“In a muddy way, the movie attempts to instruct us about the universal insensitivity, living-deadness and the inability to be turned on by anything short of the grotesque. However, this ‘Frankenstein’ drags as much as it camps; despite a few amusing moments, it fails as a spoof, and the result is only a coy binge in degradation.”
NEW YORK TIMES
Who made it? Directed by Paul Morrissey | Written by Paul Morrissey | Director Of Photography Luigi Kuveiller| Special Effects/make up Antonio Margheriti| Music Claudio Gizzi
Who’s in it? Joe Dallesandro | Monique van Vooren | Udo Kier
If you weren’t watching this the week it came out, you might have been watching…
Serpico | The Wicker Man | Digby The Biggest Dog In The World / Disney’s Robin Hood
Production notes and whatnot
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flesh_for_Frankenstein
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0071508/fullcredits/?ref_=tt_cl_sm
What’s it all about?
I once saw a meme with a laser-printed sign on a toilet door, marking it “out of order” or some such. Underneath someone had written “please do not use Comic Sans. We are a Fortune 500 Company, not a Lemonade Stand.”
A design decision that did not bother Andy Warhol, as this epic of 70’s gothic style, camp, ham, shrieking, blood-letting, incest, cliché and gall-bladders opens with just that sort of childish font.
We are watching Andy Warhol’s “Flesh For Frankenstein,” (although, beyond name recognition, there is doubt Warhol had much to do with this production beyond turning up on set for coffee once). And the amount of time choosing a scary typeface was exactly the same time spent asking the cast to “act naturally.” Much fun awaits. Let’s get stuck in!
We open as two of the spookiest kids since Disney’s 1974 Escape From Witch Mountain, peer and poke about a huge gothic castle laboratory.
They are be-garbed in olde Victoriana outfits, adding to their air of Midwichian eeriness.Moving about the slabs, tiles and tools of a very sinister and un-sterile looking workplace indeed (cages, bottles, limbs, brickwork) they come across a rag doll. Like father like kids, as we are about to discover, in a nice bit of looming foreshadowing, they pick scalpels and silently dissect the doll, removing fluff and stuffing, only to then place poor dolly into a handy desktop executive guillotine. Eyes gleam as the blade comes thundering down and off plops the doll’s head.
Yep. These children have clearly learned bodies are for playing with, toying with, dissecting and discarding. We are soon to discover from whom they have picked up these attitudes and horrifying habits.
Infact, without further ado, let’s meet mum!
Through dapply sunlight, in an Essex-wedding princess-white pony-drawn carriage, the children trot along with their mother. Mother is Katrin, a stuck-up, snooty, snobbish, sinister woman, all pale skin and peery nostrils, decked in her Sunday best, out with her kids. They are still in their “Damien at a birthday party” formal attire, she all corsets and hairclips. In the hazy distance looms Castle Frankenstein. We are somewhere in that odd Hammer period where all horror movies seem to take place. Electricity but horses, science but farming. Waistcoats and boots but penicillin and surgery. See “Carry On Screaming” for the campy aesthetic.
But before she can drop the kids home for more laboratory mischief, Katrin comes across some key players in our sketch. Lounging around in the hay with wenches and a frankly Millennial attitude to a decent days work, she find some hunky farmhands, slouching on hay-bales and canoodling with wenches. Katrin gives them a right royal ticking off. These, we will meet later, are Sacha (the shy one) and Nicholas (the randy one). The busty wench is nameless. Let’s call her “Busty McWench.”
Katrin’s husband is of course the Baron Frankenstein promised in the titles. And boy oh boy, what a chap he is. High collars, starchy waistcoats, high forehead and screamy teutonic manner, he has all the Vs, Zs and Ws of a sitcom German, wide eyed histrionic yelling being his sole form of communication. Like all decent Frankensti, he has in tow an Otto, a toadying and forelock-tugging assistant, all “yessss master!” and “of course massssterrr!” like he were trying to make you guess “Peter Lorre” in a game of Outburst.
Within his smoking jacket and from behind a crazed glare, he toils with Otto sweatily in the lab. It’s clear he’s nuttier than an almond crunch bar, ranting as he does about his beloved “creations!” The Baron (as we will now refer to him) is trying to create creatures. Zombies, really. But perfect specimens of, for some reason, the Serbian race. He seeks body parts! In particular, the “perfect nose!” to complete his male monster. “The finest features of the Serbian ideals!” We learn from his startchy arm-waving wailings that “Serbians come from the glory of the ancient Greeks!”
Basically, it’s the standard Frankenstein Mary Shelley plot. But mixed oddly with Hitlerian eugenics and a madman’s desire to create a master race from his two “perfect Serbian specimens,” hand built in his Klimt-inspired cavernous laboratory. The attempt to complete this task (to build these two perfect monsters from body parts, convince them to mate, and then sit back while they breed a master Serbian race), is loosely what you might describe as the “plot” of this flick. It takes about 90minutes for it all to fall apart, but there’s lots of fun to be had before the Comic Sans credits return.
So, where were we? Katrin drops off the kids after a bit of bickering with her busy-busy hubby. We meet Olga, the housekeeper/nanny type. As fusty, dusty and busty as the cliché requires of a mumsy help. As Katrin tucks her oddball kids into their heavy bed linen and pecks them a matronly goodnight, she explains they will not be returning to “that school.” It is full of rumours about her and her husband. The Frankensteins are clearly better than the locals, looking down on the village’s prollish prying. The kids are not to listen to rumours.
(These rumours presumably being “hey, those kids’ parents are weirdo snobby insane Serbian-worshipping, castle dwelling freak-jobs who might well be brother and sister as well as husband and wife.”)
But mum tells them to bare them no mind. Their family is above such things and seek only beauty. (Or beauty and randy big-cocked farmhands, as we’re about to discover. Sorry. Spoiler).
So let’s dig into the Baron’s work, as this takes up a huge amount of running time. And if you find laborious shots of corpses, wounds, stitches, scalpels, flesh and electrodes tedious, get out now while you still can. Back in the cavernous tiled lab (all Greek statues, dark wood, bubbling bottles and smoking test-tubes) the Baron and Otto remove a man’s body from a winched slab, cut out the kidney in glorious claret-spilling gore and toss his empty torso in a pile of discarded body-parts in the corner, clearly not having the right colour bin for bio-recycling. The parts are coming together, offal by offal. But the Baron still misses that vital “Serbian Nose!” (If this is beginning to remind you of Woody Allen’s Sleeper, you’re not alone.)
At dinner, the family sit at a preposterously long table. Husband and wife/brother and sister (yep!) at either end, the weirdo kids opposite. There are candles and flowers, statues and fruit, wine glasses and silver bowls. Olga serves soup as the “couple” argue about the children’s upbringing, their parents’ love and tedious posh picnic whatnot.
Meanwhile, let’s get back to our two lowly farmhands we met earlier. Sacha and Nicholas. They chew corn stalks and loll about in the grounds of the castle. Neither of them appear to do much to earn their keep. Nicholas berates Sacha, as Sacha is a gentle, virginal man of God who wishes to leave the castle-life and join a monastery. Nicholas, randy old goat that he is, wants Sacha to at least taste what he’s missing and invites him to visit a brothel with him that night. With almost no resistance, Sasha agrees. After all, he’s a monk, he’s not an idiot. And what harm could come to a simple chap with a (spoiler) beautiful Serbian nose..?
Anyhoo, sometime later (it’s not clear how long) the family Frankenstein (minus crazy dad, of course, who never leaves his lab, aside from silly long table dinners) are taking a picnic in the castle grounds. A bit of carelessness with the picnic rug and a basket of apples cause them to “lose their lunch” (much like the audience will, less symbolically, in an upcoming gall-bladder-themed lab scene. Brace y’self) and they go running after their tumbling pomme. Only to find, still fingers deep in Busty McWench, Nicholas and his farmhand pals shirking once more. But wait! Katrin likes the look of this Nicholas chap. Clearly her husband/brother is not satisfying her in the boudoir dept, and she invites him to come and, ahem, “work for her,” up at the Castle. Hmmn. He’s not going to need much farming equipment, we sense. But some serious “ploughing” might be on the cards, so to speak.
Back at the lab Otto and the Baron are busy dismembering and carving the two bodies (male and female) they have on the slabs. Arms are carved off, stumps glow wet red, sewn-up scars are pink and fleshy. The Baron decides they need a horny mo’fo (with a Serbian nose) to complete their monster, only then can it be guaranteed to have the lust and longing needed to breed an entire new race. Perhaps a bordello in town might provide such a hard-cocked panting chappie? Indeed.
Meanwhile, the ever present Midwich Weirdoes watch from the upper balconies. Honestly, where are Social Services? Or a distracting episode of Blue Peter?
Predictably, as a foggy dusk falls, Nicholas The Randy and Sacha The Monkish approach a local bordello/brothel/knocking-shop (as my dad used to say) or “discreet executive massage parlour.”
Tinkly roller piano clanks, women in frowsy frocks wash their boobs in the sink and generally lounge about the place. It’s cheap and nasty, much mascara and blusher in attendance. The men enter. “Why don’t we show him a good time?” one of the “ladies” suggests. But god-fearing Sacha is reluctant to get stuck in. He’d rather, in amusement park parlance, “hold the coats.”
Meanwhile the Baron and Otto wait outside to find the sort of man who would frequent such a place. Cutting to and fro between their waiting and soft core snogging, fondling, topless moaning and whatnot, lusty listless passion continues among the beads, sashes, petticoats and candlelight. But in a tragic twist, a slimy lizard should scuttle across the bed, causing the ladies to shriek and scream and run helter skelter from the building. Sacha follows. And therefore, in a key misunderstanding, the Baron and Otto mistake this poor chap for the kind of lust-filled cock machine that could
- Manage two women at once
- Cause them to gasp and scream and flee the bedroom.
They have their man.
So as darkness descends, Otto and The Baron return to the brothel with all the complex equipment needed to remove Sacha’s head. That is to say, a massive fucking pair of scissors. In a gloriously gory snap of blade on flesh, Sasha’s head in wrenched from its neck and held aloft, perfect nose and all. “It’s magnificent!” At last the Baron has his final part. Nicholas, meanwhile, is merely clonked on the head by Otto to get him out of the picture.
We cut to the next morning, and Nicholas is naturally alarmed to wake up with
- A headache
- A close friend without a head.
Terrified, he buries Sacha’s decapitated body. But doesn’t forget, in all his “trauma” he has an appointment with Katrin at the Castle first thing, for some corporate sanctioned cock action. Or some tiling and wallpapering, whatever her coy look ultimately suggested. We’re not really sure which he’d prefer.
So while the Baron and Otto attempt to sew Sacha’s head to the bits of torso they have gathered together, Katrin greets her new, ahem, “servant” who has dutifully arrived for a day’s “work.” Katrin, all lacy lingerie and panting busom, waves away Nicholas’s talk of “headless friends buried in woods” and “offers him a position.” Okay. Well. We can leave that where it is, as she grasps and pulls at his lithe young body and he discovers he doesn’t have to do as much tiling as he thought.
And now we get the key scene for which this movie is most quoted and remembered. Ask Mark Kermode. He’ll tell ya. The Baron stands over his female zombie, stroking her puffy pink scars. “I go into her digestive parts!” he cries, snipping away at her pink stiches. Blood seeps and blobs and he daubs ineffectually with a cotton swab.
He opens her up, solemn, sincere, firm of jaw and task. Her eyes open softly, but she makes no movement. The crazed Baron smears her breasts with blood like he’s seasoning a chicken. In goes the hand with extra squelch, counting her innards. “Spleen, kidneys, gall bladder…” Breathless and horny as he delves around insider her, panting and sweating – “Liver!” it’s not really clear what he’s up to but boy oh boy his mounting excitement is apparent as he thrusts and gasps and thundering piano chords tell is he’s shot his load in his smock. Nice.
The splattery remains of the woman are wheeled upright. The Baron climbs on and the table is levelled by Otto’s winching. Thrusting his hand inside her body, he begins to dry hump, face to face, gasping and sweating. “Soon you will give me the right children, the children I want!” Fist deep in her bloodied torso, he thrusts and moans and gasps himself to satisfaction on top of her, hips writhing. Piano tinkles romantically. Otto helps him down when he has “finished. “To know death, Otto, you have to fuck life in the gall bladder!” Otto blinks. Good advice, I guess.
So we’re about halfway through, in case you’re keeping count.
Anyhoo, where now?
Katrin and the Baron squabble. She explains there is a new person “on staff.” A man?! Why not a girl! He’s just a farm hand. “I’ve seen him work and I’ll keep him very busy” Cut to them after sex again with plenty of swooning piano trills and chords, while we see the creepy kids observe from behind green tannined old mirrors. This is not an upbringing Miriam Stoppard would recommend.
But now the test! In the lab, electrodes are attached to the two bodies – male and female – and they twitch and spasm. The Baron and Otto force the two zombies to face each other, naked aside form modest covered bandages over their “whatnot”. He commands them to move their limbs, which they both do, slowly and creakily, cracking leathery sounds like an Exorcist neck. “I’m fulfilled! But not yet!” the Baron screams. He wants them to breed!
But not before dinner. So we get a very odd scene as both Katrin and The Baron introduce their new “arrivals” to the dinner table.
Gentle chamber music wafts with string quartet plucks as the monsters arrive for dinner – dumb, plodding, trussed up in back braces, arms in stirrups to keep their backs straight, ribs held together tightly with hard leather straps – and Nicholas moves around the table offering slices of what looks like pheasant or quail. The atmosphere is, shall we say, stilted. The kids, as always, say nothing. They’ve seen worse, we imagine.
Bit later in her boudoir, Nicholas is distraught! The man at the table! It was his friend Sacha! But…taller! He asks about the Baron’s work, his lab. He is intrigued! But lusty Katrin urges him to forget about it. He cannot go wandering the castle. He has “better things to do,” and he succumbs to a dull off screen blow job. Naturally.
Okay, so we’re about an hour in now. To recap: Sister/Wife Katrin has her farmboy lover. But he knows in the lab, something has happened to his friend Sacha. Whose head (and Serbian nose) has been planted on a body to create a monster breeding machine that will fuck another zombie and create – at Katrin’s husband’s wishes – a master Serbian race. Right. With me? Okay. Let’s go.
While the lab experiments continue, and the kids resume their ill-advised spying on dad’s “work”, Katrin and Nicholas continue their lusty workman-like by-the-hour lovemaking. However the Baron has spied on them and knows exactly what is going on with his sister/wife and her servant/lover. Blimey, lots of forward-slashes needed for this one.
But meanwhile, where is Olga? The trusty housemaid? Well she’s decided, presumably for the first time in 60 years, to sniff about the lab. And what sights she sees! Bodies! Limbs! Wounds! Hand to throat in shock and eyes wide, she tries to run. But who should be waiting with sex on his mind and 3D in his contract, but Otto. He catches her and, lapping and licking like a gecko, chases her about the tiles. She tries to escape among spider webs and clanking chains in the back room of dusty bottles and stone but Otto is too insistent. It seems he has waited a long time for this conquest! Otto bites and gnashes at Olga’s flesh, causing her to fall and her organs to swing and dangle above us, Olga lying prostrate on the grate, the viewer below, watching them swing red and shocking like a gory pendulum. Nice. Well worth the red and green specs, if you’ve bought 3D tickets (more of this later).
But back in lab, the Baron MUST make the two zombies mate! He lowers them in front of each other and barks, yells, commands them to kiss. KISS HIM! KISS HIM!
But sadly, as we the viewer knows, he has picked the wrong head if he wants sexy fuck-time, and the dull head of Sacha refuses to comply. The Baron, understandably, goes bat-shit mental at this turn of events. His beloved couple! AAARGH!!! And so on. “It can’t be true! Somebody disturbed our work!” But no response. They glance down at Sacha’s manhood under bandages, but nary an adolescent twitch.
The Baron paces the ground screaming about his mistakes. That perfect nose! He is convinced someone is meddling with his experiments. He bellows and rails at the world. He pleads with his son for information about who may be messing in his work. The boy is maddeningly non comital with “I don’t know” idiot shrugs. The Baron must discover who is stymying his work!
And now we reach the climax. And at 73 mins, it’s about bloody time.
Nicholas of course, finds his way to the lab. He wanders about the bodies. Orchestral strings go swirly and woozy. He tries to awake Sacha. Meanwhile the Baron rails at his sister. “I did everyzing for you!” He wants information about who has been meddling with his “verk!” Katrin toys with him, demanding that the Sasha monster is brought to her boudoir to, ahem, “fill in” where Nicholas couldn’t. Indeed.
As Nicholas pleads, the half Sasha/half monster explains he is happier dead. He doesn’t want his body back. “Breathing is better than not breathing!” Nicholas urges! But “No.” Sacha is resigned to his fate. He doesn’t care. It doesn’t matter. “I want to be dead.” Nicholas grabs the male and female by the elbows and tried to march them out of the lab to freedom and safety, only to be frozen in the doorway by Otto and the Baron for, of course, the big showdown. “We’re leaving and you’re not stopping us.” Baron commands his Sacha-Monster to grab Nicholas. Nicholas runs, swings derring-do style on a chandelier Errol Flynn style with another bit of gratuitous “Look Ma! Its in 3D!” action, kicking Sacha in the gums.
There is much dramatic yelling and struggling atop the lab steps, Nicholas falling to Gerry Anderson music tumbles. The Baron must steal Nicholas’s randy brain and replace it with Sacha’s “less willing” noggin. Suddenly Katrin arrives, sweeping about in her night-time frock. She appears glad Nicholas has gone, tired of him as she is. And now she is ready for his replacement. “So soon?” Yes! She fancies a bit of Sacha The Monster! Baron offers him up. “I’ll bring him back in 2hrs,” she says. “I won’t say untouched…but intact.”
As the Baron goes to fetch chemicals and tools to put Nicholas’s brain into the monster, Otto, frustrated with his serf position, eyes up the female monster, Homer Simpson style. “Mmmmm, female! Urrghhhh…” etc.
Meanwhile (and so sorry for all the meanwhile) upstairs, Katrin gets to grips with the scarred, bandaged torso of Sasha, seemingly untroubled by the snakes and ladders of the stiches and wounds across his body. She orders him into bed. She guides him, lower, gentle, lower, more…until he’s robotically making love to her. “Squeeze me tight…tighter…” She begins to scream, gasp, he grips and tightens his huge arms, the orchestra going mental with squeaking strings. She is crushed. Oops!
Otto, meanwhile, has the terrified Nicholas strung up by his arms. Otto is getting power hungry, feeling he never had his chance, the Baron having treated him so badly. He will try and emulate the Baron’s work! With the dangling Nicolas as an audience, he unties the woman and tries to play-act at the Baron’s sexy stylings. He begins to lick at the wounds as The Baron did. He peels back her paper bandage panties, eyes wide. And then, as his master did, he plunges his hands into her wound.
But he’s clearly missing some expert technique, as she screams, gasps and falls to the floor in a mess of bloody and innards. Otto is aghast! Where has his lust and temptation brought him? What will the furious Baron say?
Well, we are about to discover, as the Baron marches in to the lab, to find Otto bent over the bloody mess, Nicholas dangling by his wrists.
“It can’t be true! What are you doing to me! Bastard!” Screaming with fury, the Baron strangles Otto with rage for ruining his work. He must find a new female! He must! And as if prayers answered, Sascha returns from the boudoir carrying a limp body of Katrin. Baron sobs and rages. He commands the monster to kill Nicholas. Screaming and bellowing. “KILL HIM! LISTEN TO MY COMMAND!” Oh, but Sacha – aware of who has created such distress – thunders towards the Baron instead.
The Baron runs, pursued by the stomping monster. Escape is no use as, through an iron gate, his arm is trapped and his hand is wrenched off in a splurge and squirt of pillar-box red blood.
Bleeding out, the Baron stumbles with his bloodied stump, back to the lab, holding his dismembered hand, thrusting it against his bloodied wrist pathetically. “It’s all your fault!” He yells at Nicholas. Running to the suspended Nicholas he brandishes a scalpel to kill him, only to find behind him, approaching silently with a long window pole/hook is Sacha. And with a 3D inspired thrust, he pierces The Baron, who has his innards thrust out and waggled at the camera on the end of the pole.
He gasps. Reaching for it, as if to put it back in. “My verk will live on! I vill not die in wain!” He gives his triumphant speech. “He lives! He vill show ze world my genius.” And the Baron collapses silently, gasping his confession and triumph.
As he dies, Nicholas – dressed like a panto Han Solo – commands Sacha to take him down. But Sacha wants to stay, he cannot live like this. He has changed too much. He must be dead. He strips off his shirt, Pulling at his stiches, eyes rolling, we see a mess of groo come flopping and lolloping out of his stomach, in glorious 3D colours.
Nicholas winces. Sascha The Monster collapses to the stone floor, among the corpses of the others.
Finally, as the camera pans away leaving the horrid tableau, the children arrive. Observing the bloody carnage and sorrow and loss, an oboe piles on the sadness. They glance around the floor. They are strung-up Nicholas’s only pleading chance of being saved.
But they spot the lungs and heart puffing and panting away. With eerie looks and nightmarish intent they are inspired to continue dads work and approach the helpless Nicholas with scalpels… An ending of destiny…but hope. Of something. Of…oh for heaven’s sake, don’t do a sequel…
Is it any good?
Well I sat through this one twice. Once, to get the full uninterrupted effect, the next time jotting down notes on plot and thoughts and reactions and such and such.
And I still can’t make up my mind. Because it’s silly. Loud, campy, over-blown, self-referential, knowing, wink-to-audience, lavish and plain daft end-of-the-pier nonsense. The writer/director, Paul Morrissey, has not set out to make a dark, brooding po-faced version of the Frankenstein legend. This is not Peter Cushing being all reptilian and sinister, this is not Kenneth Branagh being all bare-chested and grandiose. There is nothing slow, spooky, cobwebby or tense about this telling. Everything is turned up to, in Mark Kermode’s lovely phrase “eleventy-stupid,” and clear instructions to the crew, the production designer, the composer and – most importantly, the terrific cast – were “More! Louder! Again! Sillier! Shout!”
Morrissey himself, according to a little research, was not the icky, Franksploitation mondo kitch-in-sync type the movie suggests. The colour and camp would suggest a helmer from the Roger Corman, John Waters pulp vein. However Morrissey’s memoir (Factory Days) explains more that his style was the result of 16mm news cameras, able to take much, much longer shots (33mins uncut), which allowed him to get his cast to improvise, repeat, try new things and generally throw everything they had at the camera, without the worry of reel-changes and cuts. Perhaps it was this that allowed Morrissey to simply ask his splendid cast to go again, again, again, trying all sorts of excessive expressions. Or maybe it was Warhol’s hand, steering the scenes into the pop-culture tackiness that made him famous. Whatever it was, Morrissey has chosen the maddest, eyes-wide, flamboyant and laughable takes of every scene.
But let’s talk about camp, for a moment. What, for some is a glorious celebration of life, colour, excitement, sexuality and expression is clearly, for many, just “mucking about” and “not doing it properly.” Picture London’s Prince Charles Cinema off Leicester Square. (This is a bit Londonist, but bear with me). A small rep cinema off the main drag of the West-End’s neon, popcorn-peddling multiplex machines, the Prince Charles has been showing late-night, singalongs, shoutalongs, triple bills and all-night-o-ramas since about 1991. The place for horror fans, sci-fi fans, obsessives, dress-ups, indie fans and movie geeks, it’s one of the country’s leading Independent Cinemas.
On a personal note, I discovered its charms in the mid nineties when I fell in with a movie-obsessive crowd and we discovered, for the sum of £3.50, we could catch mid-morning and midnight re-runs of old classics long since departed from the Odeons and Cineworlds. Always a “student” art-school, off –beat hipster crowd, this is where faded prints of 2001-A Space Odyssey, Duel, Butch & Sundance, Pink Flamingos and The Evil Dead were re-run for whooping and cheering fan-boys and girls long into the night. It also showed movies that had been banned on VHS, so we could get (in my fading memory) weekly showings of Reservoir Dogs, The Exorcist and Natural Born Killers, while the BBFC fannied about with home certification decisions.
A key night out at The Prince Charles – and why I’m banging on about it – was their hugely popular “dress up and quote-along” Rocky Horror Picture Show nights. Swathes of fans in fishnets, corsets, mascara and wigs, clutching bags of rice and other key ephemera, would arrive on a late Friday to shriek, sing, yell, argue and quote-along with Richard O’Brien’s schlocky vampy tale, shouting “slut!” at the screen on cue, Timewarping in the aisles and generally having silly fun their parents wouldn’t have thought “quite right” for a public cinema.
To the majority of course, the loud and arm-waving over-the-top performances, to-camera-winks, screeching and am-dram cheapiness of movies such of this are a massive turn off. Why is it so stupid? Why is the dialogue so clunky? Why are they over-acting? Why aren’t they – for heaven’s sake – doing this “properly?”
And I suppose, if you have to ask, then you don’t “get it.” If all the over-lit, over-dressed, over-acted, over-bearing over-the-topness makes you wince and cover your ears – like Norman Tebbit at a Pride march – and just wish everyone would “calm down” and “stop showing off,” then something like The Rocky Horror Picture Show – or, to come back to our theme, Flesh For Frankenstein – is not going to do anything but irritate you.
Camp is a taste thing. Much like kitsch. For many, a 99p plastic neon “glow in the dark” Virgin Mary bottle opener is the most tasteless and garish and foul thing in the world. Why would you want such a thing, when you can go to Habitat or Boden and buy a lovely, subtle, ergonomic brushed-chrome device for £40? Indeed. But then, the reverse is true. Why have something smooth and functional and professional and sleek when something delightfully daft and cringingly naff could raise a smile everytime you reached for the Merlot?
A lot of folk grow out of “campy kitsch” of course. It’s something for their student bedrooms, along with fairy lights and inflatable armchairs and flying ducks and 70s pineapple ice-buckets. Collectable, knowing, cringey but fun and – without getting poncy – a celebration of life in all its meaninglessness. By the time ithey’re 30, all that plastic crap has been car-booted or binned and it’s IKEA picture frames and “nice rugs” from there on in. For others – and Ebay will attest – age just brings more of an income and bobble-heads, tiki bar-accessories, leopard-skin and polyester are the prizes at the end of a long weekend in Brighton, at a car-boot or on some over-priced collector’s site.
Anyhoo, enough. I’ve got carried away on this one, because…well, that’s pretty much where Andy Warhol’s Flesh For Frankenstien sits. Overblown, garish, in-your-face panto over-acting, whooping stereotypes, pearl-clutching reactions, wooden dialogue, spoof-like sets and Hallowe-en costume party clobber.
The cast are giving it their all, no doubt about it. The Baron – a fierce and glaring Udo Keir – whom we saw in 1970’s Mark Of The Devil – relishes his dialogue and a chance to spit and flail and give it proper madman intensity, screaming like Mussolini about his “creations!” and his “master race!” An extraordinary set of eyes on a beautifully chiselled face, Keir has rollicking fun shrieking at Otto and blasting his creations, while wrist deep in “zere gall bladder!” ranting and sweating and chewing the scenery.
His sister – the delicious Monique van Vooren (American Belgian born) – plays it as a mix of Vampira and Marlene Deitrich, swooning and panting over the lithe bodies of her farmhands. Nicholas – Joe Dallesandro – has come to Serbia via, if his dialect is anything to go by, The Bronx. Making no attempt at all to “Europenize” his accent (although to be fair, Vooren and Keir are vowel-chewing enough for the whole cast) the beautiful Dallesandro thunks and plods his way through his few lines, it clearly being sufficient to Morrissey that he merely looks incredible sexy with no shirt on and doesn’t – ahem – “feel the cold” during a draughty full-frontal moment.
Production values are just the right side of lovely. The laboratory is a huge proscenium of tile, statues, dark wood, bubbling phials and buzzing electrodes from the Hammer “spooky prop” dept. A huge stage where most of the wild action plays out, it gives a theatrical setting – not dissimilar to Rocky Horror – for the players to go full am-dram shrieky.
The movie has a small 3D history, being filmed in the Space Vision 3D process, requiring the standard cheapy red and green cardboard glasses. This version was shown on only limited screens in London, Stockholm and Australia, but is the primary explanation of why, whenever possible – gore and grue and innards are thrust and waved and waggled at the camera.
Critics, much like myself, are clearly divided. As – depending on your taste for the silliness and over-blown ham – this will make you laugh: “To know death, Otto, you must fuck life in ze gall-bladder!” “I am fulfilled!….But not yet!” and repeated screams about the importance of “a Serbian nose!” and you’ll have giggly silly fun, as you might with Mars Attacks, Pink Flamingos, Grease or the work of Ed Wood. For many of course, ten minutes in and you’ll be rolling eyes and sighing and getting all het up and cross that nobody’s “doing it properly,” and everyone is “tired and showing off.”
Nasty?
Oh yes yes yes yes yes. And therein lies a lot of the fun. For all its shouty nonsense (and honestly, it somehow mixes passionate, wide-eyed, hearfelt pleading performances with Carry On Screaming whooping swanee-whistle cartoonishness) Morrissey has got some beautifully textural, rotting, sticky, gloopy offal-flapping innards from Carlo Rambaldi.
If that name rings any bells, and for the cineasts and splatter-fans, it may well, 3 time Oscar winner Rambaldi is something of a star in the world of make-up and effects. More of his amazing latex/flesh work can be seen in more “upmarket” fare later in his career. In fact if you marvelled at ET or hid behind the cushion during Alien, then it was Rambaldi’s KY Jelly and polystyrene you have to thank.
No cutaways, no pull-backs and no hesitation has been considered in showing as much “Flesh” as the title of the movie promises. It isn’t, after all, called “Suspense For Frankenstein” or indeed “Plot For Frankenstein.” The whole movie is a glorious celebration of stomach-churning gruesome close-ups. Scissory decapitations (complete with waxy heads held aloft), unpicking pink-fresh stiches, plunging fists into lungs and kidneys and hearts, spurting limbs, missing hands, dangling intestines and torn open torsos are all lovingly shot in glorious technicolour close-up with “don’t spare the sheep’s blood” clearly written on Rambaldi’s call-sheet. I’m not going to call it “realistic” as I am no surgeon, and it’s all rather “cinematic” rather than “traumatic.” But for 90mins, you certinaly aren’t spared the innards and it’s howling, “uuuurgh!” fun for all you gore fans.
Ban worthy?
Well it was prosecuted during the VHS frenzy of the 80s. Originally passed with cuts for cinema, it had some material reinstated (about a minutes-worth) in 1996, not finally released for home viewing uncut until 2006. And for fleshy close-up gore, innards, blood-letting and splattery death, it’s right up there on the “blimey” list. Interestingly of course, aside from the grue, it’s a wholesome tale. In a sense. That is to say, we are not faced with the gritty, unpalatable, misogynistic, rapey nastiness of many a “Nasty.” No 17 year old virgins are stalked, no-one is beaten up, mugged, violated or attacked in the manner of, say, “Last House On The Left” or “Love Camp Seven.” The horrors are all “fantastical” in that gothic Hammery/Universal way – unlikely to encourage copy-cat violence as it’s all done with a sort of cartoony innocence. (The period costumes and lavish sets somehow soften the blood-letting, just as the silly comedy of movies like “The New Adventures Of Snow White” lessen the obvious pornography. So no. Don’t ban it. But don’t put it on after Christmas dinner either.
What does it remind me of?
Seriously? It’s got all the campy fun of “Carry On Screaming,” all the horrors and fleshy punctures of “Mark Of The Devil” (but none of the heavy-handed religious theme) and the theatrical glory of The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
“Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein” this very much isn’t. Nor does it give Boris Karloff’s agent anything to worry about, copyright wise.
Where can I see it?
There’s a really nice, widescreen clear HD version on YouTube, hiding under the name Filme Carne Para Frankenstein (Flesh For Frankenstein/1973) [HD 1080p] – Legendado #TrashMovie
letsgetthebannedbacktogether.uk 