is staying at a boarding house while fellow scientist Dr. Frederick Brandt resides in a nearby insane asylum. After discovering that his landlady Anna's fiance Karl has been stealing narcotics in order to support Anna's ailing mother, Frankenstein blackmails them into helping him kidnap Brandt so he can get the secret formula of his experiment. During the kidnapping, they are caught by the nightwatchman. Karl panics and stabs the nightwatchman to death. Upon returning to lab, which Frankenstein has built in the house's basement, Brandt has a heart attack, prompting Frankenstein and Karl to kidnap the asylum's administrator Professor Richter to transplant Brandt's brain into his body. Frankenstein and Karl kidnap Richter and transplant Brandt's brain into his body. While the creature recovers, Frankenstein and the lovers relocate to a deserted manor house when the police begin to close in. The creature awakens and is horrified by his appearance. He scares Anna, who stabs him, causing him to escape. Frankenstein returns to the lab and finds the creature gone. In a rage, he fatally stabs Anna and goes after Brandt. The creature makes it to his former house, where his wife refuses to accept him as her husband. Wanting revenge on Frankenstein and knowing the Baron will eventually track him there, the creature allows his wife to go free and pours liquid paraffin around the house. When Frankenstein arrives, Brandt sets fire to the house and makes Frankenstein choose between the police and the flames. Frankenstein finds the secret formula for his experiment and flees, only to run into Karl, who knocks him out. Brandt steps outside, knocks Karl out and carries Frankenstein back inside. Frankenstein awakens as the fire surrounds him and Brandt.
The scene where Frankenstein rapes Anna was filmed over the objections of both Peter Cushing and Veronica Carlson, and director Terence Fisher, who halted it when he felt enough was enough. It was not in the original script, but the scene was added at the insistence of Hammer executive James Carreras, who was under pressure to keep the American distributors happy. This explains why there is no mention of the rape subsequently by Anna or Frankenstein. The scenes featuring Thorley Walters as Inspector Frisch were also late additions to the original script; they have been described as unnecessary, adding an unwelcome element of comedy into the suspenseful story and also making the film too long.
In 1978, the Welsh television stationHTV Cymru/Wales broadcast a version dubbed into the Welsh language called Rhaid Dinistrio Frankenstein, a more-or-less literal translation of the English title. This was one of three films that were dubbed into Welsh, another being Shane, with Alan Ladd. Both these were rebroadcast on the new Welsh language channel S4C on its launch in 1982.
Reception
Variety called the film "a good-enough example of its low-key type, with artwork rather better than usual a minimum of artless dialogue, good lensing by Arthur Grant and a solid all round cast." The Monthly Film Bulletin called it "the most spirited Hammer horror in some time. The crudities still remain, of course, but the talk of transplants and drugs seem to have injected new life into the continuing story of Baron Frankenstein." Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed currently holds an average 50% on Rotten Tomatoes.
