October Horror Challenge 2023 #10: "Blackenstein"

For awhile there, I watched mainly sleazy old exploitation flicks, and I saw a lot of blaxploitation films, and this was one of the movies I checked out during that time, but I don't remember anything about it, so I decided to give it a go today and see what I think now. What do you think of that movie title? Nice and sleazy isn't it? That befits the movie, which is a sleazy, trashy little movie about a mad scientist in the 70s who treats patients with experimental medicine to heal their wounds. He decides to treat the fiancé of a coworker who has had his arms and legs blown up in a mine explosion. the Mad scientist (Dr. Hart) is able to restore the man's limbs, but something goes horribly wrong and the man soon turns into a killer. Now the creature known as "Blackenstein" or simply "black Frankenstein" must be stopped before he kills anyone else, but his fiancee still loves him, so what should she do?

It's sad that until recent years, if you wanted to watch a horror movie where all the main characters aren't played by white people, you had to resort to watching mainly blaxploitation flicks. These were angry little movies made cheaply and thrown together by ad hoc film crews who mainly wanted to make a quick buck and didn't much care about the art of cinema or anything like that. the difference between blaxploitation and exploitation flicks was, of course, that blaxploitation featured mostly black actors. It's sad that these movies were tossed away like trash and don't get acknowledged for being good when most of them aren't that bad. "Blacula" is pretty good and I actually think that it's sequel, "Scream Blacula, Scream" is a genuinely decent vampire flick. And "Blackenstein" isn't the pinnacle of cinematic genius or anything, but it's a fun little monster flick. it's better than a few Frankenstein movies I could name for sure.

Frankenstein was at its core a very tragic tale, and this movie is tragic in a lot of ways too. The poor guy who got his arms and legs blown off in the war, the crappy way the Vietnam vets were treated in the hospital where he's staying at the beginning of our movie, the Fiancee who never stops loving him even when he turns into a monster, these are all pretty sad and tragic events, and you almost can't blame Blackenstein for the people he kills, at least to start off. I kinda wanted to kill them too. So minus the scenes that were obviously filler (do we really need to watch someone sleeping in the lab for five minutes) this really isn't a bad movie. I've seen far worse.