The Revenge of Frankenstein

A strange, blackly comic reworking of the Frankenstein myth, which was Fisher and Hammer's follow-up to their initial The Curse of Frankenstein of 1956. In one of his best performances, Cushing plays on the ambiguity of the central character, so that the Baron becomes a kind of Wildean martyr, alternating between noble defiance and detached cruelty. Much of the action is set in a poor hospital reminiscent of The Marat/Sade, and there is an extraordinary climax which irresistibly suggests the forces of chaos erupting into a repressive community as a monstrously deformed experimental subject crashes through a window into a smart society ball.