House of Frankenstein [VHS]
The first of Universal's all-star monster tag-team bouts,House of Frankensteinboasts Dracula, the Wolf Man, and Frankenstein's monster, plus a menacing mad scientist (played with hammy glee by Boris Karloff) and his hunchbacked assistant (J. Carroll Naish). It's really more like two films. Karloff and Naish escape prison and find the skeleton of Dracula, resurrecting the dapper vampire (played by a dignified John Carradine) and unleashing him on an unsuspecting town. In the second half, the not-so-good doctor investigates the ruins of Castle Frankenstein (left from the cataclysmic conclusion ofFrankenstein Meets the Wolfman) and finds the frozen bodies of the Wolf Man (Lon Chaney) and the Monster (Glenn Strange, picking up creature-feature tips from former flathead Karloff, no doubt). He proceeds to revive them, with the expected results: murder, mayhem, and a bad end for all. The screenplay has a slapdash quality about it, notably the Dracula sequences which dismiss Universal's most dignified monster with almost no fanfare, and Erle C. Kenton's direction only rises above perfunctory for the conclusion, a mad monster brawl with some arresting moments. But while it's hardly the best of the Universal horrors, the high monster quotient makes it a fun if undercooked entry in the genre.--Sean Axmaker