There is a Diner today. Can’t let Halloween go by without a Diner. I haven’t done any for a while for two simple reasons: life got busy, and –

Well, first the Busy part. I’m now firmly seated in the new schedule, and I am starting to exhale. As long as I can nap, it’s all good. The big difference in life is the new parking spot, I think; not having to feed the meter, to husband quarters, to watch the clock – oh, world of difference. I’d like to say I start each day by listening to the BBC World Service as I make my way downtown, nodding sagely to the latest report from Surinam – things have been grim, but the new government has called for a spirit of national unity, although opposition leaders raise doubts, but one thing is certain: this is the last time you will hear about Surinam for a year, unless our stringer is kidnapped – but it’s the one time in the day I listen to music. Loud music. Dare I say crude music. On the way home it may well be a Brahms adagio, but if you want to start your day with enthusiasm, 80s hair metal works. If you enable the “guilty pleasure” mental filter that allows you to simultaneously enjoy it as the elemental ravings of the id and a pre-fab howl crafted by conglomerates to safely channel aggression into the desired consumer behavior.

Anyway, why would I listen to the news on the way to work? The first thing I do when I get to my desk is hear what the news will be.

Tomorrow will be a good show. Animal testing, leprosy, and then I dress up in a Halloween costume. It’s a Gladiator costume. Minimus Lilecus.

Wife is hella sick, child was home from school today. When I got home I could tell this was so, since everything was as I’d left it this morn – the lunchbox, the backpack, the cello, all the things that should have been packed up and hauled off. I don’t know if it’s the Oinker Grippe, but if so, it’s mild; wife just has congestion that suggests she is leaching fluids from another dimension through a nasally-based wormhole. I’m fine, because I wash my hands 93496034 times a day and wear condoms on my fingers and have set up magnetic fields on my hands and face that use natural repulsive forces to keep me from inadvertently touching my noggin with my germy digits. We have foaming hand-soap units by all the elevators now, and I hit them every time I walk past. I could strip paint with my hands, they’re so dry.

So! Friday! Hoo and/or rah. The Diner is here. It was quick and cheap, but I just wanted to do it. More to come, now that the routine is settling down, and I don’t have that drawn-and-quartered feel so much anymore.

Now, the final installment: FIVE DAYS OF FRANKENSTEIN!

If you want to be a stickler for details, technically, this isn’t the fifth Frankenstein movie. And by “technically” I mean absolutely, factually, the fifth. It’s the sixth. But #5 was Frankenstein vs. Wolfman, and for this sequence I chose to do the first 5 classic Universals that just had Frankenstein in the title.

Which is a weasely way of saying I messed up, but I thought the vs. cop-out came later. Ah well. This one has Boris Karloff, but he doesn’t play the Monster; he’s a Mad Scientist who’s escaped from jail with his assistant, who naturally has a hunchback. It was the law in those days. (If you weren’t Mad, but merely Peeved or perhaps an Irritable Scientist, you could get someone who stood erect but tended to slouch.) The Dr. and his Hunch come across a traveling show that just happens to have this item in its catalog of horrors:

Naturally, it’s the real thing; could there be any doubt? The owner of the bones is swiftly killed for his prize, and – well, maybe swiftly isn’t word for it.

Talk about telegraphing your strangulating.

The Dr. and Hunch take on the guise of the traveling showmen, with Hunch acting all miserable about his costume:

It’s you! NO IT’S NOT YOU’RE JUST HUMORING ME MASTER

It’s only a matter of time before they bring Dracula back to life. Having been asleep for a while, Dracula did not know they cancelled Firefly and does not take the news well:

It’s John Carradine, and he has the exact expression of a guy who was in the next door room over in college, and had a king-hell acid freakout:

Doesn’t take long to get Drac off the stage, though; he’s hunted and exposed to the sun, and it’s crackle crackle scream for him. On to the next batch of monsters, then! This is a Frankenstein movie, after all. Dr. and Hunch find an ice cave -

and like all ice caves in the Carpathian mountains, it contains the entombed bodies of Frankenstein AND the Wolfman. It’s BOGO day in Monsterland. They’re unthawed, and the mad Dr. sets about doing . . . .something or other. Your basic terrorizing / experimenting / tempting God routine. I’ll be honest: this isn’t the scariest Frankenstein ever. There’s a touch of Herman Munster in him:

Meanwhile, the Wolfman goes on a killing spree, annnnnd . . . . cue the villagers!

Universal must have had these guys on retainer. The Hunch gets peeved at the Dr for not giving him a non-hunch body – yeah, like that was going to happen; ever read the union rules? – and the Monster watches their fight in alarm:

I hate when you guys fight!

Eventually he throws the Hunch out the window and takes the doctor to the swamps, where his lack of knowledge about the terrain leads him straight into a bog. Glub, glub, aw crap, glub glub.

You’d think the villagers would haul the Monster out of the bog, shoot him, saw him into pieces, burn them and mix the ashes with concrete, but no. Well, that’s the last we’ll see of him, as we said five times before!

I’m leaving out a subplot about a gypsy girl who falls in love with the Wolfman, and the anguish this causes Hunch. But the Hunch is great – in fact everyone’s pretty good, except for Lon Cheney, who expresses sorrow and despair by looking slightly less wooden than previously. Even though it throws all the lads into the mix, and seems confused about having a coherent plot, it’s fun, and has more crackle and skill than “Ghost Of.”

–

Later today: Sears 1934. And now: the Diner.

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