In praise of MMA: Mixed Monster Adversaries (Part One)

You can’t convince a kid that less is more. Try telling an eight-year-old that instead of getting into that awesome [fill in the blank] costume and driving to the neighborhood where they give out full-size candy bars, the family will be going over to grandma’s for Halloween, where she keeps a bowl of dusty, 20-year-old Werther’s candies for all her visitors. See how that goes over.

Monsters are like candy bars. One is nice, but there’s nothing like emptying out a full bag of candy at the end of a great night of trick or treating. Sure, you can parcel out your monster enjoyment one solitary vampire, werewolf or man-made abomination at a time. But throw them all together in a single film, and you’ve got a party like no other, the monster equivalent of Friday Night Smackdown.

I was a greedy little kid as far as my monsters were concerned. The local Saturday night horror show, Gravesend Manor, introduced me to the Universal monsters (and appropriately enough, it featured not one horror host, but a whole cast of macabre zanies). Frankenstein, Dracula, the Wolf Man and the Mummy were revelations to the 10-year-old me. But my little heart really got racing when I realized that there were films out there featuring not one, but two or even more of the beloved classic monsters.

Watching the monster combos on TV -- Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, House of Frankenstein, House of Dracula and Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein -- inspired me to round up neighborhood friends and put on short plays in the garage featuring my favorite fiends. By the time I was in high school, I’d seen each monster rally multiple times.

Of course, much has been written, especially in the snobbier critic and fan circles, of the exploitative cheapness of the rallies, especially in comparison to the Golden Age films of the 20s and ‘30s that started everything. (I think we forget that the original classics were considered cheap and exploitative when they first debuted.) They aren’t great movies, but they are a lot of fun when you’re in that “more is more” frame of mind.

Let's be honest, Bela Lugosi as the monster in Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man (1943) is anything but frightening. So much footage of Lugosi ended up on the cutting room floor that the film is disjointed in places (all of the excised scenes were of Franken-Lugosi speaking in his inimitable Hungarian accent, which had the production execs nearly “convulsed with laughter” when they ran the dailies.) [ Tom Weaver, Michael Brunas and John Brunas, Universal Horrors: The Studio’s Classic Films, 1931-1946, Second Edition, McFarland, 2007, p. 327]

But Larry Talbot (Lon Chaney Jr.) has never been more angsty, and the old gypsy woman (Maria Ouspenskaya) from the original Wolf Man is there to provide gravitas. And you just know that Larry’s doctor, mild-mannered Dr. Mannering (Patric Knowles) -- full of good intentions at the beginning -- is going to be seduced into dabbling with things better left alone, like revving up Frankenstein’s monster and seeing what he can do.

Next, the monsters went house hunting. House of Frankenstein (1944) is also disjointed, playing much like a series of vignettes organized by the wraparound story of mad Dr. Niemann (Boris Karloff) and his loyal hunchback assistant Daniel (J. Carrol Naish). And John Carradine’s suave Dracula is ridiculously easy to defeat, hardly sticking around long enough to make an impression.

But Daniel’s unrequited love for the gypsy girl Ilanka (Elena Verdugo), and Ilanka’s dangerous love for Larry Talbot, is truly heart-rending. Plus, there’s something satisfying about Boris Karloff coming round full circle to play the umpteenth doctor to revive the monster that he immortalized.

Did you know? The success of Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man got Universal execs thinking that if two monsters in a film was good for the box office, three (or even more) would be that much better: “On June 7, 1943, The Hollywood Reporter announced that Universal was developing a new shocker entitled Chamber of Horrors with an all-star cast of goons including the Invisible Man, the Mad Ghoul, the Mummy and ‘other assorted monsters.’ George Waggner was named as the ringleader of this three-ring circus of horrors. The cast read like a Who’s Who of cinemacabre: Karloff, Chaney Jr., Lugosi, Lorre, Rains, Zucco, Hull and … James Barton (!).” [Weaver, Brunas & Brunas, p. 448]

Chamber of Horrors never saw the light of day (or the full moon for that matter), but the monster rally concept was soon realized by House of Frankenstein. See my post, “What Might Have Been: The Universal Monster Rally You Never Saw,” which lays out an imaginary Chamber of Horrors film with the original slate of monsters.

And then there’s House of Dracula (1945). Universal was in no mood to mess with a winning formula, so the unholy trinity of Dracula, the Wolf Man and Frankenstein’s monster are back (I guess including the Mummy would have been too much of a good thing). To complete the deja vu feeling, there’s a reprise of the kindly, serious doctor who turns mad midway through (Onslow Stevens as Dr. Edelmann), and yes, there’s another hunchback, this time in the form of a female nurse/assistant (Jane Adams as Nina).

When I first saw House of Dracula, I was turned off by Edelmann’s prosaic, scientific explanations of the “curses” inflicted upon the Count and the Wolf Man: the former supposedly suffering from a parasite in his blood, the latter from pressure on the brain (!?). Supernatural monsters should be just that -- super - natural, beyond conventional scientific reasoning. When you explain away the mystery, it just becomes a sort of dull, pedantic science fiction.

So House of Dracula became my least favorite monster rally. But subsequent viewings have given me a new appreciation of the film. John Carradine’s Dracula is much more of a malignant presence in this one.

In a great, understated scene, the Count seduces Edelmann’s beautiful assistant Milizia (Martha O’Driscoll), who is playing a haunting, elegiac piece on the piano:

Miliza: "You like it?"
Count Dracula: "It breathes the spirit of the night. They played it the evening we met at the concert."
Miliza: "I'd forgotten... until I saw you again."
Count Dracula: "Perhaps I wanted you to remember."  [IMDb]

As an added bonus, Onslow Stevens gives it his all playing perhaps the maddest of all doctors in the Universal canon -- the result of an attempt to cure Dracula with a blood transfusion, but which instead infects Edelmann’s blood when the conniving Count reverses the transfusion machinery.

1948 saw the release of the greatest monster rally of them all, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. I know a lot of people don’t appreciate mixing comedy with horror, but I find that A&CMF threads the needle masterfully, not overdoing the duo’s routines that in other movies overstayed their welcome, while juxtaposing clever sight gags with effective chills.

If memory serves, I first saw A&CMF sometime after the original Draculas, Frankensteins and Wolf Man, but somehow, the 1948 film seemed entirely fresh, even though it repeated the monster combo from the two "House of" films. And it certainly didn’t hurt that Bela Lugosi was there, resplendent in cape and formal wear, reprising his signature role.

I remember being just as creeped out by Larry Talbot’s transformation into the Wolf Man in this outing, and alternately bemused and on the edge of the couch as Wilbur (Lou Costello) blundered his way around the screen, narrowly missing falling into the clutches of the various monsters.

One of the great laugh out loud moments is when Wilbur, exploring the dark dungeons underneath the castle, stops to rest for a moment in a large chair and ends up in the Frankenstein monster's lap -- only realizing his situation when he looks down at his own hand and sees two there.

The addition of Vincent Price’s voice as the Invisible Man at the very end of the movie was an inspired comic version of a “shock” ending.

Did you know? “The original working title of the film was The Brain of Frankenstein. Aside from Dracula, Frankenstein’s Monster and the Wolf Man, the Mummy was also to be worked into the script, but was eventually eliminated. [Editor’s note: the Mummy could not catch a break!] The script evolved into the Wolf Man (in his sane moments) trying to prevent Dracula’s attempt to transfer Costello’s brain into the Frankenstein creation. … To keep the actors happy, the studio hired comic Bobby Barber (who also played a role in the film) to act as court jester, thus speeding up the shooting schedule. Practical jokes occurred all the time, including the comedians throwing pies at each other during dull stretches between scenes.” [Richard Bojarski, The Complete Films of Bela Lugosi, Citadel, 1980, p. 223]

In Part Two, the classic monsters go up against masked Mexican wrestlers, and meet a guy by the name of Waldemar Daninsky. Don't miss it!