Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man - Wolf Man Legacy Collection DVD Review & Comments

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Ok, so the film really only garners a 6 out of 10 – and many would claim that even this score is being overly lenient – but there is still much of worth in this addition to Universal’s horror canon. Production values are high and the film is packed with incident. The werewolf side of things is definitely the most impressive and Chaney makes the most out of a character who wants nothing other than to die. Lugosi’s Monster is, inevitably, a letdown considering the great big boots he is trying to fill, but it is strange how easily you can warm to his crumpled-down version of the Karloff’s icon, even if he is a relative guest star in the picture. So, two stories go into the mix, but only one has any real relevance, ensuring that this remains markedly a Wolf Man picture first and foremost. Still, the production showed some shrewd initiative by hurling two of Universal’s greatest horror archetypes together. The fact that they kept on marketing such monster-mashes for years to come – of considerably lesser value – proved that they knew they’d found a cool idea to begin with but lacked the writing skills and imaginative panache to pull them off, the series ending up as a mere parody of former self. Nevertheless, FMTWM is indispensable in the continuation of Larry Talbot’s plight.

This edition sits very snugly on the same disc as the original, with a nice enough transfer for a film of this vintage. A commentary would have been nice to put some historical relevance across and to provide some insight into Bela Lugosi’s clod-hopping segue into the role made famous by his arch-rival, Boris Karoff, but sadly this is not to be.
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