The Revenge of Frankenstein

The Revenge of Frankenstein—Hammer's 1958 follow-up to The Curse of Frankenstein—is a curiously bloodless and fleshless costume drama masquerading as a horror film. It features very little in the way of actual horror. Or, perhaps to put it better, in a film such as this, it is the flesh which is exhibited in all its aberrant glory. Here it is absent, and so, right up front, there's a problem.

The flesh of the Frankenstein monster, reanimated from bits and pieces borrowed from charnel-house cadavers, is what we expect to go shambling forth in such a film—carrying with it the oppressive burden of its blasphemous birth and the longing, wounded sense of rejection experienced at the hands of its mad scientist "father."

Here, that dynamic is absent. Revenge is, in point of fact, like a monster movie without the monster.

Cut to the chase: Baron Frankenstein is up to his same old tricks again, now posing as “Dr. Stein” and working tirelessly in a Victorian poorhouse among the impoverished sick and elderly. Meanwhile, he’s planning a brain transplant for his deformed assistant, Karl (played by Carl Quitak)—a rather humdrum, average-looking fellow, save for his twisted arm. This is your first clue: there will be no monster in this so-called horror film. Not a single stitched-together shambler to go moaning and gasping about, searching for “Daddy.”

Dr. Hans (Francis Matthews) recognizes Stein as Frankenstein and offers to aid the mad genius in his ongoing trials. Together, they transplant Karl’s brain into a new, stolen body (not one stitched together from corpses, unfortunately). Karl is then played by Michael Gwynn. He falls in love with a woman from the poorhouse stables—Margaret (Eunice Gayson)—and eventually breaks into the lab, burns his old deformed body (kept floating in a glass phone booth that looks like something Houdini died in), and kills a girl, Gerda (Avril Leslie), for reasons that are... let’s say, unclear. A torch-bearing mob gets involved, of course, and the door is left hanging open for yet another sequel.

If you want to slog through a curiously dead (ha-ha) Frankenstein film, be my guest. It’s essentially a costume drama on stilted legs. Strip away the brain-transplant gimmick and the Frankenstein name, and it could pass for any middling Victorian soap opera of the era. The viewer may find their mind wandering—until jolted back by the sudden realization that the film is almost over, and the Frankenstein Monster has yet to appear.

Even a zipper-necked Peter Boyle stumbling in with Gene Wilder in a top hat, singing “Puttin’ on the Ritz” to a Taco-infused synth backing, would be appreciated at that point. Instead, we get “Frankie by the numbers,” and in a fast-paced, ever-changing cinematic world, honey, that just don’t wash.

Actually, it’s not even “by the numbers.” It fails the basic smell test—like an abnormal brain dropped in a lab by a hunchbacked assistant who got spooked by thunder. Squash go the brains on the floor. And like the gross-out scene in Jekyll and Hyde… Together Again, where everyone’s slipping around on a deli-tray of transplant organs, the viewer may find themselves sliding backward into the gothic, haunted land of falling asleep during a movie that, while stylistically gorgeous and undeniably competently directed, still manages to lack anything resembling entertainment value. It certainly doesn’t hold up as a Frankenstein sequel—even by Hammer’s often generic standards.

But watch it I did, so write about it I must. It’s a self-created, often odious and thankless task I still dutifully perform.

Perhaps someone should transplant my brain.

The Revenge of Frankenstein / Original Theatrical Trailer (1958)

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