Lady Frankenstein

Lady Frankenstein (1971)

Dir. Mel Welles

Story by Dick Randall, Written by Edward Di Lorenzo (wikipedia lists about a dozen other writers, but those are the only two on-screen credits)

Starring Joseph Cotten, Rosalba Neri (as Sara Bay), Paul Muller, Peter Whiteman

“Sure, Rosalba Neri (aka "Sara Bay") is no Peter Cushing, but there's no doubt which one of them I'd rather see naked.” -- IMDB commentator “Lazarillo” (or is it “Iazarillo with an “i”?” hard to tell.) 11/30/04

So, what LADY FRANKENSTEIN offers is a radical reimagining of the Frankenstein story, where Frankenstein is a lady. Or, to be more specific, where Frankenstein is a man but then he dies at the end of the first act and he has a daughter who is a lady. A Lady Frankenstein, if you will. The movie at least has enough class to assume that you understand that “Frankenstein” refers to the scientist, not the monster. The monster is not a lady, he is a regular Frankenstein’s monster. That is the most class the movie will be able to muster, so enjoy it while you can.

The weird thing about LADY FRANKENSTEIN is for a while, it’s pretty much just REGULAR FRANKENSTEIN. Joseph Cotten --who starred in CITIZEN KANE, SHADOW OF A DOUBT, and THE THIRD MAN before he must have done something to really piss off his agent-- appears as Baron Dr. Victor Frankenstein, MD, who has a dream to resurrect the dead by transplanting the brain of a freshly deceased convict into a monstrous body he’s whipped up from scratch. When his sidekick Dr. Marshall (Paul Muller, NIGHTMARE CASTLE) points out that the brain they’re planning on swapping has been damaged, Frankenstein irritatedly tells him that sometimes science is more art than science and goes ahead anyway. Or, as he puts it: “Instinct changes the world, not thought! And my instinct tells me to transplant that brain right now!” To the surprise of no one except this brilliant scientist, instinct does not turn out to be the best means of determining when to transplant brains, and pretty soon the monster has killed him and is running amok.

Fortunately, Frankenstein has a daughter named Tania (Rosalba Neri --going by “Sara Bay” here-- probably most known for this movie, but with perhaps the best track record for films with great titles that I have ever seen on IMBD*) who is just home from college. She wants to get involved in the family business, but Frankenstein is having none of it, until his untimely demise. Fortunately, Dr. Marshall really, really wants to bone her (understandable) and reluctantly gets on board with her plan to take her father’s place. Weirdly, considering the whole point here is to resurrect the dead, there is very little if any discussion of reviving daddy Frankenstein; instead, the new plan is to A) deny responsibility for the monster who is running around the countryside encountering various Italians having sex in the middle of the road in broad daylight and murdering them, and B) transfer Dr. Marshall’s brain out of the unfuckable body of a nebbish scientist and into the comparably more fuckable body currently occupied by “mildly retarded servant” (not my term; that's from the official plot synopsis) Thomas (Marino Masé, who has worked with both Goddard and Coppola. No, seriously!).

Not much happens to further either of these goals for a long time, and the movie contents itself with some unbearable filler about a detective and the Frankenstein family’s merry band of grave-robbers, which is distinguished only by the startlingly over-the-top anti-semitic Jewish caricature of a grave-robber (Herbert Fux, “Austrian actor and politician”** JESUS FRANCO’S JACK THE RIPPER), which is about as over-the-line as I’ve seen in a modern film (note the gigantic menorah in his house). But blatant anti-semitism can only entertain us for short periods, so we also have to occasionally flash back to the monster, still running around and killing naked Italians. This tends to be what Frankenstein movies think we’re paying for, but it’s usually a pretty dull affair, without much notable gore or memorable gimmickry. And besides, we didn’t pay for a Frankenstein movie. We paid for a Lady Frankenstein movie. So the more interesting storyline has to do with the plan to get Dr. Marshall a younger, hotter bod. The murder part turns out to be pretty easy; Madam Frankenstein lures the young man into the house with the promise of sex, and then has Marshall smother him while they’re right in the middle of things. I say “the middle,” because, heroically, she doesn’t let her partner’s demise spoil her fun. They should put a frame from this scene on one of those motivational posters above the word “persistence.” Unfortunately the brain transferring part goes a little less smoothly, as they are interrupted by the return of the prodigal monster, with a very pissed off mob of ignorant villagers hot on his tail.

None of this really adds up to much, but I do have to give the movie credit for doing something a little different. It’s an odd mix of Hammer-style gothic horror (a looming castle, period costumes, an impressive mad science lab) with imaginative sleaze that could only come from Italy (necrophiliac coitus, random open-air daytime sex), but directed by an American actor (Mel Welles, LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS 1960) right as the scales were beginning to tip away from Gothic Horror towards the giallo and eventually the slasher. So it’s kinda a hybrid, stitched together from different traditions into an unwieldy whole. A Frankenstein’s monster, if you will. And draped over that odd structure is a bizarre and confused story of female empowerment and sexual liberation which the movie is both repulsed and fascinated by. Lady Frankenstein is a villain, and not much of a character even at that, but it’s worth noting that she’s very much the protagonist, a vastly more active and complex character than virtually any Hammer female role that comes to mind. The movie is cheap and incompetent (the opening credits have a fucking typo, for god’s sake), but as an especially offbeat iteration of the Frankenstein story, and especially as an artifact from a very particular cross-section in both horror cinema and the sexual revolution, it’s worth a peek. Also the monster has a popped-out eye dangling there, which wins it another half-star all by itself.

*Lo strano ricatto di una ragazza per bene (The Strange Blackmail of A Good Girl), THE SEXBURY TALES, AND THEY SMELLED THE STRANGE, EXCITING, DANGEROUS SCENT OF DOLLARS, IN THE WEST THERE WAS A MAN NAMED INVINCIBLE, THE FRENCH SEX MURDERS, WATCH OUT GRINGO! SABATA WILL RETURN, PASSWORD: KILL AGENT GORDON, HERCULES AGAINST THE SONS OF THE SUN, SECRET CONFESSIONS OF A CLOISTERED CONVENT

**If the thought of an Austrian actor playing a greedy, amoral Jewish desecrator of Christian graves fills you with some degree of concern, at least be comforted to know as a politician he “was among the founders of a citizens' initiative against commercialization and uglification of Salzburg's historic townscape and became an elected member of the city council. In 1982 he and others established the Austrian United Greens party (Vereinte Grüne Österreichs, VGÖ), which in 1986 merged into the Green Alternative (Grüne Alternative). Fux was elected MP of the Austrian National Council in the 1986 legislative election, he retained his seat until December 1988 and again entered into parliament in November 1989. In November 1990 he retired and later served as culture committee chairman in his hometown Salzburg.” according to wikipedia. So seems like a pretty good guy.***

***Also, Fux must be the only actor to work with both Ingmar Bergman and Jesus Franco in the same year (he has what must be an extremely minor role in THE SERPENT’S EGG, and co-stars as “Satan” in Franco’s LOVE LETTERS FROM A PORTUGUESE NUN). That’s some fuckin’ range as an actor. He followed it up the next year with another strange pairing, appearing in movies by Meneham Golan (THE URANIUM CONSPIRACY) and Werner Herzog (WOYZECK)

Because sometimes quotation marks and commas are the same thing.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2016 CHECKLIST!

Good Kill Hunting

TAGLINE	Only The Monster She Made Could Satisfy Her Strange Desires! Which is actually more accurate to the plot than you’d usually expect from these things, and A Mad Surgeon's Mind in a Woman's Body which, while technically true, is both sexist and misleading, because it suggests the mind didn’t start out there.
TITLE ACCURACY	100%
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	Very, very, very loose adaptation of Frankenstein: Or, The Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley
SEQUEL?	None
REMAKE?	No
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	Italy
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Science (mad), Monster, Frankenstein
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	Joseph Cotten
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	None.
NUDITY?	Yes, the area seems to be mainly populated by nude women and topless men engaged in the throes of passion.
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	Yes, in the sense that multiple people are assaulted while having sex
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	No
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	Zombie / reanimated corpse
POSSESSION?	No
CREEPY DOLLS?	None
EVIL CULT?	No
MADNESS?	Arguably
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	Eventually some brains get swapped, etc
VOYEURISM?	Yes, Lady F and Timmy or whatever go at it while Charles watches.
MORAL OF THE STORY	Women can be just as good at science as men, but they’d just use that knowledge to put the brains of smart men into the bodies of handsome men.

And not a very strong C- at that. But at least weird enough to escape a two-thumb rating.

Frankenstein and the Monster From Hell

Frankenstein and the Monster From Hell (1974)

Dir. Terence Fisher

Written by John Elder (Anthony Hinds)

Starring Peter Cushing, Shane Briant, David Prowse, Madeline Smith

Less an escalation and more of a coda to FRANKENSTEIN MUST BE DESTROYED, this very late-game, noticeably cheaper final Hammer sequel finds the doctor back to his old tricks, and I do mean his old tricks. This is almost a remake of REVENGE, with the doc something of a good guy here, assisted by a younger doctor whose own amorality reflects the wizened old man. But it’s not as bad as you might think, particularly considering the circumstances: the Baron had been absent from the big screen for five years since 1969’s FRANKENSTEIN MUST BE DESTROYED (it appears he was not) and during that time, Hammer studio’s fortunes declined precipitously. The trickle of far-more-graphic imports from Hollywood and Italy that had challenged the studio for dominance in the late 60’s had now become a torrent; Hammer, constrained by English censorship laws, could hardly compete with the over-the-top gore and frank sexuality being generated elsewhere in the world, and were engaged in a dismal, pathetic frenzy to pimp themselves to the youth market by chasing tacky trends (hippies in THE SATANIC RITES OF DRACULA, martial arts exploitation in LEGEND OF THE SEVEN GOLDEN VAMPIRES) and unfocused thrashing about (the ill-conceived Cushing-free comedy reboot HORROR OF FRANKENSTEIN, the sleazy softcore wannabe Karnstein trilogy). This, in 1975, would be not only the final Frankenstein movie for the studio, it would mark a definitive end for the studio’s heyday as well. Only two more films would be produced by Hammer for more than 30 years, and of those only TO THE DEVIL A DAUGHTER would continue their horror tradition (and even in doing so would bring little of the recognizable Hammer magic to the proceedings, beyond hiring Christopher Lee.)

So considering all that, it’s kind of a miracle the movie is as good as it is. Oh, it has its problems, no doubt. It’s certainly a bit of a letdown after the dark and ambitious DESTROYED. It’s derivative and doesn’t bring a lot new to the table except a Frankenstein’s Yeti (more on that later). It’s obviously an order of magnitude cheaper than the already-pretty-cheap previous sequels. The monster’s makeup is laughably inept even by Hammer standards. And Peter Cushing (returning to the role for a final time) is bedecked in a blonde curly wig that makes him look like Shirley MacLaine (TERMS OF ENDEARMENT*) (he actually identified it as a Helen Hayes [HERBIE RIDES AGAIN], but I don’t know who that is). While this confirms what many have suspected (that Cushing would be a pretty unappealing drag queen), it isn’t as distracting as some reviewers seem to think. Actually now that I think about it it’s too bad he died before PRISCILLA, QUEEN OF THE DESERT. I’d like to think he’d have been great in that. But I digress, and with it already a good way into November and me with still something like 40 movies to review from October, I can’t really afford to do that. Back to your regularly scheduled rant.

Pretty woman.

Anyway, the movie. It begins, as so many of the greatest movies do (THE REVENGE OF FRANKENSTEIN, I SELL THE DEAD, CASABLANCA, BLUE HAWAII**) with graverobbing. But the catch here is that the culprit isn’t the nefarious Baron, but rather a handsome young doctor named Simon Helder (Shane Briant, CAPTAIN KRONOS,VAMPIRE HUNTER)***. Helder is sentenced to a madhouse for the very reason Frankenstein once was, i.e. meddling in God’s domain. Once there, however, he discovers that his role model Dr. Frankenstein --presumed dead, not for the first time-- is in fact very much alive, having cheated the gallows again and now posing as the head doctor of the asylum, with a side dish of unspeakable human experimentation sans consent forms. And Frankenstein has a very special experiment in store for the two of them: removing the mind of a mentally ill genius and placing it in the body of a brutish ape man, and, you know, seeing what happens. You know, science.

I know, I know, that sounds exactly like the plot of REVENGE OF FRANKENSTEIN, with a dash of FRANKENSTEIN MUST BE DESTROYED tossed in, the only thing missing from the classic formula is a sidekick named Hans or Karl. And it pretty much is. Oh, there’s the colorful detail that although people are too polite to point it out, the “criminal” body that Frankenstein has earmarked as his new monster (David Prowse, VAMPIRE CIRCUS) is some kind of crazy god damn Sasquatch. The makeup looks about as convincing as Cushing’s toupee, but you gotta enjoy a weird touch like that (you’d think Frankenstein would have learned his lesson with that cannibal Chimp in REVENGE, but I guess by this point we gotta just admit that he’s one of those guys who never learns). But other than that, it’s mostly a fairly modest regurgitation of a lot of territory we’ve already covered, but cheaper and a good five years after it would have been cool.

I've met a lot of apes in my time, and some very good ones at that. But you, sir, are a great ape.

So given all that, what’s the damn point? Well my friend, the damn point is, as always, Cushing himself, yet again finding something new in the surprisingly rich psychological faunt which is the good doctor’s squirming, one-track mind (now, of course, demurely obscured by his flaxen locks, which now that I’m looking at them again have a surprising amount of shine and bounce, particularly considering that conditioner would not be introduced until the turn of the century, though maybe the nefarious Baron figured that one out on his own sometime between sequels. Man, that thing is distracting.). Watching Frankenstein slop brains around like a kid in a mud puddle is a bit old hat by now, but Cushing’s take on it is surprisingly fresh; this is the first sequel to genuinely acknowledge just how long the poor guy has been at this.

This Frankenstein is, at long last, just a touch world-weary. He subtly alludes to his long history of trying this and failing, exclaiming with a wan smile at the sight of a fresh victim, “I haven’t been this excited since… well, that was a long time ago.” There’s a redoubtable enthusiasm here as ever, of course. His hands have been damaged in a fire**** but he also has a resoluteness and a cheerful energy which kinda make him a likable protagonist again. Still, there’s an undercurrent of something kind of tragic and pathetic in his character. This is the man who in CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN was unsatisfied merely conquering death, insisting that the only worthwhile endgame would be to create his own humans from scratch. Now, decades later, he’s reduced to being a physician for the mentally ill, subbing one madman’s brain for another and keeping the missing link in a cast-iron cage. But he soldiers on, I think more than anything because it’s all he knows. There’s almost a desperation in his single minded zeal for mad science. Gone are are his speeches about how he’ll benefit mankind; he does this now simply because its all he knows, and all he’s lived for. When horribly foiled by the death of his monster, he seems almost energized about the prospect of starting again.

At least they kept its pants on.

We should be so lucky. Like his scrappy new crew of mentally ill misfits, FRANKENSTEIN AND THE MONSTER FROM HELL is a little confused, a little disoriented, a little distracted, and can’t in good conscience be said to seem entirely clear on its end goal 100% of the time. But even here, at the very end, you gotta admit there’s genuinely something interesting going on. While Hammer’s Dracula films were lurching into shameful ignominity and their other properties were languishing or painful contorting to try and bend themselves to the zephyrous whims of a bored public, Frankenstein alone continued to be interesting, old fashioned fun. A big part of that is Cushing, of course; even gaunt as a mummified cat skeleton, he’s wonderfully alive in the role (check out the stunt where the 60-year-old, spry as a schoolboy, springs off a table and onto the back of the monster, who swings him around like a dry leaf in a windstorm). Another part is director Terence Fisher, in his final film as a director -- this guy was just incapable of phoning it in, and even here with pathetically dwindling resources he finds things to be interested in and manages to shoot it so it doesn’t look as cheap as it really was. He started the whole thing way back in 1957, so it was fitting that he got to end it, too.

And finally, there’s simply that ineffable Hammer magic. There’s just something unique and special about the films put out by this studio; that sense of gothic heaviness which linger about their film, the rich combination of genuine talent and abject amateurishness, the sense of the old-fashioned 50’s horror infused with just a hint of modern salaciousness. There’s nothing else quite like it. It couldn’t last forever, of course, and just as Dr. Frankenstein discovered, trying to swap the old Hammer brain into a new, sexy body wasn’t as good an idea as it might seem on paper. A few lumbering monsters later, Hammer would be no more, lying silent for decades. But even though nothing can, or should, last forever, FRANKENSTEIN AND THE MONSTER FROM HELL is a perfectly fitting swan song, a grace note of an ending that fondly recalls all of Hammer’s finest moments and all of their charming foibles. “I haven’t been this excited since… well, that was a long time ago.”*****

HAMMER'S FRANKENSTEIN SERIES:

1: THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN

2: THE REVENGE OF FRANKENSTEIN

3: THE EVIL OF FRANKENSTEIN

4: FRANKENSTEIN CREATED WOMAN

5: FRANKENSTEIN MUST BE DESTROYED

6: FRANKENSTEIN AND THE MONSTER FROM HELL

*I actually thought she was Lamb Chop, turns out that was Shari Lewis, who also has hair that looks kind of similar. Huh. That’s gotta mean something, right?

** I think. It’s been awhile since I saw that one.

***For what it’s worth, Briant is probably the best of Frankenstein’s assistants, coming dangerously near being remotely memorable.

**** Presumably the same one at the end of THE EVIL OF FRANKENSTEIN which left them paralyzed in FRANKENSTEIN CREATED WOMAN, a detail which for whatever reason did not make it to DESTROYED.

***** OK, so it was only like two weeks ago in my case.

SPECIAL! HAMMER’S FRANKENSTEIN CHECKLIST:

• PETER CUSHING: Yes
• TERENCE FISHER: Yes
• MONSTER MAKEUP LOOKS LIKE SHIT: Yes
• FRANKENSTEIN: GOOD, BAD OR UGLY? Good, but the wig is ugly.
• HANS OR KARL: Assistent this time is named Simon, but there IS a credited Hans.
• CONTINUITY: Only the burned hands, which are in part 4 but not part 5 for whatever reason. Unless maybe this is suggesting he re-burned them at the end of 5.
• POINTLESS, THANKLESS FEMALE ROLE: Yes
• MONSTER’S TOTAL DEATH TALLY: 1
• FRANKENSTEIN’S TOTAL DEATH TALLY: 2
• MORAL OF THE STORY: Friends don’t let friends experiment with stray yeti brains.
• TITLE ACCURACY: Frankenstein, check. At least the title acknowledges that this new monster is not just some especially hirsute north-ender, he’s obviously some sort of Bigfoot. Not sure where the from “Hell” came from, though. Call it 60%.

Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed

Frankenstein must be Destroyed (1969)

Dir. Terence Fisher

Written by Bert Batt

Starring Peter Cushing, Simon Ward, Veronica Carlson, Freddie Jones, Thorley Walters

FRANKENSTEIN MUST BE DESTROYED begins with arguably the best introduction in the long-running Hammer series (of which this is the fifth installment). A wealthy looking doctor is walking the shadowy, almost expressionistic city streets to his office door. Unbeknownst to him, though, there’s a figure waiting for him the the shadows, brandishing a cruel-looking scythe and a worrisome hatbox. Before long, the incoming doctor’s blood is splashing on his office signboard (in one of Hammer’s more poetic images of gore) and his head is accompanying the mysterious figure back home in a handsome hatbox. But the night is not over yet -- while all this is happening, a scruffy burglar has broken into a dreary basement and discovered a laboratory setup which by this point looks troublingly familiar to fans of the series. The dead body in a glass box, the inexplicable chemistry set, the vaguely sourced green lighting -- we know what this means all too well. So it’s a huge surprise when the owner of the lab violently accosts the burglar (who just barely escapes with his life) and reveals himself to be a bald, horribly scarred monster.

It is our boy Victor Frankenstein, of course, hiding under a mask (and once again played by the indispensable Peter Cushing). But man, what an opening -- it gets right down to the business of being violent and mysterious while at the same time boldly stating its intention to shake the series out of its potential complacency by never doing quite what you expect.

What's a good lab without a little mood lighting?

1969 was an interesting year for Hammer; they’d been unexpectedly reinvented as a horror factory with 1957’s THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN more than a decade earlier, and had dominated the increasingly youth-oriented horror movie market since that time, essentially reinventing it in Hammer’s own image. They were still at the peak of their powers and their resources here, but the times were definitely changing -- the stately, implied sexuality and violence that made their name synonymous with boundary-pushing in the late 50’s was now starting to look quaint in the wake of the increasingly explicit American cinema, and meanwhile mainland European cinema (particularly Italian, of course) was challenging Hammer in terms of sharp gothic style as well, while simultaneously pushing the limits of shock cinema far beyond anything the English censors would allow. Eventually, this tension would push Hammer to make pandering, embarrassing messes like DRACULA: AD 1972 and THE LEGEND OF THE SEVEN GOLDEN VAMPIRES. But here, in 1969, it seems to have pushed director Terence Fisher and our dear Baron Frankenstein to up their game, to go darker and deeper into the Baron’s twisted psyche than ever before, resulting in what is likely the darkest (and in some ways the best) film in the entire franchise.

After the gripping, lightning-paced opening, things slow down a little as the film sets up. Frankenstein, forced to flee his old lab after his encounter with the burglar, has to move on to new digs, and eventually ends up at a boarding house run by Anna (Veronica Carlson, from the one non-Cushing Hammer Frankenstein sequel THE HORROR OF FRANKENSTEIN) and her physician fiance Karl (Simon Ward, “Angel Caine” in HOLOCAUST 2000*). Frankenstein quickly discovers that Karl has been stealing drugs and supplies to afford medical care for Anna’s sickly mother, and uses this knowledge to blackmail and browbeat the unfortunate young couple into putting him up and aiding him in his work. (He doesn’t mention it, but this is his second assistant named Karl, after his run of three “Hans”es in the last three movies).

Measure twice. Cut once.

Frankenstein opens the movie with a cold-blooded murder, his first since the original CURSE, but for awhile he seems like he might still be bordering on the lovably cantankerous old bastard we got in the last film, FRANKENSTEIN CREATED WOMAN. There’s a great scene where he verbally eviscerates a few of his fellow boarders (who don’t realize who they’re now rooming with) for judgmentally poo-pooing the work of one Dr. Frankenstein. He’s super mean, but he’s also undeniably funny in his cutting kind of way, and he’s dressed in a maroon leisure jacket like Hugh Hefner so you can’t help but kind of chuckle at the bastard. He makes very convincing speeches about how his work could help mankind, and how really it’s the fault of the meddling peasants who don’t understand his work that has forced him into criminality. Besides, even if he’s a murderer, he has a good cause here: a former colleague with special knowledge that Frankenstein requires --one Dr. Brandt-- has gone mad and been committed to an asylum. Frankenstein knows he can restore his sanity with a simple surgery, but the uptight assholes in charge of the asylum won’t let him get anywhere near their patient. So for awhile it turns into something of a heist movie, with Frankenstein and the kids desperate to break a man out of a mental hospital to cure him and restore his mind. That’s a cause we can all get behind, and there is admittedly sort of a giddy pleasure to be tagging along with someone as iron-willed and frighteningly capable as the Baron is. We get swept up in his boldness and ambitious imagination, and can kind of overlook his casually murderous side.

But things get worse quickly; after conscripting Karl as his assistant, he pushes the youngster into his first murder in frighteningly short order. The traumatized youth is a subject of obvious amusement for the Baron, who becomes increasingly sadistic in tormenting the young couple trapped in his iron grip. He’s exciting to be around, but after awhile you can’t help but notice how gleefully he crosses moral lines simply for his own convenience or amusement. I mean, he’s right, i agree with him in a way: these discoveries really could fundamentally change mankind for the better, and the people really are a bunch of medieval ninnies for forcing this life-saving knowledge to go underground and scrounge for resources that can only be acquired illegally. Even Karl is sort of intrigued and excited by the work he’s being forced to do. He knows that only Frankenstein could ever push him so much further than anyone else has ever gone in the field of medicine. But as time goes on, both he and the audience inevitably grow increasingly disillusioned about the doctor. Despite his pretty speeches, despite the good his work could do, HE has finally crossed the line and definitively become an egomaniacal, inhuman monster, hiding behind the principle of scientific progress as an excuse to justify his petty cruelties and self-serving whims. His belief that the work is important has slowly transmuted into a belief that therefore he is fundamentally important, and that other people are valuable only to the degree that they serve his interests. He has such amazing ability to improve human life, and he’s able to articulate worthy goals which would improve the world, but at the same time he clearly has utter contempt for all human life. So why is he even doing this? At this point, it’s purely a game to him. He wants to take humanity apart and rebuild it bit by bit, simply because it amuses him, like a bored schoolboy tormenting insects.

He's got a good head on his shoulder.

About halfway through, a tipping point occurs: Frankenstein sends Karl out on an errand, and while he’s gone...well, there’s no other way to say it… he violently rapes Anna. This scene seems to come out of the blue to some extent; while he’s crossed many, many lines over the many sequels, and even been shown to kill without remorse, this is surely the most nakedly sadistic thing he’s ever done. The way he impassively toys with her before the assault begins makes your skin crawl; she’s vulnerable to him in every possible way, and he’s savoring her sense of frustrated powerlessness. There’s nothing even remotely sexual here, this is purely the act of a man who ceased to be human a long time ago, idely torturing someone because he’s bored and he can. And suddenly, it’s clear that this is who he’s been all along. If he ever helped anyone, it was only the result of his selfish desire to push boundaries for his own amusement; he’s totally incapable by this point of seeing any other value than his own immediate pleasures, if indeed he ever was to begin with.

The rape scene has long been a source of controversy for Hammer fans; in fact, it comes out of the blue because it wasn’t in the original script, having been forced on the production (despite the strenuous protests of both director Fisher and Cushing) by its American producers who felt the film lacked the sex appeal needed to sell it to young people.** In my opinion seeing skeletal, coldly intellectual 50-somethings violently attacking screaming, weeping young women is not exactly what the youth culture had in mind when they invented the concept of sex appeal, but there you go, apparently Italy wasn’t the only country with producers who believe in the enduring sex appeal of leering rape scenes. It’s in there for purely prurient commercial reasons (though it’s acted and shot so resolutely unsexily you’d never know it) but I actually think it ends up being essential to the plot. Without that scene, Frankenstein could still hide behind his correct claim that his research is more important than the people’s delicate sensibilities and restrictive religious law. With it, he’s revealed as what he’s probably alway been: a monster that truly must be destroyed. Since it was inserted late in the production, the assault is never referenced again, which actually makes it even worse: watching the Baron casually demanding Anna make him coffee two scenes later is even more cold-blooded. He’s moved on to something else now, and has all but forgotten this minor incident from earlier. For a crass commercial concession, the whole episode in context makes perfect sense for the character: he’s simply such an egomaniacal monster that he only sees people as objects to suit his particular whim. He doesn’t even really realize he’s become evil, he’s just utterly detached from anything remotely resembling empathy or humanity.

Lest you worry that this scene was too traumatizing for poor Veronica Carlson, here's a glossy photo of it she autographed "to dear Stephen." Actually, you almost gotta feel worse for poor old unfailingly gentlemanly Peter Cushing, who felt so bad about the scene that he reportedly profusely apologized to his co-star. 

This scene refocuses the film and ultimately signals a change in direction. Things get darker and bleaker; the police (led by the blustery Thorley Walters from FRANKENSTEIN CREATED WOMAN) are closing in, and it’s up to Anna to try and protect the Baron from discovery for fear of dooming her fiance to execution along with her tormenter. How fucked up is that? A sequence where a broken water pipe dislodges a buried victim and requires her to crawl through the corpse-strewn mud to hide it recalls the frantic grossout finale of DRAG ME TO HELL and was very likely an inspiration, but there’s also something perverse and Hitchcockian about it. Frankenstein must be stopped, and Anna knows that better than anyone, but she’s forced to struggle through a gauntlet of tense and degrading close calls to protect him. Meanwhile even as things spiral out of control, Frankenstein succeeds in curing his colleague’s madness, but in the process is forced to transfer the cured brain into a new body (procured from an unfortunate bureaucrat who had earlier provoked the Baron’s displeasure). The new Dr. Brandt (now played by English character actor Freddie Jones --father of Toby Jones, it turns out-- in a splendid and surprisingly moving performance) awakens in a new body and immediately knows who was responsible and what has been done.

Brandt is the first of Frankenstein’s experiments to emerge in a new body with total physical and mental facilities intact, but he’s now faced with the idea of trying to resume his life, go back to his wife, in the body of a murdered acquaintance. The great irony is that Brandt had been a colleague --even a peer-- of Frankenstein; the Baron considers him to be perhaps the only other person who understands what he’s doing and operates on the same level. But Brandt is merely a boundary-pushing scientist, he hasn’t lost all ties to humanity the way Frankenstein has, and now he sees all too clearly the horrifying joke that fate has played on him. Brandt shows up late in the film, but he turns out to make a much better foil for Frankenstein than the poor kids; this is a rare man who might be almost Frankenstein’s equal, and certainly does understand and empathize with the work he’s doing… but to whom it is now painfully obvious that FRANKENSTEIN MUST BE DESTROYED. The Baron doesn’t understand his former colleague’s anger, simply has no concept of why he might feel irrecoverably violated by being uprooted from his own body, and Brandt, for his part, seems resigned that the doctor is well beyond understanding such things and simply needs to be stopped. The final confrontation between Brandt and the Baron in a burning house is a doozy, inarguably the strongest and most wrenching finale the series has to offer, and ending in a truly bleak climax which is, by that point, richly deserved.

The "monster" is mad as hell and is not going to take this anymore.

It’s not a perfect film, of course; any movie that has a rape scene added at the last minute by the producers was probably beset by commercial concession and too many studio cooks from the start. I have no direct proof that this is the case here, but the narrative is all over the place, sometimes dramatically changing direction or introducing new conflicts out of the blue. That always suggests something that was likely being rewritten on the fly to please different parties, instead of evolving naturally from the story. Karl and Anna get incredibly shortchanged by the end of the film, despite all they’ve suffered through, and some unwieldy tonal shifts (including some fairly broad comic scenes with Thorley Walters) make for a somewhat confusing experience. But somehow the good here overwhelms all that. There’s a genuine tension at work which some of the other films in the series lack, a sense that this time, the title character has crossed irredeemably over the line and that there must be serious consequences. The pathos Jones brings to his role as the “monster” somehow manages to make his late introduction still work to bring the film to a satisfying close.

Cushing, composed as he is primarily of balsa wood and tissue paper, is particularly vulnerable.

And then there’s Cushing himself. Man, is this guy an amazing actor. Even though the series doesn’t have a lot of continuity to it, Cushing’s Frankenstein has steadily and subtly evolved, and here he finally delivers, in his penultimate performance of the character, a vision of a man who has well and truly left behind whatever fleeting bit of his humanity remained. I’ve griped before (for example, in REVENGE OF FRANKENSTEIN) that this series sometimes seems to have an irritating anti-science bent, as though the problem is that the Baron is “meddling in God’s domain” or trying to learn things that “man was not meant to know” or some such hooey. But this performance finally puts the lie to that; it’s not his science that’s the problem, it’s his merciless, suffocating contempt for human feeling. It’s a fitting bookend to CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN --which also presents the character as surprisingly vicious-- but a decade later Cushing brings a kind of time-worn and frayed madness to similar material. Even all these years later, Frankenstein still simply doesn’t understand that he’s the bad guy. His inability (or unwillingness) to even grasp the harm that he’s doing makes him all the more alien and terrifying than it would be if he was nakedly villainous. Even at the end, as everyone turns against him, the look on his face says he can hardly believe the terrible luck he’s having. What was once perhaps attributable to the arrogance of youth and wealth finally looks simply pathetic and desperate, the hollow-eyed confusion of a man who knows an incredible amount, but understands very little. A mad scientist indeed.

On the plus, side, he finally learned how to pronounce his own name correctly. Check it out, he says “Frahnk-ehn-schtein,” very German. Maybe the old guy’s capable of a little self-improvement afterall.

*Seriously.

**Way to go, America.

HAMMER'S FRANKENSTEIN SERIES:

1: THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN

2: THE REVENGE OF FRANKENSTEIN

3: THE EVIL OF FRANKENSTEIN

4: FRANKENSTEIN CREATED WOMAN

5: FRANKENSTEIN MUST BE DESTROYED

6: FRANKENSTEIN AND THE MONSTER FROM HELL

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2014 CHECKLIST!

The Hunt For Dread October

• LITERARY ADAPTATION: Still vaguely linked to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein: Or, the Modern Prometheus, but the film does not credit her.
• SEQUEL: Fifth sequel in Hammer's series
• REMAKE: None
• FOREIGNER: British, Hammer studios
• FOUND-FOOTAGE CLUSTERFUCK: None
• SLUMMING A-LISTER: None
• BELOVED HORROR ICON: Peter Cushing. I guess he doesn't quite count, but Freddie Jones has also been in about a million things.
• BOOBIES: None, nudity was still not gonna fly in 1968 England, although rape would.
• SEXUAL ASSAULT: Yes, a particularly unpleasant one.
• DISMEMBERMENT PLAN: Head removed, brain removed
• HAUNTED HOUSE: None
• MONSTER: The "monster" this time is just a normal guy with a scar.
• THE UNDEAD: Nah, no one comes back from the dead, just body-swapping.
• POSSESSION: None
• SLASHER/GIALLO: No
• PSYCHO KILLERS (Non-slasher variety): Actually Frankenstein might count here.
• EVIL CULT: None
• (UNCANNY) VALLEY OF THE DOLLS: Still no dolls.
• TRANSMOGRIFICATION: Body swapped, leading to much angst
• OBSCURITY LEVEL: Mid, well-known franchise
• MORAL OF THE STORY: If you're going to meddle in the realm of God, at least don't be such a fucking dick about it.
• TITLE ACCURACY: 100% in agreement with it.
• ALEX MADE IT THROUGH AWAKE: N/A

Very tempted to go five thumbs here, I think the story's a little too loose for me to quite do it. But think A-, B+