#27: Flesh for Frankenstein
Good morning, friends!
I just want to let you know the Costco cedar garland is the best $$ I’ve spent this year. My house smells and feels like a forest.
20/10 recommend.
Also, Dawson’s Creek is BONKERS. Also 20/10 recommend.
#27: Flesh for Frankenstein
Director: Paul Morrissey
Country: United States
Year: 1973
Runtime: 95 minutes
Language: English
**As always, this post contains spoilers**
CW: rape, necrophilia, incest, violence, gore, blood, guts
Welcome to another installment of “Is This Movie Good or Is The Director Just a White Man and the Producer Andy Warhol, Who Might Be Overrated?”!
I was going to wait until the end to tell you how much I hated this movie, but then I re-read it and my disdain is just oozing out of this whole review so there’s no use in waiting: I hated this movie so much that Josh came back from the bathroom once and laughed at how mad I was that I had (lol “had”) to watch this: literally frowning, legs hanging off the side of the ottoman, my head slumped to the side, lit by the glow of the Christmas tree. Them’s the rules of this project tho, Steph.
Also I want to reiterate the content warning for gore, blood, guts, weird rape/necrophiliac stuff. Because it’s campy and B-movie quality, it was somehow graphic but not gross, but if you’re sensitive to even the talk of that stuff, I would suggest skipping this whole review. I will ALSO say that it is more in the absurd camp than the scary or disturbing so I found it easy to shrug off, so I didn’t end up feeling disturbed by it like I did with Salò.
We open with two kids, Erik (Marco Liofredi) and Monica (Nicoletta Elmi) Frankenstein, in their dad’s laboratory. They are cutting open a stuffed doll with a scalpel and then they behead it with a guillotine. Cut to them in a mini horse-and-buggy with their mom, Baroness Katrin Frankenstein (Monique van Vooren), coming home to their castle from school through their giant farm and estate.
Baron von Frankenstein, (Udo Keir), their father, is in his giant castle laboratory with his assistant, Otto (Arno Juerging). I had to pause and confirm Udo Keir played the billionaire in Ace Ventura who had the house where Ace gets attacked by the shark and comes out of the bathroom and says, “Do NOT go in there.” (He did.)
Anyway, Frankenstein is going on and on about how he wants to create a creature that is the epitome of the perfect Serbian race.
He pulls a naked woman out of a clear glass box of water with a pulley. There are also two naked dead men (save for a loin cloth masking taped to their ass cracks) in a pile.
That night, Frankenstein and his wife, the Baroness, have dinner with their two kids, Erik and Monica, at a ridiculously long table. The Baron and Baroness start to talk about their parents and then I realized ohhh they’re talking about THEIR parents and it hit me that they are not only husband and wife but brother and sister. So just recap the first 8 minutes: incest, children of incest, dead girl in a vat of water, two dead guys, and all of them live in a castle. Got it.
In a field on the estate, two male farm hands who work for the Frankensteins, Nicholas (Joe Dallesandro) and Sacha (Srdjan Zelenovic) are arguing. Nicholas for some inexplicable reason has a Long Island accent (everyone else in the film has a German accent). I don’t get what they’re arguing about, but Sacha says he wants to become a monk.
On a picnic, the Baroness sees Nicholas hooking up with a girl. She calls the girl a whore and sends her away, but she tells Nicholas to meet her later so they can talk about the status of his employment. She sounds mad but also turned on.
We are back in the lab with Frankenstein. I asked Josh why labs in movies always have to have shit constantly bubbling and smoking and he said, “So we know he’s a mad scientist.” Which is a great point.
Frankenstein and Otto are literally sewing together the “perfect man” from the parts of corpses. Frankenstein’s master plan is so cool: breed the perfect man and perfect woman to create a race of perfect humans who will listen to everything he says. Sounds familiar! 🙄🤮 He, for some reason, needs his OG male monster to be super horny, so he goes on a hunt for the head of a man who is super horny. Where would they find someone like that? The town brothel, DUH. Once they find it, they wait outside.
Inside the brothel (which is just three nude ladies in a single room), we find Nicholas and Sacha. Nicholas is super into it, but Sacha is not; he just sits there looking sad. At one point, a small lizard appears on the Brooklyn guy’s ass and the women run out screaming.
Josh says, “Is the implication that the lizard crawled out of his ass?” And that’s when I realized I hated this movie for forcing us to have this fucking conversation.
Frankenstein and Otto see Sacha appear in the doorway, don’t see Nicholas, and assume he is one man pleasuring three women so he must be the horny guy they’re looking for, not knowing that he is the guy who is so not horny that he actually wants to be a monk. They decide to wait for him to emerge later that night so they can steal his head.
Frankenstein and Otto are hiding in the forest when Sacha walks by with Nicholas drunk, hanging off of him. Otto bops Nicholas on the back of the head with a Flintstones club and then Frankenstein literally just puts this clamp around Sacha’s neck and takes his head off!! They leave his body next to knocked-out Nicholas, where Nicholas finds it the next morning when he wakes up. Back in the lab, Frankenstein and Otto sew Sacha’s head on to the rest of the body while VERY INTENSE Frankenstein talks about how excited he is for this new race of people who will only listen to his commands. His male monster is now complete.
Nicholas shows up to the Baroness’ chambers, as requested. She looks super sexy and says they’re considering firing him for being such a scamp, I guess. He tells her what happened the night before with Sacha now being headless and dead and she INSISTS he stay because there’s a murderer on the loose. She tells him her and her brotherhusband are married in name only and the kids are just “property,” which is like okay cool you still had sex with your brother. She tells Nicholas he’s super hot and strong and then they bang! She hires him as her new servant.
Back at the worst laboratory in the world, Frankenstein and Otto are opening up a huge gnarly incision on the lady monster’s torso that runs from her chest to her belly. The effects are….not good. So like I said, while it’s graphic, it’s not actually gross.
What IS gross is when he starts fondling her breasts and then breathily names all of her organs while he’s feeling around inside there. And then, in a sentence almost too terrible to type, with Otto in the room, Frankenstein fucks this monster’s open wound.
He THEN says, “To know death, Otto, you have to fuck life in the gallbladder.” --which is truly the worst thing I’ve ever heard.
Josh pondered, “It’s amazing that Udo Keir had a career after this.” INDEED.
Did I mention I hate this movie?
They activate the monsters by attaching electrodes all over them and shocking them. Now that they’re awake, Frankenstein can control the creatures by simply saying “Arm” and they lift their arm. “Head” and they turn their head. “They’re so natural!” he says. Yes, SO natural. Hey, try yelling “arm” at a real person sometime and see what happens. HAS Frankenstein spent any time with a real person before?
That night at dinner, the Baroness introduces to Frankenstein her new servant fuck boy. One-upping her out of jealousy, he invites his two fuck monsters to dinner! He says they’re assisting him in his laboratory, trying to pass them off as just regular people with “medical problems.”
But UH-OH Nicholas recognizes Sacha’s head. Sacha’s head does not recognize him, though. Nicholas plays it cool but seems to be suspicious. Overall, very awkward dinner.
After dinner, Nicholas tells the Baroness the guy at dinner was his friend who was killed in the forest the other night. Nicholas probes her about what her husband does for a living, but she claims not to really know because he’s so private and his laboratory is allllll the way on the other side of the castle. Basically, the Baroness doesn’t care about Nicholas’ suspicions at all.
And neither does Josh because this is when he fell asleep for a little while. It’s hard to see other people living your dreams.
For some reason, while Otto and Frankenstein are gone, the family’s maid, Olga (Liù Bosisio) sneaks into the laboratory. Otto shows up out of nowhere, attacks her sexually by flicking his tongue and grabbing her and chasing her around into weird alcoves. And then ruh-roh he’s accidentally disemboweled her. He leaves her body.
Frankenstein runs into Nicholas in a hallway and they get into an argument prob because he’s sleeping with his sisterwife. It turns out the kids are assisting Nicholas in getting into the lab covertly, presumably so he can find out what’s going on with his friend/not friend, Sacha.
While Nicholas and the children watch from a doorway, Otto and Frankenstein are trying to get the monsters to hook up (by yelling “kiss him!” over and over ) but because Sacha’s head has a very low libido, nothing happens.
Back in her chambers, Nicholas confronts the Baroness, telling her what he’s seen in the lab. She denies her husbandbrother is doing anything untoward, which is a weird hill to die on as a woman who married and had two kids with her own brother. They get in a fight where Nicholas slaps her after she calls him a low life and a FARMER and he leaves.
Frankenstein, the man who fucked the surgery incision of a zombie monster, yells at the Baroness for sleeping with her servant, calling her a sex maniac. HER response is: I would like to hook up with your male monster, so please order him up to my room. Maybe I was too hard on them, y’all. Maybe they’re meant for each other.
Nicholas gains access to the lab and tries talking to Sacha/the male monster when Frankenstein shows up. He orders Sacha/the male monster to make Nicholas unconscious, which he does through a headlock. After hearing that he’s sleeping with his sisterwife, Frankenstein has realized Nicholas is actually the horny guy, so now he wants to use his head on his monster instead of Sacha’s. He orders Sacha to go to the Baroness’ room, knowing the monster will not be into it.
They get to her room and she has to tell him how to do EVERYthing: touch me. Hold me. Closer.
And then he squeezes her so tightly it sounds like he cracks ALL of her bones and she dies. Whoops.
Back in the lab, Nicholas is hung from the ceiling by his wrists and Otto is BLABBING at him about how he knows how to do everything Frankenstein knows how to do and he needs to be respected.
And then he goes to town on the female monster’s incision with his tongue and then says “I have to get into you!” and opens her incision and disembowels her. She dies (can you die if you’re a zombie?) and Frankenstein enters and yells at him and strangles him to death for ruining his creation.
Okay and then just….even more happens. Nicholas is hanging from the ceiling, Frankenstein is losing his SHIT about having to create a new female monster, Sacha/male monster enters carrying the dead Baroness and Otto is dead. It’s just a lot. It’s a lot.
Frankenstein orders his male monster/Sacha to kill Nicholas. He doesn’t do that, but what he does do is force Frankenstein out of the room, slamming an iron gate on his wrist, causing him to sever his hand, which Frankenstein, a medical doctor, keeps trying to just put back on. Out of anger, Frankenstein grabs a scalpel and goes to kill Nicholas, who he blames for all of his problems. Before he can, Sacha/the male monster rams a very pointy, enormous rod through his middle. Frankenstein dies a very slow, melodramatic death.
Nicholas tries to convince Sacha/the male monster that they should leave the estate together. But he realizes life as a zombie will suck, so Sacha rips open his stitches and disembowels himself. THERE IS SO MUCH DISEMBOWELING IN THIS MOVIE JESUS CHRIST
So Erik and Monica, the Frankenstein kids, enter and find everyone dead but Nicholas, who is still hanging by his arms, bless his heart. They each pick up a scalpel, smile and nod at each other, and using the pulley crank he’s tied to, raise him even higher in the air.
That’s it. That’s the end.
Oh my god I hated this movie so much. I cannot believe we are TWENTY-SEVEN movies into this and this is what they thought should DEF be in the collection. Had to make it in ASAP.
Look, I am not a prude. I think I’ve said that before when I refused to write about Salò. Also, while I’m squeamish about a lot of stuff, if it’s clearly fake I’m usually not phased so it wasn’t even being turned off by the gore. It was all just SO…pointless. I had no idea what this movie was trying to say aside from shock value, which I will go on record as being fundamentally opposed to in nearly every instance because it is BORING. It actually doesn’t take talent or creativity or thoughtfulness of any kind.
I laughed a few times, but the tone doesn’t ring true to a spoof and it ends up feeling like a string of grotesque gestures with no interesting heart to it.
I also would just love, LOVE a movie that didn’t have women being abused in it. And if it’s not asking too much, a female main character?
Unfortunately for me, the next one is another horror film from the same director called Blood for Dracula, which “involves Count Dracula arriving in Italy to feast upon the blood of virgins, only to find difficulty with this due to the lack of virgins present in Italy,” so no luck there.
Please don’t abandon me in my hour of need, my friends. See you there?
XOXO
Steph
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Another great piece! Sorry you had to watch this, and I appreciated the warnings at the beginning. However, according to a bumper stick I once saw, we need to stop the demonization of intergenerational consensual incest.