Dr. Frankenstein is left for dead in the woods. His daughter, Dr. Vera Frankenstein, hunts for his attacker: Dr. Cagliostro, a mad scientist who’s created a race of human-animal hybrids.
30 Oct The Erotic Experiences of Frankenstein (1973)
Dead Bits Arise
Most people watch Franco it seems specifically because it is junk, or so they think. The cheapness and (for the era) exotic nudity must give some sort of trailer park thrill.
But these films seem important to me. The reason is that today’s most exciting cinema comes from the Spanish tradition of layered realisms. While the main source is Latin literature, I fancy that it can be traced back to Franco and buddies as well.
About half of these that I encounter make me yell “This! This must be the ultimate Franco!” I had that experience when gliding through this.
Yes, of course it is cheap, with bad acting and so on. But nearly every movie is for me. It is just a matter of degree and earnestness. Overlook that, dear viewer.
The story alone should be enough to attract you. I won’t recount it here, but it is complex and ambiguous, borrowing from several genres and reinventing them capriciously. One character is the evil genius’s erotic soothsayer. She is blind but sees, a vampire but humanly erotic, our surrogate on screen.
That evil genius wraps us up in capturing Frankenstein’s monster to mate for a purpose I didn’t understand. This eventually involves Frankenstein’s beautiful scientist daughter who temporarily reanimates her now carrion dad and ends up getting nudely whipped… well it hardly matters.
The real thing is in how he creates a gauzy, abstract world that floats above the normal world of movies. It is a movie like other movies, but not. It engages us in a conspiracy to weave a new world. Who cares about what that world contains, it is how it is woven that matters.
Posted in2005
Ted’s Evaluation — 3 of 3: Worth watching.
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