Hooptober X: The Devil Made Me Do It
#21: 8 decades (7)
Peacock

This starts out great -- a spooky, foggy cemetery at full moon. Larry Talbot is buried in his ancestral crypt, covered in wolfsbane to keep him from awakening.

Graverobbers -- you'd think graverobbers were a major problem based on how often it happens in these films -- break into the crypt and pull the wolfsbane off his corpse, causing him to wake up and turn into the wolf man.

Lon Chaney Jr. reprises his role as the tortured Larry Talbot, and he gives it all as a tragic figure. Talbot feels guilty for what he's done as the wolf man and wants to die and spends the whole film looking for some way to do this. What bothers me is that while this film is a direct continuation of Talbot's story, it ignores a few important things:

-Talbot was able to kill the werewolf that bit him with a silver cane. Did he forget that?
-Maleva had a talisman that prevented him from turning into a werewolf but he gave it away. Why aren't they looking for something like that? Maleva seems to forget it as well.
-Talbot was dead in the ground for 4 years thanks to wolfsbane. If he really wants to be at peace why not just go back to the crypt, pull up his wolsfbane blankie and go back sleep?

Talbot's obsession with death brings him to the ruins of the Frankenstein castle, where he breaks the monster out of a block of ice. This time the monster is played by Bela Lugosi, and I gotta be honest, his portrayal was a mess. His walk was so exaggerated it was comedic. The monster didn't speak at all in this one because his delivery made the studio execs laugh.

Talbot wants to find Frankenstein's notes because he's convinced only a guy who reanimated a corpse would know how to kill a wolfman (??). The monster shows him a chest full of notes and papers from the good doctor, but Talbot somehow knows immediately that's not what he's looking for, without even reading any of it. Kind of odd.

We do finally get to see the big showdown between the wolf man and Frankenstein's monster, but it's short, it's at the very end, and it offers no real resolution. Pretty fitting end for a mess of a film. While Chaney gives a great performance and it has some fantastic Universal monster vibes, the story itself is a dud and a big letdown.