Frankenstein Created Woman

 

Picture: C+     Sound: C+     Extras: C     Film: C

 

 

Terence Fisher’s Frankenstein Created Woman (1967) sounds like the Hammer Studio’s belated answer to James Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein (1935), but it owes more to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1926) in its Frankenstein-inspired idea of transferring a soul from one body to another without the stitching.

 

Unfortunately, John Elder’s screenplay is dull and this is maybe the least of the Hammer Frankenstein films, even with Cushing there.  The revived Doctor’s experiments with force fields and indestructibility seem like filler.  Most of the rest of the cast are not up to Cushing, but with a script like this, that is no surprise.  At this point, Cushing’s diction in his “discovery” and “deduction” about what will lead him to the ultimate fruit of his lifetime of experimentation is a spoof of itself.  Talk about your false Marias!

 

The women are trivialized to a point of being tired, even if they do sometimes look good.  The girl monster gets the soul of the Doctor’s lost son, who was killed while he was in a hyper-sleep.  The beheadings also become a laughable motif when they are not boring.  Too bad, for a better script could have made something of this and director Fisher should have asked for a rewrite.

 

The anamorphically enhanced 1.66 X 1 image is not bad, but what it should be color-wise is a point of debate.  Arthur Grant, B.S.C, shot the film on the usual single-strip color stock films have been shot in since the mid-1950s to date.  On all the trailers on the DVD and in the credits of this print, it is all DeLuxe color.  Though not spectacular looking and sometime grainy or even harsh transfer-wise, that would otherwise be the end of the analysis.  Some softness and a bit of the Video Black even being a little off as it is here is still par for the course.  However, the inside of the DVD case has a card that offers the chapters on one side and poster art for the film on the other.  This has been common practice for Anchor Bay’s Hammer releases.

 

The twist is that the poster is from the original British Warner/Pathé release, which lists the prints as from Technicolor.  That means this film looked better in England than the U.S. and it is too bad the print on the DVD is not as good.  The Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono is the typical above-average kind, from an optical mono source.  That combo is somewhat shaky, but acceptable for being the U.S. print.  The few extra include two TV ads (actually in black and white), and two full color theatrical trailers, all from the U.S. release, that also pushes The Mummy’s Shroud the same year as a second feature.  The World of Hammer Curse of Frankenstein installment shows the films made throughout based on the monster, rounding out the few extras.  Those are at least as interesting as the feature, so only the very curious or real die hard fans need apply.

 

 

-   Nicholas Sheffo