Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed (1969)

Baron Frankenstein (Peter Cushing) is pseudonymously living in some backlot German or Austrian city, committing the occasional murder to further his scientific goals.

On the run from the police, Frankenstein more or less stumbles into the perfect set-up for these goals, the small boarding house of Anna Spengler (Veronica Carlson). It’s not just a great place to hide and act creepily – and eventually worse - towards a young woman. As luck would have it, Anna’s fiancée is a young doctor of what goes for psychiatry at the time. Not only that, Karl (Simon Ward) just happens to work at the asylum where the incurably insane Doctor Brandt (George Pravda) is kept. Brandt is a former associate of the Baron, and has developed a formula Frankenstein would do everything to acquire. Given the ethical framework this version of Hammer’s Frankenstein works under, I really mean everything.

It certainly helps in Frankenstein’s plans that Anna and Karl are young, stupid, and eminently blackmailable – and once he has his hooks in them, there’s ever more culpability for ever worse crimes mounting up. So soon, everyone is involved in a sordid tale of violence, rape and brain transplants.

That “rape” part is generally the element of Terence Fisher’s Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed that breaks the film for quite a few viewers. Even with this, the nastiest and most physically and emotionally brutal version of Frankenstein, the baron also turning into even more of a sexual predator than the first Hammer Frankenstein film, Curse of Frankenstein, had already made him a decade earlier, comes as a kind of shock.

To me, that shock is actually an effective one, one that is really meant to pull away the last illusion an audience might have had of the man indeed working for something he truly believes to be a noble scientific goal. This Frankenstein’s only believes that his wants and impulses are more important than anything and anyone else.

Consequently, Must Be Destroyed is the Hammer Frankenstein movie least interested in presenting monsters or mad science as anything more than another way for Frankenstein to destroy everything and everyone he touches to satisfy his own needs.

Thus, this is certainly the least fun of the Hammer Frankensteins, not the kind of horror of gothic castles – in fact, I’d argue Fisher very consciously films this as the least gothic Hammer movie he can make it – but one where the pseudo-Victorian world of Hammer shambles towards the brutality of the 70s in horror right at the cusp of that decade.

I can’t help but admire the film for what it tries, and mostly succeeds at, to do, but I can also very much understand why people don’t want to see Peter Cushing of all people going the sexual predator route.