Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948)

ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET FRANKENSTEIN (1948) ****
Over a period of a couple years, I watched all 36 Abbott and Costello feature-length comedies from their scene-stealing minor roles in One Night in the Tropics (1940) to their last disappointing picture in Dance with Me, Henry (1956).

Bud Abbott (1897-1974) and Lou Costello (1906-59) are not on the same elite level as Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, W.C. Fields, the Marx Brothers, and Laurel and Hardy, for starters, but they fit on a tier below neatly alongside the Three Stooges and Wheeler and Woolsey.

I recommend 28 out of their 36 films, and I do like the duo and their films a good bit. That said, I do not recommend binge-watching their films because they are often saddled with cornball musical numbers, cornball romantic subplots, and comedic routines that could quickly become very repetitive and tiresome after repeat exposure to their work. I spread their 36 films out very effectively, rarely ever watching any of them consecutively in a single sitting.

Until I recently watched Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein again, easily their most famous picture, I would have even argued they never made a truly great motion picture.

I’ve seen it several times over the years, and I’ve always liked it a lot ever since that first viewing many years ago on AMC. I always considered it nothing less than a very good film and the ultimate Abbott and Costello motion picture experience.

Anyway, this last time watching Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, a meeting of Universal’s main staples, I thought Who the hell am I kidding, this is a great movie and I’m bumping it up to four stars exactly right where it belongs!

Of course, Abbott and Costello don’t actually meet Frankenstein, it’s Frankenstein’s Monster (Glenn Strange) and he plays a subservient role to Count Dracula (Bela Lugosi) and Larry Talbot / The Wolf Man (Lon Chaney Jr.), and it’s also not Abbott and Costello but Chick Young and Wilbur Gray who do the meeting within the movie. I guess Chick and Wilbur Meet Frankenstein’s Monster or Abbott and Costello Meet Glenn Strange or Abbott and Costello Meet Dracula, Frankenstein and the Wolf Man just wouldn’t have worked as titles.

If you stop and think too much about the inconsistencies and continuity gaps and logical flaws in any Universal horror movie, especially the ones made during the ’40s, you just might drive yourself stark raving mad and start foaming at the mouth.

I recommend just going with the flow. You’ll likely live a little if not a lot longer.

I’m not even going to regurgitate a plot synopsis for Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein because life is short, life is precious, and I honestly believe that one knows more or less what to expect from something titled Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein.

Abbott and Costello developed a routine in their horror comedies, as early as 1941’s Hold That Ghost and starting again with Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein and continuing through 1955’s Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy, where something frightens Costello’s character and he will try (often in vain) to get Abbott’s character to believe him.

I am not exactly the biggest fan of this routine, I must admit, and it’s the first exhibit for what I wrote earlier about their comedic routines becoming repetitive and tiresome.

They never got that routine down any better than Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, however, and it definitely has something to do with the presence of Lugosi (1882-1956), Chaney (1906-73), and, to a much lesser degree, Strange (1899-1973).

Lugosi, Chaney, and Strange play it straight and they help sell the laughs just by acting no differently than if they were in House of Frankenstein or House of Dracula.

Costello never played more convincingly frightened than he does throughout Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein.

Abbott and Costello were never more consistently funny than they are during Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein.

Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943)

FRANKENSTEIN MEETS THE WOLF MAN (1943) ***1/2
Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man starts with an absolute big bang and we have possibly the greatest five minutes in any classic Universal monster movie.

That includes such immortal movies as Frankenstein, The Bride of Frankenstein, Son of Frankenstein, Dracula, The Mummy, The Invisible Man, and The Creature from the Black Lagoon, all stone cold classics essential to every horror movie lover.

The opening gets everything absolutely right: two grave robbers, a cemetery in the middle of the night, Larry The Wolf Man Talbot’s crypt, a full moon, a whole bunch of wolfbane, the revived Wolf Man’s hand, and enough overall spooky atmosphere for approximately 50 scary movie scenes. Yeah, it’s such a phenomenal sequence that director Tom McLoughlin revived it for his opening in Jason Lives, the one film during that long-running series most influenced by classic monster movies.

The rest of Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man does not quite measure up, especially once Frankenstein’s Monster enters the picture, but it’s still a great deal of fun.

Of course, it doesn’t hurt any that Lon Chaney Jr. (1906-73) returns as Larry Talbot, one of the greatest horror movie characters. Chaney Jr. played Talbot five times from 1941 through 1948 — the original Wolf Man, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, House of Frankenstein, House of Dracula, and Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein.

Talbot’s a tortured soul — in fact, mondoshop.com hypes its Wolf Man poster, The most tortured soul in the Universal Monsters universe is unquestionably that suffering bastard Larry Talbot, a.k.a. The Wolf Man — and we feel great empathy for this character because he essentially doesn’t want any damn part of being the Wolf Man. Your own son Bela was a werewolf. He attacked me. He changed me into a werewolf. He’s the one that put this curse on me. You watched over him until he was permitted to die. Well, now I want to die to. Won’t you show me the way?

In that way, he’s different from Dracula, Frankenstein’s Monster, the Mummy, and the Invisible Man. Lon Chaney’s Phantom in the 1925 classic The Phantom of the Opera inspires similar feelings as Talbot and the Wolf Man. To his enduring credit, Boris Karloff (1887-1969) worked some pathos into Frankenstein’s Monster, especially in Frankenstein and The Bride of Frankenstein. Still, Talbot stands apart from most cinematic monsters and maybe it’s because he’s the most explicitly human.

Bela Lugosi (1882-1956) passed on Frankenstein’s Monster in Frankenstein, much to his eternal regret, and so he signed on for the Monster in Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man after playing Ygor in Son of Frankenstein and The Ghost of Frankenstein. During the latter film, one might remember that Dr. Ludwig Frankenstein accidentally put Ygor’s brain into the Monster’s head — he speaks poetically at one point in the film, I am Ygor. In a series that paid minuscule attention to continuity from one film to the next, the Monster originally spoke and explained his plight in Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, but Universal studio heads apparently laughed their heads off at Lugosi’s dialogue and demanded it be excised from the final cut, rendering the monster absolutely ridiculous and his scenes basically a washout. I am not sure why Lugosi’s voice suddenly became laughable. Lugosi’s stunt double stands in for the 61-year-old man in many scenes. Ironically, though, whenever people imitate Frankenstein’s Monster, it’s the Lugosi version from Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man. (Lugosi played Bela in The Wolf Man and Chaney Jr. was Frankenstein’s Monster in The Ghost of Frankenstein after Karloff bowed out.)

We’re not sure exactly why the Monster’s encased in ice or why there’s a production number that must have moseyed on over from MGM. The second half of Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man often leaves us feeling awful perplexed.

Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man finishes strong, thankfully, and we do see our titular monsters slug it out, though it presents an internal struggle because while we’d love more battle royale between the monsters we do love the 90 seconds they give us. This movie paved the highway for King Kong vs. Godzilla and Freddy vs. Jason.

In most every way possible, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man proves to be a red hot mess, but a lovable and thoroughly entertaining one nonetheless.

Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy (1955)

ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET THE MUMMY (1955) Two stars
Bud Abbott (1897-1974) and Lou Costello (1906-59) enjoyed a phenomenal run for Universal Studios from 1941’s Buck Privates through 1955’s Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy.

They made lots of pictures that made lots and lots of money and they met lots and lots of interesting people (and monsters) in their pictures.

Their career meeting people for Universal took off with the 1948 hit Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, a title which sells Larry Talbot / The Wolf Man (Lon Chaney Jr.), Dracula (Bela Lugosi), and even for one gag the Invisible Man (Vincent Price) short. After that, let’s see, Abbott and Costello meet the Killer, Boris Karloff (not the killer), the Invisible Man (not Vincent Price), Captain Kidd, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the Keystone Kops, and the Mummy. We should pause right here and mention Abbott and Costello visited Jack and his beanstalk, Africa, Mexico, and Mars.

I wanted to like Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy.

I wanted to laugh at Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy.

I had a mixed reaction instead.

I liked it without laughing at it once.

Since it’s a comedy and I didn’t laugh even once, I guess I don’t really like it.

I call it a forced smile picture more than anything else, where I see the joke, understand the joke, and finally smile with a sense of resignation.

Maybe I have seen too many Abbott and Costello films in close proximity during quarantine, not to mention imitation Abbott and Costello Don Knotts and Tim Conway in The Private Eyes, but I failed to laugh at humor frequently predicated on Costello fumbling bumbling stumbling into or through someone or something, being terrified beyond the capacity for rational thought or a coherent sentence, and then most often failing to make the skeptical Abbott believe him. I swear, Abbott and Costello must play their favorite routine about 100 times during Meet the Mummy.

Abbott and Costello only call each other by name throughout Meet the Mummy. During the final credits, they’re listed playing Pete Patterson and Freddie Franklin, respectively. That’s about the high point of the humor in Meet the Mummy.

Of all the Universal classic monsters, I must admit that I like the Mummy series the least, namely the four pictures Universal rattled off like machine gun fire in the 1940s — The Mummy’s Hand, The Mummy’s Tomb, The Mummy’s Ghost, and The Mummy’s Curse. I like Hand alright, find Tomb elevated by Lon Chaney Jr.’s debut as Kharis, and Ghost and Curse have already blended into monotonous goo in my brain after seeing them back-to-back recently. Don’t even get me started on the Indiana Jones wannabe Brendan Fraser CGI monstrosities and I blissfully missed Tom Cruise’s so-called abomination completely.

Chaney Jr. proved to be the most menacing Mummy on screen, and he’s not in Meet the Mummy. It could be any other guy wrapped in gauze and affecting a lumbering pace. Yeah, it’s a guy named Eddie Parker. Oh, sure, probably a nice guy, but still no Chaney Jr. They call the Mummy ‘Claris’ — not Kharis — anyway in Meet the Mummy.

Meet Frankenstein and Meet the Invisible Man worked because the actors portraying the monsters played it straight rather than knowing they were in a comedy. It’s similar to the acting in Airplane, Top Secret, and The Naked Gun, in that it never received the credit it deserved.

As for Abbott and Costello, there’s always Hold That Ghost, Meet Frankenstein, Meet the Invisible Man, and “Who’s on First.”