not horrible nor great

best movie i've ever seen.

The movie's not perfect, but it sticks the landing of its message. It was engaging - thrilling at times - and I personally thought it was a great time.

One of the most extraordinary films you will see this year. Take that as you want.

These Hammer films all began with this offering. For the first time in my life I got to see the Frankenstein monster look like something other than Boris Karloff. This is in brilliant color and the bloody corpses are much more believable. Lets face it, the old films often forgot about the implications of robbing graves and pasting together body parts. Christopher Lee is a fine monster. Who was to know that he would be a staple in the horror movie realm along with Peter Cushing. I remember people in the theater screaming when Lee's patchwork face was presented to the public. We would see the monster appear in a great many other films that certainly rivaled the Universal trademark.

...and Victor Frankenstein is shown not that sympathetic even as a small boy. The story is being told in flashback by Victor (Cushing) as he awaits the guillotine. Baron Victor's mother has just died, leaving him an orphan, and he looks to be in his young teens, yet he apparently doesn't have a guardian nor a tear for his dead mother. Instead his interest is in hiring a tutor, Paul (Robert Urquhart). Paul takes the job, and their experiments and work together show that Paul is probably neglecting the liberal arts part of Victor's education in favor of the sciences. Their ultimate work together - by now Victor is a grown man - is to bring a small animal back to life.Victor wants to go further, he wants to bring a dead human back to life, and not just a deceased human. He wants to build him from body parts. Paul at first assists Victor in this experiment, but his heart isn't in it. His heart really isn't in it when Victor's distant cousin Elizabeth (Hazel Court) comes to live there, since she and Victor are betrothed. It is an arranged marriage. You get the feeling Elizabeth feels she owes this to Victor for supporting herself and her mother all of their lives, but she is fond of Victor, what little she knows of him, and she does NOT know about the human in progress in the lab.Victor crosses the line you just knew he was going to cross when he invites a great professor to his house to dine and then pushes him off the balcony of an upper floor and makes it look like an accident so he can have his brain for the creature. Paul didn't see the murder, but he does figure it out. Paul damages the brain so it will be useless to Victor, and implores Elizabeth to leave the castle and not marry Victor. Both acts are in vain.Victor builds the creature with the damaged brain anyways, and brings a very angry brute to life. I'd be angry too if I were the creature, since he (Christopher Lee) looks like one of the Beatles, down to the 60's haircut and the Nehru jacket, except a recently deceased version. To further add to Victor's crimes, he is bedding a servant girl in the house, and would probably continue to do so post marriage to Elizabeth, but the servant girl winds up pregnant. Hmmm. What to do? He has an angry murderous creature and a blackmailing overly curious pregnant servant girl. Watch and find out.Now Paul knows the whole story, and knows it to be true. The authorities think that the murdered were the work of Victor. After all, how could a man make a man out of body parts and bring that man to life? Poppycock. A word from Paul and Victor is free. But Paul has grown a fondness for Elizabeth and knows the darkness of Victor's heart. What will he do? Watch and find out.If you want atmosphere go watch the original Universal horror films. If you want pretty good storytelling in a horror film, even if isn't close to the original story, done on a budget but done fairly well- and what isn't done well is funny to the point of being endearing- see the Hammer horror films. They do tend to satisfy.

Movies starring Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee are a subgenre of horror films, one that I have never cared for. Actually, this is one of those Hammer productions, which I do not care for either, even when they do not star these two actors. Such movies are typically ponderous and dull. In the original story, Dr. Frankenstein is dedicated to science, which he believes will benefit mankind, but ends up creating a monster instead. Though we feel sorry for the monster, he is dangerous and has to be destroyed. In this movie, Dr. Frankenstein is more evil than the monster, committing murder to get the brain he needs, which then makes the monster seem superfluous. Furthermore, whereas the original story was a cautionary tale about the unintended consequences of science, the only moral to this story is that if you commit murder, you will probably be punished.

One of the earliest Hammer horror movies, THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN tells a familiar tale, one that closely follows the plot of other adaptations, notably James Whale's groundbreaking film for Universal in 1930.What makes Terence Fisher's version so compelling is the way in which the story has been treated; for the late Fifties it is surprisingly explicit in the way it depicts Baron Frankenstein (Peter Cushing) handling various body-parts - eyes, limbs - and at one point is shown sawing the head off the corpse that forms the basis of the monster (Christopher Lee). The principal female characters Elizabeth (Hazel Court) and the maid Justine (Valerie Gaunt) wear period costumes whose décollété leaves little or nothing to the imagination. The only concession to the more squeamish viewers that Fisher makes is to refrain from showing the Monster killing his various victims, notably Grandpa (Fred Johnson) in gory detail.Cushing turns in a memorable characterization of the Baron - an enthusiastic scientist who has spent much of his life being spoiled. In early sequence, the Baron is shown as a young boy (played by Melvyn Hayes) running the house on his own - ordering the servants around, and engaging a tutor Paul Krempe (Robert Urquhart) to teach him about life's basics. This independence, acquired at so early an age, has both positive and negative effects: the Baron learns to fend for himself, but at the same time proves reluctant to take advice - even when it is well-intentioned. The adult Baron becomes more and more committed to the project of creating the Monster, even if it means contravening the laws of Nature. Krempe tries his best to dissuade him, but the Baron takes no notice; on the contrary, he becomes quite frenzied in his efforts to finish his experiments. Cushing suggests this cleverly through a series of bird-like movements; his body taut, his hands flitting across the instruments and test-tubes that clutter his laboratory.In the end the Baron gets his comeuppance, as he is sent to jail and hanged. But Fisher does not send him to his death without providing a memorable denouement, which does not exist in the source-text but emphasizes the extent to which the Baron's brilliant intelligence has been corrupted by his scientific work.Although only just over eighty minutes long, THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN still has the capacity to startle audiences through its combination of memorable sequences and taut storytelling. Definitely worth repeated viewings.