Monday, October 21, 2019

October Horror Challenge 2019 #61: "Frankenstein's Castle of Freaks"





This is a case where the title of the movie doesn't do it any favors. It sounds like a wacky, sleazy, silly romp of a movie, and while there are elements of that, it's also got some things going for it that make it a better movie than I expected, and it almost deserves a better title, because no one will ever take it even remotely silly with the ridiculous moniker it has now.

So in this movie, the infamous Doctor Frankenstein loves in a secluded castle, continuing his experiments with dead bodies, trying to transplant brains into dead bodies and bring them back to life. He robs graves to achieve his goal, and he has servants to help him out with his evil schemes. In this version of the story, Frankenstein was married once and has an adult daughter who happens to be getting married soon, and she has returned to the castle to have her wedding with her friends at her childhood home, unaware of her father's wicked experiments. Things don't go well, and the people in the surrounding village are getting sick of Frankenstein's antics as more bodies go missing from the local cemetery, and Frankenstein's creatures become uncontrollable and commit horrible crimes.

The movie is ridiculous, and there's bad acting and gratuitous nudity, and a lot of the dialogue is silly, but there's some good here. One of Frankenstein's creatures has a subpar brain, and that's likely why he turns evil, but the other creature is more childlike and innocent, reminiscent of the creature in the original version. This creature even tries to do some good, which is misinterpreted because of his freakish appearance. There's some genuine pathos there that could have worked better in a better movie. It's a shame that all that good is buried in this crappy movie.


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