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Frankenstein Created Woman / The Mummy's Shroud; March, 1967
Topic Started: Oct 3 2014, 09:43 AM (204 Views)
Laughing Gravy
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Frankenstein Created Woman
Dir. Terence Fisher
Written by John Elder (Anthony Hinds)
With Peter Cushing, Susan Denberg, and Thorley Walters

The Mummy's Shroud
Written and Directed by John Gilling
Based on a story by John Elder
With Andre Morrell, John Phillips, and Michael Ripper

The last two films produced at Bray before Hammer moved onward (and downward), released as a double-feature in the spring of 1967. Somehow, I missed these as a kid, and I saw pretty much all monster movies. My brudder, six years older than me, was a teenager by this pernt and probably was taking girls to scary movies, the dawg.

In our first feature, Dr. Frankenstein (not working undercover, for the first time since the first Hammer Frankenstein) is experimenting with human souls, trying to find out if he can extract one from a body that's dying. He manages to do just that, courtesy of his beheaded assistant Hans, and he - get this - puts the soul into the crippled and deformed body of a young woman, taking care to fix her face and twisted leg (and dye her hair blonde) and turning her into Playboy's Miss August of 1966(!). She then lures unsuspected men to her boudoir and beheads them(!!!).

Far be it from me to complain about a Frankenstein movie that features a Playboy centerfold seducing and beheading guys, but... Well, don't think me unmanly, fellers and gals... it's just that... Well... WHERE'S THE FREAKIN' FRANKENSTEIN MONSTER?!?!? As you'll recall, I've always looked down this thing (*points to his nose, and says aloud, "I'm not pickin' it, I'm pointin' to it," just in case anyone is watching) at the Val Lewton things for usually forgetting to include the monster in the title in the actual movies. Well, if you call this movie something else it's not bad at all, although in another 4 years or so the centerfold lady would be all a-titties showin', which would be even better, although it's not GOOD, either, it's just okay. As a Frankenstein movie, though, it's a massive let-down, even by Hammer standards. The fact that Martin Scorsese ranks this as one of his favorite films makes me wonder about him, let me tell you.

Million-dollar Dialog:
Dr. Frankenstein is being questioned at an inquest.
Inspector: "Your occupation?"
Dr. F: "I am a doctor.
Insp: "Of medicine?"
Dr. F: "Of medicine, law, and physics."
Heckler in the court: "And of WITCHCRAFT!"
Dr. F: "To the best of my knowledge, doctorates are not awarded for witchcraft. But if they are, no doubt I shall qualify for one."
Insp: "You are a very clever man, then, Baron."
Dr. F: "Yes, I am."

After viewing their gorgeous HD offering of Dracula Prince of Darkness, I was profoundly disappointed in Millennium's Blu-ray of Frankenstein Created Woman, which is not very good.

Oh, and here's a joke you'll enjoy: the first screen treatment for this came about directly after Revenge of Frankenstein in 1958, and, as a nod to a certain Roger Vadim film, was called And Then Frankenstein Created Woman.

Let's move on to The Mummy's Shroud, shall we?

Okay, so, a bunch of guys enter a cursed tomb when they'd been warned not to, incurring the wrath of Egyptian high priests who bring a mummy to life and it shambles around killing them until the surviving young couple in love destroys it.

Shit, is that the best they could come up with? The exact same mummy story, told yet again? Well, if it's well done, I guess they could get away with it. But there are some serious problems here - John Gilling pronounced the film a wreck, a disaster, a terrible movie, and he wrote AND directed the damn thing, so he should know. (He left Hammer after this, which says something, right?)

Serious Problem #1: The film begins with a long, long prologue set in Ancient Egypt and it's stupid and ridiculous, with "clashing armies" played by 10 guys, a "dry, arid, sun-soaked desert" that looks like the Moors from Hound of the Baskervilles, pot-bellies and blackface makeup on the Egyptians, and a giant royal palace that's played by the typical Hammer one-room set. Seriously, it takes the film about an hour to recover from the disastrous opening.

S.P. #2: The Mummy. Somebody went down to the Royal British Museum to check out the REAL mummies and discovered they don't look anything LIKE Kharis or his cousins; they wear belts and gloves and have painted lips! So we get a mummy that looks surprisingly like Joel Grey in Cabaret, wearing baggy, saggy pants.

S.P. #3: There is no S.P. #3.

S.P. #4: The cast. Andre Morrell is the best thing in it, so they make him naturally the first victim. That leaves Michael Ripper, given too little to do, Elisabeth Sellars (who'd been in the first Hammer production at Bray, brought back for the last one), who has nothing to do, and beautiful Maggie Kimberley, who has less than nothing to do. John Phillips is the nasty, grumpy guy we all hate, and they give him all the lines. Sheesh. Oh, you'll love the little Gypsy woman (in Egypt?) who keeps predicting deaths and keeps being accurate.

Okay, so, finally, in the last 25 or 30 minutes, that damn mummy (whose name, in case you're wondering, is Prem, and is played by the guy who was Christopher Lee's stuntman and double in the 1959 mummy movie) springs to life and goes around killing people, and I have to tell you: those of you who said that Hammer films are nasty, distasteful, and ugly, you may well be thinking of the bloodbath and unrelenting unpleasantness that is the last act of The Mummy's Shroud. I found it frightening, frankly, but even I was put off by the appalling violence and gruesome deaths depicted. Shockingly, the censors in England - usually so adamant about this stuff - went ahead and okayed it. Perhaps they'd simply given up.

The ending - sort of a new take on the classic ending of Horror of Dracula - is really, really well done, with the mummy's crumbling making up for a lot of what had gone before.

I have the old (1995 or so) Anchor Bay DVD of The Mummy's Shroud, and I swear it looks better than the Blu-ray of the Frankenstein picture.

Postscript

Over the Christmas break in 2011, I took a look at all those boxed sets of "British Noir" VCI had given me, mostly Hammer crime dramas from the 1950s, and decided to watch them all, obtaining Wayne Kinsey's wonderful book "Hammer Films: The Bray Studio Years" as a guide. After working my way through those, I kept going into the gothic horror and post-Psycho years, and now I've reached the end of the trail. Here's a list of the films I watched and reviewed, all from 1951-1966:

The Last Page
Wings of Danger
Stolen Face
Lady in the Fog
The Gambler and the Lady
Four Sided Triangle
The Flanagan Boy
Spaceways
36 Hours
Face the Music
The House Across the Lake
Murder by Proxy
Five Days
The Stranger Came Home
Third Party Risk
Mask of Dust
The Glass Cage
The Quatermass Xperiment
X the Unknown
Quatermass 2
Curse of Frankenstein
The Snorkel
Horror of Dracula
Revenge of Frankenstein
Hound of the Baskervilles
The Man who could Cheat Death
The Mummy
The Stranglers of Bombay
Never Take Sweets from a Stranger
The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll
The Brides of Dracula
Terror of the Tongs
The Full Treatment
Curse of the Werewolf
Taste of Fear
Cash on Demand
The Damned
Pirates of Blood River
Captain Clegg
Phantom of the Opera
Maniac
Paranoiac
Kiss of the Vampire
Nightmare
Devil-Ship Pirates
Evil of Frankenstein
The Gorgon
Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb
Fanatic
The Nanny
Dracula Prince of Darkness
Plague of the Zombies
One Million Years B.C.
The Witches
Frankenstein Created Woman
The Mummy’s Shroud


I count 56 films! Wow. I can count! Go, me! I'm sorry there are some I missed: I couldn't find The Abominable Snowman, She, Rasputin the Mad Monk, or The Reptile, to name a few I really wanted. I'll probably get to them as they go back into print in the years ahead.

By doing a Search on this message board, you'll find all 56 reviews. Spend a couple of days reading them! Post responses to each one! I double dog dare you.

As for the post-Bray era, clearly Hammer turned out some good movies, and I have a bunch of them. Into the 1970s, they went for more gore and more nipples, and I have some of THEM, too. I'll probably be watchin' them as we go forward, and writing more motley reviews. Hammer kept making films until about 1973, and then afterwards several attempts were made to resuscitate the studio, none of which worked, culminating in the last Hammer film, The Lady Vanishes, in 1978.

Growing up, I enjoyed the Hammer films when I saw them on TV or at the movies, but much preferred Universal and Monogram horrors, and I guess I still do, but the colorful Hammer films can be a tasty change of pace, and some of them are really, really good monster movies, although those are outnumbered by the ones that aren't as good.

Thanks for following my misadventures with all this, Oh Loyal Balconeers.




"I'm glad that this question came up, because there are so many ways to answer it that one of them is bound to be right." - Robert Benchley
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Sgt Saturn
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Laughing Gravy
Oct 3 2014, 09:43 AM
... the little Gypsy woman (in Egypt?) ...
Where did you think the name "gypsy" came from? yeah, I know they didn't really come from there, but it kinda fits. Kinda.
The Ol' Sarge
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