lon chaney jr

Famous Monster B-Lister: The Mummy

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It may just be a marketing term coined by fans, but the existence of Universal’s “Famous Monsters” brand suggests that there must also be a Famous Monsters B-List. Every celebrity industry has its own power-rankings hierarchy, with public-figure colleagues competing amongst themselves for job opportunities and name recognition. Within Universal’s early horror successes from the 1930s through the 1950s, the C-List is easy to define, as it’s mostly made up of semi-literary characters who get excluded from the nostalgic posters and action figures celebrating the brand: Mr. Hyde, The Phantom of the Opera, the bitchy little freaks Lugosi & Karloff play in The Black Cat, etc. Differentiating the B-List from the A-List is more of a case-by-case judgement call. To me, the official roster of Universal’s Famous Monsters can be cleanly split in half. The A-List celebrity monsters are Dracula, Frankenstein, and The Wolf Man. They’re the ones who most often cross-pollinate each other’s sequels, and they’re the ones whose likeness you’re most likely to see on generic Halloween decorations year after year. That leaves The Mummy, The Invisible Man, and The Creature from the Black Lagoon as B-List celebrity monsters, the ones whose numerous sequels and knockoff plastic masks collect dust on the shelf while the A-List monsters get to run wild in the streets every October into perpetuity.

The most curious case of B-List monster celebrity has got to be The Mummy, since his first appearance in the lineup immediately followed the success of Universal’s Frankenstein & Dracula, a decade before The Wolf Man. The problem is that the poor walking corpse spent his entire career following Frankenstein & Dracula’s heavy footsteps, never truly becoming his own thing. 1932’s The Mummy was penned by John L. Balderson, who is most famous for writing the 1924 stage play version of Dracula that starred Bela Lugosi and was eventually adapted to the screen by Tod Browning, kicking off the Universal Monsters brand. Balderson was seemingly going through the motions in his secondary contribution to the canon, writing yet another story of a foreign-born romantic ghoul who uses his evil powers of hypnosis to woo a young woman he believes to be the reincarnation of his one true love. Only, that archetype is instead played here by Lugosi’s career-long professional rival Boris Karloff, whose monstrous figure is most closely associated with Frankenstein’s monster, further minimizing The Mummy as a Famous Monsters footnote. Stuck between the lecherous behavior of one A-List Famous Monster and the walking-corpse physicality of another, The Mummy was destined to be relegated to the horror celebrity B-List, to the point where his initial onscreen outing is often confused for details from its various sequels & spoofs.

The Mummy pictured in the Universal Monsters branding never appears onscreen in 1932’s The Mummy; that’s a mummy of a different name. At the start of the picture, Karloff’s mummified Egyptian sorcerer Imhotep does appear wrinkled & bandaged as another monster creation from legendary make-up artist Jack Pierce, who also crafted the actor’s more famous look in Frankenstein. We just never see him moving outside the confines of his sarcophagus while wearing that get-up. After dismissing ancient curses warning against it as Egyptian “mumbo jumbo,” some naive archeologists invade Imhotep’s tomb to pilfer cultural artifacts for career-making museum exhibits, mistakenly activating the long-dormant loverboy’s corpse by reading the forbidden scrolls he was buried with aloud. Once awakened, Imhotep immediately leaves his tomb & rags behind to work on reclaiming his lost love through ancient magic spells, transforming from a dried up corpse to a mildly disconcerting gentleman with sun-damaged skin and glowing, hypnotic eyes. We never get to witness this bodily transformation, nor is there any shot of Karloff schlepping around in the famous mummy rags before putting on a more respectable fez-and-robe ensemble. The mummy’s walk out of his tomb is left mostly to the audience’s imagination, as the movie is more of a classy mood-setter than it is a proper creature feature. It leaves that cheap business to its many sequels, headlined by an entirely different mummy.

Although its many sequels frequently repurpose footage from the flashbacks to the undead Imhotep’s days as a living priest and self-proclaimed King of the Gods, they immediately swap him out for a new mummy named Kharis. Since the first of Universal’s Mummy films only has a couple shots of its titular monster in the iconic bandages, the sequels have to start over and dream up something more recognizable (i.e., more marketable) without relying on the familiarity of Boris Karloff’s mug. Weirdly, that leaves the 1940 follow-up The Mummy’s Hand both more archetypal and lesser seen than the original film it was tasked to rework. Getting ahead of the next decade’s trend of pairing Universal’s Famous Monsters with Abbott & Costello, The Mummy’s Hand already stars two over-their-heads Brooklyn goofballs who get into a scrape with the famous monster. The out-of-place American archeologists are desperate for a big score while shopping the markets of Egypt, where they again ignore locals’ warnings & curses and pry open the tomb of a long-dormant mummy, in this case Kharis. Again, that mummy is liberated from his sarcophagus and immediately seeks to reconnect with his supposedly reincarnated soul mate, but this time he never ditches the rags. This is where the image of The Mummy skulking around in full uniform is born, finally becoming his own thing (even if actor Tom Tyler plays him like Karloff’s Frankenstein with a bum leg).

Once Universal found a mummy they could market in Kharis, the rest of the sequels can only work to boost his stats to match the more formidable figures of Dracula, Frankenstein, and newcomer hotshot The Wolf Man. 1942’s The Mummy’s Tomb further legitimizes The Mummy by dressing up Lon Chaney, Jr. in the make-up for an otherwise pointless sequel, which is essential to the brand (see also: Son of Dracula, The Ghost of Frankenstein, and the many appearances of Lawrence Talbot, a.k.a. The Wolf Man). Then, it proceeds to delegitimize the Mummy by further developing him into a blurry photocopy of Frankenstein’s monster; Kharis giveth, Kharis taketh away. Not only does Kharis start to carry around his unconscious, reincarnated loves with the exact posture of Karloff’s Frankenstein, but he’s also brought to a fiery end by an angry mob at the film’s climax, directly alluding to James Whale’s visual iconography. 1944’s The Mummy’s Ghost continues that work by finally giving Kharis an official Bride of Mummy counterpart, complete with the white streaks of hair at the temples in the unmistakable style of Elsa Lanchester. At this point in the series, the perils of reckless archeology are no longer a concern. Once Kharis reaches American soil in Tomb & Ghost, the series fixates on red-blooded American men protecting their women from the corrupting forces of seductive foreigners. The most impressive thing about Ghost is that it commits to the bit in a shocker ending, finally allowing The Mummy to successfully steal away his reincarnated love, sinking into the swamp with her dangling in his arms as her body rapidly ages to close their centuries-scale age gap in mere seconds.

There’s some incredibly shameless runtime padding in The Mummy’s Tomb, starting off an hour-long sequel with over ten minutes of “Previously on . . .” recapping before setting The Mummy loose on American soil.  It’s an instructive reminder that these sequels were produced before the invention of home video and, subsequently, VHS rental stores. Since audiences couldn’t easily rewatch a classic movie on a whim, the studios would just remake that same movie again and again to scratch that itch, as a matter of routine. The later Mummy sequels have no interest in being their own thing; they just take the same old Mummy out for a walk. Even the choice to relocate Kharis to Cajun swamp country in 1944’s The Mummy’s Curse affords the series little novelty outside the amusement of hearing Old Hollywood’s goofy misinterpretations of the Cajun-French accent. The Mummy started as Egyptian Dracula in his first outing. Then, he gradually, improbably became New England Frankenstein. For his last trick, he emerges as Cajun Swamp Thing. He’s a true international playboy, seducing a new woman at each stop along the way, including a choice to leave The Bride of Mummy behind here in favor of a new The Mummy’s Princess love interest (future Folgers Coffee spokeswoman Virginia Christie, who looks incredibly hip here with some Bettie Page bangs). Even the novelty of seeing The Mummy trudge along in a swampy locale isn’t especially distinct to this famous monster, though, considering that Lon Chaney, Jr. had already appeared there in the previous year’s Son of Dracula (under the hilarious pseudonym Count Alucard). That’s not even getting into the obvious concerns of what would happen if you dragged your dried-out mummy through a humid swamp. The whole enterprise is one big afterthought.

Of course, the final indignity for all of Universal’s Famous Monsters is to officially sanction Lou Costello’s buffoonery, which The Mummy was tasked to do in 1955’s Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy. It’s here that the Mummy, forever following in Frankenstein & Dracula’s footsteps, has finally Made It. Even so, he’s way late to the party, taking his turn with the comedy duo after they already met Frankenstein, The Invisible Man, Dr. Jekyll & Mister Hyde, and “The Killer, Boris Karloff” in similarly titled comedies. Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy was the very last of the comedians’ onscreen run-ins with Universal’s Famous Monsters, as it also marked the end of their overall contract with Universal Pictures. There are a few stray laughs scattered throughout the picture—mostly catering to fans of “mummy”/”mommy” puns—but the bit had very obviously been exhausted before The Mummy’s number was called, and it feels like just as much of a tired exercise as proper Mummy sequels like The Mummy’s Curse. None of the later Mummy films are especially great, but they are all mercifully short, and by the time you meet up with anyone for the sixth or seventh time they start to become your friend, so it’s fun to see him goof around in this final outing. It’s just that The Mummy is more like your work friend, whereas Frankenstein, Dracula, and The Wolf Man are true buds you look forward to seeing on the weekend.

Like most horror franchises that stumble past their obvious expiration date, The Mummy’s initial outing is a great film in its own right, and its numerous, goofy follow-ups are only made endearing by their familiarity and nostalgic value. There’s nothing iconic about The Mummy’s lore, really. His tana-leaves medicine regimen, crime-scene contaminating mold, and smoky flashback pool have all been forgotten to time, as opposed to other Universal-specific details like Dracula’s hypnotic hand gestures or the bolts on Frankenstein’s neck. The Famous Monsters roster would feel thin & incomplete without him, but he’s mostly a background player. The biggest claim to modern fame for The Mummy is that its 1999 remake is by far the most success Universal has had in its attempts to revitalize its Famous Monsters brand for new generations. It succeeded where fellow studio titles like Renfield, Van Helsing, and Dracula Untold have failed. Even so, that accomplishment only further cements the original Mummy in a B-List status. When someone references the movie The Mummy in conversation, most people immediately picture Brendan Fraser, not Boris Karloff. The audience who remembers any of the Kharis titles in the series—Hand, Tomb, Ghost, Curse—is shrinking every year, despite that version of the monster being the one that appears on all of the throwback posters & Funko Pop boxes. Meanwhile, cinematic references to Dracula, Frankenstein, and The Wolf Man immediately conjure the likeness of Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff, and Lon Chaney, Jr., which is what makes them official Famous Monster A-Listers. Everyone else is just lucky to be on the guest list.

-Brandon Ledet

Tres cines de la CDMX

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I recently enjoyed a weeklong vacation in Mexico City with my family, my first time traveling abroad. It was an indulgent trip that mostly consisted of visiting art museums, shopping for vintage clothes, and eating piles of delicious food. Those may not sound like especially strenuous activities, but they did require long hours strolling in the sunshine, which meant a lot of afternoon downtime for my fellow travelers to recover with a traditional siesta. While everyone else smartly took the opportunity to nap between major-event excursions to the lucha libre show or to Diego Rivera’s studio, I instead ventured out of our apartment on solo adventures to survey the local cinema scene. In total, I visited three of CDMX’s local theaters that week for three unique moviegoing experiences. The films I saw were English-language productions subtitled in Spanish, so the only language barrier was figuring out how to order tickets without totally embarrassing myself; I like to think I failed admirably. Here’s a quick recap of the titles & venues I was able to squeeze into the trip.

Goodbye Horses: The Many Lives of Q Lazzarus (2025) @ Cine Tonalá

The one hip English-language film that screened at every indie CDMX cinema the week I happened to visit was the portrait-of-an-artist documentary Goodbye Horses: The Many Lives of Q Lazzarus. Like most audiences, I was previously only aware of its titular one-hit-wonder through her association with Jonathan Demme soundtracks. It turns out that was for a very obvious reason: racism. After running through about a dozen or so Q Lazzarus in the usual style of more famous artists’ docs, a title card in this new career recap reveals that she’s never had an official record release besides her contributions to movie soundtracks, because contemporary producers decided she was too “difficult to market.” It dropped my jaw. As a rise-to-near-fame story, Goodbye Horses gets intensely friendly & intimate with Q herself as she gets to know documentarian Eva Aridjis on a personal level. The most incredible part of her story, really, is the happenstance of meeting the two directors who’ve popularized her music through cinema—Aridjis & Demme—by picking them up as a cabbie working the streets of NYC, decades apart. For his part, Demme made an all-time classic out of “Goodbye Horses” by placing it in two separate films (Married to the Mob and, more infamously, Silence of the Lambs). Aridjis’s contribution is no less significant, though, since her new documentary includes a 21-track collection of Q Lazzarus songs that have been previously left unpublished.

Just as I knew little of Q Lazzarus’s personal or professional life before watching this new documentary, I also had no idea the documentary itself existed until I traveled to Mexico City, where it was playing relatively wide (partially because it’s director Eva Aridjis’s home town). That widespread distribution gave me plenty of options for cinemas to visit, and I settled on Cine Tonalá in the La Roma neighborhood. The single-screen theater is attached to a proudly laidback cocktail bar & performance venue, functioning as a multi-purpose arts space rather than a popcorn-shoveling corporate multiplex. Its closest local equivalent in New Orleans would be The Broad Theater, except with steeper incline seating and more lounging-around space in the lobby. It’s the kind of cozy spot with thoughtful programming that I would visit every week if I lived in the neighborhood (speaking from experience with The Broad).

The Haunted Palace (1963) @ Cineteca Nacional

The Cineteca Nacional museum in the Coyoacán neighborhood is anything but laidback. Built in the 1970s as a temple to celebrate & preserve the artform, it’s an impressively large & lively venue that was swarmed with visitors on the Saturday evening when I dropped by to see 1963’s The Haunted Palace. The 12-screen cinema was showing an eclectic mix of both repertory titles (including selections from Hayao Miyazaki & Agnieszka Holland) and new releases (including Goodbye Horses), but its public cinema is only one facet of the sprawling facility. The massive complex had a college campus feel, complete with museum exhibitions, appointment-only archives, multiple cafés & vendors, an outdoor market, and a quad area where young cineastes were chilling & chatting. I arrived at least a half-hour early, which allowed me enough time to go DVD shopping, picking up a copy of the Mexican horror staple El Vampiro. If I ever return, I’ll make sure to arrive a half-day early instead, since there was plenty more to explore elsewhere on-site.

Among the few repertory titles being offered that week, I of course went for the one directed by Roger Corman and starring Vincent Price, since that’s squarely in my comfort zone. The Haunted Palace is an odd outlier in the Corman-Poe cycle that actor-director duo is best known for, since it only recites a few lines from an Edgar Allan Poe poem and mostly pulls its inspiration from Lovecraft instead. It’s also out of step with the typical payoffs of a classic Roger Corman creature feature, since its central monster doesn’t move an inch and Lon Chaney Jr. gets all of the best jump scares in a supporting role just by . . . hanging around. It’s only a pleasure for audiences who enjoy lounging in spooky castles and fog-machined graveyards while flipping through pages of the Necronomicon (or listening to its Vincent Price audiobook version), not in a rush to get anywhere. That is to say that I very much enjoyed seeing it screened big & loud with an enthusiastic crowd, even if there are far better titles in the Corman-Poe cycle that would’ve been a better use of the time & space (primarily, The Masque of the Red Death). In local terms, the experience was comparable to The Prytania’s recent afternoon screening of The Fall of the House of Usher, except the venue was a half-century newer and the audience was much fuller.

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning (2025) @ Cinemex

If Cine Tonalá is the Mexico City equivalent of The Broad and Cineteca Nacional is the Mexico City equivalent of The Prytania, then Cinemex is the local equivalent of an AMC palace. I must’ve passed by a half-dozen locations of the corporate franchise while exploring different parts of the city, so it was hilarious that the one located closest to our apartment was called Casa de Arte, as if it were an independent arthouse. It’s the same way that AMC arbitrarily labels some of its offerings as “Artisan Films” even though they’re wide-release, major-studio productions with massive budgets (no offense meant to the artistry behind AMC Artisan titles like Sinners & The Phoenician Scheme). Cinemex does not offer a one-of-a-kind arthouse experience. It offers the same-as-it-is-everywhere multiplex experience, which is a different flavor that sometimes tastes just as good. It’s about as artisan as a cup of Coca-Cola.

It was in that downtown multiplex that I caught the latest (and possibly last) installment in the Misión: Imposible franchise, The Final Reckoning. Perhaps due to the lack of enthusiasm with the previous entry in that franchise, Dead Reckoning, the three-hour epic does a lot of sweaty scrambling to connect its story to the larger, decades-spanning Mission: Impossible narrative arc before then settling into the tension of two lengthy Tom Cruise stunts: one in which he raids a sinking submarine and one in which he pilots an upside-down airplane with his foot. The resulting picture is one hour of aggressively incomprehensible crosscutting & flashbacks followed by two hours of old-school movie magic. I would say that it’s the kind of classic movie magic that you can only find in Hollywood, except the movie was mostly shot in England and I personally watched in it Mexico. There really isn’t anything especially recommendable about it beyond the excuse it offers to escape the summer sun for a few hours with a lapful of overpriced junk food, which is the only reason anyone would visit an AMC or a Cinemex anyway.

-Brandon Ledet

Dracula’s Children

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Like all corners of the creative arts, Universal Picture’s classic horror period was overrun with nepo babies.  Carl Laemmle, Jr. kicked off the studio’s Famous Monsters brand by producing 1931’s Dracula after Carl Laemmle, Sr. passed down his studio-head executive position to his son instead of a more qualified protégée.  Lon Chaney, Jr. changed his name from Creighton Chaney to cash in on the name recognition of his early-horror legend father, making him a more credible, marketable Wolf Man.  Then, of course, there’s the case of Dracula’s children, who waltzed into power in Universal’s most prestigious sequels after their father’s untimely second death at the end of the first film in their franchise.  While The Wolf Man fathered no cubs to take over his sequels, and Frankenstein’s Monster only made it thirty seconds into his own marriage before burning down the lab, Dracula’s progeny did a good job making the most of their family name.  The Dracula kids don’t appear to have met or crossed paths, but their polygamous father did have multiple wives in the first film, so I suppose that doesn’t undermine the series’ narrative continuity.

Much like the goofier Frankenstein sequels from this early Universal period, 1936’s Dracula’s Daughter is an absurdly direct follow-up to the Tod Browning original.  The film opens with Van Helsing being arrested for Dracula’s murder at the scene of the crime, and then spending the rest of the film convincing his jailers that actual, real-life vampires are afoot.  Dracula’s immediate replacement is his angsty goth-girl daughter, who is reluctant to continue the family business of draining innocent civilians of their blood despite it being the only thing she’s trained to do.  She’s rebelled by moving to the big city, where she stalks the streets as a bisexual vamp, picking up hungry artists’ models and lustful playboys to drain back at her spacious parlor.  Foretelling a lot of the later Famous Monster sequels, she feels incredibly guilty about this blood-addiction vice and spends most of the film seeking a medical cure for the family legacy that has shunned her from polite society & daylight – ultimately to no avail.  Inevitably, like all nepo babies, she ends up not being able to strike it out on her own after all and moves back to the family castle in Transylvania for some super traditional Dracula kills, meeting the same tragic end as her father.

Like the direct sequel to James Whale’s original Frankenstein movie, Dracula’s Daughter has earned more critical respect in recent decades than the film that precedes it.  Its reputation has largely risen due to the sexual transgressions of its lesbian seduction scene, in which the titular vampire convinces a young woman to expose her bare neck for the sucking by telling her she’s going to pose for a nude portrait.  Likewise, Bride of Frankenstein‘s gender politics have drawn a lot of attention with modern viewers for the concluding scene in which the titular monster takes one look at her assigned undead groom and decides she’d rather be dead (again) than mate with her “man.”  Of the two films, Bride of Frankenstein is the better direct sequel overall, since Whale was given unprecedented creative freedom to play up the stranger, campier elements of his original text in an anything-goes horror comedy free-for-all that doesn’t even bother to deliver on its central premise until the final three minutes of runtime.  By contrast, Dracula’s Daughter has the generosity of affording its titular villain plenty screentime & pathos, which is invaluable in the Boys Club of Universal’s Famous Monsters.  Like the Monster’s bride, she effortlessly, tragically cool, so it’s nice that we actually get to spend time with her beyond a few quick frames of celluloid.

While Dracula’s Daughter exemplifies the Famous Monsters sequels’ penchant for direct, narrative continuations set seconds after their preceding films’ endings, 1943’s Son of Dracula exemplifies their penchant for wildly recasting the central villains from film to film.  The most hilarious example I’ve seen is Bela Lugosi’s miscasting as the Monster in Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man, a performance so laughably unconvincing that studio executives decided to remove his heavily accented dialogue from the final cut, fearing audience mockery.  Lon “Wolf Man” Chaney, Jr. made more visual sense as the Monster in the previous picture, Son of Frankenstein, but could not be tasked with sitting in the makeup chair for two separate monster performances in the same picture (not to mention the narrative contrivance of Lugosi/Igor’s brain being transplanted to the Monster’s body at the end of Son of Frankenstein).  Appropriately enough, that film was made the same year Chaney got his own laughably bad Famous Monster miscasting as the mysterious “Count Aculard” in 1943’s Son of Dracula.  The reason Chaney works so well in his tyepcast roles as The Wolf Man, Frankenstein’s Monster, and Lennie from Of Mice and Men is that he looks like a sweet, lumbering oaf who doesn’t know his own strength.  That image doesn’t translate especially well to playing a debonaire European vampire who seduces women to their doom.

Despite Count Aculard’s ridiculous appearance and name (which registers among the all-time goofiest horror pseudonyms, like Dr. Acula in Night of the Ghouls, Jack Rippner in Red Eye, and Louis Cyphre in Angel Heart), Son of Dracula is a surprisingly solid supernatural melodrama.  Unlike his rebellious daughter, Dracula’s son has enthusiastically taken to the family business of seducing young women to death, moving to a Southern plantation to hypnotize & marry its recent heiress.  Dracula’s daughter-in-law is a bit of a gloomy goth herself, and she attempts to manipulate the power of the Dracula dynasty for her own wicked profits, but the inevitable tragedy of the undead couple’s Southern Gothic surroundings makes a happy ending impossible.  For his part, Count Aculard adjusts to the Southern atmosphere incredibly well, literally becoming a part of it by materializing as swamp gas in his nightly rises from the coffin.  The movie carries over a lot of classic spooky set dressing of the original Dracula film despite this new locale, including a return to the flapping rubber bats that were missing from Dracula’s Daughter.  Still, it’s visually accomplished in continually surprising ways, including an early version of the double-dolly shots from Spike Lee’s playbook as Count Aculard glides over the marshes to drain his victims.

Pumping out cheap-o sequels to Universal’s most successful horror films was obviously more about doing great business than it was about making great art.  Through the tougher stretches of The Great Depression & WWII, the Famous Monsters that made Universal a major player in the first place were a near bottomless well for immediate cashflow.  Frankenstein & The Wolf Man got stuck with the goofiest, trashiest end of that rushed-to-market schlock production, and by the time their many crossover sequels brought an off-brand version of Dracula into the fold (in John Carradine), the character was so far removed from Bela Lugosi’s performance in the original that it could do no real damage to the Dracula brand.  Meanwhile, Dracula’s more direct sequels about his undead children are both very stately, handsome productions that hold up on their own among the best of Universal’s early horror run.  Dracula’s Daughter is certainly the cooler of the pair and has rightfully been reappraised as a great work by modern critics.  Son of Dracula would likely earn its own reappraisal too, if it weren’t for the goofy miscasting of Lon Chaney, Jr. as the titular vampire.  Unsurprisingly, nepotism is a double-edged sword, one that can open opportunities you’re not always the best fit for.

-Brandon Ledet

Roger Ebert Film School, Lesson 8: Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948)

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Roger Ebert Film School is a recurring feature in which Brandon attempts to watch & review all 200+ movies referenced in the print & film versions of Roger Ebert’s (auto)biography Life Itself.

Where Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948) is referenced in Life Itself: On page 51 of the first edition hardback, Ebert reminisces about a theater called The Princess where he used to watch movies as a child. He describes tickets as costing 9¢, popcorn 5¢. Shows started at noon & lasted hours as newsreels, serials, and double features (often a pairing of a Western and a comedy) lit up the screen. One of the comedies mentioned in this anecdote is Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein. 

What Ebert had to say in his review: Ebert never reviewed the film, but he did expand on his memories of The Princess, including the memory of watching this feature, in his essay “Hooray! Hooray! The First of May!“.  Roger writes, “When Bud & Lou met Frankenstein, it scared the shit out of us.”

By the time Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein reached cinemas, Universal Studios had more or less discontinued their “Famous Monsters” brand & decided to retire the loose franchise on a remarkably silly note. Bela Lugosi returned to his role as Dracula for the second & final time in the film (though he would continuously play various other vampires throughout his career). Lon Chaney Jr. returned as the Wolf Man (despite being cured of his lycanthropy in The House of Dracula three years earlier). Sadly, Boris Karloff didn’t return as the Frankenstein monster (possibly due to his longtime rivalry with Lugosi), but Glenn Strange serves as a suitable replacement. All three actors had been sufficiently terrifying before in previous horror pictures, but that’s not their exact purpose here. Instead of scaring the audience, they’re meant to scare skittish funnyman Lou Costello, who delivers the film’s true bread & butter: broad, child-friendly yuck-em-ups. The film’s horror context is merely a backdrop, a stage for Costello to play on. Horror comedy is one of my all-time favorite movie genres, but I don’t think it’s a format that really came into its own until the 1980s. Old Hollywood horror comedies struggled to homogenize both of their respective formulas & the results often feel like a standard vaudeville routine that happens to feature scary monsters. Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein offers no exception.

In light of recently watching the Marx Brothers’ comedy A Day at the Races for this project, it’s difficult not to compare Abbott & Costello’s vaudevillian humor to that of the Marxs’. The comparison is not flattering. Bud Abbott is an uninteresting straight man archetype, which leaves Lou Costello to carry all of the film’s humor on his own two shoulders. His banter is never quite as impressively complex as Groucho’s. His physical humor never even approaches the high standard of Harpo’s. Lou Costello is, in essence, adequate as a comedic force in this picture. I can pick out a couple moments here or there when he got a really good laugh out of me: I particularly enjoyed the gag where he attempts to match the Wolf Man’s beastly howling over the telephone & the self-deprecating humor of him answering the suggestion “Go look at yourself in the mirror sometime” with the response “Why should I hurt my own feelings?”. For the most part, though, he’s entertaining, but far from the height of hilarity. It might be an issue of Costello himself not being especially into the production. Before filming, he was quoted as saying “No way I’ll do that crap. My little girl could write something better than this.” He eventually warmed up to the film & had fun during filming, but it’s not too much of a stretch to assume that his heart wasn’t fully into it.

The plot of Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein is fairly bare bones. The titular comedic duo are a pair of dock workers charged with delivering crates that contain the corpses of none other than Dracula & the Frankenstein monster (despite what the title implies, Dr. Frankenstein is not involved) to a sort of House of Horrors wax museum/cabinet of curiosities. The monsters come to life & scare Costello stupid. Laughs ensue. You get the picture. What really surprised me about this story line, though, was how familiar it felt. About halfway into Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein I had to ask myself whether or not my childhood favorites, The Monster Squad, was in fact a remake of the comedy classic, at least in terms of their shared central conflict. In both films Dracula serves as a criminal mastermind hell-bent on taking over the world by controlling the Frankenstein monster through a magical talisman. The only real difference is that in the Abbott & Costello version the Wolf Man is determined to stop the dastardly Dracula instead of blindly joining his ranks (and getting punched in “the nards” by young children). If you have any personal affection for The Monster Squad, I think Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein is worth a look as a possible starting point for its source material.

I’m slightly diminishing the significance of Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein here. The film is effortlessly charming as an old school horror comedy & has been deemed “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” enough to be selected for preservation by the US Library of Congress’s National Film Registry. I think the picture had a lot of significance among younger viewers who grew up to hold it in high regard. Just like my generation latched onto the similarly-minded The Monster Squad, Ebert’s generation connected with Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein on a personal level. Not only was the humor of both films skewered towards younger crowds, both Ebert & I most remember being scared by the relatively tame horror end of our respective childhood favorites. If nothing else, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein captured the terrified imaginations of its pint-sized audiences during its theatrical release & also served as the final major studio production for future legend Bela Lugosi, who desperately needed the money. That’s all the significance a broad comedy really needs to justify its place in the world.

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Roger’s Rating: N/A

Brandon’s Rating: (3/5, 60%)

three star

Next lesson: My Dog Skip (2000)

-Brandon Ledet