The fifth of an eventual seven Frankenstein pictures from Hammer Studios, 1969's "Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed" has a reputation of being one of the best of the bunch, with Peter Cushing's Baron particularly nasty this go-round. And it turns out that the rep is well deserved, too. This time, the Baron, having been driven out of his native Bohemia, blackmails a young couple (ridiculously beautiful housekeeper Veronica Carlson and her fiancé who works in a mental asylum) to assist him in his scientific experiments. In perhaps the film's most suspenseful sequence, they liberate a former associate of the Baron's from the asylum and put his living brain into the noggin of the head doctor there. This procedure is accomplished during a fun, not overly gory operating scene, although why the Baron feels the necessity to cut and paste (oops...I mean saw and stitch) at this stage of the game, after having perfected a seemingly more advanced spirit-into-body procedure in 1967's fourth installment, "Frankenstein Created Woman," is beyond me! Anyway, Terence Fisher directs his picture (his fourth of an eventual five Franky films) with a good bit of style, and the film has been given Hammer's typically fine production values. The scene in which the Baron rapes Veronica is an astonishing one, and very uncharacteristic; it was inserted as an afterthought on the insistence of Hammer bigwig Sir James Carreras. Fans of the 1960 Cushing film "The Flesh and the Fiends" should get a nice chuckle when the Baron invokes Dr. Knox and the Burke & Hare case, just as fans of the 1990s Britcom "As Time Goes By" will delight in seeing Frank Middlemass, the perpetually "rocking on" octogenarian on that program, here almost 30 years younger (but sounding exactly the same). So yes, the fifth time IS the charm for this fun series indeed. Oh...another great-looking Warner Bros. DVD here, too.
Review of Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed
