You’ve always wanted to! Now take a longer look at this uncredited editorial cartoon of Professor Brandt and Baron Frankenstein, seen all-too-briefly in FRANKENSTEIN MUST BE DESTROYED.
the crushed Anna’s later impulsive gut-stabbing of the innocent monster. In earlier films, Cushing’s Baron was ambiguously charming but fanatical; here, any pretense of civilization is an act, and the blood-on-lapels bit from CURSE is one-upped as an elegant, spats-clad shoe kicks a bloody sev- ered head down a trap in the floor. The dandyish and lady-flattering witticisms of REVENGE or CRE- ATED WOMAN are replaced by barked commands that Anna make more coffee and an on-a-dime mood switch after Frankenstein has turned on the plausible benevolence to talk Mrs. Brandt out of going to the authorities but becomes a barking fascist (“Pack! We’re leaving!”) the second she’s out of the house. In contrast with the chilly home Frankenstein makes by blackmailing a compro- mised couple (Karl has been stealing cocaine from the asylum to support Anna’s unseen invalid mother) into enslavement, Jones’ Brandt-in- Richter returns at last to a warm, loving envi- ronment which can no longer be his and burns it down (Fisher’s staging of the lamp-tossing and fire-spreading is as inspired as the key toss which commences the rape scene), dragging
his appalling creator into the flames in a reiteration of the Karloffian “We belong dead.” These releases are important building blocks
in several bigger pictures: Hammer horror, three auteurs, two major horror stars, several support- ing horror careers (Jones, Bates), fanboy girl-ap- preciation (Carlson, Hayden, a glimpse of Madeline Smith in TASTE), spotlights on valued contribu- tors like composer James Bernard (his TASTE score is outstanding), the wave of rebelliousness that swept the genre in the late 1960s (even the staid HAS RISEN has an argumentative hedonis- tic student as a hero), connections with cross- currents in cinema (compare the saucy Victoriana of TASTE with THE BEST HOUSE IN LONDON or THE ASSASSINATION BUREAU) or current events (MUST BE DESTROYED is informed by the then- hot topic of organ transplants, with a minor ele- ment of drug-pushing that is anachronistic since cocaine wasn’t illegal when the film was set). We’re glad to have them; now we’d like vari-
ous distributors to plug the gaps with THE BRIDES OF DRACULA (especially!), THE EVIL OF FRANKENSTEIN and DRACULA A.D. 1972.
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