Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter(1966)
"We shall" Maria Frankenstein snaps, "Soon see which one of us is insane."
No one is, really. Except perhaps the lug that chose the title. This is a movie about Frankenstein's granddaughter.
When the movie opened with a sobbing Spaniard drinking from a wine bottle full of orange juice, I had high hopes: hopes that were dashed, watching a slow, and largely dull movie. A pair of murderers from Vienna are violating the human rights of local folk, deep in the Wild West, when Jesse James and his inexplicable beefcake (but fetchingly simple) sidekick cross their path.
The Igor is played weak-and-vacillating, but at the same time inexplicably murderous; the Inga is a fetching young village girl; Frankenstein herself would be a good depiction, if not for the mind control helmet.
There are only two details in this movie worth seeing:
The brightly striped anachronistic US army helmets rigged with neon-tube lightening bolts and short Jacob's Ladders that serve as re-animators and mind control helmets.
The other is the activation of the artificial brain: the addition of a vial of crystals, and it begins to pulse like a heart!
As a odd touch, the beaker that the poison is stored in is a vacuum filtration flask with a side entry port! Considering they had the budget for a rack of glassware on the other side of the lab, this is a odd choice.
The lab itself was rather boringly furnished, and the sound mixing was bad. Maria Frankenstein's main monologue was almost drowned out by a really loud rotary switch.
This is a movie which had some promise. You can see that the filmmakers were trying to stay true to the Frankenstein Film Mythos: its just to bad that they mistook tedium for realism. No mugging at the camera, careful and consistent use of accents, no gratuitous nudity*. They even minimized the creature's Stiff Servo effect. They put them into castle by making it an old mission, but missed the 'profaning sacred ground' possibilities inherent in such a locale.
I'll forgive the excessive eye-widening for emphasis.
In RenegadeMime's tautology, 'If it hadn't been a poor movie, it would have been a good one.'
*Okay, the beefcake took his shirt off more than necessary, but he did have a nice physique.
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