Film and television producer-director Herbert L. Strock died of heart failure following a car accident in Riverside, a community northeast of Los Angeles, on Nov. 30. He was 87.
Strock's TV work include the series Highway Patrol, Sea Hunt, and 77 Sunset Strip. Among his feature films, almost invariably B-horror flicks, are I Was a Teenage Frankenstein (1957), with Gary Conway in the title role and Whit Bissell (Lt. Gen. Heywood Kirk of the 1960s TV series The Time Tunnel) as Prof. Frankenstein; How to Make a Monster (1958), with Conway reprising his Monster role while joined by Gary Clarke as a teen werewolf; and The Crawling Hand (1963), about a dead astronaut's hand with a penchant for strangling the living.
Strock also directed the relatively prestigious Gog (1954), shot in 3-D, and starring Richard Egan, Constance Dowling, and former Bette Davis leading man Herbert Marshall.
I've always wondered if people at the time took movies like "Teen Frankesntein" seriously or if it was just a silly cartoonish film that people made (or watched) as a joke.