By 1948, Universal had given up on horror, the genre they’d help to define with its run of films from 1931’s Dracula and Frankenstein through to the sad offerings released in 1946. Similarly, the comedy duo of Bud Abbott and Lou Costello had already hit their creative peak earlier in the 1940s and were in danger of losing their appeal. Universal saw an opportunity to revive both their fortunes by pairing the comics and the monsters. Although it gave Abbott and Costello a new lease of life, it actually did little for the fortunes of the company’s “big three” monsters, Dracula, Frankenstein and the Wolf Man, all of who were making their final Universal appearance here.

A hallmark of the “meet the monsters” series is its eccentric attitude towards titling. On screen, the title card for the first film in the series reads Bud Abbott Lou Costello Meet Frankenstein, an ungrammatical and unwieldy title. It’s more commonly referred to as simply Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, and for the sake of brevity and sanity (the amount of often very angry comments that using the full and correct title generates is not worth the effort…) that’s the title that will be used here.

The general tone is set by a jokey animated title sequence (animated by Woody Woodpecker creator Walter Lantz) but after that, the story doesn’t hang around. We pick up with Larry Talbot (Lon Chaney Jr) in London, frantically calling a railway station in Florida where Chick Young (Abbott) and Wilbur Grey (Costello) are working as baggage clerks (it’s always a matter of some amusement that the dimwit characters that Abbott and Costello played ever found gainful employment – see also The Three Stooges and even Laurel and Hardy for more of the same). Talbot tries to warn Wilbur about a shipment for McDougal’s House of Horrors but is cut off when he transforms into a werewolf. The crates are duly delivered to McDougal (Frank Ferguson), the duo unaware that they contain Dracula (Bela Lugosi) and his coffin and the Frankenstein monster (Glenn Strange). Dracula seduces Dr Sandra Mornay (Lenore Aubert) who sets him up at her castle on a small island where the Count, now using the name Dr Lejos, intends to give the monster a new brain to make him more obedient – and it’s Wilbur’s brain he wants. After being arrested for the loss of the monsters, Wilbur and Chick are bailed by undercover insurance investigator Joan Raymond (Jane Randolph) who joins them at a masquerade ball that evening where Talbot turns up, seeking Wilbur and Chick’s help to find and finally destroy Dracula and the monster.

If you’re immune to the supposed charms of Abbott and Costello – and with the former’s brusqueness and the latter’s wearisome “man child” routine, they could often be hard to love – then this could make for hard going, though it is the best in the series. The monsters are treated with surprising respect, never becoming the butt of cheap gags (the comics keep those for themselves), the actors never hamming it up when the temptation to do so must have been overwhelming. Given that this was the  end of the road at Universal for the monsters, and that Chaney and Lugosi had been lured back to reprise their most famous roles, it was a very welcome touch. In their book No Traveler Returns: The Lost Years of Bela Lugosi, Gary D. Rhodes and Bill Kaffenberger quote Lugosi as saying “all I have to do is frighten the boys, a perfectly appropriate activity. My trademark will be unblemished.”

If, on the other hand, you’re a fan of the duo’s brand of noisy clowning, there’s plenty to enjoy here. It may never be laugh out loud funny, but there are some amusing bits of comic business scattered here and there. In fairness, the monster stuff isn’t much better than that in House of Frankenstein (1944) or House of Dracula (1945), but it’s certainly no worse. It suffers the same problem as those monster rallies, that of not having nearly enough plot to accommodate all three of them as well as Abbott and Costello, but at least the Frankenstein monster gets to do a lot more here – in the House films, he spent much of the time lying comatose on operating tables, where here, he’s up and about and wreaking havoc, particularly in the finale.

Nostalgia undoubtedly plays a part in the film’s cult status today. Particularly in the States, it seems to have been a small screen staple and whole generations of nascent horror fans may well have found it their gateway drug to a wider world of horror. As such there’s a danger of viewing the film through rose-tinted glasses – it’s certainly amusing, far less grating than some of Abbott and Costello’s films and still stands head and shoulders over what was still to come. But as horror comedies go (an even more purely subjective genre than horror alone), The Cat and the Canary (1939) did it a lot better.

But it’s fun, and it was great to see the monsters getting one last outing – Karloff declined an offer to return as the monster but was happy enough to turn up to help promote the film, and both Chaney and Lugosi got one last crack at their signature roles. Like the monsters themselves, it did little to boost their careers which were already in the doldrums (so the story goes, the studio heads thought Lugosi was dead, so far had he fallen off their radar). Chaney still had a few classier films left in him, particularly for producer Stanley Kramer but for Lugosi, already reduced to Poverty Row horrors, it was downhill all the way from here.

The film almost didn’t get made at all. Abbott and Costello had nearly broken up in 1945, their relationship cracking under the pressures of their health issues – Abbott suffered from severe epilepsy and Costello had nearly died in 1943 from rheumatic heart disease. And when he first read the script, then titled The Brain of Frankenstein, Costello hated it and producer Robert Arthur had to stump up a $50,000 advance to keep him on board. It was a shrewd investment – Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein was a huge hit for the newly formed Universal-International who, in 1948, were teetering on the financial brink. The film may have helped to save the studio and give Abbott and Costello a welcome boost, but it did little for the monsters. Its success ensured a series of films, none of them a patch on this one, in which the duo locked horns with The Killer (1949), The Invisible Man (1951) (who turns up – or doesn’t, perhaps – here as the uncredited voice of Vincent Price in a last-minute vocal cameo), Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1953) and The Mummy (1955).