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.