So, at what point do you just give up a lucrative franchise? Do you quit while you're ahead artistically, or try to wring out every last cent? It's pretty clear how Universal executives felt when you look at `House of Frankenstein.'
This chapter of the Frankenstein story follows an episodic path. The tale of Dracula seducing his way into a family works on a short-story level -- I would have preferred Bela Lugosi as Dracula instead of John Carradine, but everything worked out well. The second half, the recovery of the Wolf Man and Frankenstein's Monster and the search for Dr. Frankenstein's secrets, goes through its paces faithfully, but the centerpiece of the movie is the tragic romantic triangle between the hunchbacked Daniel (J. Carroll Nash), the beautiful Gypsy, and the suicidal Larry Talbot (Lon Chaney). The actors all do good work: Boris Karloff makes his return to the Frankenstein series here playing a mad scientist, which he performs with glee. J. Carroll Nash's Daniel becomes a sympathetic character, and the girls (Anne Gwynne and Elena Verdugo) are attractive and appealing. On the other hand there's John Carradine as a not-very-convincing Dracula, Lon Chaney's increasingly tired hysterics as Larry Talbot / The Wolf Man, and Glenn Strange does little as the Frankenstein Monster except lie on a slab and finally get up and lumber around a bit.
A big plus: `House' features another appearance of the incredibly durable Frankenstein lab equipment, which I always get a kick out of seeing. It amazes me that no matter how many times that equipment gets blown up or washed away or buried, it always comes back for the next sequel, more or less intact. That Henry Frankenstein (the original designer and builder of those mechanisms) would have made a heck of a mechanic!
There isn't anything about `House of Frankenstein' that is really bad, it's just that there isn't any particularly good in it, especially in light of what had come before.
This chapter of the Frankenstein story follows an episodic path. The tale of Dracula seducing his way into a family works on a short-story level -- I would have preferred Bela Lugosi as Dracula instead of John Carradine, but everything worked out well. The second half, the recovery of the Wolf Man and Frankenstein's Monster and the search for Dr. Frankenstein's secrets, goes through its paces faithfully, but the centerpiece of the movie is the tragic romantic triangle between the hunchbacked Daniel (J. Carroll Nash), the beautiful Gypsy, and the suicidal Larry Talbot (Lon Chaney). The actors all do good work: Boris Karloff makes his return to the Frankenstein series here playing a mad scientist, which he performs with glee. J. Carroll Nash's Daniel becomes a sympathetic character, and the girls (Anne Gwynne and Elena Verdugo) are attractive and appealing. On the other hand there's John Carradine as a not-very-convincing Dracula, Lon Chaney's increasingly tired hysterics as Larry Talbot / The Wolf Man, and Glenn Strange does little as the Frankenstein Monster except lie on a slab and finally get up and lumber around a bit.
A big plus: `House' features another appearance of the incredibly durable Frankenstein lab equipment, which I always get a kick out of seeing. It amazes me that no matter how many times that equipment gets blown up or washed away or buried, it always comes back for the next sequel, more or less intact. That Henry Frankenstein (the original designer and builder of those mechanisms) would have made a heck of a mechanic!
There isn't anything about `House of Frankenstein' that is really bad, it's just that there isn't any particularly good in it, especially in light of what had come before.