Frankenstein's new experiment is the hulking, ape-like Herr Schneider, a homicidal inmate whom he has kept alive after a violent suicide attempt and on whom he has grafted the hands of a recently deceased sculptor.

[6][7] For this film, he helped to design the wig that he wore, but years afterward regretted the outcome, and apparently quipped that it made him look like the American stage and screen star Helen Hayes.

[8] Cushing's dedication to the role was never truly dampened, however; even at the age of 59 and in poor health, he still insisted upon performing a stunt which required him to leap from a tabletop onto the hulking creature's back, spinning wildly in circles to subdue the monster gone amok with a sedative.

The film begins promisingly by restoring the Baron to the role of Wildean dandy, with a superbly handled entrance in which Peter Cushing, a gaunt figure dressed entirely in black, silences with a-gesture a howling mob of lunatics.

But the accumulated suspense is finally dissipated by a script which plunges into the kind of comic-strip melodrama that Jimmy Sangster – author of the early Hammer Frankensteins would never have sanctioned.

John Elder is evidently at a loss to know what to do once he has established the characters and basic situation; and where Fisher was able to exploit the script's general indecisiveness in the last of the series to lend a more personal tone to the whole project, this here proves impossible. ...

Even so, aficionados will find much in the first half of the film to enjoy, and one would still relish further Fisher journeys through the Gothic landscapes that have made him – fortuitously or not – one of the few instantly recognisable British film-makers.