One of the later Frankenstein movies (Hammer's fifth in the series). It was nearly entirely filmed in the studio and those studio sets give the film a lovely old-fashioned look, almost as if you're watching a stage play in an old British theatre.
Dr. Frankenstein, traveling incognito, forces a young couple (the young man works in a asylum) to help him with his mad experiments. Our doctor is trying to 'cure' a brain of a colleague who has gone mad by planting it into another body. But even dead bodies and transplanted brains seem to have a mind of their own ...
It's interesting to see the development of the character of the mad doctor: Originally Frankenstein was a deranged genius, a man who would do anything for science, but not necessarily a depraved person; in this movie he is portrayed as an entirely immoral maniac, the incarnation of evil. Even when trying to save the brain of his colleague, his motives are purely egocentric: he's interested in the knowledge his colleagues had discovered prior to his mental illness. If he can save the brain and remove the sick parts, he'll be able to dig up the secrets.
This is one of the better Frankenstein movies, grim and gruesome, with a few surgery scenes that will send shivers down your spine. There's also a scene in which Cushing assaults Hammer babe Veronica Carlson ("Hammer Glamour") with the intention to rape her, the kind of things you don't expect in a Hammer movie. Thorley Walters provides some comic relief as a pompous police detective. Some might argue that it does feel a little heavy-handed, with a 'creature' (more pathetic than horrifying) going through a genuine identity crisis. Existentialism finally reached Hammer.
