Directors: Mel Welles and Aureliano Luppi
Writers: Edward Di Lorenzo from a story by Dick Randall
From: Chilling (only 5 remain!)
Watch: archive.org
Dr. Frankenstein’s daughter returns home after completing her training as a surgeon. Once the monster kills Dr. Frankenstein, his daughter continues his work by trying to build a man for her own pleasure.
A public domain “classic” that I’ve seen several times due to having multiple copies of it. This is the basic story of Frankenstein--Frankenstein creates his monster, his hubris leads him to making several fatal mistakes, and both the creation and creator are killed at the end—with a twist: titties!
Werewolf Ambulance would get a lot of use out of their titty bell for this movie.
The titular “Lady” is Frankenstein’s daughter. She’s recently returned from university where she’s completed her training as a surgeon and is eager to join her father in his research. While she suspects, she does not know that he’s working on reanimating the dead until she goes down to the lab while he’s working on the creature. Frankenstein refuses her help mostly because he doesn’t want her to be held liable should the truth of his experiments be revealed before he’s ready.
Then the creature wakes up and kills him.
As the creature wanders the village massacring people and working its way through the gravediggers who worked for Frankenstein, Lady Frankenstein convinces her father’s assistant to continue the work. They come up with a plan to murder the handsome but mentally-challenged stableboy and put the assistant’s brain in the body. The assistant agrees because he’s an aging man in love with the young Lady Frankenstein.
The transplant is a success, but now the creature is working its way back to the castle to take revenge upon the assistant. Also, the local police captain has started piecing everything together and knows Frankenstein was responsible for the creature. When the creature arrives at the castle, it faces off with the assistant who realizes Lady Frankenstein doesn’t love him, she just wants the glory of having completed the process. As long as either the assistant or the creature lives, she achieves her ambition.
The two monsters battle, the assistant wins, and, while having sex with Lady Frankenstein, chokes her to death. Meanwhile the townspeople have descended upon the castle and set it aflame, destroying the creatures and any evidence of Frankenstein’s work. THE END
As I jokingly implied at the top, there’s a lot of gratuitous nudity here, even beyond the expected nude scenes of Lady Frankenstein. The movie’s entire conceit is that it’s Frankenstein, but with the creature being made to satisfy sexual desires. What’s unexpected is the creature, during its rampage, just stumbling across a couple having sex in the middle of a field during the day and carrying off the naked woman. Or the random instances of toplessness here and there. These moments clarify exactly what kind of movie this is, but also provide a certain dissonance because the movie doesn’t look or feel like a cheap, perfunctory exploitation film. The sets are expansive, the colors lush, and the creature satisfyingly grotesque. In other words, this feels like a gothic film done in earnest that had Martin Skinemax come in to do a final pass.
Also, the movie’s kind of boring. There isn’t much drama or tension around the creature, the murder plot, or the police captain getting closer to the truth. The characters largely state their intentions and then act upon them without much struggle or challenge. As I said at the top, I’ve seen this a bunch so I watched the Elvira version just to have something going on to keep my interest. As she notes in one of her riffs, the monster walks around the castle like he owns the place, like he’s just going down to the kitchen for a snack, which maybe tells you all you need to decide if you’d like this flick.
While the movie isn’t good enough on its own, it does have a certain good-bad quality to it that would make it a lot of fun for a bad movie night or a bunch of riffing. To that purpose, we’re lucky that it’s in the public domain and available for download on archive.org here. I’d recommend it in that context. Outside of that, this doesn’t really strike me. To clarify, I’ve seen this several times and I remembered the host segments from Elvira more than I did any part of the movie.
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