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It begins where Curse ends, the guillotine falls but the Baron (Peter Cushing) lives to vivisect another day. (The ruse leaves a decapitated cleric in his coffin, joined by a weak-hearted grave-robber.) Revenge to him means vindicating his earlier experiment, as Dr. Stein he runs a busy ward while secretly collecting body parts for a new project. "A life devoted to the needs of others," sighs a plummy dowager who directs the physician to her anemic daughter, "overhaul her!" A member of the medical council (Francis Matthews) recognizes him and becomes his assistant, his tour of the laboratory includes a demonstration of the nervous system with severed eyeballs and hands floating in greenish tanks. The manufactured body (Michael Gwynn) "isn't born yet," the hunchback aide (Oscar Quitak) volunteers his brain, the finished product is not keen on being studied as "a great part in the advancement of medical science." Terence Fisher midway between James Whale and Paul Morrissey, a parable of flesh old and new. The gentle monster has an unhealed skull marred by a brutal janitor, he's alarmed to find himself drooling over a fresh corpse while contemplating a fellow botched creature, the cannibalistic chimpanzee in a nearby cage. "A strange shape," crashing the recital of the aristocratic candy-striper (Eunice Gayson) with a twisted cry for his maker. The air of unruffled obscenity accommodates the unsavory orderly (Richard Wordsworth) with his philosophy on the warmth of filth, along with the soft plop of grisly gray matter sliding off a tray and into a beaker. "Fugitive, murderer, mutilator," reborn on Harley Street with tattooed arm and lapel flower, ready for more sequels. "They will never be rid of me." With John Welsh, Lionel Jeffries, Charles Lloyd-Pack, George Woodbridge, and Michael Ripper.
--- Fernando F. Croce |