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Italy - France - U.S.A.
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1974
Directed
by Paul Morrissey
Starring
Joe
Dallesandro
Udo Kier
Monique van Vooren
Color
| 95 Minutes
| Not Rated
Format:
DVD (R1 - NTSC)
Image Entertainment
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Review
by
Brian Lindsey
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7
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9 |
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10
= Highest Rating |
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I
could kick myself for blowing this off for so many years...
because it's an absolute gas! Both an homage to European gothic
horror cinema and a campy, over the top send-up of the genre,
Flesh
for Frankenstein (perhaps
best known as Andy Warhol's Frankenstein*)
is that all-too rare example of a film that deliberately
tries to be "so bad it's good" and actually succeeds.
(Look to most Troma pics for the opposite case.) Provided you
don't mind a plethora of tasteless, taboo and just plain weird
subjects literally shoved in your face, you'll definitely have
a fun not to mention jawdropping time with it.
Cult favorite Udo
Kier, in one of the most delightfully crazed performances I've
ever seen, totally owns the movie as Baron Frankenstein.
The aristocratic, castle-dwelling mad scientist is up to the
usual ghoulish antics trying to create living beings from
dead body parts but this time he's also a fanatical Serb nationalist.
In fact, it's this belief in the superiority of the Serbian
race that's holding up his current experiment. With the help
of twitchy lab assistant Otto (Arno Juerging), the Baron is
constructing a male creature he plans to mate with the beautiful
"female zombie" he has already stitched together.
The "male zombie" lacks only a head, which the Baron
insists must have the perfect "nasum" (nose)
just any old proboscis won't do! The male must also possess
strong sexual desire and prowess, since the ultimate goal of
the experiment is to sire a master race. The female will give
birth to a new breed of human owing total obedience to the House
of Frankenstein.
While the Baron obsesses
over his work, the physical needs of his wife (Monique van Vooren)
who's also his sister, with whom he has two incestuously bred
children go unfulfilled. (Somewhat understandable, given she's
a stone cold bitch.) At the moment she has her eye on the estate's
hunky stable boy, Nicholas (Joe Dallesandro), a strapping peasant
stud with a well-deserved reputation as a ladies' man and a
severely conspicuous Brooklyn accent. Nicholas has been trying
to interest his terminally morose friend Sacha (Srdjan Zelenovic)
in the pleasures of the fairer sex but the tall blond dope is
completely apathetic to the idea; he only wants to become a
celibate monk. What his pal really needs, Nicholas decides,
is a trip to the local whorehouse.
He convinces Sacha
to go with him, unaware that Baron Frankenstein and Otto are
staking out the bordello in hopes of finding a head donor. In
a case of mistaken identity they ambush the men and cut off
Sacha's head, believing that he's the one with the studly
mojo. (At least his nasum is perfect.) Nicholas is only knocked
unconscious. When he comes to he's horrified to discover Sacha's
headless corpse lying by the road. He next encounters the Baroness,
who offers him a promotion to the household staff ostensibly
as a butler but mainly to service her in the boudoir. A singularly
kinky aspect of said service is to let the noblewoman slurp
and suck, rather noisily, on his armpit. (WTF?)
Down in the lab,
the Baron prepares for the culmination of his grand experiment.
Soon his "perfect" creations will receive the spark
of life. Sexually aroused, he humps the comatose female zombie
(Dalila Di Lazzaro) while fondling her entrails through an incision
in her abdomen... "To know death, Otto," he
tells his assistant, "you have to fuck life in
the gall bladder!"
Flesh
for Frankenstein is
a sick, twisted little movie, a garish goulash of necrophilia,
incest and splattery gore that occasionally achieves Monty Pythonesque
levels of absurdity. Knowing ahead of time that it's
more of a comedy than a horror film albeit one that's as transgressive
as it is humorous makes a big difference. Because it's played
in completely deadpan style against a classical gothic backdrop
(accentuated by Claudio Gizzi's very traditional orchestral
score), I could easily imagine someone who's going into it blind
being utterly discombobulated. The ludicrous dialog is often
hysterically funny merely because it's played so straight. Kier
effortlessly steals the show in this regard; his nutty, German-accented
rants are among the highlights even Klaus Kinski at his most
manic couldn't begin to compare. (The film was shot in English
using live sound recording, so the performance is 100% Udo.)
Cranking it up to 11 during the über-gory climax, Kier
also gets one of cinema's all-time amazing death scenes... "I
don't regret anything!" he defiantly boasts with a
six-foot pole piercing his torso, a bloody chunk of meat (his
stomach? Liver?) dangling from the tip. "I tried my
best!"
The same can't be
said of the rest of the cast. There's no discernible difference
in Zelenovic's performance whether playing the hapless Sacha
or the Baron's male creature (the one with the perfect nasum).
Until he goes mad with necro-lust during the wild third act,
Juerging's Otto character mainly serves as a sounding board
for Kier's bizarre diatribes. Van Vooren comes off more icky
than doable (her alarming lack of eyebrows is perhaps the scariest
aspect of the film), while "female zombie" Di Lazzaro
(The Pyjama
Girl Case) doesn't have much to do except stand around or
lie on the slab naked. (At least she's hot.) As the hero Dallesandro
demonstrates all the thesping skills of an anvil. Yet these
shortcomings hardly matter.
Lushly lensed by cinematographer
Luigi Kuveiller (Dario Argento's Deep
Red), the relatively low budget production makes marvelous
use of Serbian locations (exteriors were shot in Yugoslavia)
and elegantly dressed Cinecittΰ sets. The copious gore effects
courtesy of Italian maestro Carlo Rambaldi (A
Lizard in a Woman's Skin, Alien)
are the stuff of Midnight Movie legend. Originally exhibited
in 3D, Flesh
for Frankenstein works just fine in its
2D form; the in-your-face gore effects still 'pop' in the standard
format. It's a leisurely paced flick to be sure, but something
truly odd, funny and/or disgusting is guaranteed to come along
every few minutes. And Udo is a riot.
|
| *
The famous artist/pop culture celebrity was only marginally involved,
earning a co-producer's credit by lending his name to the project
for marketing purposes. |
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Previously
released on DVD by Criterion, Flesh for
Frankenstein was 'reanimated' by Image Entertainment with
this superior version in 2005. Unlike the out-of-print Criterion
disc the Image edition is anamorphic, giving the film its best
showcase on home video to date. The 2.35:1 widescreen transfer
is practically flawless (the least flattering moments all occur
during the opening credits); colors are vivid and detail sharp,
something I wasn't expecting given that Flesh
was originally a 3D movie. (Usually this results in a muddy
palette and soft, blurry visuals.) The mono audio track presents
music and dialog, even Udo's heavily-accented rants, in clean
and clear fashion.
As
with the Criterion DVD, an audio commentary featuring director
Paul Morrissey, Udo Kier and film historian Maurice Yacowar has
been ported over from a mid-1990s laserdisc edition. It's a cut
'n' paste job, since the participants were all recorded separately,
but still worthwhile... even if Yacowar takes a much too
serious/didactic approach to the material, his oh-so-careful enunciation
of every syllable eventually becoming annoying. Morrissey talks
about how the film came together, the casting and various technical
aspects, as well as his philosophy of portraying sex on film;
Kier is as you'd expect sardonic and witty. (I wish he'd had
an entire track to himself.) Morrissey also provides commentary
over Zelenovic's screen-test footage and an image gallery of production
stills. 6/19/09 |
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