It’s Beauty and the Beast : A multiracial ‘Cinderella’ and a bloody-bad ‘House of Frankenstein’ kick off sweeps.

Frankenstein, Hollywood’s well-traveled horror creature for the ages, has met the Space Monster, the Monster From Hell, the Wolf Man, Dracula, and Abbott and Costello.

Now Frankenstein meets Cinderella.

In this column, at least--the occasion being Sunday’s ratings sweeps orgy of classics, featuring a generally pleasing rendering of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s “Cinderella” on ABC’s “The Wonderful World of Disney” and the premiere of NBC’s “House of Frankenstein,” a bloody-bad two-part movie so thick with vampires that only a stake through the heart will slay it. Where is Buffy when you really need her?

If not much of an actress, Brandy of UPN’s “Moesha” sings sweetly enough and makes for a tender, fresh Cinderella in this romantic fairy tale and musicale lite that includes all the familiar components. If you need a reminder, they’re the cruel stepmother; the shrewish, boorish, marriage-fixated stepsisters; the benevolent fairy godmother able to turn a pumpkin into a carriage, rats into footmen and mice into horses; and the palace ball, where our dolled-up Cinderella wins over the young prince before dashing off at midnight, leaving him holding the glass shoe.

And then they all do lunch? No. That’s the Comedy Central version.

In this one (teleplay by Robert L. Freedman), the magic comes mostly from two of the supporting players: Jason Alexander (“Seinfeld”), so wonderfully inept as the palace chief of staff, and Bernadette Peters, overplaying gorgeously as the huffy stepmother who shoves her obnoxious daughters (Veanne Cox and Natalie Desselle) at the prince. You want to cork her every time she shrieks “Cinderella!”

In addition, Whoopi Goldberg adds a nice, wisecracking touch as the queen.

But Paolo Montalban, although singing nicely, is about as pastel as a prince can get (although it’s not his fault the character is written as a doofus), and Whitney Houston (a co-executive producer who originally was to have played Cinderella) isn’t much of a fairy godmother.

Robert Iscove directed “Cinderella” and Rob Marshall choreographed, their collaboration yielding an especially rewarding ballroom sequence in which all of the realm’s husband-hunting babes, including Cinderella’s pushy stepsisters, compete for the sleepy, schleppy prince’s attention, as underwhelmed Queen Whoopi looks on. And the famous shoe-fitting contest here becomes delightfully broad nonsense.

Some of the tunes, especially “The Sweetest Sounds” and “Falling in Love,” wear well. If “Cinderella” is at all distinctive, however, credit its multiracial casting--the mix includes white, black and Filipino (Montalban)--a suitable approach to a story featuring such universal themes as romance and underdogs having long-shot dreams that come true.

You have to suspend belief to buy the notion that the prince, while trying to trace the black Cinderella through her tootsies, wouldn’t notice that most of the females participating in the big try-on are white. That, however, is what makes this “Cinderella” at once a rainbow and color-blind, a fat social message squeezed into a dainty, glass slipper of a fable.

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“House of Frankenstein” is distinctive for other reasons, one of them being its ground-breaking depiction of a vampire disco. It also is TV’s first known staging of an assault on a vampire stronghold by Los Angeles Police Department officers armed only with stakes and crosses.

What we also have here is possibly TV’s first werewoman, featured in a plot that raises the critical issues of whether a hospital emergency room should treat a wounded werewolf that doesn’t have medical insurance, and whether a gorgeous babe of a werewolf, when weighing offers from competing suitors, should choose the vampire or the police detective. To some Los Angeles residents, this would be a toss-up.

In past years, this four-hour bomb of a B-movie might have been titled something on the order of “Frankenstein Meets LAPD.” But no one here, including writer J.B. White and director Peter Werner, is inclined toward self-mockery, instead playing it stonily with no hint of a smirk.

The humor appears unintentional, not the least of which originates with Frankenstein himself (Peter Crombie), a soulful, softy of a brute who, after being dug out from Antarctica and thawed, is befriended in Los Angeles by a street person named Armando (Richard Libertini). In one of the story’s defining moments, Frankenstein, who has gray skin and jagged scars crisscrossing his face, goes shopping with Armando.

Just as campy is Frankenstein’s memorable meeting with an admiring scientist (CCH Pounder), whose field is the undead. She tells Frankenstein, “After all my studies, it’s extraordinary to meet you, face to face.”

But wait, we’re getting ahead of ourselves, for all of this happens after Frankenstein escapes from a rubbery master vampire named Grimes (Greg Wise), only to be accused by the cops of being a serial murderer.

Overshadowing all of this is a deepening bond between a police detective (Adrian Pasdar) and a strange woman (Teri Polo), who within a 24-hour period becomes a werewolf and awakens nude in the bed of a vampire.

Undead does not describe this script. The only thing scary about it is that it got on the air.

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* “Cinderella” airs Sunday at 7 p.m. on ABC (Channel 7). The network has rated it TV-G (suitable for all ages).

* “House of Frankenstein” airs at 9 p.m. Sunday and Monday on NBC (Channel 4). The network has rated it TV-14 (may not be suitable for children under the age of 14), with a parental advisory that it “has some violent depictions.”