Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed

Hammer's fifth Frankenstein film shifts the horror from the Monster, now a sad and pathetic victim, to the Baron (Cushing), now an embittered and ruthless tyrant. Abducting his former assistant Dr Brandt (Pravda) from a lunatic asylum, the Baron transplants his brain into the body of Dr Richter (Jones). Restored to sanity but with his brain trapped within an alien body, the heavily bandaged Brandt/Richter monster is able to talk to his grief-stricken wife (Audley) but unable to understand or explain the transformation that has 'cured' him. Fisher taps a rich vein of Romanticism here, making this the high point of a series that afterwards degenerated into the sloppy self-parody of Jimmy Sangster's The Horror of Frankenstein.