Frankenstein! Watch your language
THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1957)
I liked this a lot more just now than when I first watched it way back in that dim misty era long gone, when 42nd Street had a dozen theatres showing three movies for three dollars. (Sigh) The shock of the bright red blood and the gore and brains and goo has lost much of its impact. Like everyone else, I guess I have been desensitized over the years. What used to be scandalous is now mere commonplace.
CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN started an awful lot of trends. During the 1950s, American horror films had been mostly replaced by science-fiction thrillers, giant insects and invaders from outer space. Even the attempts at more traditional horror had a semi-rational explanation as in THE VAMPIRE and I WAS A TEENAGE WEREWOLF. Hammer brought back the no-fooling in-your-face supernatural with HORROR OF DRACULA, THE MUMMY, CURSE OF THE WEREWOLF etc. It was all in vivid color, more openly gruesome and bloody than the old Universal classics and with the added spice of frequent cleavage shots (see, THAT'S what horror films were missing!)
Peter Cushing has received so much praise for his ongoing portrayal of Baron Frankenstein (which he certainly deserves) that I thought I would mention what a good job Christopher Lee does as "the Creature." The make-up was usually described at the time as disgusting and nauseating, but today it looks appropriate. (It doesn't have the timeless iconic quality of Jack Pierce's design, but that's asking a lot.) Lee's Creature has a mop of black hair in a sort of proto-Beatles cut, one sightless eye, pasty skin with stitches and a generally chewed-up aspect. He really looks like a dead body that was brought back to life. (And now I can recognize Lee beneath the make-up, which gives the performance an extra dimension.)
Lee's performance is all pantomime, no dialogue. In the first phase, he is murderous from the start. As soon as he rips the bandages from his face, he lurches toward the Baron and proceeds to strangle him. As a kid, I figured this was Frankenstein's fault; he had murdered an old scientist to get his brain for the Creature. It seemed likely that the monster woke up, and his admittedly damaged brain recognized the Baron as his killer. Later, wandering in the woods, the Creature encounters a blind man who he also kills, no for any particular reason other than he's functioning with a brain that got smushed, had bits of broken glass in it and was restored to life by lightning. That's a lot for any organ to go through. Also, Lee's monsters seems to be in pain. This makes sense. He's like someone who just had extensive surgery and is stumbling out of the operating room with painkillers. If nothing else, that gouged-up face has to smart. In the second phase, the Creature gets shot in the head with a rifle bullet (right in the eye! Owww.) and is killed, only to be resurrected AGAIN by Baron Frankenstein. If at first... The monster is now like leftovers warmed up in the microwave, not nearly as good as the first time. Lee plays the Creature at this point as rather pathetic, moving with spastic jerky motions and not seeming to fully understand what's going on.
At the end of the film, the Creature is set on fire and falls into a vat of acid, while the Baron goes to the guillotine. Not that it will stop him.
Hammer took a different approach from Universal, which had the Monster survive certain destruction over and over. In the Hammer series, it's the Baron who lives from one sequel to the next, making a new and different monster each time. This gave us some fine performances by Peter Cushing. But, you know, in some parallel universe there was a 1958 Hammer movie called RETURN OF FRANKENSTEIN, with Cushing somehow reviving the Christopher Lee Creature, patching him up and giving him a new brain. The Creature manages to speak and swears he will come back to visit Frankenstein on his wedding night... welllll, I'd pop into that dimension long enough to watch that film!