I Was A Teenage Werewolf / Teenage Frankenstein and How To Make A Monster
Teenage Werewolf / Teenage Frankenstein / How To Make A Monster (1957) Rewatch: ✅
I really need to learn to just watch one of these instead of all three but that would probably lead to me just watching Teenage Frankenstein a disproportionate amount and that’s not really fair on the other two.
I do, sincerely, love all three. Teenage Werewolf leans the hardest into actually being a teen movie but with a werewolf, Teenage Frankenstein is absurd bliss and How To Make A Monster staples the two together in a meta film about a fired make up artist using the actors playing the werewolf and Frankenstein’s monster - in their full monster make up - to gain their revenge on the studio that wronged them.
They’re each such a different film experience, each a different kind of fun in their own right, they would totally stand up to being watched individually with no complaints but, well, I’m weird sometimes. That’s really all there is to it. I’m just the sort of weirdo who likes to watch three tat films in a row. That’s how we end up here.
All three are, as you’d well expect from cheapies, incredibly talky films where a lot of time is spent talking about what’s going on. That doesn’t mean they entirely shy away from the horror. Teenage Werewolf has a nice line in screams, there’s a fantastic bit in Teenage Frankenstein where limbs are being sawn off, held up and disposed of and the entire premise of Make A Monster is this gruesome twosome doing violent murderings.
Yeah, it’s all fairly fleeting but it’s there and, if you’ll excuse the phrase, there’s plenty of bite to each of the films.
So, given they’re all great, why does Frankenstein have the edge for me? Two things, dear reader. The first is it has some incredibly comical timing from whoever is on sound effects duty, someone had the car noises tape out and had so so much fun with it. The second? It’s the casual reveal by Frankenstein of where the rest of the body is going to go. It would be funny without the film building on it but as the film doesn’t waste the reveal in the slightest it’s tremendous. The very last shot in the whole film… solid gold.
Though he plays similar roles in both Werewolf and Frankenstein, it’s also worth mentioning how great Whit Bissell is in these. He makes for a genuinely nasty Dr Frankenstein and, erm, proxy Frankenstein but it’s werewolves instead of corpses. He’s sorely missed in …Make A Monster but never mind, eh. It’s still a stonker. All three are proper tat classics.