Lady Frankenstein (1971)

dir. Mel Welles cast Sarah Bay (Rosalba Neri), Paul Muller, Mickey Hargitay, Joseph Cotten


Dr. Frankenstein (Cotten) welcomes his daughter, Tania (Neri) home from medical school. She's managed to overcome sexism to win recognition as a fully qualified surgeon and wants nothing more than to help her father in his latest attempt to create an artificial man. Frankenstein, however, must pay a group of scummy criminals to steal bodies for him and doesn't want his daughter involved. Without her help, Frankenstein and his loyal assistant, Charles Marshall, bring life to a monster, which ungratefully murders Frankenstein (for no apparent reason) and flees into the countryside.

When Tania finds her father's body, she swears to vindicate his name by creating a new monster, which will kill the original one. Telling the suspicious policeman Captain Harris (Hargitay) that her father was murdered by a thief, she develops a plan to put Charles' brain into the body of a mentally challenged but handsome stable hand. She gains Charles' acquiescence to the scheme by promising him to become his lover once his brain has been transferred. Meanwhile the first monster goes on a killing spree and the police and townspeople become increasingly suspicious.

There are a few good aspects to this movie. Cotten is professional. There are a few moments of effective atmosphere. Neri is astonishingly beautiful.

However, the weaknesses far outnumber the strengths here. The original monster has to be one of the most ridiculous-looking in the history of Frankenstein films. He looks like something straight out of a bad 1950's horror comic. Since the lighting strike that brought him to life also burned his face, the right side of his face is nothing but a mass of burn scars with a protruding eyeball. How his eye survived the fire that burned all the tissue around it is inexplicable, and the makeup looks completely artificial. He also has a huge domed, hairless head, which looks comical rather than scary. He has no personality and we feel no sympathy for him. He kills Frankenstein and a couple of random people, then goes after the gang of graverobbers who dug him up. Why? How does he even know who they are?

This films seems to be a copy of both the Hammer films and the sadomasochistic films of directors like Jesus Franco (all three sex scenes in the film end in death), but it fails on both counts. The Hammer films were low-budget, but were anchored by fine performances in the lead roles by such accomplished actors as Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing; this film does have Joseph Cotten, but he has little to do and is killed off early on. Neri is sexy, but everyone else is quite dull and the script gives them nothing interesting to say. The verbal duels between Captain Harris and the head grave robber, which are supposed to sound like tough-guy banter, just fall flat. Franco, at least in his best films, like Necronomicon, could keep viewers interested with parades of surrealistic imagery, but this film is visually quite dull. Between the monster attacks (which aren't very interesting) and the sex scenes, nothing worth watching happens.

This is Neri's film, but she just can't carry it. It's not all her fault; her character is weakly developed suffering from confused motivations. At first she seems to be motivated by a desire to vindicate her father's reputation, but then simply by the desire to create a handsome and smart lover for herself.  The beginning of the move seems to be setting Tania up as a strong, independent woman, but in the end, she's controlled by her sexual desire; she's just a sex object. Spoiler Alert: She successfully creates her new monster just in time to fight the old one, who's returned to the lab. Tania and the new monster manage to kill the original one, and then immediately have sex on the laboratory floor. It strangles her. The End. What? This makes no sense, as the second "monster" actually seems to be a totally rational human being: Charles' (fully self-aware) brain in the stable hand's body. He has no reason to kill her. End of spoiler.

I'd heard a lot about this movie before actually seeing it. I wasn't expecting a good movie, but I thought it might be an entertaining piece of exploitation cinema, or at least a so-bad-it's-good movie. But it doesn't even rise to that level.