Guillermo del Toro is just about to release his epic new Frankenstein adaptation, swathed in self-conscious artistry and mythic self-importance. But this rereleased 1957 Hammer shocker from the screenwriter Jimmy Sangster and the veteran director Terence Fisher, shows the way it should be done – with unpretentious energy and sly macabre gusto. In vivid Eastmancolor, it’s a film electrified with its own melodramatic crassness, unencumbered with good taste and certainly uninterested in making either Frankenstein or his creature in any way tragically sympathetic.
Peter Cushing plays the brilliant and fatally hubristic scientist Victor Frankenstein; the young Melvyn Hayes has a notable juve-lead role in flashback as the supercilious young Victor. Working with his sorrowingly reluctant colleague and former tutor Paul (Robert Urquhart), Frankenstein secretly constructs a new human from gruesome body parts, robbing gibbets and bribing charnel house attendants in the process; he drops surplus anatomical items into his acid bath, a horrible item that inevitably plays a homicidal role later.
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