- Title: Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein
- IMDb: link
Scary Sunday takes us back to an unlikely meeting of Hollywood stars. Hoping to use the studio’s most popular stars to rekindle interest in their monster properties, Universal brought the comedic duo into the world of Dracula (Béla Lugosi), Frankenstein’s Monster (Glenn Strange), and the Wolf Man (Lon Chaney Jr.) bringing back the actors who had made the monsters popular. Despite concerns about the script from everyone involved, and the less than cordial relationship between Abbot and Costello, the film became one of Universal’s biggest hits leading to further misadventures of the duo with the Universal Monsters.
Built around a single joke of railway clerk Wilbur Grey (Lou Costello) seeing the monsters while his more serious partner Chick Young (Bud Abbott) keeps missing them, dismissing Wilbur’s flights of fancy, the script follows them delivering the coffin of Dracula and the inert Monster to McDougal’s House of Horrors where the pair come alive.
Also central to the plot is Wilbur’s girlfriend, Dr Sandra Mornay (Lenore Aubert) who is actually working for Dracula and has chosen the gullible Wilbur as the perfect new brain for the Monster. Jane Randolph is also added as an insurance investigator looking for the missing shipment (which no one believes literally walked away) who also feigns to have romantic interest in Wilbur further infuriating Chick.
The film successfully merges the slapstick humor of the comedians with the trappings of the monsters, which of course scare poor Lou Costello to no end. The film ends in a creepy castle, full of secret rooms and a laboratory, where the fate of Wilbur is decided. It’s not quite a parody or spoof of the monster franchise, as those characters are taken seriously in comparison to the comedians, but it does showcase how goofballs like Abbot and Costello would do in a world full of monsters.
Fun for the whole family, the film was added to the National Film Registry in 2001, and has been released multiple times of the years on VHS, DVD, and Blu-ray. It’s also currently available on a number of streaming services.
Watch the trailer
