After teaming up their werewolf and Frankenstein monster in Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943), Universal decided to go for broke and bring them back for a rematch, with Dracula, a mad scientist and a hunchbacked assistant thrown in for good measure. Unfortunately, when they entrusted the script to Edward T. Lowe, a hugely prolific screenwriter since the silent days and writer of The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923), The Vampire Bat (1933) and Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon (1943) among many others, Universal hadn’t thought of including Dracula. When, late in the day, they changed their mind, Lowe was forced to simply bolt him on to his screenplay in a separate plot thread that gives House of Frankenstein the disjointed feel of a not very well planned two-part anthology film.

Dr Gustav Niemann (Boris Karloff, returning to the thread of Universal Gothics for the first time since Son of Frankenstein (1939)) breaks out of prison with his hunchbacked assistant Daniel (J. Carrol Naish) who he has promised a new, perfect body. They encounter travelling sideshow owner Professor Lampini (George Zucco) who they murder, stealing his horror exhibit and heading for the town of Riegelberg to take revenge on Burgomaster Hussman (Peter Coe) who had sent them to prison in the first place. As part of the exhibit, Lampini had the skeleton of Count Dracula who Niemann revives. Dracula (John Carradine) seduces Hussmann’s granddaughter-in-law Rita (Anne Gwynne) and Hussmann but is swiftly disposed of when he’s stranded in the sunrise without his coffin. Niemann and Daniel then move on to ruins of Castle Frankenstein in the town of Visaria (“a town that doesn’t care for horrors,” Lampini had told them) where they find Frankenstein’s monster and Larry Talbot (Lon Chaney Jr), the Wolf Man, preserved in ice beneath the castle. Thawing them out, Niemann offers to find Talbot a cure for his condition but is really more interested in the monster and continuing to take his revenge. Talbot becomes a werewolf, Daniel falls in love with the gypsy girl Ilonka (Elena Verdugo), who in turns turn falls for Talbot, the monster is revived, Talbot is killed with a silver bullet after transforming again, Illonka is fatally wounded, and the monster drags Niemann into the nearby marshes where they both drown.

House of Frankenstein is certainly packed with incident, though its disjointed storyline (Dracula is despatched with unseemly haste and there’s far too much emphasis on the romantic triangle in the latter half) make it a surprising chore. The fact that Lowe couldn’t find a way to integrate the monsters effectively means that Dracula never meets the Frankenstein monster of the Wolf Man, a huge let down for anyone expecting a full-on monster rally. Mind you, Carradine’s urbane, top-hatted Dracula makes for an unimpressive variation on the Count so getting rid of him early was probably no bad thing anyway, disposing of him in what feels like a mini-movie within a movie. His demise is perhaps the film’s best moment, pursued by the authorities across the countryside (there’s some actual location filming here) and clawing frantically at his coffin as the sun rises. The chase, filmed in the manner of a western, is one of the few times that director Erle C. Kenton manages to bring any kind of dynamism to the film which otherwise just meanders about going nowhere fast.

There are other flashes of greatness here, notably an impressive opening jailbreak, but Kenton is, for the most part, an uninspired and lethargic director. He’d made the classic Island of Lost Souls for Paramount in 1932 but his work on the Universal horrors leaves one wondering if the success of that film had been down to the work of others. The cast do a lot to help him out – Carradine may be lacking as Dracula, but Karloff, playing Frankenstein in all but name, is firing on all cylinders, Chaney reprises his “tragic hero” routine to good effect and Lionel Atwill is on hand, once again in policeman’s uniform, though not playing his memorable Inspector Krogh from Son of Frankenstein. Zucco barely rates a cameo as Lampini and poor Glen Strange, taking over the reins from Karloff, Chaney and Bela Lugosi (who was too busy touring with a stage version Arsenic and Old Lace for a part here), spends most of the film on the slab until the climax when he gets to carry his illustrious predecessor to his doom in a very abrupt finale (Karloff, it must be said, looks less than pleased to be disappearing beneath the surface of the backlot water tank.) Jack Pierce’s make-up suits him far better than it did either Chaney or Lugosi, though it remains a far cry from the iconic design sported by Karloff.

But none of them get much from Lowe’s flabby, episodic and shapeless script which ultimately proves to be the film’s real undoing. Niemann’s brain-swapping plan doesn’t make a whole lot of sense (what was he trying to achieve exactly?), not that he actually gets to achieve it – or much else really – by the end. Even the murder of Hausmann is carried out by Dracula for his own ends. Given that Daniel proves himself an efficient strangler – albeit one that can’t tell the difference between a pentagon and a pentagram – why does Niemann need the monster at all to commit his murders? Chaney is good enough as Talbot until he gets bogged down in a romance that rather reduces him to a whining, lovestruck wuss, the script over-egging the whole “tortured soul” business.

The film’s release was delayed by several months but when it made it out into the wild, it did reasonable if not exactly spectacular business. The end of the road was in sight for the Universal monster films – not counting the Johnny Come Lately Gill-Man – but the company was keen to give their menagerie of horrors one last roll of the dice, which they got in House of Frankenstein‘s companion piece, House of Dracula (1945). After that, they were reduced to straight men in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948) and despite sporadic appearances in independent films in the 1950s, it would take Hammer Films to restore dignity to the great monsters at the end of the decade. A 1997 three-part television mini-series, also titled House of Frankenstein, reunited a Dracula-like vampire, Frankenstein and Wolf Man but, despite the title, isn’t a remake of this film.