Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed (1970)

This is one of the best films of the Peter Cushing Frankenstein series. I found it to be superior to parts 3 & 4 (just my personal taste in films). This 5th film is equal to parts 1 & 2 in my opinion. It is a fantastic Sci-Fi Horror film.I find this film more graphic than the others - that is a fair warning for first time viewers. There is indicated rape, murder, insanity, some blood-letting, among other things that really shows how far Dr. Frankenstein will go to prove himself and his theories true to the medical community - he will stop at nothing.This film is highly recommend viewing for fans of Hammer Horror and Peter Cushing. It is a most excellent film! 9.5/10

Hammer Film definitely made better films about Baron Frankenstein (as played by Peter Cushing) than those dealing with the Count Dracula (with Christopher Lee). "Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed" is a superb entry, with a script written by the man Orson Welles once called one of the two best A.D. in the film business. The scientist is again ruthless and cruel, stopping at nothing to keep experimenting with life and human organ transplants. He blackmails a young couple that is planning to wed: the girl administers the guest-house Frankenstein takes hold of, while her groom is a surgeon. As the story unfolds, Frankenstein turns into a real wicked old man (excellent "el Cushing")… As in "The Revenge of Frankenstein" there is no monster in the plot and the surgeries are successful, so the writers had to create potent dramas dealing with medicine, "progress", death, the infinite possibilities of scientific experimentation, the negative effect of the ignorant's slander, the selling of drugs as modus vivendi, and of course with erotic elements. Although the Baron is trapped in a fire before the closing credits, he surely found a way to reappear in the next entry of the series, the also good "Frankenstein Created Woman", in which he would transform a crippled girl into (Playmate of the Year) Susan Denberg.

Forced to flee town again, the Baron learns a colleague has perfected a process invaluable to his own research and brings along new helpers to do so, but a series of incidents results in the creation of a new monster that upon realizes what he has done to him sets out to avenge his death.There was a couple of good points to this one at times, making it far more watchable than expected. The main factor with this one here is the fact that despite its extreme boredom his one manages to mostly stay interesting the whole way through its incredibly strong story. This is one of the strongest in the series, mainly due to how it manages to avoid many pitfalls and keep things moving along. Here, Frankenstein branches out into other fields of research, still homing in on the freakish advance of medicine but no longer so obsessed with creating life, a great way of bringing back an old character but giving him new things to do and not settling for a hackneyed retread of the monster. The experimentations offered up are also handled well, especially with the way that the original intent of the whole thing is pretty logical and not all that unrealistic, which serves to make the irrational actions later on seem all the more normal. There's also some really good action scenes, starting with the opening where a thief breaks into an underground laboratory only to be confronted by a horrible monster carrying a severed head when the monster rips off his face revealing the hideous skeletal visage of Victor in one of the most dramatic and engaging ones in the genre. The scenes of the monster-on-the-loose out in the countryside are always fun, and this one is no exception, taking on several fun encounters here. The best, though, is the film's explosive and undeniably fun encounter at the end. With the usual house- in-flames ending coming into play again, there's a difference with the cat-and-mouse games between the two taking place amongst the flames, which makes for some really exciting sequences and is enough to make it end on a high point. The last plus here is the fact that the film has one of the usually high-standard surgery scenes in place, and this is one of the best. There isn't a whole lot here to really dislike, though there are a few flaws to it. One of the main issues to come up is the fact that the film is just way too long and drawn-out with a tendency to drag on for way too long, getting in plenty of scenes that, while they do give the film the impression that it's actually doing something and going somewhere, ultimately suffers from the lack of energy during them. It seems to go about it's own deliberate pace, never really doing anything that really offers up some excitement until the end. The fact that the monster doesn't really show up in the film at all is another problem, and the monster here is one of the weakest. There's nothing at all to fear from this creature, as it's entirely human-looking in behavior and appearance, while the scenes of it trying to persuade his wife to recognize him generate nothing but eye-rolling at the fact that this is supposed to be a monster and is acting nothing like what one should be like. The last flaw here is the rape scene, which really should've been eliminated as it stops the film dead and barely recovers. Overall, this is a fun if slightly flawed entry. Today's Rating/PG-13: Violence including graphic surgery scenes and a Rape Scene.

Hammer's Frankenstein movies are, for me, superior to most of their Dracula efforts, and this one, with Peter Cushing(who else?) again in top form as Victor Frankenstein, is one of their very best films.Frankenstein, perhaps hardened by his previous failures to a kind of ruthless insanity,is here a callous and manipulative soul. Blackmailing two young lovers (Veronica Carlson and Simon Ward) into helping to kidnap an insane former colleague, one who holds the secret of cryogenically freezing brains indefinitely, he sets about transplanting the brain of his abductee into another body, in order to gain the secret.This bleak, nihilistic, richly rewarding film is a constant eye-opener, full of classic grotesque moments superbly realised by director Terence Fisher. From the opening murder (with a sickle no less) to the frantic tussle with a burglar in Frankenstien's laboratory, to the woman patient terrified by imaginary spiders in the asylum, the action never lets up.Perhaps the highlight is a terrific sequence involving a burst water pipe which causes a previously disposed of corpse to bob back to the surface of the garden where he was buried, causing a frantic Carlson to try and drag it into some bushes before the repair men get there. A masterful scene that Hitchcock would be proud of.And of course there is Freddie Jones' wonderful performance as "the monster". I use quotations as Jones makes him a wonderfully sorrowful creation. It's perhaps gone unnoticed that this is the best performance since Karloff in this type of role. The attempted rape sequence - inserted at the last moment over the actors and the director's protests, is perhaps the only false moment in the movie. The movie is harsh enough without it.After this, and set designer Bernard Robinson's untimely death, cheapness and slackness set in at Hammer. They staged a partial recovery with some interesting movies such as Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde and Demons Of The Mind, but not enough to save the company. Still, one can savour the rich texture of this film and the remarkable Cushing in compensation.