Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943)

Directed by Roy William Neill. Starring Lon Chaney Jr., Patric Knowles, Maria Ouspenskaya, Ilona Massey, Lionel Atwill, Béla Lugosi, Rex Evans, Don Barclay, Dennis Hoey.

Joint follow-up to The Ghost of Frankenstein and The Wolf Man kicked off the “monster rally” trend of combining two or more classic movie monsters in the same motion picture. Lon Chaney Jr.’s werewolf-doomed Larry Talbot is inadvertently resurrected by grave robbers, and he seeks out the notorious Dr. Frankenstein’s journal to find a way for him to break the curse and die peacefully, uncovering and thawing Frankenstein’s monster’s body in the process. No better than second-rate in the pantheon of early Universal horror pictures, with insufficient monster action and cursory dialogue. Chaney is in good, tortured form, but curious parties eager to see Béla Lugosi play Frankenstein’s monster for the first and only time are likely to be disappointed by his broad, cartoonish gestures as he lumbers around, arms stiffly outstretched, moaning like a ham. As far as genre familiarity is concerned, the polished atmospheric elements are more cozy than chilling. Incidentally, the only Frankenstein the Wolf Man meets is a baroness descendant played by Ilona Massey who just sort of shows up and then vanishes from the story without a fuss. Lugosi initially had dialogue, but because of his thick accent, all of his lines were cut from the final edit. Dwight Frye, who had previously appeared in several Universal horror classics (Frankenstein, Dracula, Bride of Frankenstein, The Invisible Man), has a small part here, his final credited film role before his untimely death.

55/100