Frankenstein – Zachary Mule

(GREGORY WILLIAM MANK, JAMES T COUGHLIN, DWIGHT D FRYE; 320 pages; LUMINARY PRESS/MIDNIGHT MARQUEE PRESS; 1997)

I grew up watching (and loving) the Universal Monsters movies; a very vivid memory was seeing ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEETS FRANKENSTEIN (sort of a 1948 Monsters-adjacent free-for-all with Bela Lugosi, Lon Chaney Junior and Glenn Strange co-starring with Bud and Lou) on a Saturday afternoon. It wasn’t such a big leap to THE WOLFMAN, THE MUMMY, THE INVISIBLE MAN and the dynamic duo that launched Universal’s monster franchise, DRACULA and FRANKENSTEIN. Then, of course, there were the numerous sequels. Many of those films featured a manic young man named Dwight Frye; I was fascinated by Dwight’s characters and he became an instant favorite. Why? Was it the four-note laugh that his DRACULA character, Renfield, used to chill the marrow? Was it the fact that my favorite band, Alice Cooper, featured a six-and-a-half minute tune on their third album, LOVE IT TO DEATH, called “Ballad of Dwight Fry?” (Fry, by the way, was Dwight Frye’s real name… the “e” was added by Dwight early in his acting career to give it a more continental, distinguished flair.) Whatever the reason, Dwight Frye became “The Man” for me, at least as far as horror movies were concerned. I didn’t know anything about the man himself and found that there wasn’t really a lot of information out there about him (this was the pre-internet, “dinosaurs-still-roamed-the-Earth” late 1960s and early 1970s). The fascination waned, as it is wont to do, and I moved on to other things. Oh, I still watched DRACULA, FRANKENSTEIN and the rest any chance I got and Dwight’s Renfield and Fritz were still fun to watch. It wasn’t until the late 1990s that I heard about a book co-written by Dwight’s son, Dwight David, that my interest was once again piqued. And so, I started haunting (pun fully intended) various book stores and other venues for a copy… with no luck! It wasn’t until very recently that – after watching DRACULA for, maybe, the millionth time that I renewed my quest to acquire DWIGHT FRYE’S LAST LAUGH. Things have become so much easier now, with search engines like Google and a website called ThriftBooks to find those hard to find items. So, now, thanks to that very same ThriftBooks, I have my very own copy of DWIGHT FRYE’S LAST LAUGH. Was it worth the wait, the time and trouble to hunt down? Absolutely!

DWIGHT FRYE’S LAST LAUGH (DRACULA, 1931: Helen Chandler, Bela Lugosi, Dwight Frye) (UNIVERSAL STUDIOS promotional photo)

To call the book exhaustive is sorta like saying that there’s some water in the Pacific Ocean. The second book review I ever wrote was a critique of Fred Kaplan’s THE SINGULAR MARK TWAIN, a 655 page biography with an additional 70 pages of notes and explanations of the main body of work. I was not a fan! The same cannot be said of DWIGHT FRYE’S LAST LAUGH; it is filled with minutia, but it’s presented in such a way that you really don’t mind. The biography portion of the book ends with Chapter 10 (even though Frye dies in Chapter 8). Those eight chapters are chock full of minutia regarding Dwight’s early life, his stage career – from stock productions in Denver, Spokane, Seattle and Pittsfield, among other towns and cities with theaters (the most common form of entertainment in the 1910s and ‘20s, just about every small city or medium-sized town had one) to his successes on Broadway – where he met Laura (using the stage name Laurette) Bullivant, whom he would marry. Chapter Five, titled “Dreams To Nightmares: The Horror Classics of 1931,” begins the chronicle of Frye’s career in the relatively new film industry and his eventual downfall. As Renfield in DRACULA and Fritz in FRANKENSTEIN, his over-the-top, rather psychotic performances led to Dwight being typecast as lunatics, with hunchbacks and wild eyes. Soon, he found himself relegated to bit parts (often uncredited) in a variety of B movies of varying quality. No matter how small the role, Dwight threw himself into the character as if his part was the most important. FRANKENSTEIN director James Whale was so taken with his portrayal of the sadistic, hunchbacked dwarf, Fritz, that in later years, he reached out to Frye, offering him roles in nearly every movie he worked on throughout the actor’s lean years in the ‘30s and ‘40s up to Dwight’s death in 1943; For THE BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN, Whale famously combined three separate roles into one for his to-to ghoul; the actor delivered a tour-de-force performance as Karl, another in a string of hunchback dwarfs.

DWIGHT FRYE’S LAST LAUGH (THE MALTESE FALCON, 1931: Dudley Digges, Ricardo Cortez, Dwight Frye) (WARNER BROTHERS STUDIOS promotional photo)

Between DRACULA and FRANKENSTEIN, Dwight portrayed Wilmer Cook in the first film version of THE MALTESE FALCON, a grittier, pre-Code offering that wasn’t as pretty as the 1941 version with Humphrey Bogart; when Warner Brothers tried to re-release the flick in 1935, the request was denied by the office of the Motion Picture Production Code for “lewd content.” It may have been Dwight’s last big role in which he wasn’t typecast as some sort of twisted, maniacal, deviant toady for whatever the Monster-du-jour was for a particular film (the vampire, Count Dracula, or the man-who-would-be -God, Henry Frankenstein). DWIGHT FRYE’S LAST LAUGH mentions numerous occasions where the studio would severely edit or completely cut the actor’s performances. As he struggled to provide for his family, he took on any role offered, no matter how small (or how ludicrous). Dwight Frye was the consummate actor, but first and foremost, he was the consummate family man.

DWIGHT FRYE’S LAST LAUGH (THE VAMPIRE BAT, 1933: Dwight Frye, Maude Eburne) (MAJESTIC STUDIOS promotional photo)

By the fall of 1943, Dwight Frye had been working an overnight shift at Douglas Aircraft (it was his way of contributing to the war effort, as he was too old to serve) for a year or more, looking for movie roles during the day. He had heard about a new movie being produced by 20th Century-Fox called WILSON, a biography of President Woodrow Wilson. With the help of a friend at the studio, he tested for and was given a fairly important, meaty role in the film, Secretary of War Newton D Baker. To celebrate the part, Dwight took Laura and their son, Dwight David, to a double feature. After the movie, the family caught a bus; before the bus even pulled away from the curb, the actor had collapsed in the aisle. He died about an hour later, at 11:15, of coronary thrombosis.

DWIGHT FRYE’S LAST LAUGH (THE BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN, 1935: Dwight Frye, Valerie Hobson) (UNIVERSAL STUDIOS promotional photo)

Chapter 9, titled “Milestones,” highlights turning points (mostly deaths) in the lives of the people in the life of Dwight Iliff Frye, everyone from Tod Browning to Bela Lugosi, Lionel Atwill and James Whale to Boris Karloff. “Immortality” called in Chapter 10, as the authors recount the efforts of – not only Dwight’s son, Buddy (his father’s nickname for Dwight David) – but leading members of fandom like Warren Publishing’s James Warren and Forrest J Ackerman, publisher and editor, respectively, of FAMOUS MONSTERS OF FILMLAND (as well as the comic magazines CREEPY, EERIE and VAMPIRELLA), who invited Dwight David, Sara Karloff (Boris’ daughter), Ron Chaney (grandson of Lon Chaney Junior) and Bela Lugosi Junior as guests of honor to the 1993 Famous Monsters Convention. The chapter ends with the death of Dwight David Frye on March 27, 2003. Until that time, he worked tirelessly to keep the memory of his father alive to new generations of fans.

DWIGHT FRYE’S LAST LAUGH (Laura Bullivant Frye, Dwight David Frye, Dwight Frye) (family photo, 1933)

The actual biography of Dwight Frye – including a lot of great pictures and a couple of pages of notes – ends on page 202. The remainder of the book’s 320 pages features four appendices listing all of Dwight’s acting credits (“Filmography,” 60 pages with production information, cast and notes regarding Frye’s work; “Early Theatre Work: Stock, Vaudeville, Repetory,” 20 pages with much of the same information as Appendix A; “Broadway Plays,” 20 pages of his work there; “Regional Theatre,” 8 pages, including his last role, reprising Renfield in a stage production of DRACULA) and more photos. A bibliography and biographies of the authors make up the last few pages.

(IMAGE ENTERTAINMENT/RUTHLESS PICTURES (114 minutes; Unrated); 2015)

This flick follows, fairly accurately, the accepted Hollywood take on Frankenstein: A doctor, after years of research (and an overwhelming God complex), has discovered the secret to reviving dead tissue and, intent on creating life from death, hires an unscrupulous, borderline psychotic to procure human remains from the medical school’s freezers for his experiments. As the creature nears completion, all that is needed to conduct the experiment is a relatively fresh brain; the “procurement specialist” finds one so fresh that the homeless man it belongs to is still alive, so… he kills him, delivering the organ to the doctor, demanding more money to buy his silence. Of course, the two argue, the brain is damaged beyond use during a struggle which sees the doctor forced to take fatal defensive action against his associate. Suddenly, the problem of the useless specimen has been solved; the recently deceased felon will supply the final piece to the doctor’s cruel attempt at reincarnation. Oh, yeah… there’s also an ancient mummy in this version.

FRANKENSTEIN VERSUS THE MUMMY (Ashton Leigh) (publicity still)

This flick follows, fairly accurately, the accepted Universal Monsters take on the Mummy: An archeology professor has unearthed the tomb of a long-forgotten pharaoh of a minor Egyptian dynasty, a cruel ruler whose soul, as the result of a curse, is trapped forever in his body, after having his senses physically removed… first his tongue was cut out, then his ears were cut off, then his nose; they let him keep his eyes long enough to force him to watch them whack his tally (which, I suppose, is where the term “tallywhacker” comes from). The archeologist and his scientific dig-buddies return to the school’s Ancient Studies building, mutilated, mummified (but, then, weren’t they all) king in tow, to better study what is a prime specimen of the ancient art. Of course, the department head is enthralled by the spirit after finding and removing the cursed talisman from the well-preserved corpse, leading to several wickedly violent murders by, not only the mummy, but also the professor. Naturally, one of the professor’s assistants is a beautiful young Egyptologist who just happens to be the spitting image of the priestess responsible for cursing the senseless pharaoh. Oh, yeah… there’s also a chain-smoking, smack-talking modern day reanimated creature in this version.

FRANKENSTEIN VERSUS THE MUMMY (Brandon DeSpain) (publicity still)

Okay… I couldn’t resist the two-pronged introduction and, while it may seem that I am not a fan of FRANKENSTEIN VERSUS THE MUMMY, it does retain enough of the classic horror movie feel to make it worthwhile… even enjoyable… despite the flaws (most of which will be discussed throughout the course of this review). The two plots weave in and out of each other, leading to the all-too short climactic duel, as the two main antagonists are not only on staff at the college, but are also lovers, reconnecting upon the return of Egyptology professor Naihla Kahlil (portrayed by a magnificent specimen in her own right, Ashton Leigh). The slightly unhinged (at least, in the beginning of the story) anatomy professor is only identified once, as he writes his name on the chalk board as, simply, Professor F. Naturally, Naihla calls him by his Christian name, Victor (played by an equally magnificent specimen, Max Rhyser). As Professor F’s “assistant,” Carter (played to the oily hilt by John Pickett), begins to exhibit more of the homicidal traits that made him perfect for the job, Professor Walton (a VERY creepy performance from Boomer Tibbs… a guy who was obviously built to be in horror movies) is well on his way to becoming the pharaoh’s conduit for collecting human sacrifices and, in general, its all-around toady. With the body count in the Ancient Studies building steadily rising, Carter meets his demise at the hands of Professor F, who certainly knows a good thing when he sees it (or maybe not, since he blew off a date with the delectable Professor Kahlil to work on his pet project), confiscating the felon’s brain to complete his set of human remains and placing it in the cranium of the lifeless creature he has constructed.

FRANKENSTEIN VERSUS THE MUMMY (Constantin Tripes) (publicity still)

Unfortunately, for Victor, Naihla follows him to his sewer sanctuary, where his experiments have all taken place and where the VERY upset Carter discovers what he has become. So, distraught and confused, Naihla decides to clear her mind with a visit to the mummy, Userkara (a combination of digital trickery and an amazing make-up job on actor Brandon DeSpain, courtesy of writer/director/special effects make-up artist Damien Leone). Walton, having fed the pharaoh’s need for blood, is caught off guard by her sudden appearance and, more so by Userkara’s fascination with the beautiful Egyptologist… it seems that he believes her to be the sorceress who cursed him to an eternity stuck in his current form. As things go from bad to worse – in the sewer and in the examination room – Carter, in the body of the creature (Constantin Tripes in a make-up that leaves something to be desired), has beaten Professor F and chained him to some pipes (the very pipes the professor had only recently chained the Carter creature to) and is off to exact his revenge by raping and pillaging Professor Kahlil; while this is happening, Naihla has convinced the pharaoh that she will remove his curse if he kills Walton (before Walton can kill her), leading to that gentleman’s gruesome demise.

RANKENSTEIN VERSUS THE MUMMY (Max Rhyser and Constantin Tripes) (publicity still)

Naihla heads for the sewer in search of her beloved (if just a tad maniacal) Victor, Userkara in lumbering pursuit, at about the same time that Professor F’s creature is making his way out of the sewer; naturally, the two monsters meet for an impromptu throw-down. From there, things happen rather quickly, leading to a not unexpected ending (at least, not unexpected if you’re familiar with the nearly 85 year history of the Universal movie monsters). Overall, I gotta say that I found FRANKENSTEIN VERSUS THE MUMMY as much fun as any monster movie I’ve seen in a while but, as mentioned, it is not without its flaws. I’m sure that you’ll pick up on most of them yourself but, there is one that I just have to rant about: Victor’s creation appears unfortunately cartoonish. The facial make-up makes it look like a comedic approximation of the face paint – a skeletal white – worn by ex-Misfit Michale Graves during his tenure in that band and, it looks even worse against the buff and tanned body that makes up the rest of the monster; if the white make-up had been present from head to toe, the effect would have been much better. It may not seem like a big thing, but it was all I could focus on in virtually every scene the creature appeared in. The movie is quite brutal and bloody in parts and, though unrated, should probably be considered at least an “R.” Parents should take that into consideration before buying it or renting it for anyone younger than 17.

WHAT’S INSIDE