Acquired: Both of the Blu-rays were purchased this past November. The DVD was, like the others, Feb. of 2013.
Seen before?: I've seen this twice before - once on cable roughly around 1998 or 1999 and once from the DVD on July 7th, 2017. This was my first time on Blu (watched the Wolf Man disc, mainly because that set repeats so much from the Frankenstein set that I kinda felt bad about it not getting as much play).
Ah, now that's the stuff.
Whereas Jekyll & Hyde is a poor A&C vehicle in part because it's also a very poor Jekyll-and-Hyde riff, Frankenstein is the classic it is because it is foremost a terrific Universal-monster movie. Good horror-comedy, whether Young Frankenstein or Re-Animator or Shaun of the Dead, builds out from a core of seriousness about the horror part of the equation. There's a myriad of ways a horror-comedy can step wrong, but chiefly among them is to refuse to treat the threat as a threat; to de-monsterize the monsters is to end up with bumbling buffoonery where there's no legitimate stakes because no character ever really feels in danger (Zombieland being the most egregious recent example of this). This succeeds where Jekyll failed because it manages to juggle two separate tones, often in the same scene, without cheapening either or making it feel like two films awkwardly grafted together - the horror feeds off the comedy and vice versa.
While the panic endemic to Costello's character is the dominant vehicle for the humor, I also really like the bit where Lou goes into Larry Talbot's room to take an apple from his fruit dish, not knowing that Talbot has completed his nightly transformation into the Wolf Man. It's a funny sequence that relies on Lou's lack of knowledge about what's in the room with him - a key point that mines humor from an unexpected angle without devaluing the menace. The Wolf Man is not treated as a punchline but as a threat, and when he jumps at Lou and misses the expected reaction is a jump and a shriek, followed by a laugh; in short, Lou's obliviousness to the danger is the joke. I also adore the early bit where Lou is on the phone with Talbot as Talbot is changing; Lon Chaney Jr. gets to maintain his seriousness while Lou finds the humor in the situation by reacting with befuddled, slightly tetchy logic ("You're awful silly to call all the way from London just to have your dog talk to me.").
That said, most of the humor that branches from the core is based on Lou being extraordinarily aware of the danger he's in and reacting extravagantly, a mode in which Costello excels, being one of the funniest men to ever live when it comes time to spout gibberish and be freaked out past the point of coherence. Just thinking about his fruitless attempt at whistling when in the house of horrors and witnessing Dracula's coffin creak open is enough to get me chuckling to myself. I do think the film gets a little waylaid by plot matters in its midsection, especially whenever it drags poor aggrieved Mr. MacDougal back into the mix, but from about the time Lou finds himself sitting in Frankenstein's lap counting the number of hands in front of him, it becomes a perfect model in how to properly blend horror and comedy - particularly the breakneck multi-level final chase sequence extending from Lou on the gurney to the dock catching fire, which is an astonishingly sustained object lesson on how to wring the maximum amount of action from a given scenario.
What catches me this time around is how simple most of the gags are - the punchline to the barricaded door, for instance, or the quick gag that pops when Lou is told to turn to the left while running. Maybe my favorite joke in the whole film is another simple bit of business that meshes the urgency of the situation with a burlesque-hall-broad aim to please: Lou is running from the Frankenstein monster. sees a tablecloth with which he can attempt a ruse and yanks it out from under the glassware on top of it, at which point he briefly breaks the fourth wall and shoots the audience a lopsided grin as if to say, "Hey, it worked!" It's an old gag, but properly utilized it's still funny. Pare the elaborate constructions down to their elemental parts and the jokes are simple, silly and effective. The old classics still kill.
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