Frankenstein: A Cinematic Scrapbook

Frankenstein: A Cinematic Scrapbook (1991)

*** (out of 4)

There's certainly nothing ground-breaking about this documentary from Ted Newsom but it's certainly very entertaining. Basically we have film trailers to several Frankenstein movies and Newsom adds some narration to tell the history of the Frankenstein monster on the screen.

If you're not familiar with any Frankenstein film then this here would be the perfect place to start just to get a basic education on the monster and his movies. You get a still from the 1910 Edison movie and then we get into the Universal pictures, the Hammer ones and countless other films like I WAS A TEENAGE FRANKENSTEIN, FRANKENSTEIN 1970, FRANKENSTEIN MEETS THE SPACE MONSTER and FRANKENSTEIN'S DAUGHTER.

Again, if you're a horror expert, there's certainly nothing new that you're going to learn here but you'll at least have some fun watching the trailers and going down memory lane. There are a wide range of films discussed here and it's fun getting to see all the Frankenstein trailers in one place.

An innocuous looking video with a treasure trove of rare footage and vintage trailers, offering a rich and unusual look at the history of Frankenstein on the screen. For the serious collector there are two visual treasures early on: the first is an extremely rare makeup still of Bela Lugosi in a test for the 1931 version, and this is followed by a still of an rejected Karloff makeup. Also included are some rare color footage from "Son of Frankenstein."