Violence/Gore: There are guillotine deaths, severed heads, a butcher knife to the head, stabbing, a scarred face, an old man beaten to death and chopped firewood.

Sex/Nudity: Doomed couple Hans and Christina share a moment of unclothed intimacy where you see nothing. Christina’s reconstructed body is shown off nicely in a cleavage-heaving dress. Christina poses as a prostitute to revenge Hans’ death.

Best Line: “To the best of my Knowledge, doctorates are not awarded for witchcraft, but in the event they are, no doubt I shall qualify for one.” (Frankenstein to a court room heckler)

Score:

Frankenstein is working on capturing the human soul (a more religious undercurrent here than usual) when tragedy fortunately rears its head to assist him in his cause. One of his assistants, a violent-tempered young man named Hans, is accused of a murder he did not commit. Rather than reveal that he was copulating with his girlfriend at the time of the crime, Hans decides he’d rather take the Guillotine. He does, and his girlfriend, a facially-scarred cripple named Christina, kills herself after Hans’ death.

Frankenstein takes this opportunity to put Hans’ soul in Christina’s reconstructed body, and Hans takes the opportunity of having his soul in Christina’s body to brutally murder the men responsible for the murder of which he was falsely accused. The victim, incidentally, had been Christina’s father.

The third Frankenstein movie from director Terence Fisher and actor Peter Cushing is generally considered the weakest of their pairings. For some reason, Baron Frankenstein is played with an unecessary warmth this time around. While Cushing is an excellent thespian adept at playing characters at opposing ends of the personality scale, the thematic undercurrent of the series always seemed to be that the true monster was Frankenstein, a cold calculating devil of a man. This time he’s a slightly less kindly variation of Cushing’s own Van Helsing character.

The film itself is basically a revenge story, with Hans’ ghost returning from the grave to dispatch his adversaries. Frankenstein’s inclusion seems rather secondary - he’s only here to remove the usual supernatural aspect of such tales, although the idea of the soul as the true life force of the body doesn’t exactly ring of hard science.

The movie maintains a fair level of atmosphere throughout, but the conclusion is cursed with the patented Hammer tendency of ending abruptly without coming to a satisfying resolution. Nevertheless, the film is enjoyable as a slight terror tale, boasting the low budget but earnest style of Britain’s best cinematic horror outfit - Hammer Films.

DVD Extras: The Anchor Bay DVD features some TV and theatrical spots in which the film is featured as a double bill along with THE MUMMY’S SHROUD. Included as well is a WORLD OF HAMMER episode, “The Curse Of Frankenstein,” which provides a nice overview of Hammer’s output in this area, even if it completely ignores FRANKENSTEIN MUST BE DESTROYED. This DVD is available from Anchor Bay either as a stand-alone disc or paired with the highly enjoyable THE LEGEND OF THE 7 GOLDEN VAMPIRES as part of their recent ‘The Hammer Collection: Double Feature’ series; Cinejunkie highly recommends the latter for purchase.

AH