LadFr-icon

Lady Frankenstein is one of the more unusual films to emerge from New World Pictures dur­ing its for­ma­tive years.  Rather than tackle then-current exploita­tion themes pop­u­lar in the early 1970’s like women in prison movies and biker flicks, it harkened back to the kind of gothic hor­ror ele­ments that Roger Corman explored in his Edgar Allan Poe cycle for A.I.P.  That said, it’s a much trashier vari­a­tion on that kind of mate­r­ial, with a din­stinctly 1970’s level of sex and vio­lence that brings it into line with the rest of New World’s out­put around that time.

This film rep­re­sents a sort of drive-in fem­i­nism take on the Frankenstein mythos, with anti-heroine Tania Frankenstein (Rosalba Neri) return­ing home for a visit with her father, the Baron (Joseph Cotten).  He’s on the brink of reviv­ing the dead and rushes through an exper­i­ment using a murderer’s dam­aged brain to revive his lat­est pro­to­type.  The end result brings both suc­cess and tragedy: the mon­ster (Paul Whiteman) is suc­cess­fully revived but mur­ders the Baron and escapes into the countryside.

As the Baron’s mon­ster attacks the towns­peo­ple — show­ing a unique abil­ity to crash his way into sit­u­a­tions involv­ing naked women — Tania decides to com­plete her father’s work.  She talks his faith­ful assis­tant, Dr. Marshall (Paul Muller), into donat­ing his brain so she can place it in the body of hand­some but men­tally hand­i­capped man who works at the cas­tle… thus allow­ing her to cre­ate a man who is her intel­lec­tual equal and also able to sat­isfy her sex drive.  Unfortunately, she has to con­tend with local cop Captain Harris (Mickey Hargitay), the ever-more-suspicious locals and the mon­ster, who is bump­ing off all respon­si­ble for his plight as he works his way back to the castle.

The end result isn’t likely to be cham­pi­oned by the aes­thetes of the hor­ror crowd: it has a style that evokes the tack­ier side of Hammer’s early 1970’s out­put com­bined with the height­ened sleaze quo­tient of an Italian genre out­ing from the same time.  It also has one of the goofier makeup designs for Frankenstein’s mon­ster, a sort of huge, bubble-headed look that resem­bles a grue­some ver­sion of Frankenberry.

That said, a hor­ror movie doesn’t have to be classy to be enter­tain­ing — and Lady Frankenstein deliv­ers the goods in its own Eurotrash sort of way. It was directed by for­mer Corman actor Mel Welles, who had become a direc­tor in Italy since his days in Corman’s Filmgroup pro­duc­tions.  His approach is work­man­like but enthu­si­as­tic, a style that is abet­ted by above-average pro­duc­tion val­ues for a film of this bud­get.  The Italian crew fur­ther aids the level of pro­fes­sion­al­ism: Ricardo Pallottini’s pho­tog­ra­phy gives the action a nice grimy-gothic look and Morricone pro­tégé Alessandro Alessandroni gives it a nice blood-and-thunder musi­cal score that con­jures up fond mem­o­ries of Claudio Gizzi’s work on Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein.

Better yet, Welles gets game per­for­mances from a solid cast: Cotten is slum­ming here but he brings an effec­tive, weary sense of grav­i­tas to his role as the Baron and Euro-cult reg­u­lars like Hargitay and Muller turn in respectable per­for­mances.  That said, the movie belongs to Neri as the title char­ac­ter.  She plays her role like the Euro-horror equiv­a­lent of a film noir femme fatale, giv­ing it all the inten­sity and over­ripe sex­i­ness that fans of this cin­e­matic style expect.  When she takes con­trol of the story’s sec­ond half, her work has a real sen­sual charge to it.

In short, Lady Frankenstein rep­re­sents the junk-food end of the gothic-horror spec­trum — but it deliv­ers the kind of tawdry thrills its ad cam­paign promises (“Only The Monster She Made Could Satisfy Her Strange Desires!”) and Euro-trash fans will get a kinky kick out its fast-paced sleaze/gothic approach.