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Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell (1974) ★★★ Watched 15 Oct 2025

Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell might just be the best of the Hammer Frankenstein films, though that’s not exactly high praise. Still, it’s a fittingly grim finale for the series, with Peter Cushing returning as Baron Frankenstein, now running his grotesque experiments from within an insane asylum. The setting alone gives the film more atmosphere than the last couple of entries, and the grim, enclosed tone works surprisingly well.

Its storyline feels like a 1970s precursor to Beyond Re-Animator: a young doctor (Shane Briant) is imprisoned for his experiments and ends up under the tutelage of Frankenstein himself, who’s been continuing his work behind the asylum walls. But here, Frankenstein also doubles as the evil doctor archetype. It’s the first time since the early entries that his villainy feels deliberate rather than just like inconsistent writing.

The creature (played by David Prowse) looks great. Not as iconic as Karloff’s Universal design, but distinct, hulking, and more pathetic than monstrous. He’s aware of the horror of his condition, finally giving the series at least some hints of Shelley's pathos.

That said, this is still basically another “brain swap” movie; Hammer’s favorite fallback whenever they ran out of ideas. By now, it’s less about raising the dead and more about moving gray matter from one unlucky victim to another. The film may even be self-aware of this, given the pitch-black comedy ending: Frankenstein brushes off yet another catastrophe with a casual statement to the effect of, “Oh well. Who’s next?” It feels like Hammer commenting on their own franchise fatigue.

Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed

1969

★½

Watched 13 Oct 2025

If any of the Hammer Frankenstein films must be destroyed, it’s Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed (1969).

By this point, the series has nothing to do with Mary Shelley’s novel, not that the other films really did. But this time, it's REALLY apparent. There’s no creature, no attempt to raise the dead. This is just a series about a doctor who swaps brains. The whole “brain” angle technically started back in Frankenstein (1931) and became central with Ghost of Frankenstein (1942), when Ygor wanted his mind in the creature’s body. Even that film at least pretended to care about realism. They mention mismatched blood types and blindness. But here? Brains are traded around like spare light bulbs.

It’s also baffling from a character standpoint. After Frankenstein Created Woman painted the Baron as a sort of tragic antihero, Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed resets him to full-on sadist with zero explanation. Then there’s the infamous rape scene—forced on the film by the studio, hated by everyone involved—made even worse by Frankenstein’s order to make him boiled eggs for breakfast right after. It’s one of the most tonally offensive moments in any Hammer film.

At an hour and forty minutes, this is also one of the slowest entries. The “creation” doesn’t even show up until the final twenty minutes. Even then, he's just a guy with a scar on his head; probably easier to do on Hammer's budget than the Universal films.

Frankenstein Created Woman

1967

★★½ Watched 12 Oct 2025

By this point in Hammer’s Frankenstein cycle, you’d think they’d have settled on a tone. But Frankenstein Created Woman (1967) is one of the trashiest yet most conceptually interesting of the lot. Directed by Terence Fisher, it pushes the series into slasher territory long before the term even existed. The entire final act plays out as such, with the female lead, Christina, killing off the men responsible for her lover’s death one by one. The setup and execution feel like a dry run for Clive Barker’s Hellraiser, particularly the way Julia lures victims to be killed by Frank.

The film’s premise is that Frankenstein transfers the soul of a wrongfully executed man into the body of his lover, who was herself disfigured and driven to suicide. That central conceit—a man’s consciousness resurrected in a woman’s body—is pure Barker material, foreshadowing ideas he’d later explore in The Madonna from The Books of Blood or his unmade Mummy reboot for Universal, which would have dealt with gender bending themes. Unfortunately, Hammer treats the concept more like spiritual possession, and the result is less The Madonna and more Friday the 13th Part 0, with Christina’s murders playing out as straightforward revenge kills.

The continuity here is bizarre even by Hammer standards. At the end of The Evil of Frankenstein, the Baron appears to die in a fire as his castle collapses. In this one, he’s revealed to have been frozen in a box and revived by two previously unmentioned allies, Dr. Hertz and Hans (not to be confused with Hans Kleve from the last two films, aghhh!). Was this always the plan? Did he dive into the box at the last second? Or did Hammer just give up on continuity and hope no one noticed? It would honestly have been cleaner to just start fresh and pretend the last film never happened.

Christina Kleve (again — not to be confused with Hans Kleve from the previous films; who keeps reusing these names?) becomes the centerpiece of the story after her lover Hans is wrongfully executed. The Baron (never a title Victor had in the books, incidentally), now joined by Hertz, steps in to preserve Hans’ soul, placing it into Christina’s body after she kills herself in despair.

That’s another oddity: Victor is a full-on hero now. Once an amoral murderer, he’s now written as a man genuinely trying to understand the nature of the human soul and help others. His atheism is retconned; here, he accepts the existence of the soul, using it as the foundation for his experiment. That shift gives the film pseudo-spiritual themes, and explains why Frankenstein Created Woman ended up being one of Martin Scorsese’s favorite Hammer films. Back in 1987, Scorsese named this among his favorites, saying: “If I single this one out it’s because here they actually isolate the soul... The implied metaphysics are close to something sublime.”

★★½ Watched 12 Oct 2025

Of all the Hammer Frankenstein films, The Evil of Frankenstein feels the most like a Universal movie. That’s no coincidence. This one was distributed by Universal, meaning Hammer could use the classic Frankenstein look without risking lawsuits. The result? Peter Cushing’s Baron builds a new creature that looks closer to the 1930s version than anything Hammer had done before, with a flat head, blocky brow, and greenish skin.

Though it’s part of Hammer’s continuity, tonally, Evil is a strange hybrid of both studios’ sensibilities. The storyline and characterization are closer to Son of Frankenstein or Ghost of Frankenstein than Hammer’s psychopathic approach to the character. Victor is still ruthless, but less monstrous. He’s in hiding after being driven out of town. The real villain is Zoltan, a drunken carnival hypnotist who manipulates the newly revived Creature into committing robberies and murders.

This is the first time in the Hammer films that the Baron is shown as something other than a pure sociopath. Aside from stealing a heart in the opening, he’s largely reactive; trying to stop Zoltan, protect the mute woman, and salvage what’s left of his life’s work. The police and burgomaster come off as more antagonistic, gleefully looting his laboratory once it’s seized.

Meanwhile, Victor’s relationship with the mute beggar girl adds a flicker of compassion rare for this series. She’s a stand-in for the blind hermit from Bride of Frankenstein, another outcast who sees the humanity in the monster. The Creature, for his part, is far more sympathetic than Hammer’s previous version: he protects the mute woman, never kills without reason, and even turns on Zoltan when ordered to harm innocent people.

For all Universal’s influence, the creature’s design doesn’t resemble the skeletal, waterlogged look Jack Pierce created for Karloff in 1931. It’s an approximation of cultural ideas of what the Karloff monster looked like rather than trying to look like a corpse, which is what the Karloff design was actually going for. Up to this point in film history (1964), Karloff’s original makeup was still the closest we’d gotten to Mary Shelley’s description: a sickly, jaundiced face, watery eyes, and the appearance of a body preserved in water. Even in Bride of Frankenstein, when Karloff looked healthier, those sunken cheeks from ’31 gave the impression of something truly dead. By the time Lugosi took over the role, the creature had become a Halloween mask caricature of itself. Hammer continues that trend here.

The pacing is uneven, and generally, The Evil of Frankenstein feels cheaper than the Universal films it imitates. You can see all the right pieces: the icy revival scene recalling Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, the hypnotist dynamic mirroring Ygor from Son of Frankenstein, and that classic Gothic revenge setup. But it never quite comes alive.