Well, I wasn't that fond of either The Wolf Man or Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man. I just don't find Lon Chaney, Jr. all that charismatic. The Wolf Man makeup is kind of goofy-looking, and TWM had kind of a weak climax. As for FMTWM, it had a rather lame excuse for having Talbot seek out Dr. Frankenstein, and played rather fast and loose with both monsters' backstories and mythologies. Retconning the Wolf Man so that he changed when the moonlight touched him was silly -- couldn't he just stay in a windowless room? And though it was nominally a sequel to The Ghost of Frankenstein, it did the usual thing of completely changing the geography and design of the location -- Ludwig Frankenstein's walled estate from The Ghost of Frankenstein is suddenly a castle on a craggy mountainside. And the dialogue tended to lump Ludwig (referred to only as "Dr. Frankenstein") together with his father Henry, who actually created the monster; the only person who acknowledged them as two different individuals was his daughter Elsa.
Plus it's weird the way they rearrange actors in these films. Lionel Atwill is in his third consecutive Frankenstein film in his third consecutive role. Bela Lugosi has gone from playing Ygor in TGOF to Bela the werewolf in TWM to the Monster here. And conversely, the returning character of Elsa has been recast from Evelyn Ankers to Ilona Massey and gained a Hungarian accent in the process, perhaps because Ankers also played Talbot's love interest in The Wolf Man. But Patrick Knowles, who played Talbot's romantic rival in that film, is now the substitute mad doctor in this film. So they're casting returning actors in different roles and different actors in returning roles. And to think -- people today get confused when Alfre Woodard isn't playing the same character in Luke Cage that she played in Captain America: Civil War.
Come to think of it, the Godzilla/kaiju franchise from Toho had a similar approach -- using the same actors in movie after movie, often in equivalent roles, but changing their character names each time. However, they didn't seem to do the reverse, recasting a returning character (other than the kaiju themselves). On those rare occasions when a character did return, it was always the same actor.
Plus it's weird the way they rearrange actors in these films. Lionel Atwill is in his third consecutive Frankenstein film in his third consecutive role. Bela Lugosi has gone from playing Ygor in TGOF to Bela the werewolf in TWM to the Monster here. And conversely, the returning character of Elsa has been recast from Evelyn Ankers to Ilona Massey and gained a Hungarian accent in the process, perhaps because Ankers also played Talbot's love interest in The Wolf Man. But Patrick Knowles, who played Talbot's romantic rival in that film, is now the substitute mad doctor in this film. So they're casting returning actors in different roles and different actors in returning roles. And to think -- people today get confused when Alfre Woodard isn't playing the same character in Luke Cage that she played in Captain America: Civil War.
Come to think of it, the Godzilla/kaiju franchise from Toho had a similar approach -- using the same actors in movie after movie, often in equivalent roles, but changing their character names each time. However, they didn't seem to do the reverse, recasting a returning character (other than the kaiju themselves). On those rare occasions when a character did return, it was always the same actor.
