Baron Frankenstein (Peter Cushing) is forced to abandon his experiments at an abandoned water mill after an angry priest discovers his hideout and destroys his equipment. The Baron and his assistant Hans (Sandor Eles) realise that they have no alternative but to flee as the priest will without doubt return with the police. They return to the Baron's hometown of Karlstaad, which is risky because Frankenstein was expelled from there less than ten years ago. Thankfully, there is a festive carnival going on in the town that provides them with cover to pass through unnoticed. The pair arrive at the Baron's chateau to find that it has been looted by the Burgomaster (David Hutcheson) and his corrupt Chief of Police (Duncan Lamont). Enraged, Frankenstein confronts them and he only narrowly avoids arrest. The pair flee to the mountains where a mute beggar girl (Katy Wild) offers them shelter from a storm in a cave. Here, Frankenstein tells Hans that he was expelled all those years ago because he succeeded in creating a living being in his laboratory but it escaped and went on the rampage in the countryside before it was driven off of a cliff by a mob. The following morning, the Baron explores the caves and to his surprise, he finds his creature preserved in a glacier. He thaws it out and transports it back to chateau aided by Hans and the beggar girl. It transpires that enough of his electrical apparatus survived and he succeeds in restoring life to the monster (Kiwi Kingston). But its brain is dormant due to the fall from the cliff and Frankenstein acquires the services of Zoltan (Peter Woodthorpe), a fairground hypnotist, whom was recently expelled from the town by the Burgomaster and the Chief of Police for performing his act at the carnival without a licence who succeeds in reactivating the monster's mind through mesmerism. Trouble is though, the creature will now only obey Zoltan's commands and the alcoholic hypnotist blackmails Frankenstein into letting him use it for his own ends. First he instructs the creature to go and steal gold from the town and then to punish the people responsible for his expulsion.
The Evil Of Frankenstein is generally regarded as the weakest entry in Hammer's celebrated cycle of movies featuring the exploits of Mary Shelley's notorious Baron Frankenstein. I personally feel that it has been unfairly underrated even though it does have its faults without any doubt. Firstly, the screenplay by producer Anthony Hinds (penned under his usual pseudnonym John Elder), totally ignores its two predecessors, Curse Of Frankenstein and Revenge Of Frankenstein, electing instead to restart the story from scratch with a completely new monster for no apparent reason. Secondly, the film is seriously weakened by a disappointing monster in which the make up is clearly no more than a paper mache mask that only allowed Kiwi Kingston to wander through the proceedings and go about his destructive business with a fixed, bland expression. The fact that Kingston was essentially a wrestler and not an actor probably did not help matters either and the monster shows no emotion in his plight, an element which was integral to the story. Hinds' script does attempt to establish an emotional element in the story by having the creature and the beggar girl fall in love with each other. But Kingston, partly due to his restrictive make up and lack of acting experience, is unable to depict this in his mime but Katy Wild works really hard to show this element and she deserves a glowing review for her efforts here. Interestingly, Evil was being made for Universal which meant that Hammer now had the freedom to copy the original Boris Karloff monster make up as they pleased and one would have thought that they would have come up with something more imaginative than they actually did.
Director Freddie Francis openly admitted that he never really had much affection for the horror genre and disliked being "typecast" as a horror film maker. Indeed his directorial work has varied in quality with the dismal Legend Of The Werewolf and the lacklustre The Deadly Bees, but his best work always papered over the basic material and The Evil Of Frankenstein comes under this category. He takes the rather tired Anthony Hinds script, which on the most part is a formulaic plot, and enthuses it with his splendid visual style. There is an incredible shot in the pre-credits sequence where a body is stolen from a woodcutter's hut by a bodysnatcher witnessed by a little girl. Terrified, the child runs into the moonlit forests and runs into Baron Frankenstein himself. Francis uses well judged low angle shots to show what's going on from the child's point of view. The winds howl through the trees and Don Banks' doom laden music gives it a gothic fairytale like quality, which the director maintains throughout the proceedings and the movie is directed at a frantic pace. The laboratory set is extremely impressive as Francis insisted that a large amount of the film's budget be spent on making these sequences as stylish as possible. The set work of Don Mingaye is impressive and is almost as good as anything that Hammer's regular production designer Bernard Robinson ever did for the company and the Eastmancolor cinematography of John Wilcox is stunning. With the exception of Kiwi Kingston's rather lacklustre creature who was all muscle and no character and Sandor Eles' whom is saddled with a boringly written assistant role that he could do little with, the performances are largely excellent. Cushing offers his usual accomplished performance as the Baron and it is always interesting to note that as different writers worked on the series, the Baron's personality seemed to change from film to film. Here, he seems quite humane with Zoltan turning out to be the real villian of the piece. For instance, in one scene where Zoltan has managed to break through to the creature's brain through mesmerism, he says "You'll make a lot of money by showing him off at fun fairs" as a freakshow. "Show him, I have no intention of showing him" the Baron replies in disgust. Then later when the Baron discovers that the crooked mesmerer has used the creature to plunder gold and murder people, he loses it and throws him out of the house. The Baron we see here is in complete contrast to the one we see in the later Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed in which he is a completely ireedeemable character who does not care whom he hurts provided he gets his way. In addition, he was not above blackmailing a young couple into helping him with his experiments and he took a sadistic pleasure in their destruction as they got deeper and deeper into trouble under his orders. The script for that film was the work of long time Hammer assistant director Bert Batt whereas Evil was penned by producer Anthony Hinds who quite clearly had their own conceptions of how Frankenstein should be. Peter Woodthorpe who would later appear in the long running Inspector Morse series as Max the pathologist does fine work as the villianous Zoltan and Duncan Lamont shines as the corrupt Chief of Police.
As the master of the fantastical Neil Gaiman's touch is certainly to be seen in this film version of "Stardust" with a stand-out cast of actors like Peter O'Toole, Sienna Miller, David Kelly & Ian McKellen to name a few. We also get the likes of Jason Flemyng, Rupert Everett, Robert De Niro, Ricky Gervais & Claire Danes. Michelle Pfeiffer is a tour-de-force as the evil scheming witch Lamia striving to reach her goals by any means necessary. But alas - Fantastic as it is; it is also so sssslllllllllooooooooooowwwwwwwwwwwwww dragging itself from one scene to the next with far to much exposition and explanation when they should just get on with the story.
Rejected in love our Hero archetype wanders over the wall into Stormhold hoping to find a fallen star to show his truelove - Unfortunately on the other side of the wall is a very different world from ours with flying skypirates catching lightning and evil witches with hideous charms amongst the political scheming of a group of brother Princes attempting to seize the crown of Stormhold for themselves. Certainly have no idea what sort of market this film was aiming at; but worth a wet Sunday afternoon watch at least once.
