last night's movie was The Curse of Frankenstein (1957)! and it was...fine! these movies are always hard to kinda fairly evaluate because they were unbelievably influential for so many reasons and revolutionized an industry with new and bold ideas......buuuuuuuuut often because they were so influential, other more interesting and exciting works ransacked this one for ideas and inspiration and slowly bled it dry of unique things because so many others stand on its shoulders. what i'm saying is that The Curse of Frankenstein is kinda...boring? like there's nothing really wrong with it at all! the performances are excellent, with Peter Cushing playing Victor Frankenstein as an absolutely repugnant asshole literally from childhood and the always reliable Hazel Court as Elizabeth, Frankenstein's long suffering cousin and wife who is ignored by her betrothed for most of her life. Robert Urquhart is great as as the morally upstanding Paul Krempe who tries desperately to protect Elizabeth from the horrific knowledge of Frankenstein's experiments and attempts to steer our awful protagonist away from the path he's found himself on. and finally, Christopher Lee's creature is just as pathetic and sad as Karloff in the Universal original, if not more so. the make up on his head alone is so grotesque yet sympathetic, with a permanent look of hellish misery at being taken back from the afterlife and put back on Earth. where the film does kind of fall apart for me is the locations and camera work. simply put, the complete lack of interesting or dynamic locations (owing to the movie's low budget mostly, let's be clear) turns what could be an exciting and skin-crawling movie into....a soap opera. and on top of that, the extremely static camera work with so many long shots of nothing happening kills the excitement of the movie for me. there's no interesting editing style and very few attempts at interesting shots outside of a few near the end. it just causes the entire thing to become dull. the music is also very plain and the lighting work is....fine, i guess? the use of color was obviously a big deal for the time, and the color is used very well though at times it becomes almost too saturated. as i mentioned, it's really hard to separate this movie's breakthrough achievements from it's successors. the setup for this one is pretty much the standard Frankenstein story. Frankenstein is visited by a priest on the night of his execution for the murder of his maid Justine and tells the story of how he got to where he was, beginning with the tragic death of his mother at age 15. as the sole executor of the Frankenstein estate, the young baron is quick to seize power. however, he understands that he cannot maintain everything by himself and retains the services of his aunt Sophia (Noel Hood) and her daughter Elizabeth to keep the estate in working order and allow him to focus on other things. one of those things being the recruiting of one Paul Krempe, a scientist, to tutor him. a few years pass and the two become inseparable comrades in pursuit of scientific endeavors. during one such experiment, Krempe and Frankenstein work together to see if they can restore life to a dead puppy. and they succeed. unethical scientific hijinks ensue. i do think this movie is worth watching but i struggle to say if it's 'good' or not outside of it's importance to the horror genre. give it a shot, maybe you'll like it more then i did!

co'ost