Lady Frankenstein (1971)

You’re making a Frankenstein movie in 1971 but you want to add something different, to make your film look less like a rip-off of Hammer’s Frankenstein movies. So what do you do? You give Baron Frankenstein a beautiful sexy daughter who is also a mad scientist. And you make her the focus of the story. That’s the basis for Lady Frankenstein.

Of course you’ll need the right actress. How about Rosalba Neri? She’s sexy, glamorous, classy, she can act and she has the ability to be equally convincing as a heroine or a villainess. She turned out to be an inspired choice.

Joseph Cotten gets top billing but he actually has only a supporting role. This is totally a star vehicle for Rosalba Neri. She has to carry the film. And she does so with ease.

The setting is supposed to be England but it looks more like the Central Europe of Hammer’s gothic horror movies. In fact the whole visual style of this movie owes quite a lot to Hammer.

Lady Frankenstein adds some sleaze and some hints of sexual perversity. That was very much the trend in European horror at the time and Hammer were moving, a bit tentatively, in that direction. Lady Frankenstein goes a bit further than Hammer would dare to go.

Baron Frankenstein (Joseph Cotten) and his assistant Dr Charles Marshall (Paul Muller) are on the verge of the final successful breakthrough in their attempts to create a living man out of dead tissue.

The problem is that the brain they are using comes from a hanged murderer and this brain has a few malfunctions. They create a man-monster and bring him to life but they can’t control him and Baron Frankenstein pays the price for his error of judgment.

In the 1931 Frankenstein there is of course a famous scene involving the monster, a child and a pond. In Lady Frankenstein this scene is a little different - the monster hurls a naked young woman into a lake, having surprised her having sex on the lakeshore with her young man. This is the monster’s first killing but there will be plenty more.

Baron Frankenstein’s daughter Tania (Rosalba Neri) vows to continue her father’s work, which Dr Marshall’s assistance. This is where the movie gets interesting. Tania Frankenstein is not a mere simplistic evil mad scientist. She has a number of simultaneous motivations. Ambition is one motivation but she is also driven by both lust and love. Tania has a woman’s emotional needs and a woman’s physical needs. Dr Marshall can satisfy the former and she is attracted by his mind but his weedy middle-ged body does not set her pulses racing. Maybe Tommy, her servant, can satisfy her sexual needs? He has a strong masculine body. Unfortunately he is a halfwit. Tania needs a man with both an exciting mind and an exciting body. If only the dumb-as-a-rock but hunky Tommy had Dr Marshall’s brain!

It’s always difficult to judge acting performances when they’re dubbed, but Rosalba Neri smoulders when she needs to smoulder and she’s convincingly depraved. Joseph Cotten is very good - he did quite a few exploitation movies in Italy around this time but in this instance at least he is not just phoning it in.

Mel Welles directs. He doesn’t have much of a reputation as a director but here he is at least competent. It’s visually reasonably impressive with a fairly cool mad scientist’s laboratory (which was re-used in several other movies) and manages not to look cheap.

The big problem is the very lame monster. It’s not a fatal flaw because the focus is very much on Tania Frankenstein and her romantic and erotic entanglements that lead her to become a fully-fledged evil mad scientist. But the monster is seriously lame.

Lady Frankenstein doesn’t push things very far on the gore front. There is however a fair bit of nudity and sex. The movie’s selling point was clearly going to be the sexy lady mad scientist.

The movie was shot in Italy and partly financed by Roger Corman’s New World Pictures. The version released in the States was cut, apparently not so much to remove sex and violence as to get the running time down to the length Corman wanted. With the cut scenes restored the plot makes a lot more sense and the motivations of the characters are a lot clearer.

Lady Frankenstein isn’t one of the gothic horror greats but it offers plenty of enjoyment. Highly recommended.

This movie is included in Severin’s Danza Macabra Volume 1 Blu-Ray boxed set and it gets a lovely transfer. There’s an audio commentary by Alan Jones and Kim Newman which, as you would expect from those two, is both illuminating and entertaining. And there’s a second audio commentary and other extras as well.

Sex and Fury (1973)

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The Night Porter (1974)

Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter was released in 1974 and ignited a firestorm of controversy. It dealt with forbidden and disturbing topics. It retains its power to shock, but interestingly enough not for quite the same reasons.

It is Vienna in 1957. Max (Dirk Bogarde) is the night porter in a luxury hotel. He had been a concentration camp guard during the war and had done some terrible things. He is on the list of wanted war criminals but he is considered to be too unimportant to make tracking him down worthwhile.

He belongs to an organisation of former SS officers. They protect each other by destroying incriminating evidence and occasionally eliminating witnesses. They conduct mock trials as a way of trying to exorcise their guilt feelings although at the same time that they try to deny those feelings. Max thinks they’re fools. The war was a long time ago. He just wants to live a quiet anonymous life. It’s not that he feels no guilt. He simply doesn’t see anything to be gained by dwelling on the past.

Then he runs into Lucia (Charlotte Rampling). They recognise each other. They knew each other very well during the war. Lucia was a prisoner at one of the camps. Max was a guard.

One thing that should be noted is that Lucia is not Jewish. She was sent to a concentration camp because she was the daughter of a communist and she was considered to be politically suspect. Liliana Cavani was inspired to make this movie after interviewing female camp survivors for a documentary. The women she interviewed had all been sent to the camps for being communists. Cavani clearly wanted her protagonist to be such a woman.

It’s perhaps worth noting that had Lucia been Jewish the film would have had zero chance of being released. The subject matter was already touchy enough.

Lucia is married to an orchestra conductor. But the wartime relationship between Max and Lucia cannot be left in the past. They rekindle the relationship which is, for various reasons, a very dangerous thing to do. Max’s old wartime comrades may well now decide to hunt down Max and Lucia.

The story in broad outline could have been made into a safe conventional politically acceptable movie but Cavani consistently choose bold options rather than safe options. She presumably had no interest in telling the kind of story that had already been told countless times.

The events during the war are told in brief flashbacks scattered throughout the movie.

The first safe option would have been to make it absolutely explicit that Lucia was forced into her wartime relationship with Max. But Cavani does not do this. Of course Lucia would have been under immense pressure but the matter is left uncertain.

That wartime relationship was complex. Max fell hopelessly in love with Lucia. Lucia’s emotions are left ambiguous but was is made quite explicit is that she was intensely sexually attracted to Max.

When the relationship is revived Max falls in love with Lucia all over again. This time it is obvious that Lucia is in love with him. And her sexual hunger for him is breathtaking.

It is also obvious that Lucia is now a very willing participant indeed. She leaves her husband to move in with Max.

The success of the movie depends to a huge degree on the ability of the two leads to sell this story to us. Dirk Bogarde is perfectly cast. He was superb at playing contradictory and ambiguous characters. The audience has to be able to see Lucia’s attraction to Max as plausible. Bogarde has the good looks, charm and self-confidence to do this. A young woman might well find such a man very very appealing. Bogarde also conveys to us Max’s dark side. He is a sadist. That’s why he excites Lucia so much. That’s something that Lucia likes in a man.

Rampling is superb. She easily convinces us of Lucia’s lust for Max but she keeps Lucia’s emotions just mysterious enough to keep us interested. Could she truly be madly in love with Max or is it just her sexual hunger? These are things that need to remain uncertain as long as possible.

This movie contains of the great cinematic sex scenes. It’s not graphic and it’s not erotic but it’s unbelievably intense.

In my view the wartime events are not in themselves a major focus except insofar as they represent lives lived in darkness. Cavani has said that Max and Lucia are two people trying to escape from the darkness into the light. Of course there is the darkness within them as well. Perhaps love can redeem them. Perhaps even Max can be redeemed by love. The idea of a war criminal being redeemed by love was certainly going tp push people’s buttons in 1974.

Max is a hunted man and he’s a man in love, and he’s a man in love. An audience is always going to be inclined to be at least a little sympathetic to such a character. On the other hand we know some of the things that Max has done. Our feelings about him are going to be a little conflicted, which one assumes was precisely what Cavani was aiming for.

There’s also the the fact that Lucia cannot be considered as a straightforward victim. Perhaps not a victim at all. Perhaps party a victim. Perhaps partly guilty. She knows the things that Max did during the war. Again we’re going to feel conflicted about this character.

1974 was about the time that Stockholm Syndrome was first identified and there is perhaps a touch of that here.

The Night Porter is confronting and provocative but we need confronting and provocative movies. Highly recommended.

King of the Rocket Men (1949 serial)

King of the Rocket Men is a 1949 Republic serial that mixes crime and science fiction. There are those who consider it to be the last great Republic serial.

Super-villain Dr Vulcan is murdering scientists at a company called Science Associates. Professor Millard decides it would be safer for him to feign death. He and Jess King (Tristram Coffin) hope to uncover the identity of Dr Vulcan. They know he has to be one of the key members of Science Associates’ staff.

Professor Millard and King have one ace up their sleeve. It’s Millard’s new invention, a rocket suit. With its aid Jeff King becomes Rocket Man.

Being able to fly though the air is certainly a useful attribute.

There are quite a few gee-whizz inventions. There’s the rocket suit, a kind of death ray machine and Dr Vulcan has a few communications and surveillance gadgets.

The plot however is reasonably solid and isn’t too outlandish, being essentially a tense but straightforward crime thriller. The plot isn’t entirely reliant on the gadgetry. It’s a good formula. Adding too many fantastic elements was a temptation that made some serials seem a bit silly but this one mostly feels grounded in reality.

And in 1949 a rocket suit would have seemed like a plausible near-future scientific advancement.

The cliffhangers are not quite as imaginative as those that William Witney and John English provided in classic serials like Spy Smasher and Daredevils of the Red Circle but they’re still pretty effective.

The pacing is good, with plenty of action scenes. The fights are well staged. 

The hero and the villain seem evenly matched. Both are intelligent, both have some cool technology, both are determined.

Dr Vulcan isn’t a crazed megalomaniac. He doesn’t seek world domination. He just wants money. He’s a plain old-fashioned gangster.

The special effects are terrific. The flying sequences are exciting and look convincing. They looked convincing in 1949 and they still look surprisingly convincing today. And the flying sequences are imaginative. Clearly a lot of thought was put into coming up with ideas for ways in which the hero could use his rocket suit.

That rocket suit with its full-face helmet looks cool.

The stunt work is good as well.

Budgets for serials were getting tighter by this time but King of the Rocket Men doesn’t suffer too much from this. It’s slick and well-made and looks thoroughly professional. It manages to look more expensive than it was.

The pacing is pretty good and the action scenes are handled well.

You don’t win Oscars for acting in serials but the cast members acquit themselves quite satisfactorily.

This is not far future sci-fi in the Buck Rogers mould. This is more cutting edge super-technology in the present day sci-fi. Actual rocket back packs were developed at the beginning of the 1960s. It’s a crime thriller with futuristic gadgetry.

If you’re a fan of movie serials you’ll want to see this one. King of the Rocket Men is a lot of fun and it’s highly recommended.

This serial is available on DVD as a two-disc set from Cheezy Flicks. The transfer is acceptable.

Lost Highway (1997)

Lost Highway is a 1997 David Lynch film that received a mixed reception at the time.

It certainly establishes a weird disturbing atmosphere right from the start. Everything is normal, and also somehow wrong. We see a house. Everything is as it should be but it’s oddly disturbing.

We meet jazz musician Fred Madison (Bill Pullman). He has a very attractive wife, Renee (Patricia Arquette). It seems like an ordinary marriage. Then we see them making love. That’s normal but the music on the soundtrack is spectacularly inappropriate. It wouldn’t matter what kind of sex scene this was, whether it was romantic or sleazy or desperate or passionate, this music would be spectacularly inappropriate. Lynch is trying to make us see perfectly ordinary things as weird and unsettling.

They keep getting videotapes in the mail. It seems that somebody has been filming them, inside their own house. This creeps them out, naturally.

Then we see Fred walking into a strange hall of darkness. This is a David Lynch movie. It could be a portal to another reality, or a portal from one dream world to another.

Fred finds himself convicted of murder. He is on Death Row.

The guards get a shock when they check his cell. He has gone. There’s another guy in the call, a guy who should not be there. This guy is a young punk named Pete Dayton, a guy who is pretty harmless. Pete has not done anything. No-one knows how he got into the cell.

So where has Fred gone? Good question. We’re now following Pete’s story.

Pete has a girlfriend, Sheila. They have lots of hot sex.

Pete is mixed up in some ways with an ageing big time gangster, Mr Eddy. Mr Eddy is terrifyingly violent. He could give lessons to Frank Booth. Mr Eddy has a gorgeous young blonde mistress, Alice Wakefield. The sexual sparks are immediately flying between Pete and Alice. They begin a wild sexual affair. If Mr Eddy finds out they’re both dog food.

Shortly thereafter the movie begins to make less sense. It makes less sense every minute.

There’s lots of incredibly brutal violence. I’m not a fan of excessive violence but I’m open-minded about it. If it’s your thing that’s fine. There’s lots of steamy sex. And Lynch does erotic scenes quite well - sexy but a bit edgy.

Lynch indulged in plenty of weirdness in Blue Velvet and Wild at Heart and those films also challenged the viewer to question the reality of reality. But they had some coherence. They engaged the viewer’s interest. There was a reason to keep watching.

Lost Highway is in some ways a step backwards to the incomprehensible weirdness for its own sake of Eraserhead. If you loved Eraserhead you’ll probably love Lost Highway. If like me you hated Eraserhead then you might consider Lost Highway to be 134 minutes of soul-crushing tedium.

There’s lot of spooky surreal crazy stuff but since there’s nothing happening in the movie that we could possibly care about those moments come across as self-indulgence.

We cannot be sure of the identity of any of the characters. They do not seem to have fixed identities. They have no personalities. We do not know why they do any of the things they do. All of which makes this movie exciting to film school types. When talking about the movie they get to use the words subversive and transgressive a lot and that makes them very happy.

Lynch loves bad acting. Given that his films do not take place in the real world and that his characters are probably not real people that perhaps makes some sense. It obviously makes sense to David Lynch. This time he has excelled himself, assembling a cast of breathtakingly bad actors.

The interesting thing about Lost Highway is that as it gets weirder it gets less disturbing. Things disturb us when they threaten our belief in a stable ordered world of reality. But when the movie abandons even the slightest connection to reality we cease to be disturbed because we no longer care.

There is a way of interpreting this movie that makes perfect sense but the trouble is that it can make you cease to care about anything that happens. Of course there are other possible interpretations that avoid that pitfall but to me they’re not as convincing as the simple interpretation.

This is a much bleaker much more nihilistic film than either Blue Velvet or Wild at Heart. Watching it is a gruelling experience. I personally prefer Blue Velvet and Wild at Heart because they don’t take the easy option of embracing despair and nihilism.

I can see plenty of things to admire in Lost Highway but I have to say I did not really enjoy it. It just didn’t grab me. But it’s one of Lynch’s key films and most Lynch fans like it much more than I did and for those reasons it’s recommended.

I’ve also reviewed Wild at Heart (1990) and Blue Velvet (1986) which I personally consider to be Lynch’s two masterpieces.

The Other Side of the Mirror (1973)

The Other Side of the Mirror (Al otro lado del espejo) is an odd Jess Franco movie. What’s odd about it is the lack of weird crazy elements. It’s very low-key and very restrained. This is one of those cases when it’s almost impossible not to use the very clichéd term slowburn. This one burns very slowly indeed.

It starts out giving the appearance of being a straightforward domestic melodrama. Not a psycho-sexual melodrama, but just a very ordinary story about a young woman dealing with rather ordinary problems. Even when something fairly startling happens there’s nothing bizarre about it.

Ana (Emma Cohen) lives on the island of Madeira with her father, a very respectable archaeologist (played by Howard Vernon). He’s a widower. Ana is his only child. They seem quite close, but not in a weird way. When Ana announces that she is getting married her father seems a bit upset but that’s normal and understandable. It will obviously be rather lonely living in a big house alone after his daughter moves out.

The first very subtle sign of oddness is her father’s reaction to her impending marriage. He hangs himself. It’s a shocking to do but there’s nothing inherently bizarre about it. A man in his position might well feel that without his daughter his life will be empty and meaningless. He has built his life around her. Which may not be healthy if taken to excess but again it’s the sort of thing that does happen.

We have already had indications that even before Ana’s marriage announcement her father was bored by life. Boredom is a key theme that runs throughout this movie.

Ana leaves Madeira, moves to a big city and builds a new life as a jazz singer. There’s a burgeoning love affair between Ana and jazz musician Bill (Robert Woods). Ana seems to be reluctant to let things move too quickly.

Everything about this movie is very subtle. We just get tiny clues that something might be amiss. Ana has dreams. We assume they’re just dreams. Things that happen in her dreams happen in real life. Whether her dreams predict the future or whether something stranger is going on remains ambiguous.

She begins another love affair, with theatrical producer Miguel (Ramiro Oliveros).

She ends up back on Madeira. She hangs out with a circle of idle rich people.

Carla (Françoise Brion) and Pipo (Philippe Lemaire) have an open marriage. Maybe it’s becoming a bit too open for Carla’s liking. Maybe the middle-aged Pipo is a bit too interested in Ana. This little circle also includes Tina (Alice Arno).

Several murders occur. This is starting to feel like a giallo. There’s certainly an atmosphere of decadence.

There are however hints that there is something else happening. Perhaps Ana is psychologically haunted by her past. Or perhaps she is being literally haunted. Perhaps her father is reaching out for her from the grave. At the end we find out if there is really a supernatural element at work.

What’s really interesting is the very low level of erotic content and the almost total absence of any kind of sexual perversity. There is no indication of any incestuous relationship between Ana and her father. There is not even any indication of incestuous desires on the part of either father or daughter.

At this point we need to address the question of the multiple versions of this movie. The Other Side of the Mirror was a Franco-Spanish co-production. There were three different versions released - The Spanish, French and Italian versions. What’s really fascinating is that the French version was an entirely different cut with a lot of extra material, with one of the main characters eliminated and an additional main character (played by Lina Romay) added, although utilising about three-quarters of the original Spanish film. This French version, Le miroir obscène, was apparently so different that it was in effect a totally different movie dealing with totally different themes. But the extra material was apparently all shot by Franco.

And apparently the Italian release is yet another rather different cut.

Censorship was still fairly strict in Spain and the Mondo Macabro Blu-Ray offers only the Spanish cut. One might suspect that, given the much looser censorship in France, the French version might develop a theme of father-daughter incest that Franco could not address in the Spanish version. But apparently the French version switches the focus entirely away from the father and onto Ana’s relationship with her sister (in the Spanish version she has no sister).

So my suspicion is that Franco did not see the father-daughter relationship as incestuous at all. The real link between Ana and her father is boredom, and a mutual fear of abandonment. They both feel lonely and disconnected from other people, and adrift.

It’s also possible that this movie is one of Franco’s occasional attempts to do something more mainstream. It got rave reviews from Spanish critics.

Given Franco’s obsessive love for jazz it’s likely that the idea of doing a totally different arrangement of the same basic material to create a kind of improvised variation would have appealed to him immensely.

The Other Side of the Mirror is an oddity in Franco’s filmography but it is an interesting oddity. Recommended.

It’s perhaps worth noting than in 1970 Alain Robbe-Grillet had done more or less the same thing, using mostly the same footage edited in a different way to create two totally different movies, Eden and After (1970) and N. Took the Dice (1971).