Hello everyone, welcome to Movie Buff’s theater, for year 2 of my October Monster- Fest! As I believe I mentioned in my announcement about it a while ago, I probably won’t have one review out for each day in October, but I’ll try and get as many out as I can, so there should be a good number by Halloween.
I think for these first few days, I’ll look at some family- friendly monster- fare, starting with a film that I honestly wanted to review last year but was unable to, so now I'm hitting it right away: ‘Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein.’ One of many such horror- spoof films made starring the comedy duo Bud Abbott and Lou Costello, this one also features Bela Lugosi and Lon Chaney Jr. reprising their older roles as Count Dracula and the Wolf- Man respectively, and has Glenn Strange filling in for Boris Karloff as the Frankenstein monster.
After a funny cartoon intro sequence, we see the famous duo in Florida. Here, Abbott and Costello play Chick and Wilbur, respectively, two baggage clerks who bring in a pair of large crates to a House of Horrors wax museum, which turn out to contain the remains of Count Dracula and the Frankenstein Monster. Dracula comes alive after Wilbur reads Dracula’s story at the wax museum, then revives Frankenstein. Wilbur witnesses this, but of course nobody believes him.
We learn that Larry Talbot, aka the Wolf- Man, has been following Dracula and trying to stop him from reviving the Monster. First, he tries to get Chick and Wilbur not to deliver the packages, then he takes a hotel room across from the guys’ room and tries to get them to help him, including locking him in his room before the moon rises. We learn that Dracula’s evil plan is to put Wilbur’s brain in the Monster’s body, to make the Monster easier to control, with help from a woman pretending to be Wilbur’s girlfriend. Much hilarity ensues, as our heroes have to try and keep this from happening, and escape from all the monsters with their lives.
There are only really a couple problems I have with ‘Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein.’ One is that, while Glenn Strange makes a good Frankenstein Monster, it still would have been nice if they had gotten Boris Karloff to do it, considering that they got Chaney and Lugosi in it. Another problem is that all the monsters’ apparent death scenes are rather lame.
That being said, ‘Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein’ is still an extremely good, funny movie. A lot of the best humor in the film basically stems around the protagonists’ ignorance, in two ways; First, by Wilbur/ Costello often barely escaping death by not realizing when one of the monsters (Usually the Wolf- Man) is near him and about to get him, and second, by Chick/ Abbott remaining completely skeptical about Wilbur’s claims that the monsters are real up until the climax, with Wilbur repeatedly trying to prove to Chick that he’s telling the truth with no luck. It’s also very good that the monsters are mainly portrayed as being serious, so they act as kind of the straight- men to Abbott & Costello’s screwball antics. Bela Lugosi plays Dracula with his trademark eerie charm, and Lon Chaney Jr. makes Larry Talbot/ the Wolf- Man as sympathetic and likable as usual, you can sense the fear and anxiety he’s going through. There are also a couple pretty good transformation sequences for the Wolf- Man in it.
The film’s climax is both spooky and hilarious; The monsters are battling it out in Dracula’s castle, while Abbott & Costello are just trying to get the hell out of there (The beginning of the climax also has a very funny sequence in which Costello, strapped to a lab table, is getting shoved and spun around the room by the monsters’ fighting).
And so, that pretty well sums up ‘Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein,’ a massively funny and entertaining Halloween classic for the whole family. Stay tuned until next time, when I unveil my next review.
