FRANKENSTEIN AND THE MONSTER FROM HELL (1972, Scream Factory, Blu-ray)
My book habit being what it is, I have to be fairly conservative about what I acquire - and more particularly, reacquire - on Blu-ray. When the news got out a week or so ago about the forthcoming Shout!/Scream Factory release of Terence Fisher's FRANKENSTEIN AND THE MONSTER FROM HELL missing the footage that was cut from Paramount's US theatrical release, there was an instant blowback on the various social media and message boards from fans saying they were outraged, that they would never knowingly spend their money on something that was needlessly incomplete. I was also surprised by the news, though it ultimately made sense in that Paramount was a production partner on the picture, putting up some of the money in exchange for the North American rights; they never had any participation in the slightly more gruesome version distributed through other hands elsewhere around the globe, so would be legally unable to make a more complete version available in their territories. I checked my collection and found that I already had the "more complete" version as an import Blu-ray; nevertheless, I placed an order for the new release immediately, primarily for the extras - a new audio commentary by Steve Haberman and Constantine Nasr, and the latest (am I correct in thinking "last," as well?) of Richard Klemensen's reminiscences about "The Men Behind Hammer," which this time is dedicated to producer Roy Skeggs.
The Shout! Factory discs credit Cliff MacMillan as disc producer, but Constantine Nasr has played a decisive, producer-like role in the shaping and assigning of all the various bonus materials included with the company's recent Universal and Hammer classic horror releases. With each new release, I've found their bonus materials to carry the weight of literary monographs on the individual titles, making the overall packages far more than just about definitive presentations, which they anyway usually are. The scholars chosen to represent these films generally have a number of books behind them, qualifying them for their positions, but the discs have the additional value of giving them a face, a voice, and an authority we can actually experience in a more direct and human way. I am always impressed to see someone, whose finished work I've read and appreciated, speaking spontaneously on the subject at hand with equal eloquence - and sometimes even more persuasively or more to the point than in print.
So I knew, going into FRANKENSTEIN AND THE MONSTER FROM HELL, that the movie was not going to be technically complete, but that what its commentaries had to say about this sometimes controversial film would be essential listening - and indeed it was.
I first saw the film at a private advance screening for theater owners, and I must confess to feeling a bit underwhelmed at the time. My friend Michael Schlesinger was also there and I remember him being more impressed, which is certainly to his credit. One of the aspects of the film's fate discussed by Haberman and Nasr is that the film was shot in 1972 but held back from release until 1974, which placed it after the genre-changing release of THE EXORCIST in December 1973. Though not Hammer's last horror film, it was their last traditional Gothic horror film and, as such, embodies the autumnal end of an era. When it is cited as a misfire, a throwback, an unfortunate stumble, these opinions actually have far less to do with how well the film met its own goals than with how those goals seemed at the time in regard to the company they kept on companion screens. What may have looked at the time like a failure to advance, to keep up with the times, was actually a remarkable feat of British craftsmanship that has not aged at all, while some of the independent horrors we may have preferred then have grown to look very much like products of their time. FRANKENSTEIN AND THE MONSTER FROM HELL, I learned from this track, was actually made for less money than 1964's THE EVIL OF FRANKENSTEIN yet I can find literally nothing missing from its overall makeup. Makeup, funnily enough, is the one area where the two commentators and I disagree, as I don't find it under-budgeted or problematic. Actually, the first time I saw an advance photo of the makeup, I had a strange déja vù reaction to it; it felt like something I'd seen before, perhaps in the depths of a dream or somewhere in my own subconscious.
Last week, DVDBeaver carried their review of the film, which was accompanied by the usual comparative frame grabs from the new release and a previous one. The new release looks conspicuously darker, which some respondents have taken as another mark against this release. I feel this is a serious misunderstanding of what people are seeing. When I first saw the film, at a compact indoor screening room, I remember it looking darkish and not especially colorful ("Hogarthian," actually - a word I was surprised not to hear mentioned anywhere in the commentary) and I believe this was a deliberate choice on the part of Terence Fisher and his director of photography Brian Probyn. By opting for a darker light scale, a number of things happen: we become more aware of where light is deliberately concentrated in each and every shot; the art direction is smoothed over to become more easily accepted as a general setting; and indeed the prosthetic makeup worn by David Prowse as the Monster becomes less rubbery, more realistic. There is a shot in the lab involving a blue lamp as Frankenstein (Peter Cushing) considers something and the blue actually reaches out to color his hair - if everything else in the shot were equally bright, it wouldn't have a quarter of the effect its placement has now. So I feel that, from the standpoint of the film's presentation alone, 30s shorter or not, what it shows to us about the intentions of the cinematography is articulate and valuable. It shows me that the film has been judged in recent years, by and large, by home video presentations that were far too bright and much too colorful, insensitive to how it ought to look.
The Haberman/Nasr commentary covers a lot of ground, hitting the ground running by identifying the asylum where the entire film is set as analogous to a Purgatory in which Frankenstein's disciple Simon Helder (Shane Briant) undergoes a test of soul; he is arrested for sorcery and placed in the same stronghold where his hero is planning his latest experiment. Commentaries that address newer films, and a good many older ones as well, don't even bother offering literary correlatives, but here we get Haberman wondering aloud if screenwriter John Elder (Anthony Hinds) or perhaps Fisher had read Milton's PARADISE LOST at some point in the film's pre-production, given the Angel in the cast (Madeleine Smith) and the battle she and Frankenstein essentially wage over the soul of Helder (a name that means "hero" in German). A detail I especially appreciated concerns two zoom shots that appear at points when a room is literally stricken dumb and another when a mute character finds their voice. They talk a bit about Cushing reusing the wig he wore in Amicus' AND NOW THE SCREAMING STARTS! (1972), which sports some French curls and looks somewhat effeminate, drawing no particular conclusions from it - but the discussion did take me to a conclusion of my own, which is that the only weakness left to Frankenstein at this stage of his career is vanity, a vanity that also sets him apart from and above his fellow inmates. It is this same vanity that causes him to take Simon on as his disciple, and I also realized that this very idolatry was the key it took to get the film made; 1970's HORROR OF FRANKENSTEIN had been a failed attempt to reboot the franchise as a black comedy, and MONSTER FROM HELL struck the solution of having a new young doctor, a new 1970s level of special makeup effects gruesomeness, and Cushing's Baron as well. In this way, the commentary is not only informative but engaging in the best way.
Richard Klemensen's talk on Roy Skeggs, like all of his precedent talks in this series, gives us the benefit of Klemensen's almost 50 year history as the publisher and editor of LITTLE SHOPPE OF HORRORS, the Hammer specialty publication. He actually went to London and met these people, who are little more than familiar names to most of us. Speaking here casually, warmly, and even sentimentally about Skeggs, Klemensen presents us with the man - his likes and dislikes, his thoughtfulness, his sense of humor, and above all his thorough dedication to Hammer as a true company man. As with the commentary, I now have different levels of appreciation for Skeggs, and in the future as I see his name on the screen in the credits of films, it will now mean something considerably more to me than it did before.
Whether or not you buy this disc is obviously up to you, but I wanted you to be aware that there is too much of importance gathered here to be thoughtlessly written off. I'll obviously be keeping my import disc for its European content, but for valuable information and a definitive record of how the film itself should look, Scream Factory's disc will be my go-to copy of FRANKENSTEIN AND THE MONSTER FROM HELL.
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