Universal Monsters Movies Ranked

25. The Ghost of Frankenstein (1942)

A still of 'Ghost of Frankenstein', the Universal Monsters movie from 1942.

Frankenstein’s twisted former assistant Ygor (Bela Lugosi) persuades the new heir to the Barony (Cedric Hardwicke) to pick up where his father’s experiments left off, secretly planning to replace the Monster’s (Lon Chaney Jr) faulty brain with his own to achieve immortality.

More Lugosi as Ygor can only be a good thing, as he was the undoubted devious highlight of Son of Frankenstein three years earlier.

The Ghost of Frankenstein starts off action-packed by the standards of these movies, as an angry mob besiege Frankenstein’s castle and Ygor fends them off by dislodging sections of the castle wall. But it tails off into generic hokum involving yet another Frankenstein descendent doing more experiments… because that ended so well the last time.

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24. Abbott and Costello Meet Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1953)

“This is what I get from putting two Americans on the force so they can learn our policing methods.”

Awkwardly explained away in the above one-liner, Abbott and Costello now work for Scotland Yard and are tasked with investigating a series of murders that perhaps have something to do with the enigmatic Dr Henry Jekyll (Boris Karloff).

Amazingly, Universal never did a straight adaptation of the Robert Louis Stevenson classic Gothic novel in this era, which seems like a real missed opportunity (unfortunately Paramount got there first).

The genre farce hijinks here are far from the pair’s funniest work, but some decent transformation scenes and Karloff as a charming Dr Jekyll ensure this film remains extremely watchable.




23. She-Wolf of London (1946)

A soon-to-be-betrothed heiress (June Lockhart) begins to lose her grip on reality when a series of grisly murders take place and she learns of a supposed curse in her family.

She-Wolf is absolutely fascinating in how it subverts expectations (just imagine being in the cinema to see the audience’s reaction to what is and isn’t in the movie for the first time) but is not particularly interesting otherwise.

Lockhart’s performance is good, but this doesn’t feel like a Universal horror. If anything, She-Wolf of London is more like Jacques Tourneur’s film Cat People (1942), where the themes and your imagination do the heavy-lifting.

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