Been a minute since a new podcast movie. Partly this is because I’ve been out of the house a lot the past few weeks due to various broken things. Partly because even before that I finally got several “I’ve already seen this” in a row podcast episodes that required no film viewing. But also enough time passed since I knew I needed to watch this one that I’ve completely forgotten the categories.
Twenty seconds of research later… this movie’s scare was werewolf, and the style was sequel plus. Which brings us to maybe the very first movie to establish a cinematic universe: Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man. So what happens is, Larry Talbot was killed in his Wolfman movie, and Frankenstein’s monster was killed in his Frankenstein movie, and the execs at Universal Pictures had a real pickle on their hands when they realized that, hey, it’s the 1940s and both Boris Karloff and Lon Chaney are still alive, we have to cash in on this, only, how???
So in phase one (of the plan, not the MCU[1]), some graverobbers open Talbot’s crypt, but it’s a) night time, b) a full moon, and c) they foolishly covered the crypt in wolfsbane, which they justifiably thought would repel werewolves instead of resurrecting them, but oops, now he’s alive again. And still a wolf, and still miserable about being a wolf, so in phase two he goes and finds a gypsy lady from his previous movie who tells him that Baroness Elsa Frankenstein might be able to help him not be immortal via her father’s research into life after death, under the theory that death after life is probably the same wheelhouse I guess.
So off they go, pissing off a bunch of villagers who are not a fan of the dude who owned the castle up the hill, and hey, uh-oh, those burned bones they found must have belonged to someone else, because here’s the Monster frozen in the side of a wall. All that’s left is to have some gratuitous racism[2] against the old gypsy woman, find a mad scientist willing to hook up electrodes to those neck bolts, and also for some reason let’s keep doing this stuff only when the moon is full, no way we could wait an extra week before getting started, is there, and before you know it, the battle of the century is underway.
Chaney’s wolfman is appropriately soulful, never missing a chance to express his misery with either word, expression, or deed. Karloff’s monster would be a cipher cum caricature, until you remember that no, this is what other people were caricaturing in the first place. All in all, it was a whole lot of plot getting in the way of a disappointingly short battle royale, but still worth having seen. I think the only one of these I’ve seen before is the one with Abbott and Costello, and you have to admit they were intellectually bankrupt by that point in the, let’s say, series.
This one, by contrast, worked very hard to be an actual sequel to both movies it was combining, back when nobody even knew that could be done. If nothing else, respect for the ground they broke!
[1] Monster Cinematic Universe. They kinda get dibs on the acronym, to be honest.
[2] The danger of a period piece that was still made almost a hundred years ago is you cannot tell if the people being so casually and pointlessly racist are themselves caricatures that show the then-modern audience how far we’ve come, or if, no, that’s just racist script-writers and directors playing to a racist audience. …but probably it’s the second one.
