Young surgeon and Frankenstein fanboy Simon Helder (Shane Briant) is arrested after playing with too many corpses that didn’t belong to him, and convicted of sorcery. Which – the olden tymes’ justice system being somewhat confusing – leads to him being placed in an Asylum.
As his luck will have it, it’s the same Asylum where his idol, Baron Doctor Victor Frankenstein (still and always Peter Cushing), was incarcerated. Supposedly, the great, mad scientist died there, but, as Simon quickly learns, he’s very much alive. In his own, illimitable style, Frankenstein has blackmailed his way into the position of the resident physician, the alias of Dr. Victor (a genius with aliases, he is not), freedom, and some useful ways to continue his experiments in the creation of life.
The good Baron is quite happy Simon recognizes him practically at once. After all, the young man is well suited to take over some of his responsibilities in the Asylum and leave Frankenstein more time to pursue his more private interests.
Soon enough, Simon, together with mute and beautiful patient Sarah (Madeline Smith), becomes involved in these experiments as well. Slowly, the young man begins to realize that the cliché is right and one should truly never meet one’s heroes. Frankenstein is rather more unscrupulous than Simon imagined him to be, stepping over ethical lines the young man himself clearly holds sacrosanct, how ever dubious the experiments he’s interested in.
This is the final gasp of Hammer’s Frankenstein series, again directed by Hammer’s more traditional gothic stylist Terence Fisher, and at times, it really does feel a bit like the kind of lumbering, reanimated corpse the good Baron likes to create, slowly shambling through a plot without many surprises while having to cope with a budget that clearly isn’t what it once was anymore – and Hammer never was a big budget kind of place in any case.
This doesn’t mean there’s nothing to like here: from time to time, Fisher can still create a pleasantly gothic mood, and hit a striking image or three. Particularly the third act has quite a few of those, enhanced by the somewhat stronger gore late period Hammer experimented with from time to time. Frankenstein’s final fate, for example, does sit particularly well on the border where the Gothic and the gruesome meet.
Cushing is of course very strong here, particularly in the way he reveals quite how mad and immoral his initially avuncular Frankenstein actually is – this is still the monstrous man he started the series as, just older, even more ruthless and better at hiding what he is, until he slowly lets his mask drop. The movie’s problem here is that the audience knows very well what the Baron’s true nature is, so there’s little dramatic tension to the slow reveal Simon experiences, which is the main reason the first half or so of the film feels quite as slow as it does.
Then there’s the terrible monster, looking as if somebody had taken the lower half of a bad gorilla suit, put it on a highly overweight actor, and dabbed a third generation copy of an unused version of Christopher Lee’s monster’s head from the first Hammer Frankenstein on top. Somehow, this thing manages to make David Prowse look physically unthreatening, which just isn’t right, however you look at it.
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