Frankenstein 1970 is this wonderfully cheap little 50s film that's made all the more watchable with the wonderfully charismatic performance of Boris Karloff. The film spend so much time focusing on Boris particularly that everybody else's minor acting abilities are kind of overlooked.
So I'm going to go out on a limb and say that this movie takes place in Mary Shelley's World of Frankenstein hundreds of years after the fact.
The Frankenstein family has continued on all the way up to Boris Karloff's character. I think he too is named Victor Frankenstein. And he's the last of his lineage.
He has no other family and no children to continue the line. So Frankenstein decides he's going to create his own Frankenstein (monster) as a great Testament to his family's Legacy.
Oh and there's also this weird secondary blot referring to a Madness that may have built up inside of him because of tortures he underwent under the Nazi regime.
They don't spend a lot of time on it but it is well indicated that Boris Karloff's character was brutally and viciously assaulted by the Nazis because he wouldn't use his extreme medical knowledge to Aid them in their sick and perverted fantasies.
But in order to achieve the dream Frankenstein requires the use of a atomic generator. (I guess lightning bolts won't cut it anymore).
And the only way he can do this is by acquiring money by financing chunks of his house to a film studio. So they can create their own authentic Frankenstein theme story.
How a man can acquire enough money to buy Atomic materials with the small amount of cash from a second-rate film studio is beyond me.
Maybe that's just a great dream for Hollywood.
At a certain point Frankenstein will achieve his little dream and his creation will come to life. From there it just turns into your basic slasher flick.
People start getting murdered one by one. And really the movie spends less time focusing on the monsters murdering and more time on how Frankenstein is going to cover up each incident. and it's kind of hear that the film starts to fall apart a little bit.
They didn't have that much of a budget to work with in the first place and they couldn't get away with any sort of grotesque murders on screen.
So you're kind of stuck with this Frankenstein monster who looks like 1/2 The Mummy mixed with Jason Voorhees from one of those earlier Friday the 13th movies were he still had the bag on his head. It's more comedic than scary.
Really the best part of the movie is just Boris Karloff giving off monologues. Either as he attends to a surgery business to try and make is Frankenstein monster better or when he's standing in front of a gravestone of his great ancestors going on about the legacy of his one specific family.
It's a cheap horror movie that rides the line. At some point it dives into the complete Camp category and becomes nothing more than another cheap 1950s monster movie that you would take your date to for lack of anything better to do.
And then other times it delves into playwrights territory and we're giving just enough inspiration to think this film could have been something better.
Honestly it makes trying to talk about it a little difficult. As I don't think it's anything particularly special but at the same time I really don't want to badmouth because of the occasionally nice things that pop up.
If you like cheap Monster movies than you'll find something enjoyable here and if you're a Boris Karloff fan you'll be in heaven.
I have no idea why this film is called Frankenstein 1970. It's not set in the future, nor do any of the plot points or Machinery make any sort of reference to that number. It's not shown to be an address to anything. It's just a number that's there for some reason. Possibly because it sounds cool.
Comments
Post a Comment