Frankenstein

Here’s an unusual entry into this series. Some of you may remember that when I first joined Facebook, I did a series of articles on the world of Monster magazines on my Facebook page. Beginning with “Famous Monsters of Filmland” and “Fantastic Monsters of the Films”, I took a look at over 50 Movie Monster magazines that had influenced me in the 60’s. Entry 50 listed many new or recent magazines that were influencing the teens of today, and one in particular aroused my interest, “Monster!” I collected all of the issues and became a regular reader. Only available through Amazon it deals with monsters, no slashers or psychos, only Giant Monsters like Godzilla, to smaller critters like The Monster Of Piedras Blancas, Frankenstein, Indian monsters etc. Issue 18 contained a great 14 page feature called ‘John Harrison’s Spooky Sprockets’, Vintage 8mm Monster & Horror Digest Films. It looks at a world most of us are more than familiar with and discusses Ken, Castle, Columbia, Mountain, Walton and Derann releases. The feature has 3 pages of films of interest to it’s readers and lists dozens of titles. It’s a comprehensive list, but far from complete. What shook me was that it listed a title that I had completely forgotten about at that time and as far as I can recall had only been listed in the standard 8 film library catalogue when I joined the company in 1976. It was Derann’s release of Hammers third entry into their Frankenstein series, ‘The Evil of Frankenstein’!! This was a remarkable mind jogger, because this was yet another of the Universal titles that Derann had a contract for along with ‘Psycho’, ‘Flower Drum Song’, ‘Magnificent Obsession’ and others in the late 60’s or early 70’s. [Their story and eventual fate can be found in an earlier “A Derann Story”. But here in this little magazine was the mind jogger to end all mind joggers. As an after thought, let me add that it’s possible that this and the other Universal titles may have been rental only, as we would very often produce ‘Derann Exclusive Rental Releases’. How many of you can remember this Derann Standard 8mm release from all those years ago and if it was available for sale…do you own one?

(Note: This post was originally written over six years ago and I’m well aware that the story of the ill fated Universal deal has been dealt with before… but this little tale isn’t over yet, as you will discover in the oncoming months!)