This was the first great team-up monster movie, setting a precedent for everything from King Kong vs Godzilla to Freddy vs Jason. It is simultaneously a direct sequel to The Wolf Man, in which Chaney Jr created his most lasting monster character, and The Ghost of Frankenstein, in which he had taken over from Boris Karloff as the flat-headed, big-booted Frankenstein Monster.
Since Chaney couldn’t play both title roles, it was a clever, if ironic casting stroke to put the sadly aged Bela Lugosi, who missed out on playing the Monster in the 1931 James Whale film that made Boris Karloff a star, into the make-up. At the end of Ghost, the Monster receives a brain transplant from Ygor, a broken-necked minion played by Lugosi, and so it could be argued that Lugosi was reprising this role rather than following Karloff and Chaney – though, in the event, many of the more strenuous scenes were played by stunt-men subbing for the star.
Silly but enormous fun, complete with gypsy musical numbers and an insane battle royal finish as the monsters rip each other apart while some loon dynamites the dam and the castle is swept away in a flood. This is one of the most-often excerpted films in movie history – it’s ignored by Robert De Niro and Uma Thurman while having sex in Mad Dog and Glory and appropriately screens in the background of an early scene in AVP: Alien vs Predator.