Rish's Reviews
Flesh For Frankenstein, aka Andy Warhol's Frankenstein, aka The Devil and Dr. Frankenstein, aka an Italian title (the print I saw was simply called Frankenstein), was probably a mistake. It was a sick, stupid, grotesque, campy, twisted, perverse film, and I saw it in all its 3-D glory at the recent local 3-D film festival. I've seen three films there so far (Friday the 13th 3-D, Parasite, and this), and I have to admit, a little goes a long way. There are still six more films on the schedule, and I don't know if I can manage another one. Since by the time this review sees print, the festival will be months in the past, I don't know why I'm bothering to write this. Ah well.
Whatever the title, Udo Kier plays Baron Frankenstein, who is attempting to create a master race of super-beings made up of sewn-together body parts of the dead. His plan is to mate his male creature to his female creation, but he uses the wrong brain, and things go slightly outside of plan. But don't worry, kids, pretty much everyone has sex and dies in the end.
As far as the film goes, I have little to say. I've lost my notes, which seems to happen a lot (it's one of the downsides to being insane--one personality doesn't know what the other personality is doing), but I'll tell you what I remember. This was a film that reveled in bad taste. There's a word for its like, but I can't think of it now. Maybe not all the dialogue was bad, but there certainly was a lot of it. The flick was unnecessarily gory (with splatter effects that are gruesome even by today's standards), decadent in that Eastern European way, and had enough nudity to fill a bucket. The Baron's wife is rather sex-obsessed and takes something of an interest in her husband's creation (and pretty much every male in the countryside), but there must be something in the air around the castle, because it catches pretty much everybody at one point or another. Each character is depraved in his own way (even the Baron's creepy, tongueless children*, and they all get a chance to bleed before the end credits roll. Udo Kier was quite funny, actually, and managed somehow to be likeable, leading me to be morbidly curious about Andy Warhol's Dracula.
I don't really recommend the movie (to my knowledge, it was the first X-rated film I've reviewed on the site), because I didn't really enjoy it, but I can see why some people would. I imagine there are many for whom this would be a cult classic, and that's cool, I suppose. And of course, it would be better the way I saw it, in a theater, in three dimensions. Good luck with that.
*Okay, I know one has a single line at the end, but come on.