"Revenge of Frankenstein" (1958) d/ Terence Fisher

Following up their successful adaption of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Curse of Frankenstein (1957), Hammer Studios reassembled director Terence Fisher, screenwriter Jimmy Sangster, and lead actor Peter Cushing, who'd all only just completed the studio's legendary take on Dracula together, for this interesting and entertaining direct sequel. Sure, there's no Christopher Lee this time around, as he was otherwise occupied with things like Corridors of Blood, Missiles From Hell, and the aforementioned Drac, but the movie doesn't suffer much from his absence, so you won't hear too much bellyaching from the peanut gallery where this one's concerned. It all starts like this...


"We British have never hesitated to take up arms. Take this one."
At the outset, we see Baron Frankenstein (Peter Cushing) awaiting his appointment with the guillotine for his prior crimes against humanity, only to cheat the blade with the help of his assistant, and the priest who gives him last rites ends up a full head shorter, and buried in his place, for his troubles. Years later, we note that the Baron has become a successful and highly popular physician/ surgeon in Carlsbruck, working under the alias, Dr. Stein, much to the dismay of the local medical council, save one member, one Dr. Kleve (Francis Matthews), who recognizes him to be Frankenstein, but only wants to assist him in his controversial experimentation with life and death. He agrees to take the savvy young doctor under his wing, and those outrageous experiments are soon underway, with assistance also provided by Karl (Oscar Quitak), a disfigured hunchback the Baron has promised to provide a new, healthy body for in exchange for his years of unflinching loyalty. Among the first things on Karl's "to do once I'm no longer a pitiful gimp" list, is Margaret (Eunice Gayson), the comely new brunette assistant at the hospital, who's only seen the pitiful gimp variant, thus far. I think you can figure out where this is all leading...


"I'm sorry, Karl, the hunchback turned me on more. Just saying.," says Margaret (Eunice Gayson).
Karl's brain is soon transplanted into a healthy bod (Michael Gwynn), and he's immediately struck with wanderlust, despite the Baron's orders that he remain strapped to a bed in a locked hospital room. Meanwhile, there's the issue of Frankenstein's chimpanzee, his first successful brain transplant, that seems to have developed cannibalistic traits, having eaten his mate after being fitted with an orangutan's brain. That's gonna come back to haunt these guys, I think. Karl hears of his savior's plans to tour the world with him as a medical wonder and attraction for the crowds, and convinces Margaret to spring him from his binds. What's the worst that could happen? Karl's new frame starts to show signs of rapidly reverting back to the gimpy hunchbacked one, leading him to commit several homicides before slumping dead at Frankenstein's feet in the middle of a social function, even calling the doctor out by his former name for all ears in attendance to hear. What transpires from here, I believe I'll leave for you eager Hammerheads out there to discover on your own. You'll appreciate it, alright.


The eyes have it. Especially this particular pair.
Eunice Gayson, you'll remember, was the first Bond girl, appearing opposite Sean Connery in Dr. No and From Russia With Love. She's acceptable lens candy here, too. Francis Matthews scored roles in Dracula: Prince of Darkness and Rasputin the Mad Monk, for the studio in 1966. As for Gwynne, he showed up later on in things like 1966's The Deadly Bees and Scars of Dracula in 1970. Everything about this iconic offering from Hammer is top shelf: from Cushing's performance (as always) and his surrounding cast, to Fisher's ever-exemplary direction, to the gothic sets (that you'll remember parts of from Horror of Dracula, also shot at Bray), to Leonard Salzedo's score, often considered his finest work. Popular among critics and fans alike, it's efforts like this that established Hammer as one of the premier studios for genre cinema of the era. On the scale, anything less than Three big ones would be beyond criminal, and I'd never have that where this one is concerned. So, three Wops it is. Snare yourselves a copy immediately!


"After we're found out here, I'll be Franin Kenste in the next city." 

"Frankenstein Created Woman" (1967) d / Freddie Francis

Tonight's review, a 1967 cult classic as directed by one Freddie Francis, is the fourth in the Frankenstein series for the legendary Hammer Studios, half of a horror double bill with The Mummy's Shroud, and a metaphysically kooky one, at that. Besides the expected Peter Cushing in the lead, reprising his familiar role of Baron Frankenstein, this one also displays the Austrian Playboy Playmate Susan Denberg, dubbed here as the film's producers found her Austrian accent too thick for audiences, and Robert Morris, who'd also appeared in Quartermass and the Pit for the studio the same year. It's a showcase of Francis' ability to turn a disorientated script into an effective slice of gothic horror that may sound a bit like misogynist fantasies acted out for the big screen, but in actuality, stands as an empowering display of beautiful woman in the driver's seat, if by "driver's seat", we really mean "serial murders". Onward!


This imagery takes me back to a certain ultra-cheezy music video from the "Intensities in 10 Cities" album. You know the one...
After a young boy witnesses the public head chop of his criminal father at the guillotine, we see that he's grown into an adult named Hans (Robert Morris), excessively kindhearted for someone that's seen his dear da beheaded, at work as an assistant to Baron Frankenstein (Peter Cushing) and Doctor Hertz (Thorley Walters), and in love with the barkeep's disfigured, crippled daughter, Christina (Susan Denberg), who gets the piss taken out of her quite regularly, by three wealthy deviants named Anton, Karl, and Johan (Peter Bythe, Barry Warren, Derek Fowlds, respectively) who later beat her father to death with canes when he interrupts their late night theft of his wine, and frame Hans for the murder, when he refuses to use his alibi (he was having gimpy in n' out wiff Christina, wudn't he?) and spoil her name. It just so happens, that Frankenstein, having been revived from a cryogenic death-state himself, has invented a soul-trapping apparatus, which he uses on the freshly executed Hans, and when Christina returns to the soul-crushing news and does a suicide flopper into the drink, drowning herself, well, you can see where this is going, can't you?


Harnessing the energy from Madonna's Blonde Ambition stage bra had proved disastrous for these men of science.
If you voted that Frankenstein used his medical knowledge to give a stay of execution to both parties involved, albeit a gruesome one, indeed, then give yourself a banana sticker. While the Baron uses surgery to repair all of Christina's physical flaws, he manages to trap Hans' disembodied soul inside the now beautiful young lady. That's not gonna work out the way you planned it, methinks, unless your plan was "get Hans' vengeful spirit to possess his former love and use her new fleshy wares to trap the three pompous perpetratin' bastards what put them in this metaphysical pickle in the first place". Naturally, Christina systematically snuffs the bastards at the ethereal insistence of her ghostly beau, and Frankenstein and Hertz only manage to piece it all together just as she's cancelling out the last of them for keeps. When the severed head informs her that her vengeful journey has come to an end, against the desperate pleas of Frankenstein, she takes the Nestea plunge into a waterfall, and re-drowns herself, to join her mate in the afterlife. For once, Frankenstein's comeuppance is merely psychological, and he walks away to collect his thoughts, and focus once again, on his work...


Susan Denberg wielding a meat cleaver? Halfway to full mast, with tingly potential.
Denberg would also appear in the "Mudd's Women" episode of Star Trek, which I have seen before, but can't recall whether the actress made an impression on me. I'm sure she did, and I just buried all memories of the poisonous sci-fi in the inner depths of my memory, including those of her. It is what it is, sci-fi dorks, I can't be someone I'm not... Rumors of her flipping her lid on L.S.D. and overdosing in the seventies, would seem to be unsubstantiated, probably. Cushing, as British Horror's elder statesman, would follow this up with Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed (1969), as well as assorted genre fare like Torture Garden (1967), Blood Beast Terror (1968), and Scream and Scream Again (1970). He certainly earned a packet of twenty unfiltered John Player fags, long his favorites, with his performance here. Either way, this is both must-see for film fans, and must own for genre completists, as it has earned an impressive three Wops on the rating scale. Grab a copy!


The Herman's Hermits pop music concert scheduled tonight in the East End, has, regrettably, been cancelled. Health reasons cited.
 

"Frankenstein and the Monster From Hell"(1974)d/Terence Fisher

We'll close out November tonight by taking a closer look at director Terence Fisher's final effort, the sixth in Hammer's Frankenstein series and fifth and final appearance by the iconic Peter Cushing as the Baron.As such, it's a steadfast effort from a studio on the wane from its former genre success, so long as you can get around the absolutely lamentable creature makeup work from Eddie Knight, which kinda resembles an old Sicilian woman's grill slapped on top of a rubbery caveman jumpsuit.You gotta feel bad for poor David "Darth Vader" Prowse under all that bad latex, his second go as Frankenstein's monster for Hammer, 1970's Horror of, being his initial appearance.On the positive side, you've got the rare beauty of a mostly silent Madeline Smith to dress up your frame, and an emasciated-looking Peter Cushing rocking one of the more embarrassing dandy wigs ever committed to celluloid, truly a rupture-inducing blow to cinematic masculinity if ever there was such a thing.Watching him leap on Prowse's back the first time, I was pretty sure the wind might have taken him before he touched down.All joking aside, apart from the unfortunate makeup effects, the movie is actually pretty estimable, unique and atypical from the other series entries, with solid performances from Cushing, BBC staple John Stratton, Smith, Patrick "Second Doctor" Troughton as a bodysnatcher(!) with a taste for schnapps, and Shane Briant as Victor's unscrupulous young understudy.Fisher, who helmed all but two of the Frankenstein series for the studio, shrouds the film in a gothic and lugubrious tone, with more claret-splatter than the earlier productions(and even a few laughably out-of-scale miniatures).All-in-all, a fitting send off for Hammer(who would barely produce a genre ripple in the pond from here on out), the franchise(despite the painfully miserable pittance afforded to the budget), and the director, whose stringent framing and vigorous edits are on display for the last time.Onward!

I'd need hosing down, too, if I had to share the nuthouse with Madeline Smith.
A constable investigating the criminal enterprises of a shaky graverobber(Patrick Troughton) is lead to the quarters of one Simon Helder(Shane Briant), a young surgeon who's been unsuccessfully recreating the ungodly experiments of Baron Frankenstein.When the court sentences him to five years in the same insane asylum that once housed his mad inspiration, he's not exactly troubled by the concept.And when the asylum director's(John Stratton) two thuggish orderlies welcome him with continuous blasts from a power hose, he's rescued by Doctor Victor(Peter Cushing), the resident surgeon, who Helder immediately recognizes as Frankenstein himself.It seems the Baron has been blackmailing the perfidious director for a priviledged stay that includes the same uninterrupted forays into the scientific unknown that bought him the imprisonment in the first place.When Victor hears of Helder's admiration and surgical skills, the young man is quickly implanted as his personal assistant, making rounds to all the resident lunatics and even lending his steady hand in surgery, due to Frankenstein's burn-scarred mitts, replacing Sarah(Madeline Smith), the beautiful mute girl that most of the inmates are enamored with, and refer to as "The Angel".Helder doesn't take long to uncover the Baron's secret work, a pet project involving a homicidal prisoner named Schneider(David Prowse) who fancies jabbing people in the face with shards of broken glass(!), and whose bone-breaking suicide jump from a high window was thwarted by Frankenstein, who's been adding body parts to the hulking eyeless psychopath while subtracting them from previously living inmates, like a harmless old sculptor's(Bernard "M from the Bond movies" Lee) hands.The understudy improves upon Sarah's amateur stitch-job, unaware of the lengths Victor has gone and will go to see his work to come to fruition.

"Does Victor Frankenstein(Peter Cushing) have to look directly into the camera, Richard Dreyfuss-style, while wearing a dandy wig...well, does he?!!"
Before too long, the men are giving the brutish creature new eyes, and after Victor drives the resident mathematical genius/violinist,Professor Durendel(Charles Lloyd-Pack), to hang himself in his cell with his own violin strings, a new brain.Frankenstein coldly discards Herr Schneider's old grey matter, clumsily kicking it across the floor after stepping on it(!!).The creature, implanted with a new intellect, has little use for his fiddle and abruptly smashes it to pieces, but instantly recognizes his Angel, who's been assisting all along.The Baron becomes increasingly frustrated by the disdain his patchwork creation shows for the lessons he imposes upon it, treating it less like a human being than a disobedient pet, rushing to tranquilize the thing the instant it trashes equipment or picks up a broken glass container, lapsing into the original fiend it was built from.Victor tells Helder the unfortunate incidents surrounding Durendel's violent outbursts, which stemmed from bursting in on the director as he molested Sarah, the knowledge of such events the foundation for Frankenstein's blackmail plot.With Durendel's brain inside the bulky neanderthal frame, the creature turns again to bloody vengeance, wounding Victor during his escape, and finally throat-shanking the perverted director with a broken bottle the way he always wanted to.With the entire asylum in an uproar as the misshapen monster digs up the fresh graves in the graveyard outside, Sarah breaks her film-long silence as the orderlies fill the thing's belly with hot lead before the other inmates tear it asunder amidst screams and laughter.Though Helder is shaken by the turn of events and the duo's failure, Frankenstein optimistically suggests that they will persevere and carry on their experiments, regardless of this blood-soaked setback.I love happy endings.

Mitt-less in a pine box, too ignominious of an end for me, personally.
To Fisher's credentials, you'll find his name in the directorial credits of all the finest Hammer genre movies ever produced:Horror of Dracula(1958), Curse of Frankenstein(1957), Revenge of Frankenstein(1958), The Mummy(1959), The Hound of the Baskervilles(1959), The Brides of Dracula(1960), Curse of the Werewolf(1961), Phantom of the Opera(1962), The Gorgon(1964), Dracula:Prince of Darkness(1966), Frankenstein Created Woman(1967), The Devil Rides Out(1967), Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed(1969), and tonight's entry.Cushing, who worked with Fisher no less than fourteen times(a distant second place to Tim Burton and Johnny Depp...why don't you guys marry each other already) in his long and prestigious acting career that dated back to 1939(!), has to be firmly cemented into any self-respecting horror nut's all-time top five actors, period.Smith, who you might remember as Sean Connery's Italian bed decoration in Live and Let Die(1973), has an impressive genre resume herself, appearing in movies like Taste the Blood of Dracula(1970), The Vampire Lovers(1970), and Theater of Blood(1973).On the scale, Monster From Hell checks in with two respectable bigguns, an entertaining epitaph, indeed.Recommended.

"Does the Frankenstein monster(David Prowse) have to shank a loonie in the labonza with a broken bottle...Does he?!!"

"Frankenstein:The True Story"(1973)d/Jack Smight

Tonight's entry is another plate of clammy made-for-tv leftovers one might mistake for a twenty-eight hundred dollar Wagyu ribeye at first glance, due to the ensemble cast assembled for the production.The venerable James Mason heads the list that includes a pre-Sir John Gielgud, the always lovely Jane Seymour, Ralph Richardson, Agnes Moorehead, and even Tom "Dr. Who" Baker, and all are game faced for this interesting variation(in the most politcally correct of terms) on the Shelley novel that has more in common with the modern Hammer Frankenstein series than the classic book.In fact, the special makeups are even provided by Hammer vet Roy Ashton, and to his credit, they're appropriately Hammer-y-looking, if that makes any sense at all to you.Originally broadcast in ninety minute-long halves, the production begins with an introduction sequence that features Mason stepping through the tombstones in St. John's Wood cemetery in London, incorrectly whiffing on the suggestion that Shelley was buried there, despite standing in front of a headstone that might lead you to think he was actually telling the truth.The author is actually buried in Dorset, where rumor has it, her remains can be heard ever-spinning on a flaming spit since Hollywood had the moose balls to market this long-winded take a 'true story'.Michael Sarrazin plays the monster, who starts off looking dandy then decays into what looks like a late stage terminal AIDS patient more than a superhuman creature assembled from parts of various corpses as the plot unravels(slowly.).Definitely worth a look if hearing Mason speaking Chinese or seeing some gratuitous dummy violence(and one fuck of a rotten severed head) sounds like a good time to you.

Hope you were ambidexterous...
Enter Victor Frankenstein(Leonard Whiting), an affluent, and brilliant, young surgeon-to-be who's engaged to Elizabeth Fanshawe(Nicola Pagett), studying anatomy from an unorthodox, spastic scientist named Clerval(David McCallum) in London after having lost his younger brother to a tragic boat accident and vowing that he'd work with the devil himself if he could restore life to his perished sibling.When Clerval isn't dramatically grasping at his heart, he's working on logic-defying experiments that preserve human tissue long after death, using electricity and the sun as a catalyst for ushering in a new super-race of indestructible beings from the body parts of cadavers.After constructing a nifty, isolated 40's style mad scientist laboratory in an abandoned chateau, the two scientific groundbreakers luck upon a local mine collapse which provides peasant parts a' plenty for their weird experiments, but on the night before their historic attempt to resurrect the dead, Clerval discovers that a disembodied arm he'd been keeping alive has begun to "reverse the process", or "turns hella ugly" as the screenwriters must have meant.The unsightly mitt causes Clerval's heart to cash its chips in, before he can complete the entry in his diary.Frankenstein, oblivious to the reversal, not only carries on without his partner, but also lends the dead man's grey matter for the final ingredient in their voltage-driven god-play.Lo and behold, when the cheap visual effects subside, a flawless, handsome, and articulate creature(Michael Sarrazin) has been created, with nary a mismatched section or even a stitching scar, ferchrissakes.After grooming the monster for entry into English high society and passing him off as a foreign relative of few words, Frankenstein discovers the ugly-arm-in-the-cupboard, realizing that his new patchwork pal is probably doomed to suffer the same fate, judging by the sudden appearance of sores behind his ears(yeah, bleech.).The monster, being something of an attention whore, has issues dealing with his sudden unpopularity, and after his brutal puss scares the landlady(Agnes Moorehead) to death, he repeatedly shanks himself in the labonza and swan dives off of the white cliffs of Dover to a watery end...of part one.

Get out from under those carriage wheels, you fuckin' dummy.
The resilient creature wanders off into the woods only to befriend a blind violinist, but in true Herman Munster fashion, manages to kill the old man's grandson and drive his granddaughter into the path of an oncoming carriage.Darn!Darn!Darn!The monster, smitten with the dead granddaughter's beauty, carries her broken frame back to the laboratory, only to find it currently occupied by Dr. Polidori(James Mason), Clerval's former mentor, who's whipped up some ressurrection experiments of his own, sans electricity(which he's frightened of...pussy.), but with far more colored liquids, sparklers, and Chinese coolie assistants.Polidori convinces Frankenstein, who's been trying to get the bitter taste of his prior failure out of his mouth through hum drum domestic tedium with his new bride, to assist him in creating a perfect woman(he needs the young surgeon since an earlier lab accident has left both of his paws looking like beef jerky)during the young man's honeymoon(!!)."I'll be back in a few short months, baby, and you're in for it then..."Of course, the experiment is successful, with the result, a stunningly beautiful female that Polidori has dubbed "Prima"(Jane Seymour), a decorative choker camoflaging the creature's lone stitching scar upon her throat.Polidori then looks to Frankenstein's wife's family to educate and prepare his ward for entry into high society, and here she proves mischievous and amorous towards Victor whenever his suspicious wife has her head turned.On the eve of Polidori's successful unveiling, the male creature drops into a splendid ball uninvited and proceeds to pull Prima's head from her shoulders in front of a throng of screaming partygoers.Victor and Elizabeth leave the police inquiry behind for American shores, unaware that not only is Polidori on board, but the murderous creature has stowed away, as well.The creature rips Polidori's gloves off revealing his meaty claw before hanging his screaming ass up from the crow's nest during a violent electrical storm.The mittless old fool soon eats lightning-singed death, while the creature does away with the ship's crew and Victor's pregnant wife, setting a new course for the North Pole.Victor awakens to find his bride frozen solid on the deck and his creation standing in a nearby ice cavern, where Victor shouts for forgiveness from the makeshift man, and causes an avalanche to abruptly bury both sorry bastards.Roll credits.

There's something sexy about Jane's elegant neck so close to such a dirty pair of chick-chokers.
Though I remember being a pissed-off little kid having to invest three sugar-driven hours in tonight's review(remember, I was never all that big a Frankie fan to begin with), I'd always give it a look these days, if just for Mason, Gielgud, and Seymour, who's especially young and delicious here, all favorites of mine.Still, it's an interesting idea, adding Polidori, a real-life acquaintance of Shelley's who partook in the famous literary competition that Frankenstein was born out of in the first place, as a character to the story, utilized Hammer-style as an older scientist that the younger Frankenstein reluctantly works with.Most modern viewers will find the gaps between the sparse thrills wider than a three finger Aerosmith 'Walk This Way' gap, I think.If Frankie's your bag, or you're a relic like me who's into impressive acting performances, you'll wanna queue this one up on your 'to see' list of movies.On the scale, it merits two Wops.Check it out.

Skip the Valtrex, homepiss.You're gonna need to spackle that facepiece once.

"Flesh for Frankenstein"(1973)d/Paul Morrissey

Next we're going to look lovingly upon one of my absolute favorite spins on the Frankenstein myth,often referred to as "Andy Warhol's Frankenstein",though the Pittsburgh native and mop-topped fop had little to do with the production other than lending his name to it,being that director Morrissey had an office in Warhol's New York headquarters.A ridiculously over-the-top homage/piss-take on the very genre it belongs to,Flesh was originally released in field sequential 3D(and re-released the same way in the eighties),you'd have to track down the Japanese print to enjoy it as it was intended,sadly enough.Apart from the obvious,copious amounts of sex and gore that drip off the screen at the viewer,what makes this film legendary,you query?Well,it's obviously not Joe Dallesandro,who spends most of the film naked like table dressing at a homo party,and delivers his lines like a post-stroke Sylvester Stallone on quaaludes.For tonight's entry,kudos are due to Udo.Kier's amazingly frenetic and crazed performance as the racially pyoo-ah mad Serbian sister(and guts)fucking eugenical genius is the glue that holds this whole crazy movie together,with sidekick Arno Juerging also giving a memorably mental eye-bugging turn as his assistant,Otto.The gore is dumped in buckets by Italian FX whiz,Carlo Rambaldi,an excellent score supplied by Claudio Gizzi,and second unit director was none other than genre king Antonio Margheriti,with Carlo Ponti pitching in as one of the producers.Even in the flattest 2D format,there's much to enjoy that's being showcased here.So let's embark together,shall we,on the quest for the perfect nasum for our male sssombie!

The Baron(Udo Kier)and his assistant,Otto(Arno Juerging)quest together for the perfect Serbian nasum.
When he's not having sex with his sister/wife,Baron Frankenstein(Kier)slaves away in his laboratory with his wild-eyed sycophantic assistant,Otto(Juerging),to create the perfect pair of patchwork humans that meet the superior Serbian standard,and to replace "zat worn out trash zat now pop-oolates and re-pop-oolates zat planet."Huh??He's already assembled the perfect female sssombie(Dalila Di Lazzaro),but needs a head...with the perfect Serbian nasum to complete his male sssombie.The thought of the glory he'll receive,and not the scientific world,when his master plan comes to fruition causes him to take out his sexual arousal on his female's gall bladder,through opened stitching in her torso.Meanwhile, his two creepy children steal body parts from the lab,when they're not dissecting their dolls or beheading them in a toy guillotine,to the chagrin of their pet pirahnas.His sister/wife(Monique Van Vooren) has no time for the lazy,inferior farmhands who spend her brother/husband's money on cheap liquor and whores at the local brothel and ruin her picnics with the children by openly fornicating in the grass a few feet away.She has even less time for her own eyebrows.When Nicholas(Dallesandro)takes his perma-bummed out buddy,Sascha(SrdJan Zelenovic),to the brothel in attempts to sway him from joining a monastery,The Baron and Otto,out headhunting,hear the whores cries of passion inside,and assume that Sascha and his perfect nasum are the ones responsible,when it's really Nicholas doing the ploughing.Otto makes Nicholas unconscious with a good head-clubbing,while the Baron removes Sascha's domepiece with an enormous pair of neck-scissors(!).Nicholas awakens to find his pal's headless body nearby,then reports to the Baron's sister/wife who hires him in the castle as a servant/cock-on-a-leash.Then she sucks his armpits.

Nicholas(Joe Dallesandro) is a European fahmhand who tawks like a Brooklyn cab drivuh.
At dinner,the Baron introduces two new dinner guests,decked out in body and neckbraces,when Nicholas,who is serving the family,recognizes his friend's head on the male(!).After eating,the Baron tries to force his sssombies to copulate,but the male has no interest,enfuriating Frankenstein,who gives the male to his sister/wife to get her fuck on with as a reward for selling out Nicholas,who is then captured,to him.Meanwhile,Otto tries to duplicate his employer's earlier gall bladder-fucking feat with the female,succeeding only in scooping her insides clean like a pumpkin,disemboweling and killing her.When the Baron sees his assistant's feeble bumbling,he strangles him.At this point the male sssombie returns from his lovemaking session with the Baron's wife/sister's lifeless body in his arms,causing the ever-more-enraged Baron to order his creation to kill Nicholas who is hanging from the ceiling by a chain.The male creature,still possessing some of Sascha's personality,instead lashes out at the Baron,severing his hand in an iron gate,and running him through on a pole,one of his internal organs skewered at the end.Nicholas pleads with the male sssombie to let him down and free him,but the creature denies his request,and pulls his own organs out with his bare hands,preferring to be dead.The Baron's children come into the laboratory,and grabbing scalpels,being to turn the crane wheel that is suspending Nicholas in the air.Are they going to free him or carry on their father's twisted work?The credits roll.

The Baron gets to know life by fucking death in the gall bladder.
Most of the same crew would return the following year for Blood for Dracula(1974),which we'll examine at a later date.Kier,who began his film career as a protege' of Fassbinder,has an amazing list of films under his belt that reads like a who's who of genre directors.He's worked with Argento,Von Trier,Van Sant,Carpenter,as well as artists like Madonna and Korn.He continues to be a living icon of cult,horror,and exploitation movies to this very day.Morrissey,a self-avowed right winger,went on to direct fare like The Hound of the Baskervilles(1978) and Spike of Bensonhurst(1988).Nicoletta Elmi,who played the Baron's daughter went on to act in Argento's Profondo Rosso in 1976,before scoring herself a memorable role as Ingrid the usherette in Lamberto Bava's Demoni(1985).Juerging did All Around Service Girls in 1976 then nothing else.On the scale,Flesh turns the crank on a creaky chain,lifting three solid wops out of a huge tank of preservative fluid.

"I don't regret anything!"gasps the eviscerated,handless Baron,"I tried my best!"

"The Erotic Rites of Frankenstein"(1972)d/Jess Franco

If you compiled the best ninety minutes of ALL of the films of Jesus Franco into one movie,chances are,you'd STILL have a steaming lump of fly-encompassed dogshit in your hands.Now,I've heard just about all the pro-Franco arguments,and honestly,they smell nearly as pungent as the guy's films themselves,though trying to justify the guy's glass eye behind the camera,the dull-edged tanto knife he no doubt uses to cut scenes,the fourteen bucks he usually spends on makeup effects,etc.,is probably a pretty entertaining stance to take,for someone who loves to argue,like myself.I just can't bring myself to be that guy.Everybody's got a favorite rotten director,and Franco seems to have hit a nerve within the hip film community,whereas,my top stops for cinematic poo involve other equally untalented gents.
There's two directions a Franco film usually takes.Sometimes,after enduring some of his fumbled film attempts,I find myself somehow entertained,and usually drying my eyes from a prolonged spell of laughing my ass off at the slop he's hurriedly slung together and disguised as a movie.In other instances,I find myself dozing off,my eyes strained from trying to focus on something...anything he's filmed,and tired of piecing the few lines of dialogue he's haphazardly cut the ends off of back together.Luckily,tonight's entry qualifies as the former.A low-budgeted hunk of crap,with little coherency,poor performances,lousy makeup,atrocious camerawork,and ridiculous story,all shot in and around the picturesque castles,gothic houses,and scenic landscapes of Portugal.It's a tremendous waste of time,and thus,a highly enjoyable Franco romp.

Baron Frankestein(Dennis Price)looks for his booze flask under the silver-painted disco variant of his monster(Fernando Bilbao).
Baron Frankenstein(Price),with the help of his hunchbacked assistant,Morpho(!)(Franco himself),has just electrically shocked his silver-disco monster(Bilbao)into speaking for the first time.The celebration is short-lived,however,as his lab gets the bum's rush from Cagliostro's cronies,one of which,a caped nude girl(Anne Libert) with sparse feathers and claws that a child might learn how to make in Kindergarten art class,who screeches like a bird,that tears the good Baron to shreds(translation:two blood streaks on the side of his neck),making off with his patchwork ABBA stage prop.At the castle at Varna,Cagliostro(Vernon)awaits.Not to be confused with the 18th century Italian adventurer/occultist,our version creates blood hungry blind bird women with human sperm and bird eggs,controls peoples' feeble minds with "magnetic rays",and sports one helluva fake crepe wool goatee.See,he's out to create a master race for the benefit of the cult of Panthos(translation:a caucophany of creeps in dime store skull masks,bedsheets,and in at least one instance,Spock ears) using Frankenstein's BeeGee love child as a catalyst since his blind bird-woman was a failure(on so many levels).Elsewhere,Esmeralda(Lina Romay)the gypsy girl sits by a babbling spring a lot.With his own "fixation ray",the late Baron springs back to life with a bad case of the shakes,and warns his daughter Vera(Beatriz Savón) and Dr. Seward(Alberto Dalbés)of the guy with the spinach chin and powerful magnetic rays,but spurs his daughter to take revenge for his untimely,cheaply staged death.

Melissa(Anne Libert),the bird-girl,says,"Screeeeeeee!Screeeeeee!"
So,back at the castle, Cagliostro's been kidnapping women for parts towards his female creation,built solely to do a little dance,make a little love,and get down tonight with the silver square topped boogier he's stolen from Frankenstein,but when he discovers the Baron's daughter Vera in his dungeon,he has her tied nude to his henchman,Caronte,over a pit of poisoned spikes(translation:large piece of panelling with rubber triangles glued all over it),while both prisoners are enthusiastically flogged by the silver dude,who's also shirtless,as Cagliostro and Melissa look on,laughing maniacally/orgiastically.Truly fucked up to behold,I tell you.During the ceremony where Cagliostro hopes to mate the patchwork couple for eugenical purposes,Seward breaks in and tells the creature that Beardsley has offed his creator,sending the silver chappie into a frenzy,as he puts the bird-girl out of her misery,as well as several of the Panthos cats,but when he tries to plod off with Vera in his mitts,Seward fills him full of lead.Cagliostro speeds away in a horse-driven carriage with Esmeralda aboard(he must've pitstopped at the brook),laughing maniacally(that's what the guy does,the fake beard dictates as much) as he takes a hairpin turn around a cliff.

More trick or treaters??!!I thought I told you to turn the light off out there,Goddamn it!
Kudos to my man,Blake,for scoring the German X Rated Kult print of tonight's flick,apart from being a diamond geezer,he's always a good lightning rod for Euro-trash.Howard Vernon went onto roles in The French Sex Murders(1973),A Virgin Among the Living Dead(1973),and a myriad of other genre films,including a reprisal of Cagliostro in Les gloutonnes(1973),before passing away in 1996 in Paris.Franco,apart from having more aliases than Joe D'Amato,continues to direct movies and win awards,amazingly, today,now eighty years old!The same goes for Romay,who made her debut in tonight's feature,then went on to star in over a hundred of Franco's works.She wasn't given much to do this time,but she was a striking beauty in her heyday.You know how I am with brunettes,ferchrissakes.Like I said earlier,I enjoyed Rites for its hokey appeal and low budget charm,it had me laughing out loud on more than one occasion.If you're a Steckler/H.G. Lewis/Milligan/Buchanon,et al fan,you'll probably get similar kicks out of screening this for yourself.

Perhaps the finest example of "WTF!" ever filmed.

Horror of Frankenstein(1970)d/Jimmy Sangster

In an attempt to breathe life into Hammer's ailing Frankenstein series,director Sangster cast Ralph(Dr. Jeckyll & Sister Hyde)Bates as the Baron instead of Peter Cushing to appeal to a more youth-oriented audience,and with threadbare production values and a tongue-in-cheek script,the studio set out to remake/parody the highly successful Curse of Frankenstein(1957), failing to stop the progressive slide and inevitable collapse of the franchise three years later.That said,I,personally,enjoyed this entry greatly.Sure,it's cheezy and full of dry British humour,and perhaps not the direction the series needed to take at the time,but it's still a helluva lot of fun to watch,and a refreshing turn from Peter Cushing in the same old bloody apron and bone saw(which I also happen to like,so refrain from the hate mail,fiends!).

Handlebar sideburns??I'm totally rocking these for the winter.
Enter Victor Frankenstein(Ralph Bates),a saucy and sarcastic sociopathic scientific genius and womanizer who is outraged that his wealthy father(also quite the womanizer,tired apple/tree cliche',anyone?)has forbidden him to spend anymore of his gold duckats on laboratory gear.The young man settles the score with a shotgun,inheriting his father's fortune and entering the medical college in Vienna.His scholastic endeavors end prematurely when he inadvertently knocks up the Dean's daughter,sending him homeward to ressurect his experiments and fleshy relationship with his father's housekeeper(Kate O'Mara,loverly bristols,but Irish brogue-speaking Austrian?Hmmm).With a schoolmate,he sets up his laboratory and conducts increasingly less moral plays on life and death,leading to falling out between the two men.Frankenstein cares not about anyone's feelings.He is of superior intellect,rapier wit,and he wants to build human life out of particular pieces of corpses,and by the Gods,that's what he's a-gonna do!

Exactly how did the Baron(Ralph Bates) come into possession of Warren Beatty's decapitated head in a jar?
He resurrects a patchwork,putty-headed muscle-laden monster(David "Darth Vader" Prowse) through some murders,that terrorizes the town,but knows its place when dealing with superior intellect and rapier wit,answering to the diabolical doctor.His success is short-lived,due to various frameups of friends,dispatchings of gold-digging busom-heavy housekeepers,and curious love-struck bubbleheaded classmates(the delicious Veronica Carlson),and soon the authorities are on to Victor's garishly grotesque games!While aiding his creature's escape by making it hide in a coffin-sized vat of acid,it is unwittingly destroyed by a rotten little kid who can't keep her hands to herself while the police inspect the laboratory,pulling the chains that fill the vat with acid.Sometimes you can't win for losing.

The monster(David Prowse),looking pretty buff,apart from the livid scars and putty head.
Critics have been unnecessarily hard on this one over the years,for various reasons,ranging from the humour to the shoddy creature makeup on muscleman Prowse,but overall,I find it enjoyable,none-the-less.Perhaps it lacks in ample doses of nudity and gore that Hammer was injecting into its productions at the time,but you could do a lot worse in the Frankenstein sweepstakes,i.e. Lady Frankenstein,or Frankenstein's Great Aunt Tillie(blech!)than this.For the record,Hammer DID return to form directly afterwards with Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell.Ordinarily,it'd be an average two-Wopper,but I just GROOVE on the cleavage-fest provided by Carlson and O'Mara on this set,baby!Add one Wop and the final score is:

Alys(Kate O'Mara)and her two famous supporting(well-supported?) co-stars.Aereola-rific!