Young surgeon and Frankenstein student Simon Helder (James Spader lookalike Briant) spends carefree days grave-robbing with his body-snatching assistant (Troughton), until he is arrested for 'sorcery' and bundled off to a lunatic asylum. Luckily, he soon discovers a fellow inmate just happens to be Victor Frankenstein.
Presumed dead, and working as the asylum's doctor under an assumed name, the Baron - Marquis de Sade-style - has been given virtual run of the institute and its patients, having blackmailed boozy, lecherous director Klauss (Stratton) to secrecy.
Together with the Baron's mute, beautiful assistant, Sarah 'The Angel' (Smith), Helder becomes Frankenstein's collaborator in necromancy, filching body parts from dead inmates. A suitable brain is found in Hannibal Lector-like Professor Durendel (Lloyd-Pack), who the unhinged Frankenstein has driven to suicide, and whose brilliant mind and virtuoso violin playing belied a temper "as savage as a wild cat".
A truly hideous body is borrowed from one Herr Schneider, a virtual Neanderthal who apparently favoured "stabbing people in the face with broken glass". Promising. A sadly underrated little shocker, Frankenstein And The Monster From Hell proved to be a swan song for both Hammer (it was the studio's last Frankenstein excursion), and director Terence Fisher, who would never make another film (he died in 1980).
Cushing, meanwhile, had suffered a recent tragedy with the death of his wife, possibly accounting for his gaunt, melancholy demeanour. And, accordingly, the film seems suffused with sadness, echoed in the claustrophobic sets (actually a result of budgetary restrictions), and enlivened only with occasional flashes of graveyard humour - disembodied eyeballs swivelling round to stare out from a jar; a brain kicked across a floor; Cushing's post-prandial sigh of "Ah, kidneys... delicious!"
Grisly, even by Hammer's increasingly unrestrained standards (a desperate concession, probably, to the New Wave of graphic horrors), and featuring a sickening finale akin to George A Romero's Day Of The Dead, the film would nevertheless suffer from the unluckiest of release schedules - crumbling before the hype surrounding The Exorcist and the opulent Pinewood-produced TV movie 'Frankenstein: The True Story'.
Despite these setbacks and brickbats, Frankenstein And The Monster From Hell is evocative, funny and rather moving. It remains a testament to Fisher's surgical skills in patching-up a tired saga for a studio in its death throes.
Presumed dead, and working as the asylum's doctor under an assumed name, the Baron - Marquis de Sade-style - has been given virtual run of the institute and its patients, having blackmailed boozy, lecherous director Klauss (Stratton) to secrecy.
Together with the Baron's mute, beautiful assistant, Sarah 'The Angel' (Smith), Helder becomes Frankenstein's collaborator in necromancy, filching body parts from dead inmates. A suitable brain is found in Hannibal Lector-like Professor Durendel (Lloyd-Pack), who the unhinged Frankenstein has driven to suicide, and whose brilliant mind and virtuoso violin playing belied a temper "as savage as a wild cat".
A truly hideous body is borrowed from one Herr Schneider, a virtual Neanderthal who apparently favoured "stabbing people in the face with broken glass". Promising. A sadly underrated little shocker, Frankenstein And The Monster From Hell proved to be a swan song for both Hammer (it was the studio's last Frankenstein excursion), and director Terence Fisher, who would never make another film (he died in 1980).
Cushing, meanwhile, had suffered a recent tragedy with the death of his wife, possibly accounting for his gaunt, melancholy demeanour. And, accordingly, the film seems suffused with sadness, echoed in the claustrophobic sets (actually a result of budgetary restrictions), and enlivened only with occasional flashes of graveyard humour - disembodied eyeballs swivelling round to stare out from a jar; a brain kicked across a floor; Cushing's post-prandial sigh of "Ah, kidneys... delicious!"
Grisly, even by Hammer's increasingly unrestrained standards (a desperate concession, probably, to the New Wave of graphic horrors), and featuring a sickening finale akin to George A Romero's Day Of The Dead, the film would nevertheless suffer from the unluckiest of release schedules - crumbling before the hype surrounding The Exorcist and the opulent Pinewood-produced TV movie 'Frankenstein: The True Story'.
Despite these setbacks and brickbats, Frankenstein And The Monster From Hell is evocative, funny and rather moving. It remains a testament to Fisher's surgical skills in patching-up a tired saga for a studio in its death throes.