Cheap Flesh for Frankenstein - Criterion Collection (DVD) (Joe Dallesandro, Udo Kier, Dalila Di Lazzaro) (Antonio Margheriti, Paul Morrissey) Price

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Customer Reviews of Flesh for Frankenstein - Criterion Collection

WARNING: Do NOT Eat While Viewing This Film
One would be well-advised to heed my warning. This is one of the most violent, perverse, and laugh-out-loud (intentionally) funny versions of the Frankenstein myth. It's also one of my favorite movies (I like it better than its sister production BLOOD FOR DRACULA, though most tend to rate that one a bit higher) and, as far as I'm concerned, the best film to come out of the Andy Warhol-Paul Morrisey collaborations of the 60s and 70s. Udo Kier is astounding as the mad Baron Frankenstein, Arno Juerging is great as his idiot assistant Otto, and Monique Van Vooren holds her own as Frankenstein's wife-sister, whose insatiable sexual appetite is fed by hunky Joe Dallesandro. Poor Mary Shelley could never have imagined that one day her Gothic horror novel would one day evolve into something as hideous as this. But it's all in good fun, as the Baron and Otto sew up beautiful corpses and talk science in the lab. One of the Baron's hobbies is to make love to his female zombie (Morrisey mercifully spares us the more graphic details in this scene). He and Otto go to a bordello for the perfect male "whose overriding urges are sensual". But - oops! - they pick the wrong stud to behead. Instead of Dallesandro, they pick his friend, an aspiring monk who really didn't want to be at a bordello in the first place. When the Baron and Otto find that their male creature is frigid, the plot thickens. This film is NOT for people who are squeamish. The sex and violence is all of such a perverse nature that it isn't the kind of thing you want to sit down and watch with grandma. It's filled with campy humor and super-gory FX (imagine it as it premiered in 3-D!). But, in spite of the usual Warhol-crowd tomfoolery, there is a very real sense of quality to the proceedings. Gorgeously photographed, with a sumptuous score and fine period detail, this is a little too well-mounted to be written off as simply "a camp comedy". Ironically, the final scene is genuinely tragic! Interesting bit of film-buff trivia: This film (as well as DRACULA) was shot at the same time, in the same place (Italy), and with much of the same crew as Polanski's little-known sex comedy WHAT?. Polanski, who has a brief but hilarious cameo in DRACULA, let Warhol's crowd move into his Italian villa, but their eccentricities eventually drove him off. (As he has it in his autobiography: "They were a nice enough bunch, if a bit camp...")

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One for Joe & One for the Lizard
Also known as ANDY WARHOL'S FRANKENSTEIN or ANDY WARHOL PRESENTS FRANKENSTEIN, this early 1970s film is associated with Warhol only in the sense that the pop artist put up the money for the project and because it featured several actors--particularly Joe Dallesandro--who had appeared in various Warhol "factory" films. The film is a calculated effort to create a cult film, even down to deliberate courting of the X rating it received at the time of its release.

The Baron Frankenstein (Udo Kier) is married to Baroness Katrin (Monique van Vooren); they have two children and reside in the obligatory isolated castle complete with secret laboratory, where Frankenstein and his assistant (Arno Juerging) conduct their work. In this particular case, they seek to create both a male and female "monster" for breeding purposes. Unfortunately, when Frankenstein collects a shepherd's head for his male monster, he runs afoul of the shepherd's friend Nicholas (Joe Dallesandro.) The film gives every character a far-out sexual spin: the Baron and Baroness are actually brother and sister and their children are not only the result of their incestuous relationship, they themselves give every appearance of following in the family tradition; the Baron's sex life consists of unfastening the stitches of his female monster and... ahem... shall we say enjoying the pleasures of her internal organs; sexually abandoned by her husband-brother, the Baroness takes lovers (and they are spied upon by the children)--and then decides she wants to fool around the male monster; the lab assistant wants to imitate the Baron's explorations of the female monster; Nicholas rolls around naked with every woman in the village. And so on.

The film is obviously intended to be a bloody, grotesque, and erotic black comedy--but while it's certainly bloody enough and quite grotesque, it isn't greatly erotic and it's not particularly funny. It is also very sloppily made, and worse still it is as slow as molasses in January. The absolute best thing that can be said for FLESH FOR FRANKENSTEIN is that Joe Dallesandro, who can only be described as a rough-trade dream, has a scene where a lizard runs across his naked [behind]. One star for Joe and one star for the lizard. Recommendation: rent it before you buy it, because for most people one viewing will be more than enough.

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Ain't got nothing if you ain't got love
Udo Kier, Udo freaking Kier. Perhaps my absolute favorite bad actor bringing new life to the story of Frankenstein, utterly unshackled by any semblance of the book itself. Here, we have the anthropomorphic vision of a petulant, tantrum-throwing Baron Frankenstein and his plan to create not one but TWO wombies, male and female, to procreate and spawn a master race of wombies to answer to the will of Udo Kier alone. This scheme is more or less similiar to the one favored by Bela Legosi in the Ed Wood saga, Bride of the Monster. Playing devil's advocate, I never pictured a male wombie with too many active sperm cells, nor a female wombie with an overly active reproductive system, but, who's splitting hairs.

At the outset of the movie, Udo does in fact have the female wombie fully completed, but he needs the final component to complete her male counterpart. To finish his male wombie, Udo in fact needs the proper "nazzum", and nazzums, evidently, are reasonably difficult to acquire. So, Baron Frankenstein, with his sidekick, Otto (the same guy that played his sidekick in Blood for Dracula) sets out for his nazzum. He needs a vigorous nazzum, the kind that frequents brothels and enjoys fornicating with any and every type of woman. At this stage, we have the same slouching Communist stable boy from Blood for Dracula, and his good buddy who wants to go join a convent or something. In the dark, Udo mistakes the the buddy, rather than the whoremongering Communist, for the nazzum he wants, and ends up, much to his despair, with a homosexual nazzum. Great Scott!!!

So, Frankenstein throws the two wombies together, kiss him, kiss him, kiss him, kiss him, KISS HIM, but unfortunately the male wombie with the insufficient nazzum ignores the female wombie. In desperation, Udo throws the male wombie to his wife, Baroness Frankenstein (who looks a little bit like Skeletor with a blonde wig), but, not only does the wombie fail to become aroused, he kills the baroness as well. Good golly miss molly, what a waste! Simutaneously, Otto, the hackneyed sidekick, learns that he has his own Mortal Kombat Fatality--pull out their guts and let them see them before they die trick--which he promptly launches against the housekeeper and the female wombie when they both dispassionately spurn his groping Torgoesque affections.

Udo, disenchanted, runs into the laboratory, kills Otto, then fails to defend himself against the vengeful male wombie. My favorite line: "My experiments will go on. I will not die in wain..."