Frankenstein Island

Among the most wretched and abysmal of schlock horror and exploitation films—Manos: The Hands of Fate, Astro Zombies, Blood Freak, to name just a few—is Frankenstein Island, an irredeemable piece of movie hog swill that will leave viewers feeling as if they were stranded on the beach of a remote island after being dumped there unceremoniously from a hot air balloon, which is exactly how this movie begins.

I can't explain the rest of it. The incredulous will just have to see it. I'm not sure the reason for its existence, except someone (most likely director, producer, screenwriter, and I dunno, maybe costume designer, best boy, and caterer as well, turd auteur Jerry Warren [1]) thought they could cash in on the celebrity of John Carradine, Andrew Duggan, and other aging creature feature faces. So, to that end, they cobbled together the worst aspects of gutter cinema and splashed them across the screen at the subfunctional level of a severely mentally challenged 12-year-old on LSD. But that might imply there was at least something to see here that was interesting, if inscrutable. Alas, there's nothing to see here, and, as one man whom I can't remember once said of the DADAists, they are "Nothing, nothing, nothing." This film, also (to quote my favorite Eminem album) is "less than nothing." Full stop.

Dadaism would be a step up from this bilge, but, regardless, the film concerns stranded hot air balloonists on an island, where one of them starts preaching for inscrutable reasons. Right off the bat I hate it; it's goofy and annoying. I don't know who the actors are, and I don't care. Moving right along, fur-bikinis from the set of Wild Women of Wongo, who are the descendants of ancient extraterrestrials, by the way, kidnap them (they also bring a dog named Melvin), and then they all go to Villa Frankenstein and meet, get this: SHEILA Frankenstein (I wonder if there's also a Debbie and Rhonda Frankenstein, or maybe a Jane Frankenstein), who is played by a blonde woman (Katherine Victor) in a revealing black robe who escaped from a bordello adjacent to the Grand Ole Opry, whose husband Dr. Frankenstein communicates with her from the grave (this is John Carradine, who never appears in the flesh in the film, but as a superimposed image of a very pathetic and strange old man ranting about the "Maidens of the Golden Thread" and how they have "The Power! The Power! The Power!"). Another old geezer, I think it's a Van Helsing or something, lies in a bed. He needs blood. Yawn.

Cameron Mitchell (Night Train to Terror, Terror on Tape) stars as a guy in a cage quoting the poem "Lenore" by Poe, and then disappears and I don't know what the hell he was doing here to begin with. Bad 1981 stock television crooknoses wander around hunched over like gorillas, wearing black turtlenecks and sock caps and Elton John sunglasses and fighting kung fu-style fights that look worse than the average interpretive dance. Hee-larious.

The props and special effects are literally from the Halloween store: plastic red devil pitchforks and some electrical apparatus Warren must have snagged at James Whale's estate sale. When old Frankie finally comes out of lurking beneath the sea, ala Cthulhu or something, he looks like an old fart in a bad imitation Boris Karloff get-up. He stumbles around, people fight and look incredibly silly, tesla coils spark and pop and crackle, and then nothing much of any merit happens. The end.

You, the viewer, realize then that you've been conned into wasting a precious NINETY-FIVE minutes of your ever-dwindling stock of days on this stink bomb, and you feel cheated. I first saw it, decades ago, seated next to my ex-wife on a couch at three A.M. after a hard day's night working at Pizza Hut, both of us stoned out of our gourds. The dope didn't make it any better.

I decided to torture myself once again due to a dream I had recently of the Frankenstein Monster standing on a beach. Maybe it was telling me to rewatch and review Frankenstein Island, or maybe it was telling me that Ol' Frankie is "all washed up." Maybe it meant nothing. It still means more than this pic, which is NOTHING. NOTHING. NOTHING.

John Carradine should have said THAT during his ghostly visits. As it is, audiences will be wondering to themselves what the hell he means by "The Power," as this picture is as dead and black as a blown bulb. Now let's get off this island, I'm tired of being a castaway on the rocky coast of the Isle of Rotten Flicks.

[1] Warren was a sub-par, Ed Wood-type producer/director who helmed scores of bad exploitation horror flicks, including Teenage Zombies, Invasion of the Animal People, and The World World of Batwoman, the last of which actually sounds promising but will surely also disappoint. He died in 1988.

Frankenstein Island (1981)

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