Customer Reviews

Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein

5 star:		(46)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Hello All
I was just wandering through amazon and came upon this section and was just delighted to find "A&C meet Frankenstein" getting such nice compliments.
I would like to let you all know that my father Robert Lees and his writing partner and an old family friend, Freddy Rinaldo, wrote this film.
Freddy is no longer with us but my father is still, all of 92 years old, and is thrilled that after all these years you all like the film.
A little addenda:
You all must remember that A&C were essentially radio comedians,
and it was from his training in radio that Costello had the bad habit of coming unglued if he didn't consistantly get laughs from the crew for each gag each take, no matter how many takes were involved in getting a scene right.. For him the crew was a live audience, so if he didn't take the house down, he would put in another piece of business and reinvent the scene on the spot until he did - and he was very inventive! I don't know how successfull they were, but they tried to take him aside and explain how important it was to actually follow the script!! Dad said that Lugosi enjoyed this aspect of Costello very much although I'm not so sure whether the director did, or the writers either for that matter.
Both Dad and Fred respected the "horror/terror" genre in literature very much noting to me when I was younger how complex and interesting the form had become in the hands of writers like Dunsynane Tolstoy Lovecraft Saki,or Poe to name a few.
Tolstoy wrote some strange and luminous things in this old form, once a short story about a Vampyre.
But in those days and by the time Universal Studios got through exploiting it all, "The Wolfman meets Dracula, meets Frankenstein,meets the Mummy, meets the Andrews Sisters" well, lets just say that the bloom was well off the rose.....
And so the object for them was not to parody the genre (at least the serious part) but to parody what Universal Studios had by this time done to the genre....
One of my favorite parts in the film is that sublimely dysfunctional chase scene at the end.
And its true, they had a blast writing the movie.

I can't remember exactly when I first saw this movie, but I know I must have been about 10...and that was 33 years ago. This still rates as one of my all-time favorite movies and Abbott and Costello's best film; the movie is so much fun. As most of the reviews have stated, the key element to the film's success is that the monsters played it straight and the comedy was left to Lou Costello - and what a wonderful result. One of our family traditions now is to set up a tent in the backyard in October and bring our portable television set inside and watch "Abbott + Costello Meet Frankenstein." My kids LOVE this movie!

kudos must still go tO the universal exec who came up with this.
the film is a loving sendoff/tribute to the universal horror icons and A&Cs best film by far.
Lugosi actuall gives a bette rperfromance here as the count than he did in the original Dracula, which was static and over acted. A lot of crititcs have said that Lugosi played it straight here, but that's not quite true. he draped his cape over his nose
(something, despite the cliches, he never did in the original) and has several great comedic lines ('what we need is young blood and brains'). Lugosi always considered himself a comedian and for once he is given that opportunity, thus blowing away the prevelant attitudes that he was a not so bright actor that didn't know a lick of english and thus 'accidentally' gave an eerie delivery.
Chaney too is very good. he was and remains an underrated actor. watch him tear up in the macabre 'spider babay' or his performance in ' high noon' 'the defiant ones' and 'of mice and men' (of course) to see how great an actor he could really be.
and everything with A & C is perfect here. sadly, they would go way down hill and become tiresome shortly after.
ONE MAJOR COMPLAINT:
the make up of Bud Westmore doesn't hold a candle to Jack pierce.
Universal uncerimoniousely sacked Pierce because he was no longer 'quick enough'.
oh, Westmore was quicker and it shows!

I don't have this movie on DVD. I bought a VHS copy of it. Maybe one day I'll move up to DVD. However, I will say this of the movie. It is great.
I was thinking back to it, and I suppose that this movie was my first real experience with Universal's version of the Dracula character, and with one of my favorite monsters, the Wolf Man. I woke up in the wee hours of the morning one day to find this movie on television. I watched it and really enjoyed myself. The monsters are played by the actors who made them popular (except the monster, but Glen Strange does his job well). Abbott and Costello are, of course, hilarious. The plot is a little campy, and intentionally so. Its a great movie for both comedy fans and for monster fans, like myself. I love this movie.

My purchase was delivered promptly and the item was in very good condition just as I had expected. I would buy from this seller again.

I just acquired this A&C DVD so I checked into amazon to see what the other customers thought and I enjoyed Richard Lees' comments and I'd like to invite him and all Abbott & Costello fans to www.abbottandcostello.net (the official site) especially the message boards where fans can meet and exchange stories and info. There is a lot to talk about these days with many of the movies and TV shows finally being released on DVD.

And now my first impressions about this DVD:

I tend to agree with other reviewers that say that a less than pristine film print was used to transfer to DVD when compared to the print for "Hit The Ice" on The Best of Abbott & Costello Vol.2, for example. There are the film "artifacts" and less than sharp image with harsh contrasts and not the subtle gray tones you see in some of the movies on the "Best of" packages. When the boys first turn on the lights in McDougall's House of Horrors the picture quality is particularly bad. Oh well, I bought "...Meet Frankenstein" for the special features that likely will not be included when The Best of Abbott and Costello Vol.3 comes out in August. I hope Universal has remastered the film for that edition, it will be the third time I have purchased "Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein". Yes, the film is that good. So I give 4 stars for the movie itself and the extras and not give it a full 5 stars because of defects in the print and/or transfering to DVD. Also, this DVD was a little pricey. For example, it cost twice as much (where I live) as "Once Upon a Time In The West" which just came out in a 2 DVD special edition with all the bells and whistles.

I have just recieved Abbott and Costello meets Frankenstein and it is better watching it on DVD than on video, this is because of better sound and picture quality and to see a couple of very rare outtakes and the cometary was very interesting and informative about the actors and actress of it and of course the director. the interviews with daughter of Lou was also very interesting as well as the other people in the documentary.

I would highly recommend this DVD if you are an Abbott and Costello fan.

In addition to the fine cast there is one reason why this movie works so well.

Abbott & Costello play it as straight comedy

The classics of horror play it as straight horror.

The mix works well and the actors are to blame a movie's job is to entertain, this one passes.

Watch it and enjoy

can't say nothing bad about this movie, movie goer's found it great that all their famous monsters meet up...and add some comdey....nothing taken seriously just good fun.
glenn strange as the moster...awsome..!

During the golden age of horror cinema in the 1930s, Universal Studios was king of the heap. But by the time ABBOTT & COSTELLO MEET FRANKENSTEIN was lensed and released in 1948, Universal's three biggest monster-movie icons--Dracula, the Frankenstein monster, and the Wolfman--had become too familiar and passé to truly frighten an audience. At about the same time, fickle moviegoers had also cranked down their interest in the vaudevillian and burlesque humor of the studio's biggest comedy team, Bud Abbott & Lou Costello. ABBOTT & COSTELLO MEET FRANKENSTEIN, therefore, appeared to be Universal's desperate attempt to wring just a few more dollars, in one fell swoop, from the one-time box-office bonanzas. But this peculiar pairing of the two seemingly incongruous franchises actually turned out to be a masterstroke--ABBOTT & COSTELLO MEET FRANKENSTEIN became a huge financial success. Horror fans were delighted to see Bud & Lou kid the beloved movie monsters, and for the rest of the viewing audience, watching the comedy duo play against the aging horror icons somehow made the old shtick seem fresh...and maybe even funnier. Thus did Universal birth a NEW hybrid franchise. Though later entries would never quite reach the same level of quality or box-office appeal, the success of this first one pumped new life into the waning careers of Abbott & Costello and helped to pull Universal back from the brink of bankruptcy.

In ABBOTT & COSTELLO MEET FRANKENSTEIN, Bud & Lou play Chick and Wilbur, a couple of bumbling baggage clerks who work at a Florida railway hub. The real fun begins when two strange crates arrive and the boys are told to deliver them to a nearby house-of-horrors exhibit. The crates contain the genuine bodies of Dracula (Bela Lugosi) and the Frankenstein monster (Glenn Strange), and it turns out that the master vampire and a local mad scientist have a scheme to revive the monster by replacing its brain...with Wilbur's! Goodhearted Larry Talbot (Lon Chaney, Jr.) comes on the scene to help Chick and Wilbur thwart Dracula's evil plan, but it seems that poor Larry is still cursed with Lycanthropy-that is, he still changes into the Wolfman when the moon is full--and only ends up adding to Chick and Wilbur's problems.

The movie works so well because the monsters are played straight, while Bud & Lou adapt their regular slapstick and burlesque humor to the story's "monstrous" situations. The laughs, then, come from the way in which the two comedians interact with or react to the monsters, but the audience is never urged to laugh at the monsters themselves. In other words, the monsters fill the role of straight man--the role usually filled by Bud Abbott--in comedy duo's routines. For the audience, this cinematic juxtaposition of the scary and the humorous can be quite cathartic. When one realizes that it's possible to laugh in the face of things that were once considered scary, it becomes easier to exorcise one's inner emotional demons.

For horror fans and film lovers, another thing that makes the film so scintillating is its cinematic pedigree. In later franchise entries such as ABBOTT & COSTELLO MEET THE MUMMY or ABBOTT & COSTELLO MEET THE INVISIBLE MAN, the comedy team doesn't really meet THE mummy or encounter THE invisible man, but instead have run-ins with lesser generic substitutes. In ABBOTT & COSTELLO MEET FRANKENSTEIN, however, Bud & Lou meet the genuine articles. Bela Lugosi IS Dracula. Lon Chaney, Jr., is THE Wolfman. And though Glenn Strange could never fill Karloff's shoes, the Universal-copyrighted make-up IS the definitive Frankenstein monster. The presence of the original stars and original make-up, although past their prime, adds an extra edge to the gags and the parody.

Despite its silly premise, ABBOTT & COSTELLO MEET FRANKENSTEIN is substantially funnier and more enjoyable than the mostly pedestrian comedies being released today. In addition, its humor is "clean" enough to make it a family film, but it is such without being "dumbed down" or puerile. As anybody who has listened to Abbot & Costello's classic routine "Who's On First" can confirm, the duo's humor is quite literate and witty without being the least bit profane.

Universal's DVD release of ABBOTT & COSTELLO MEET FRANKENSTEIN is pretty cool. The digital transfer is fairly clean--some filmic artifacts are present, but not too bad for a film source that is over 50 years old--with very nice continuous-tone black-and-white imagery and good contrast. As with all films produced prior to the advent of widescreen in 1953, the film is presented in the 1.33:1 Academy Ratio--basically the equivalent to the original theatrical ratio--with a Dolby Digital 2.0 mono soundtrack. Cool extras on the disc include a feature commentary from film historian Gregory Mank and an 83-minute Making-of featurette. This one is a must-own for fans of the classic Universal monsters, and any lover of old films or comedies will think it well worth the purchase price.