Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed (1969)

(On Cable TV, October 2021) By 1969, Hammer Studios had gotten the hang of producing their own takes on the classic Universal Monsters, with successive entries free to take the mythos in a different direction without worrying too much about continuity. The fifth of their Frankenstein films, Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed, begins as the doctor’s lab is trashed, and he goes on to find a way to transplant the brain of an associate in a new body. That’s pretty much it for plot, but then there’s Peter Cushing as Baron Frankenstein to hold the pieces together. (And there are pieces indeed—due to studio interference, an incongruous rape sequence was added despite the director, co-stars and audience objections. And that’s without mentioning the comic relief sequences.)  Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed is a film best seen by Frankenstein devotees—because it plays with familiar elements of the myth and rearranges them in ways that aren’t beholden to presenting the canonical version of the story.