Among the many types of animals with which I feel an affinity, I like turtles. They seem to me to be the personification of passive resistance. When you have an exterior like that, you don’t have to actively fight off much.
And so, I wasn’t thrilled when Ralph Bates, as Dr. Frankenstein, kills one in Hammer’s Horror of Frankenstein. It doesn’t matter that no actual tortoise appeared to be harmed, and whatever happened transpired off screen. He even successfully reanimates it, but I would have been just as happy if it hadn’t required resuscitation.
This 1970 production was the first time somebody other than Peter Cushing had played the mad doctor. There are also some other significant course changes from what had been established by the previous five films in the series.
For one thing, this is supposed to be a black comedy. Admittedly, it has more intentional humor in it than what one had come to expect, though Hammer of the 1970’s was already proving to be a different animal than what it had been in the 50’s and 60’s.
There isn’t any nudity yet, which would mark (and, for many, mar) the studio’s output starting shortly after this was released. Still, there is a large amount of gore, though the poor quality of those effects result in what I believe to be some unintentional attempts at humor. Body parts of the monster are often very artificial in appearance, and seem to be as hard and inflexible as stone. That said, much of what they are supposed to be is gross.
The sound design is actually more squirm-inducing than anything we see. The mind tends to richly imagine what is transpiring when Bates does something like saw crudely through various types of organic matter, even if we are not subjected to accompanying visuals.
Bates goes at his work with gusto, and he actually makes an interesting Dr. Frankenstein. He is a self-absorbed fop and sociopath with a droll sense of humor. His first experiments on human remains is while at college, where he briefly reanimates an arm, only for it flash him the backwards V that is the Brit equivalent of the American middle finger salute. I’m not sure anybody would have expected that.
He will flee university at summer break after knocking up the dean’s daughter. Bates makes a suggestion to the dean that he perform a “brief surgical procedure” to rid her of the unwanted matter inside her. That he proposes this solution without any reluctance or tact is telling.
Soon, he’s back to the lab at the family castle, where he can expand his experiments to construct the man he has diagrammed on a wall. The various parts to be assembled are outlined and numbered, like a paint-by-numbers for psychopaths.
He has also brought a school friend Graham James with him. Here is a man whose inherent goodness and sense of responsibility to man does not shift one iota in the course of his work as Bates’s assistant. It is no surprise having a conscience will not bode well for this man in the long run. Frankly, it is a rather poor, shallow and thankless role. I think I can sum up both his appearance and performance when I say he is only an ascot away from the being the ideal Freddy for a live-action Scooby Doo.
Really, this is a showcase for Bates, an actor Hammer had hoped would be their next Peter Cushing or Christopher Lee, and whom they cast in many of their pictures around this time. Alas, he is neither one, nor does have as strong of a distinctive screen presence as either of those legends. Still, he holds his own here, and was interesting to see such a repellent person as a character which has, frankly, always been more repulsive than how he was usually played by Cushing. There is something about Bates here which brought to my mind how I always imagined The Kinks’s Ray Davies might be in person.
We are introduced to Bates in a solid opening scene which tells us everything we need to know about the man. He is in a roomful of the oldest pre-college students ever to grace the screen, and he gets caught by an instructor while he is marking up an illustration of a nude woman. It is quite creepy how he has been marking off areas of her in dashed lines. Then he manages to evade punishment by exploiting the teacher’s hypochondria, convincing the man he’s having a heart attack. Now that class has finished earlier, it’s off to discuss “anatomy” in the woods with a girl we hear say, “Shall I take my clothes off now, Victor?”
This is a very horny film for one where the heaving bosoms are still constrained to the insides of their blouses. Among the lustiest of the ladies here is Kate O’Mara as the housekeeper who provided “service” to Bate’s father and, now that the elder Frankenstein is dead, is expected to do the same for the son.
I found it interesting Bates doesn’t take more advantage of the wealthy and blond Veronica Carlson, especially once her father has passed. Not that she knows it, but Bates was responsible for the man’s demise, as well as the liberation of the man’s brain from his body.
It was a crafty gravedigger played by Dennis Price who obtained that specimen. More specifically, it was Price’s wife, played by Joan Rice, who did the actual work, in what is a pretty funny recurring bit. These two are the most interesting characters in the film, though neither has much screen time. Consider Price’s lament to Bates about scarcity of product: “Times are hard. People just aren’t dying off so quick. It’s the welfare state.” And Rice has a solid line in which she defends her husband’s reputation: “In all the time I’ve known you, you’ve never dealt in shoddy goods.”
Perhaps the least interesting role is Jon Finch, as a childhood friend of Bates and Carlson and who is now a police inspector. Like so many movies of this type, the villain has the best part and everybody else has lesser ones. And the more pure of heart a character might be, the less interesting they are
I’m not sure if the heart of David Prowse as the monster was pure when it was in the original owner, but the future Darth Vader is one of the most murderous incarnations of the creature I have seen. Unlike most versions of the being so many mistakenly call “Frankenstein”, there isn’t a trace of the tragic this time. It may be the first time I haven’t felt sympathy for the creature, as it immediately goes on a rampage as soon as it is animated. From that point on, it is just one long killing spree.
It is really hard to avoid talking about the ending, and I’m still on the fence as to whether or not I agreed with it. What happens is quite unexpected, perhaps even unprecedented. It is a bold move, though not a fully satisfactory one. For one thing, it is extremely abrupt and the tempo of the movie at that point did not suggest it would end at that point.
This is even more surprising when considering Jimmy Sangster helmed this. As one of Hammer’s most frequent and dependable directors, it is odd he would deliberately trip at the finish line in such a manner.
One last aspect of the production I want to call out is the poor quality of the allegedly outdoor scenes which are unconvincing studio sets. It makes one long for the days when the studio’s gothic horror films were shot in real environments deep in rural Europe.
Horror of Frankenstein is an interesting tangent in the Hammer series, but Bates was never going to be the next Cushing and this wasn’t ever going to result in another run of films with him. In fact, Cushing would return for a final appearance as the good doctor in 1974’s Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell, a picture in which I believe no turtles were harmed in a real or fictitious capacity.
Dir: Jimmy Sangster
Starring Ralph Bates, Kate O’Mara, Veronica Carlson, Dennis Price
Watched on Shout Factory blu-ray