They did the mash — the monster mash!

In 1943, Universal Pictures pumped new life into the Frankenstein series with the first ever horror crossover, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf-Man. The mash-up of Chaney’s Wolf Man with Bela Lugosi’s Creature was the first of several such films as Universal’s horror cycle wound down, including the closest they came to a Jekyll and Hyde film, House of Dracula.

The monster-mash crossover has remained popular ever since, including a number of Jekyll and Hyde films. Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde, for instance, gives us Jekyll and Hyde, Burke and Hare and Jack the Ripper. Here are a couple more.

THE MUMMY (2017) was supposed to launch Universal’s Dark Universe which is why Dr. Jekyll (Russell Crowe) shows up: as head of the monster-fighting Prodigium (a counterpart to the MCU’s SHIELD though it feels more like the BPRD) he takes great interest in Nick Morton (Tom Cruise) whose reckless antiquity-theft efforts in Iraq have awakened Ahmanet (Sofia Boutella), an Egyptian mummy with issues who plans to turn Nick into the avatar of Set, God of Death (chaos, actually) which is, spoiler, a Bad Bad Thing.

Cruise’s role is one he’s played throughout his career, the shallow, out-for-himself jerk who when the chips are down proves capable of becoming much more. It works for him in a number of movies but this isn’t one of them. Nothing about this works, including Ahmanet as the kind of demonic mummy Arnold Voosloo played in the Brendan Fraser Mummy — it has a same-old same-old by the numbers quality (I wasn’t blown away by the Fraser version but I wouldn’t accuse it of that).

Crowe’s Jekyll/Hyde is a headscratcher. He describes himself as a good man whose buried darker side “grew into an overwhelming desire, an unquenchable thirst for chaos, and the suffering of others.” which he now controls with constant drug injections. That could mean Hyde results from the usual experiment, or that he’s naturally schizoid, or something else; he could be the Victorian Jekyll with an unnatural life span or it could be there was no Victorian Jekyll. I honestly don’t care except for the purpose of my book. “This is not some common cold you have. Chicken soup and a good night’s sleep won’t make it go away.”

The TV series The Munsters was a monster mash from the first, with the Munster family consisting of Herman (Frankenstein’s Monster), Lily (Dracula’s daughter, visually), Grandpa (vampire/mad scientist), Eddie (kid werewolf) and Marilyn (the ugly cousin — actually a pretty blonde). The 1995 reboot film HERE COME THE MUNSTERS tells the story of how the family came to America and throws in Jekyll and Hyde to boot.

When the torch-wielding mobs back in Transylvania start wielding rocket launchers, Fred (Ed Herrman) and Lily (Veronica Hamel) decide to emigrate to America where Herman’s sister in law Elsa (visually the Bride) and her husband Norman Hyde (Max Grodenchik of DS9) can sponsor them as immigrants.

Of course it’s not that simple. It turns out something happened to Norman in a recent lab experiment; he’s disappeared, Elsa is comatose so there’s nobody who can sponsor them. Worse, an anti-immigrant politician, Brent Jekyll (hmm, could it be?) is holding out the Munsters as the type of immigrant filth who should be deported ASAP.

Forget torch-wielding mobs — if this came out today we’d have shrieking mobs on X denouncing the Munsters for going woke on immigration. A running theme is that we’re already a nation of immigrants as the family interact with a Sikh customs officer, a Polynesian limo driver, an Irish employment agent and others. When a cop, Warchowski, grumbles about these freaky foreigners, his partner quips “Right. Warkowski’s an old Apache name isn’t it?” Where the original show and the various revivals portray the Munsters as social outcasts, this has them fitting into the community, including Grandpa (Robert Morse) sparking neighbor Dimwiddy (Mary Woronov) and everyone at school thinking Eddie’s cool for being able to grow fangs and fur.

As for Jekyll, it turns out an opportunistic campaign manager saw the perfect opportunity when he stumbled across the transformed Hyde — a politician who never existed so he has zero scandals in his past (the film references post-smoking and draft dodging, both of which Bill Clinton had admitted to). While Hyde’s anti-immigration rants are depressingly prescient, it turns out the campaign manager didn’t need to find a spotless candidate after all … “We must ensure that foreign influences do not infiltrate the American way of life!”’

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