mosquitodragon’s review published on Letterboxd:
Hammer goes grimdark and dredges the depths of human depravity - well, as much as Hammer was ever going to be able to do this. It's hardly The Human Centipede but it's NOT NICE AT ALL.
The most disturbing element here is Peter Cushing being his usual charming, refined, roguishly amoral take on Dr Frankenstein but also... manipulative and, well, very rapey. Much has been made of this infamous rape scene betraying the spirit of Cushing's magnificent concept of the character. I'm not about to clutch my pearls - let's not forget that he coldly sent the servant girl who he'd inconveniently knocked up to her death at the hands of the monster in The Curse of Frankenstein, so he clearly has precedence for violating women - but I do think the rape scene was a mistake. Cushing is as professional as ever but it just takes you out of the film - he can't convincingly play a rapist because they guy is just too fucking solid. It doesn't work.
All that aside, the tone of Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed is far grimmer then pretty much any Hammer horror I can think of. The sense of playfulness, always presented in total deadpan anyway, just isn't there. The closest is probably The Revenge of Frankenstein but I think this film hits the dark notes more effectively precisely because it goes all in on the immorality and degradation. The film is far more interested in the Doc's criminality and when we do finally get a monster, it's Freddie Jones with his lip-quivering pathos - not the usual horror monster but a wronged man who must deliver Frankenstein's comeuppance. That final scene in the burning building is a corker, looking fabulously dangerous and ill-advised, and there they both are: Freddie and Petey-baby, right in the middle of it.
It almost feels like an homage to Roger Corman's Poe films when we get the final credits overlaid on the image of the burning house. All very Freudian: the house as your sense of self and housefires representing our fundamental neuroses regarding our self-destructive tendencies. What could be more perfect than for Dr Frankenstein to be dragged kicking and screaming into an acknowledgement of his own obsessive self destructiveness?
Final thought: For some reason I almost equate Freddie Jones and Patrick Magee as the same actor - I always used to get them mixed up. I wish we had a film where they teamed up as leads. A buddy cop movie perhaps. Although no one could probably be less convincing policemen than Jones and Magee. Buddy psychiatrists? Buddy priests? A buddy priest movie about the two maddest clergymen in Victorian England - that'd be nice.
