In 1970, my brother Dave and I watched Frankenstein 1970 on “Creature Features.” We just assumed that it was a new movie, whose title referenced the current day. We had no idea it was actually well over a decade old, and that the title (like Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey or the television program Space: 1999) was referencing a future time. The fact that Frankenstein 1970 was filmed in black and white didn’t tip us off at all, since our family’s black and white television turned even the Batman series into black and white (complete with a weekly taunt projected on our screen).
Anyway, I remember being disappointed because there are almost no scenes of Frankenstein’s monster in the movie. Instead, the monster, such as it is, appears wrapped in bandages for most of the movie. What’s more, the 9-year-old me couldn’t follow the plot that somehow had to do with Nazis. But I recently re-watched this movie, and now I can say that…I still don’t totally follow it. But let’s take this one step at a time.
The Plot: Boris Karloff is back, and he plays the last of the Frankenstein family line. The year is 1970 (which seems irrelevant to the plot, but whatever), and Karloff needs money to buy an atomic reactor to further his great, great, great grandfather’s experiments. So he rents out the Frankenstein Castle to a film crew which is making their own Frankenstein movie. (Our movie actually starts out showing the film crew’s movie being made, which, to be honest, is far more exciting and atmospheric than Frankenstein 1970!)
I should mention also that Karloff’s character (Baron Victor von Frankenstein) was tortured and disfigured by the Nazis for not cooperating with them during World War II. He walks with a bad limp and a (not terribly) disfigured face, but this back story really has no bearing on the plot.
As you might imagine, Baron Frankenstein needs body parts to continue his ancestor’s experiments, so he starts knocking off members of the film crew that have rented his property. Yeah, this is viewed as somewhat suspicious by the police.
So a bunch of people die, and in the end both the monster and its creator die when the atomic reactor explodes. Sure, some other stuff happens along the way, but it’s really not very interesting. And, once again, it doesn’t seem to bear upon the plot.
The Monster:
The monster is played by Mike Lane, a former wrestler who would later put in an appearance as Frankenstein on The Monkees. In the mid-1970s he would play Frank N. Stein on the Saturday morning television show, Monster Squad. Anyway, none of this really matters, because we never actually see Mike Lane behind those bandages. It could have been anyone!
This is why I was such a disappointed 9-year-old: The monster wears bandages throughout the movie. I assume this is because AIP didn’t have the rights to the visage of Universal’s Frankenstein. But other studios (like Hammer) simply developed a different look for the monster. In this movie, it’s as though AIP just didn’t want to expend the effort, so they wrapped their monster in bandages and called it good.
Now, there is a moment at the very end of the film when the monster is dead and the bandages are finally removed to reveal the face of….Boris Karloff! I’m not making this up. We learn that Baron Frankenstein had been making the monster to look like himself and carry on the Frankenstein name, or something like that.
The Atmosphere: I’m sorry, but I never found the whole “atomic age” angle to be especially scary. The long, drawn-out scenes in Frankenstein’s lab feature big, clunky, unrealistic computers with pointlessly flashing lights and such. This is not why one watches a Frankenstein film. Also, the film crew, with their 1950’s hipster slang (or at least, with their movie producers’ version of such slang) is silly and grating. In terms of atmosphere, you’d find more of it on Pluto.
Oh, there’s one more thing in terms of disappointing atmosphere: Baron Frankenstein has a garbage disposer of sorts in his lab where he gets rid of unwanted body parts from his experiments. When the movie was first put together, the sound effect they used when the thing operated was a loud grinding sound. Evidently the censors considered the sound to be too gruesome, so the film as released instead uses the sound of a toilet flushing. I’m not making this up.
General Comments: This is a disappointing movie. Once those brief opening scenes are revealed to be a movie-within-a-movie, we find ourselves let down. And even though Karloff’s performance is good as always, there’s only so much he can do with the dog of a script.
Tomorrow it’s back to Hammer, with their sequel to Curse of Frankenstein. And it’s a good one. You can watch Revenge of Frankenstein here.
Chasing Phantoms 