I remember i had a class on genre horror films and TV, and i remember my teacher (while touching upon the latter days of italian horror in the ’60s and ’70s) discussed how – and i gonna paraphrase here – when genre movies start to implement meta elements, it’s usually a sign of how worn out it has become, of a status of current decay, in the sense that often horror films tended to retreat on self-referentiality and opting for the “film within a film” framing more out of desperation, in a search of some semblance of freshness to offer viewers, while de facto contributing to the genre’s eventually collapsing on itself, before it can find new stories or ways to tell them.
Obviously the meta approach in itself isn’t “bad”, but one of the examples brought up was The Crimson Executioner, a 1965 film better known as Bloody Pit Of Horror, which was a sort of desperate attempt at keeping gothic horror relevant in the mid-to-late 60s, and did use the meta angle, but was extremely campy, more akin to “fumetti neri”, as in comic books dealing in crimes, dark subject matters, more geared towards adult, like the famous Diabolik.
While 7 years apart from each other and Bloody Pit Of Horror being in color, i couldn’t help but think of that cheesy flick when i watched Frankenstein 70, as they both use the gothic trappings of the castle setting, though this one sets out to tribute to the older Frankenstein films of the 30s and 40s, but also try to update the Frankenstein myth for the atom age era.
It wasn’t even the first one, far from it, just one year earlier we got both the low budget I Was A Teenage Frankenstein from AIP and Hammer’s Curse Of Frankenstein (which started their Frankenstein series), plus later in 1958 we got Frankenstein’s Daughter, so there was no shortage of Frankenstein films, no siree.
Frankenstein 70 immediatly has that laughable name, which was even more laughable before, Frankenstein 60, as if 2 instead of 12 years made it set in the “distant future”… it didn’t.
Not even worth laughing about it much because everything looks and feels like the 50s regardless.
The plot see a film crew shooting a horror movie in the castle (and annexed lands) belonging to the the great grandson of Baron Von Frankenstein, the last of the Frankensteins, now old, scarred and so washed up he had to rent his family’s land to pay for his laboratory, and especially a nuclear reactor he order for unknown reasons.
Unbeknownst to the very disrespectful crew of douche producers and vain actresses roaming his family ancestral home, Frankenstein has actually not denounced the infamous experiments that made his grandfather a legend, but he’s actually planning to resurrect the Creature that his ancestor once created from dead bodies….
Frankly the best thing is the opening bit of the fake Frankenstein film, before they reveal they were just shooting a movie, which might have been a bit more novel back in 1958, but now it’s just a tiresome, lazy clichè, and frankly that’s also where the meta angle begins and ends, mostly, including a couple of genre savvy throwaway lines, so in the end it’s just a one trick pony.
We never get to see much of the fake movie, nor its goes full parody, as it becomes instead just a big tribute to the 30s Frankenstein film put out by Universal, especially to Boris Karloff whom here, instead of playing the monster, acts as the last of the Frankensteins, in a classic role reserval, but don’t expect much in terms of story, as it mostly patters about the routine monster movie plot beats…. but very little actually happens for most of the runttime.
Even the backstory given to Frankenstein in order to explain why he has a scarred face, him being tortured by Nazis during WWII as he refused to help them in their experiments… doesn’t really go nowhere, it doesn’t really matter at all in the end, it’s just an excuse to give Karloff more dialogue.
Most of the movie is actually Karloff’s character trying to resurrect/recreate the monster in his (then) modern laboratory, which eventually entails killing people to harvest organs for the Creature, and eventually use the monster to get some eyes…. because Herr Doctor has butterfingers and the fake eyes in the jar break in pieces.
Oopsie.
You might also wonder what the need The Last Of The Frankensteins is actually planning to do with a fuckin nuclear reactor, make a kaiju sized “Frankenstein’s monster” before Toho does?
No, he plans to transplant living organs into a corpse with synthetic skin and a head that’s just bones, just a skull, and apparently was the actual Creature made by the original Baron Frankenstein, he’s reheating the monster with modern technologies… and a sink trap of sorts where he chucks waste that frankly looks more like of those old timey freezers for moving ice cream kiosks.
Speakin of which, the monster itself not only is in need of pretty much all the Operation game pieces – sometime requiring Frankenstein to hypnotize people, of course he can just do that -, but frankly looks fuckin ridiculous even for a cheap late 50s b-movie like this, it looks like a toiler paper based mummy with a Donkey Kong barrel also shoved over its face, with those pumpkin style eye holes…. already in there despite the monster not having any eyes yet.
Damn, obviously they coudn’t replicate the old monster design because Universal was gonna sue their asses into oblivion, and they couldn’t do miracles with a small budget, but come on, the mummy ghost looks like it called upon the Great Cornholio and his bunghole.
Also, yes, the creature being blind it’s another callback to the Universal Frankenstein movies (Ghost Of Frankenstein specifically, there’s even a line about how he can’t use the new eyes because of the blood type not matching), but he manages to kill people and move about fine even without eyes, and unlike those old films, the monster doesn’t actually do shit for 80 % of the movie, heck, almost 1 hour in, and the most he did is lying on the slab and maybe move its arms a bit.
The only good thing i can say about the effects is that even for the late 50s, the trick of using a real cow heart as a human one must have been pretty disgusting, it’s still effective today.
I’m not gonna lie, Frankenstein 1970 is a pile of ass, t’s an unintentional hilarious film, like i can’t look at Karloff gazing at the half bust of his supposed ancestor Frankenstein with reverance…. while there’s a photo of Karloff himself, just slightly younger than he was in 1958. XD
Yet this is also the scene that actually sums up the movie perfectly, because it’s all a tribute to Karloff legacy as the Creature, heck, even the final reveal is how he made (via the magical properties of 50s atomic energy) the creature having his beloved servant brain… also have his face when he was younger, so that he wouldn’t be the last of his bloodline after all, or something.
Yeah, doesn’t make much sense, but who cares, look at Karloff playing the organ in a sinister fashion and how much fog there is to go around. Classic old horror cliches.
For how cheap, poorly directed and written this movie is (the forced need for frigging Frankenstein to have that sweet atomic reactor comes to mind), really fumbling any interesting take the meta angle could have given the ol formula, but i can still kinda forgive it because Boris Karloff is indeed the protagonist, he has a lot of scenes made for him, this isn’t the usual bait n switch where he’s billed as the top name but is barely even in the movie and does nothing, quite the opposite.
And it’s telling how good was Karloff that he manages to turn out a good performance despite the age, the cheap budget, the subpar material he had to work, he alone manages to actually elevate the film a bit, to make you share his own sympathy for the monster, just to make his career come full circle and immortalize the Karloff as the Creature, regardless of the Jack Pierce make up.
And for that i really can’t hate this movie too much, because at the very least it’s indeed a final send off to Karloff and his immortal role as one of horror’s classing icons… though it wasn’t the final time he played the character, he did a reunion with Lon Chaney Jr and Peter Lorre playing their classic horror characters on an episode of CBS TV series Route 66, but this is arguably the film dirge of him playing Frankenstein, the doctor and the monster.
Plus Karloff actual, real sendoff to the genre as whole would be Peter Bogdanovich’s Targets, his proper swan song, even if there were a handful of Mexican films that while released post-humously, were filmed in 1968 before he passed away, and i’m willing to bet are even worse than Frankenstein 1970, but for the moment, in the interest of mutual peace, we can pretend they don’t exist.
