The year is 1957 and The Curse Of Frankenstein is unleashed on an unprepared world. Not only is it the first Frankenstein film in color. It also features a for the time staggering amount of blood and severed limbs, introduces the dynamic duo of Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee - and is absolutely smashing great!

The seriousness of the tone is unexpected. Cushing who has previously starred in countless TV adaptations of the classics delivers his lines like this was a play by William S. Shakespeare. What happened to Abbott and Costello? Say, where's the comic relief guy? We, the audience are in for a shock. Slowly we realize that this is not supposed to be fun and worse, this good-looking British actor is not what we want him to be. He's not the damn hero! The true monster is not the pathetic creature, patched together from dead tissue (and played by a complete unknown), but - gasp!- the Baron himself. While Hollywood code demanded that Collin Clive never was considered really evil, after all he had to be in love with Mae Clarke, Hammer Studios, naughty boys, are up to no good. Their Frankenstein is an utter cynic who will commit murder, either personally or by proxy, if it fits with his schemes. A kind old professor with a phony accent is the first to go, setting the rule that people with brilliant intellects are in grave danger in the company of Frankenstein! Ze trorble vit te zientist--right. One can simply be too brainy for ones own good! And then Cushing doesn't give a damn about lovely Hazel Court, but fools around with the kitchen maid, until he dumps her in a quite nasty way.

The film ends with Frankenstein being taken to the scaffold for his crimes against humanity, but we are left with the feeling that, surely this can't be the end of such a man. Surely enough it is not. Hammer will introduce (or reintroduce) us to other great characters, Dracula, the Mummy, the depraved Karnstein Family and so on, but, not counting one-offs, the Frankenstein series, spanning seventeen years, will remain the best thing to come out from that studio. And while Christopher Lee is great as Dracula, the Count is after all a creature of imagination and you can't expect the boogeyman to undergo character development. Frankenstein, on the other hand, is a man of flesh and blood, using science, not magic to gain his ways, and with a complex, believable personality. Many people praise Peter Cushing for his interpretation of the Van Helsing character, but his finest work in my humble opinion is still his Baron Frankenstein.

Let's take a quick look at the sequels. First, The Revenge Of Frankenstein (1959). In 1863, three years after Baron Frankenstein was sentenced to the guillotine, we learn of a certain "Dr.Stein" in the village of Carlsbruck.. Guess who cheated death? You got it. Using a hospital for the poor as front, the Baron continues his grisly experiments, this time with transplantation of a live brain. He is slightly more sympathetic than in Curse, doesn't kill anyone, although he steals an occasional arm or leg from it's rightful owner and he actually seems to care for his creature. Of course the new fares no better than the original and in the end Frankenstein is beaten to pulp by his own patients, not, however, before he has ordered his assistant Hans Kleve (Francis Matthews) to execute plan B. In a curious epilogue we find Frankenstein, virtually restored to life and now under the name of "Dr. Franck", practicing in Harley Street, London.

A great opportunity was missed by not having the next entry, The Evil Of Frankenstein (1964) to take place in London. Why the Baron left England we'll never know, although there might be a connection to the Jack the Ripper case! After all, didn't the reports indicate that the Ripper was a man of medical training - a deranged surgeon, perhaps? Anyway, this is the point in the saga where bad continuity sets in. A strange, revisionist script pictures Frankenstein as the good guy, having been wronged by the people of his hometown. The scene with the creature getting drunk is unintentionally funny; otherwise the man beneath the Boris Karloff-makeup, professional wrestler Kiwi Klingston, is best remembered for, well, for being a professional wrestler! Apparently the writers were so happy of having secured the rights from Universal to use the makeup and storyline of the old films that they ripped off everything they could lay hand on. This includes the reanimation of the creature, which is straight out of the 1931 film, later it being thawed from frozen suspension and finally the fiery finale with Frankenstein and his creation disappearing in the flames together. Cushing does have some decent scenes, but the less said about this entry the better.

Now it's one of my personal favorites, Frankenstein Created Woman (1966). I watched it on Danish TV many years ago, before I knew anything about Hammer films or Peter Cushing for that matter and having been brought up with the good old Boris Karloff bolt-in-neck monster I was seriously confused and angered by what I saw. Surely, it had nothing to do with Frankenstein! (The Raven did the same thing to me, but luckily I grew a wiser man) Well, in truth, it is indeed out of character that supranational elements are introduced in this entry. But the story of a young man unjustly sentenced to death, beheaded by the guillotine and then revived by Frankenstein is not bad. Cushing has invented a machine that can trap the souls of people recently dead. Hans, the young man, has his soul transferred to the body of his fiancee who drowned herself when he was executed, which must be a rather traumatizing experience. As to be expected, he or rather she goes nuts and starts to speak to uh, well, her other self, the severed head which she carries around in her handbag, while tracking down the real killers, three spoiled young men (one played by Derek Fowlds, sheepish private secretary Bernhard in British hit TV series Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister). Thorley Walters is wonderful as the fuzzy old doctor, who assists Frankenstein. As an interesting side note, Walters played Dr. Watson, the famous sidekick to Sherlock Holmes in several films, while Cushing played Holmes himself in the 1959 Hammer version of Hound Of The Baskervilles as well as a British TV-series and a 1984 TV-film. The way the two interact, there is a strong resemblance to the relationship between Holmes and Watson (with Walters following the clownish tradition of Nigel Bruce).

Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed (1969) is regarded by many as the best entry in the Hammer Frankenstein series. It is certainly the bleakest At the end of this tale of hubris and madness all important cast members have perished, like in a Shakespeare tragedy. I find the film rather unpleasant and have consequently only watched it a few times, but this is strictly my personal opinion.

Originally it was to be the final Frankenstein film starring Peter Cushing. Instead Hammer went on to make Horror Of Frankenstein (1970) with Ralph Bates as the mad scientist, a film I have read much bad about but not actually seen yet. However, same year Cushing and Christopher Lee did (very brief and uncredited) cameo parts as Baron Frankenstein and Count Dracula respectively for the Jerry Lewis-produced comedy One More Time (also reportedly bad). And then, three years later, came Frankenstein And The Monster From Hell (1973) which is a great conclusion to the Hammer Frankenstein saga and the last film directed by Terence Fisher. At an asylum for the criminally insane the director rules in name only. The real man in control is Baron Frankenstein or "Dr.Victor" as he prefers. In the daytime he treats the inmates (actually he's one of them, but has blackmailed the director into declaring him officially dead), at night he's busy with some very private research.

An invalid from previous battles with his own creations, the Baron has in more than one sense of the word become the ruin of a man. Also mentally he's slowly and quietly cracking up. At the beginning of the film he's still very much in command, recruiting a new inmate (very ably played by Shane Briant) as his assistant. But as the project, which is of course constructing yet another creature from limbs and organs donated by his fellow man, progresses, Frankenstein starts losing his grip, laughing oddly at the wrong places and dreaming up a new race of super beings. His creature fails him in the end, as they always do, and at that defeat we get a extreme close-up of Cushing’s haunted face, his dead tired expression and suddenly we know that the great mind has finally snapped beyond recovery. The once young and handsome scientist with grand plans is now an empty shell, spent, finished. To borrow a line from Edgar Allan Poe, he is indeed The Man Who Was Used Up.