Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948)

Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948)

Directed by: Charles Barton

Starring: Bud Abbott, Lou Costello, Lon Chaney Jr.

Normally for Halloween I watch an entire series of slasher films, like Halloween or Nightmare on Elm Street, but this year… well, I forgot. I was going to watch all the Saw movies, but it just wasn’t in the stars (which is fine, because those movies suck). Instead, I watched Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, and yes, that means that I’m about three weeks behind on writing movie reviews. Shut up.

Two shipping clerks get caught in a web of supernatural intrigue when Larry Talbot (aka the Wolf Man) tries to keep them from delivering Count Dracula’s coffin to Frankenstein’s castle. The two spend nearly the entire movie running around the castle, bumping into vampires or homonculi or lycanthropes, all to comedic effect.

This is the first of the Abbott and Costello meet… series of films the comedy duo did near the end of their career, and it’s not bad. The only other one I’ve seen was Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy, which was the LAST of the series, and which was just sad. I’m just going to go ahead and assume that everything in between is just a slippery slope of two ex-popular comedians sinking farther and farther down into this horrible whole they suddenly found themselves in, and I think that excuses me from having to watch any of the others. In another note, this is the second of two films where Bela Lugosi played Dracula (the first being Dracula, of course), which is kinda awesome. If only they had managed to get Boris Karloff to be the Monster instead of whatever random dude they got, this would’ve been pretty fucking impressive. Still, if you’re going to not get one of them, might as well be the one who doesn’t talk.