31 Days of Horror Reviews 2018: House of Frankenstein
House of Frankenstein is another good Monster Mash film despite one of their monsters making a cameo appearance.
REVIEW
In some respects, I think this film is better than Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man. The acting is really good, a lot of that can be credited to veterans of Universal Horror like Boris Karloff and Lon Chaney Jr., to some new actors like John Carradine who takes over the role of Dracula and J. Carrol Naish as the hunchback assistant Daniel. The atmosphere definitely feels like Classic Universal Horror and the sets are impressive once again. The thing that the previous crossover has over this one is that it had less characters to write for whereas House of Frankenstein had not only Wolf Man and Frankenstein’s Monster, but Dracula and a hunchback character.
Boris Karloff returns to Universal not as the Frankenstein Monster, but as Dr. Niemann, a mad scientist who tried to continue Dr. Frankenstein’s work before being sent to prison. He’s still just as mesmerizing as ever when he was The Creature and Imhotep. In fact, he gave pointers to Glenn Strange on how to play the Monster in this movie. John Carradine, who has been in several Universal Monster movies before this, plays Count Dracula and he does a pretty good job. He too has an intense presence in this movie, even though he’s only in the film for ten minutes. But the best performance goes to J. Carrol Naish as the hunchback assistant Daniel. The second half of the film definitely takes a bit of the plot from the Victor Hugo novel and it makes Daniel one of the most sympathetic characters.
There are continuity issues; some of them errors and some accurate. In the film, Wolf Man and Frankenstein are found frozen in the ruins of the castle because it was flooded by the dam water that drowned them both at the end of Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man. Count Dracula when he’s a skeleton still has a stake where is heart would be, obviously referencing how he was destroyed in Dracula. But his body was burned in the beginning of Dracula’s Daughter, so his skeleton shouldn’t exist. He also drinks wine in this film when he stated in Dracula that he never drinks wine.
Despite these issues, this was a really great film.