Let me spoil this review by saying right up front that I really loved Lady Frankenstein and I'm glad I did...because I finally saw The Substance recently and it was so good--like, "the best thing I've seen since...maybe Suspiria?? and I'll be digesting it and thinking about it forever" good--that it would have been extra excruciating if I'd pulled something terrible from the Mill Creek Entertainment 50 Movie Pack Chilling Classics 12-DVD Collection. Know what I mean? So I guess bless Lady Frankenstein extra hard for being such a delight.
I was in it to win it pretty much from the jump, when the title card popped up. I mean, just look at her!
Those fonts told me everything I needed to know, and what I needed to know was that this movie was going to be a drive-in dream. And was it, ever! It's the off-Hammer monster movie I never knew I wanted or needed, but it immediately earned its place in the ongoing spooky season rotation here at Stately Final Girl Manor.
By the early 70s, the iconic Joseph Cotten was in the "I love to work, gimme work!" phase of his career, where he'd class up joints left and right, often alongside his storied contemporaries. He featured in Airport flicks, Italian Airport knock-off flicks, made for TV horror films (including The Devil's Daughter and The Screaming Woman, where he reunited with his Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte co-star (and perennial Final Girl fave) Olivia de Havilland)...you name it, Joseph Cotten would appear in it. Here he steps into the lab coat of one Baron Frankenstein--perhaps the most genial Baron Frankenstein you'll ever meet. He makes paying for corpses and experimenting with dead bodies seem like stuff you just do, a passion as normie as woodworking or latch hook rug-making.
Soon his daughter Tania (Rosalba Neri, appearing here as "Sara Bey") returns home, having completed her medical studies. Yes, her medical studies. Tania was studying to be a surgeon, like her father, and her father is very proud of her for it and they're both like "fuck yeah, we're Frankensteins and we are both surgeons and it's hard being taken seriously as a woman, never mind as a woman in medicine, never mind as a
woman lady Frankenstein in medicine."
When I tell you that I fell off of my couch when I got a whiff of the feminism in Lady Frankenstein! To not have to go looking for it, even...for it to be right there in the text because director Mel Welles deliberately wanted to have feminist themes at play...honestly. I was told that politics in horror was a new thing because woke...? And here I must hear Lady Frankenstein roar? You can keep it!
Keep it in my eyeballs and earholes, that is, Lady Frankenstein rules.
But hey, you can still enjoy this movie even if you hate women because it's just that much fun.
The Frankenstein family lab is full of all the sorts of lab equipment you'd expect, from the bzzt bzzt machine to the bubbling bottles to a...clock.
Frankenstein's assistant Charles (Paul Muller) warns the Baron that the brain they're trying to reanimate is too damaged to be good--something about the hypothalamus and science-sounding jargon and look, I have never claimed to be a Lady Frankenstein, okay? I will take Charles's word for it. The Baron, however, is tired of waiting and forges ahead with his experiment. One lightning strike (and two flaming eyeballs) (it was so good) later, and you know how it goes: It's alive.
The Monster promptly kills Baron Frankenstein and fucks off into the night, where he clomp-clomps around the countryside and kills a bunch of people.
Charles professes his love for Tania, and she's like...yeah, I love you too, but you're old and unattractive, and so what if your brain was in the hot young body of our simpleton groundskeeper Thomas?
She makes a compelling argument and Charles agrees. But let's face it, Tania is a babe and so Charles probably would have agreed regardless. And so Tania fires up the bzzt bzzt machine, not only to see to her """womanly needs""" but also to launch her mad scientist pyramid scheme. After all, the best way to kill The Monster is to create a better Monster.
I will leave it to you to see how things suss out, though yes, rest assured there is some Monster vs Monster action before the abrupt-as-hell-but-kinda-nuts ending. Lady Frankenstein is so much fun--more fun for me, honestly, than most of its Hammer ilk. It's taken me a while to admit that I love the Hammer aesthetic and the idea of many a Hammer flick more than I love actually watching them. So sue me! But this Italian drive-in cheapie has the atmosphere (the soundtrack in particular adds a great mood), the right amount of light-sleaze (besides all of her other crimes, Tania's only real crime was being horny!), and a better-than-it-should-be cast (including Mickey Hargitay as the dashing police captain) that hits all the right notes. If you've never seen it, the time is right. If you have seen it, the time is right to see it again. Bzzt bzzt!
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