Rosalba Neri (under the pseudonym Sara Bay here) plays Tania, a recent University graduate who wants to partake in the latest experiments by her father Baron Frankenstein (Joseph Cotten), though the latter refuses. And just what is his latest experiment, you ask? He and his assistant Paul Muller are attempting to revive the dead, with bodies supplied by scummy gravedigger Tom Lynch (Herbert Fux). The experiment is a success…well, except for the part where The Monster (Peter Whiteman) kills its creator and flees to the countryside to scare the crap out of local villagers. Oopsy. But Tania (Neri) wants to pick up where her father left off, and Muller, romantically infatuated with her, goes along with it. The plan is to take the body of a hunky but intellectually disabled stable boy (Marino Masé), and transplant Muller’s brain into the stable boy’s head. Remember I said Muller is going along with it. Willingly. Mickey Hargitay plays a crusading local police captain, who knows there’s something sinister going on in the Frankenstein household (Not that Tania is one for subtlety).
Crude, ponderous and slow-moving, but not nearly as bad as you’ve heard, this Mel Welles (the original Gravis Mushnik from “Little Shop of Horrors”) directed, Edward Di Lorenzo (“The Idolmaker”, of all things) scripted schlocker from 1971 gets a bit of a boost from Rosalba Neri (and her wonderful Nerries. Yep, just turned her name into a euphemism for boobies), who is the whole show here. Herbert Fux is pretty good, though, as the slimy grave robber, and a dubbed Mickey Hargitay is at least livelier than usual. I know, that’s not saying much, is it? Jesus Franco regular Paul Muller is OK too (Neri is no stranger to the world of Franco either, come to think of it), but poor Joseph Cotten, a genuinely great actor in the right part, looks suicidally bored here. He looks like he’d rather be anywhere else at this point in his career. Perhaps at the bar. Oh well, at least he got to go home after about 35 minutes of screen time. Frankly I think they could’ve livened the pace up considerably by excising his character altogether. Neri’s character is much more interesting and effective.
The film doesn’t look as cheap as I was expecting, so perhaps Welles (in only his second directorial effort) learned from the great Roger Corman in getting a lot out of very little (Corman’s New World Pictures released the film). However, the Frankenstein makeup is truly awful, he looks like a giant mutated baby with a wonky eye. The music score by Alessandro Alessandroni is pretty good, though. But at the end of the day, if you took out all the laboratory scenes, you’d have enough material for a movie trailer.
This isn’t a bad film (I liked this film’s more adult version of the ‘Monster chucks the little girl in the river’ scene), but a deathly slow one with an awful lot of padding. The ridiculously rushed finale says it all, really. It includes a fist fight, a sex scene, auto-erotic asphyxiation, and torch-bearing villagers all in the space of about 3 minutes. That’s a shame because Herbert Fux and the gorgeous Rosalba Neri do fine work here and the film certainly isn’t the absolute disaster of its reputation. I saw the cut version of this film (apparently most of the cuts were just for pacing, ironically), but believe me, a longer running time is absolutely not what this film needs. It’s got some nice nudity, though. Can’t complain about that, can we? The script is based on a story by Dick Randall (producer of Mario Bava’s “Four Times That Night” among other films), with mere lip service paid to Mary Shelley at best.
OVERALL SUMMARY
Stick with the Universal or Hammer series of horror classics, unless you’re really desperate. This one’s got good work by Rosalba Neri and the unfortunately named Herbert Fux, but is pretty feeble.
