Director: Terence Fisher
Writers: Bert Batt, Anthony Nelson Keys
Stars: Peter Cushing, Veronica Carlson, Freddie Jones
Run Time: 1 Hour, 41 Minutes
Link: https://amzn.to/2TnFwDI
Synopsis
We watch a man get beheaded in the street by a hidden assailant carrying an empty hatbox, but we already have a pretty good idea who it’s going to be.
A burglar goes into an abandoned building and finds himself in Frankenstein’s hidden lab. A horribly disfigured bald man comes in, carrying the no-longer empty hatbox, and they fight. The burglar gets away, and the bald man pulls off the rubber mask, revealing Dr. Frankenstein. Frankenstein disposes of the body he was working on while the burglar goes to the police.
The police arrive, and find a mostly-deserted lab, and they start looking for all doctors in the area. Frankenstein rides out of town once again. He rents a room from Anna Spengler, who runs a boarding house in a neighboring town.
Anna is dating young Dr. Karl Holst, who works at the asylum. He also steals cocaine from them to pay for Anna’s mother’s stay at the asylum. Frankenstein overhears a man in the boarding house talking about Dr. Brandt, an inmate in the asylum. Frankenstein knows Brandt, an expert on transplanting people’s brains. He blackmails Anna and Karl into assisting him.
Frankenstein’s first demand is to evict the other boarders. He and Karl start robbing medical supply companies to rebuild his lab. The man at the asylum explains that Dr. Brandt is hopelessly insane, and he tends toward violent outbursts. Frankenstein, on the other hand, wants to preserve Brandt’s mind, and they are both experts in brain transplants after all.
Frankenstein and Karl break into the asylum to “liberate” Brandt. They aren’t exactly subtle, and it doesn’t go well. The police realize that Brandt’s old collaborator, Dr. Frankenstein, may be involved. Brandt has a heart attack, and they have to find another body to hold his brain; they decide that Dr. Richter, Karl’s boss, would be ideal.
Dr. Richter soon ends up on a table in the lab prepped for surgery. Before that, however, Frankenstein decides he wants a little more from Anna, and he rapes her. Karl returns, and the operation begins. They plan to wake up Brandt in two days, then everything will be over for all of them.
A water main bursts, and Anna sees a dead man’s arm flop out of the hole. This is where they hid one of the bodies. She struggles in the rain to pull out and hide the body before the water department shows up.
Mrs. Brandt comes to see him, and Frankenstein ends up explaining everything to her. The second she leaves, they pack up and get out of town.
They start getting set up in their new lair when Brandt wakes up in Richter’s body. He’s alone, and does not take the surprise well. Anna stabs Brandt while Frankenstein and Karl fight in the barn. Frankenstein stabs Anna. Brandt patches himself up and escapes; he goes home to his wife, and that goes about as well as can be expected.
He knows Frankenstein will be coming for him, so he soaks the house in gasoline and gets a gun. Frankenstein comes in, they fight, and the house burns down. Brandt drags him kicking and screaming back into the burning house.
Commentary
Most of the trivia I read on this involved the “notorious” rape scene, which, while nothing special compared to modern films, was pretty explicit for a Hammer film. It does in fact, seem very out of place for a Peter Cushing Frankenstein film and doesn’t really fit in with the character as we’ve seen him so far. It just seemed very unnecessary; maybe they didn’t think Frankenstein seemed evil enough up to that point.
There’s no building bodies of cadavers in this one; it’s all about brain transplants, which seems like a natural progression for the doctor. It’s a complex story with lots of things going on, and it’s this complexity that makes it good. There’s not a huge number of deaths and no real monster other than the doctor himself.
Still, a lot of this plot revolves around lack of communication; if Frankenstein had simply been there when Brandt/Richter wakes up and they’d had a simple conversation, most of what happened in the end would have been avoided.