain for them more understandable than usual, but it’s hard to care much about anyone as the film runs formulaically through its paces. It’s not terrible, it’s just that – unlike the Baron’s laboratory – it never catches fire.
For many the big selling point of Shout’s Region A-locked Bluray is the inclusion of the alternate US TV version which, as was Universal’s wont, compensates for censorship cuts and pads the running time out for a two-hour slot with commercials by shooting new scenes with new actors. Unfortunately all they do is pad out the running time: a visiting British reporter (Patrick Horgan) quizzes Steven Geray’s doctor about Wild’s past, we see the traumatic childhood encounter with the monster (or rather the monster’s feet since the budget didn’t stretch to effects makeup) that left her deaf and mute and there’s a lengthy scene where Geray tries to persuade her drunken father (William Phipps) to send her to this doctor in Vienna called Freud who has been getting some remarkable results, but none of them go anywhere or impact on the story in any way. All shot in the Universal television style of the day they’re not as jarring as they could be, but since they’re all placed in the first half of the movie they just delay the creature’s rediscovery in an already rather leisurely paced film.
Taken from an unrestored version with severely faded colour and presented windowboxed with curved corners to the frame, the picture quality is at once both underwhelming and yet not as bad as it could be, especially if you’re a collector of old from before the home video revolution: for years these kind of faded and discarded 16mm TV prints were the only way better connected collectors could see these versions, so the there’s an element of literal rose-tinted (that colour fade) glasses at work here. It may not be very good, but for Hammer fans it’s a welcome bit of history that allowances can be made for.
Shout’s disc carries over some of the extras from Final Cut’s 2013 UK Blu-ray release – the making of documentary, brief interview with Caron Gardner and trailer - and adds commentary on the theatrical version by Constantine Nasr, a ropey video-sourced transfer of Hammer’s failed 1958
Tales of Frankenstein TV pilot with Anton Diffring and tacked on head in a crystal ball from the Inner Sanctum movies, interviews with Wild and assistant director William P. Cartlidge, new featurette on Freddie Francis presented by his biographer and an extended stills gallery.
Less to say but more to enjoy about
Frankenstein Created Woman, which is is much more fun. One of the better of Hammer’s Frankenstein sequels, it’s an efficient programmer that sees Cushing’s Baron trapping the soul of his guillotined assistant and putting it in the body of his disfigured girlfriend, only for the wronged boy to use her to kill those who really done the crime he was executed for. There’s more build-up than payoff, but its very sedateness (indeed, almost cosiness) is part of the pleasure, and it’s hard not to warm to the Baron’s arrogance and aloofness, whether it be reading in the witness box or casually answering a policeman’s “Do you take us for fools?” with a simple “Yes.” Still, it is remarkable just how well preserved that severed head is after six months…
Shout’s Region A-locked Bluray is an impressive upgrade over the previous release from Exclusive, offering a fine widescreen transfer and a decent selection of extras – carrying over the audio commentary by Derek Fowlds, Robert Morris and Jonathan Rigby (and adding a new one by Steve Haberman and Constantin Nasr), the
Hammer Glamour documentary carried over from the previous US release (and, rather incongruously, the UK release of
The Witches/The Devil’s Own), interviews with co-star Robert Morris and a couple of the crew (clapper/loader Eddie Collins, who's very good on working conditions, and second assistant director Joe Marks, who has little to say), a couple of above average stills and poster galleries (the film was blessed with an excellent and imaginative stills photographer - there's nothing as dramatic in the film as the publicity shot at the top of the review: Denberg never even wears that bikini), three US radio spots and 2 TV spots for its double-bill with
The Mummy’s Shroud, two trailers ("He shocks the world as he mocks the Devil!") and the obligatory couple of episodes of the
World of Hammer TV clipshow series (is that a contractual obligation on every US release?)
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