ANDY FISH

ANDY FISH is a comic book artist

Thursday, December 12, 2013

THIS WEEK ON SVENGOOLIE!


FRANKENSTEIN MEETS THE WOLFMAN! (1943)
Sequel to THE GHOST OF FRANKENSTEIN and THE WOLFMAN-- if they'd stuck with continuity this could have been a great movie instead of a good one.

SPOILER: At the end of GHOST the brain of Ygor (played by Bela Lugosi) is implanted in the monster (played by Lon Chaney) and the movie ends with the monster blind and speaking in Lugosi's voice.

Lugosi gets cast in this movie as the Monster which makes sense since they would have to dub his voice otherwise and Chaney is playing the Wolfman (the only Universal Horror actor to play all four big movie monsters AND the ONLY one to play The Wolfman) so if it had been filmed as it was scripted the monster is still blind, still speaks like Lugosi and is more of a lost soul than he comes across in the finished film.

Apparently the movie was screened to studio execs who laughed at Lugosi's accent coming out of the monster makeup so all his dialogue was cut as was any reference to him being blind-- but that then leaves us wondering why the monster is stumbling around like a blind man which makes Lugosi look foolish.

The movie opens with one of the scariest and most atmospheric scenes in any Universal film and it's the first team up of movie monsters in history although the battle is far from what's shown in the poster.

Still, it's got a good cast and its fast paced.  Which is more than I can say for anything I've seen made within the last three years.