Frankenstein's Castle of Freaks

This is an incredibly goofy monster/horror movie with some softcore porn and a fairly nasty rape/murder scene so don't let kids watch it, but it's great fodder for the riffers at Cinematic Titanic. The movie is so bad it makes you laugh even without all the jokes, and the jokes make it hysterically funny.

"Frankenstein's Castle of Freaks" is rancid 70's euro-exploitation at its absolute finest! Not a single line in the screenplay makes any sense, the females look hot & willing, the males are all sick perverts and the supposedly horrific make-up effects are so cheesy they cause you to laugh instead of to cringe. The residents at Count Frankenstein's castle are not only freaks, they're crazed sexual deviants! He has an army of lunatics surrounding him, all assisting in his macabre scientific research, and each of them is worthy of his/her own horror spin-off! There's the horny caveman lying on Frankenstein's operating table, the hunchback who has aggressive sex with the main butler's wife and – of course - the depraved midget Genz, who fondles dead girls' bodies and has peepholes all around the castle to stare at people having sex! Count Frankenstein is a bit of a sleaze-bag himself. When his gorgeous daughter returns home, he immediately falls in love with her sexy friend and even involves her in his demented experiments. Genz the dwarf gets banned from the castle, but he teams up with a roaming Neanderthaler in the woods and teaches him the 'art' of raping innocent women. Everything comes neatly together in the end, when the townspeople no longer tolerate the abnormalities going on at the castle and form an angry mob. As you can tell, there's a whole lot going on in this crazy flick, but it's unbelievably incoherent. This wacky production features none of the tense Gothic atmosphere of all the previous Frankenstein tales and I don't think director Robert Oliver ever intended to focus on suspense. This film is all about shlock, sleaze and the ravishing naked bodies of Simonetta Vitelli (as Frankenstein's daughter) and Christiane Rücker (as Frankenstein's mistress). The cameras follow them each time they take a bath or go swimming, preferably with Genz the sniveling dwarf spying on them. The horror-sequences are scarce, short and actually quite irrelevant. The photography and use of music are horrendous, but they acting performances are surprisingly tolerable. Rossano Brazzi doesn't seem to be very interested in playing the titular character, but the freaks and particularly the girls do a fine job. Utter trash, but vastly entertaining cult material.

FRANKENSTEIN'S CASTLE OF FREAKS is a genuine howler of a movie, an Italian "Sexy Horror" thriller made at the tail-end of the Euro Horror explosion and sleazy to a very enjoyable tee. Rossano Brazzi plays "Count Frankenstein", carrying on the family traditions of monster making using spare parts dug up from the local cemetery by his goon squad of misshapen, demented assistants. When the boneyard runs short of choice pickings he is not adversed to using the freshly murdered corpses of various supporting cast members.

The main thing to recommend this movie is it's audacity and utterly bizarre cacophony of weirdness that it hurls at the viewer. Almost nothing in the film is done in good taste, the assault on one's sense of propriety topped off by a scene where a mutated Neanderthal type & the lab midget kidnap a buxom young lass, tie her up, and enjoy the fruits of their labors. The film bombards viewers with a seemingly endless array of nude female bodies undressing, bathing, skinny dipping, and being ravished by the various goons in the gallery.

Little Person performer Michael Dunn -- best known for playing little Alexander on that weird STAR TREK episode with the telekinetic Platonians -- steals the show as the horny, vengeance minded dwarf. But the cast is actually filled with some top ranked Euro Genre talent: Luciano Pigozzi (best known for his work with Antonio Margheriti), frequent Euro Horror monster Xiro Papas, the always mousy Edmund Purdom, sexy Simone Blondell, and most fascinatingly Gladiator/Muscleman Matinée Idol Gordon Mitchell, who probably helped to finance the movie once the market for Spaghetti Westerns dried up.

I mean look, what can you say about a movie titled FRANKENSTEIN'S CASTLE OF FREAKS?? It's smutty, sleazy, non-pornographic monster movie mayhem, with a heavy emphasis on atmosphere & fleshy thrills over any sense of coherency. There's a Frankenstein monster (albeit without the Universal makeup look: Get over it, Frankenstein's monster can look any way someone wants), the sex-crazed dwarf, the Neanderthal (played by one Salvatore Baccaro, billed here as Boris Lugosi but best remembered by fans of Italo Sleaze as MONKEYBOY!! from Luigi Batzella's BEAST IN HEAT), women taking hot sauna baths together, some interesting gore effects, and drippings of Euro Horror atmosphere. The complete lack of morals sets it on a different plane than the Hammer horror films that it apes, but it's all in good fun, the low budget making it seem all the more patently absurd.

The reason why I call it a "howler" is that it's practically impossible to keep a straight face while watching a movie like this. One ends up howling with laughter not so much at how "bad" it is but how absurd the whole concoction seems. You also can't make 'em like this anymore, there is zero political correctness to be found, the attractive young women are all objectified into sex mavens and Count Frankenstein is mean to the little dwarf. If you can suspend your insistence on big-budget entertainment this is actually a sick, riotous little time killer that should make a fantastic party movie, provided of course all of your friends are a little sick.

6/10 for having the nerve to show it to us.

Even die-hard fans of the 60's Italian Gothic horror films of Bava, Fredda, et. al. would have to admit that those films aren't known their careful, logical plotting. But in the 1970's when these films were freed from the constraints of censorship (and good taste) and fell into the hands of less talented directors, they REALLY went off the rails, veering between downright silly and completely insane (sometimes both at the same time). And nobody suffered more during this period than Frankenstein's monster.

In this film "Count Frankenstein" (apparently he was demoted from Baron) takes time off from his building his monster to woo his busty adult daughter's even bustier friend. Meanwhile he has fired his lecherous hunchback dwarf assistant after catching him feeling up female corpses (did I mention this was originally rated PG?). The disgruntled and vengeful dwarf then does what any disgruntled, vengeful dwarf would do in a movie like this--he finds a group of Neanderthal men living in a nearby cave and befriends a particularly large one named "Oog". The pair plot their revenge (although not before taking time off to watch the Count's daughter and her friend skinny-dipping). As you might imagine the end is a ridiculous battle between caveman and Frankenstein's monster.

This film is similar to "Lady Frankenstein" but not as good. Lead Rossano "South Pacific" Brazzi is frankly not as good of actor as Rosalba Neri/Sara Bay (he probably doesn't look as good naked either, but fortunately we never find out). It also doesn't compare to "Flesh for Frankenstein" lacking that film's self-consciously artistic NYC irony, but all these Italian Frankenstein films are similar enough to give lie to claims of "F. for F." co-director Paul Morrisey (the guy who replaced the tripod in Andy Warhol's home movies) that his Italian collaborators made no significant contribution to that film. On the other hand, this movie is better than "Frankenstein '80" (although its PG rating precludes the rape-by-Frankenstein's-monster angle of that one). It's also better I than "Frankenstein All'Italia" (I'm not sure though since that one's only available in Italian, and I only watched it because of my strange crush on the late, obscure Italian actress Jenny Tamburi). As Italian Gothic Frankenstein sex movies go than, this one is fair to middling. You can take that as as a recommendation or not.

Count Frankenstein (Rossano Brazzi, best known as the star of the screen version of SOUTH PACIFIC) is busy at work at his castle home, sending out his gravediggers to get corpses for his experiments, and tinkering around with a tied-up cave man named Goliath (check out that unibrow). The doc's beautiful daughter Maria (played by "Simone Blondell") shows up with her fiance Eric (Eric Mann) and friend Krista (Christiane Royce aka Rucker) whom the count takes a liking to. One of his assistants is the dwarf Genz (3'4" Michael Dunn), a real sick-o type who fondles dead bodies, spies on the women bathing and having sex, and is eventually kicked out on the castle. He teams up with Ook (Boris Lugosi aka Salvatore Baccaro), yet another cave-dwelling Neanderthal man outcast, and the two plot to get back at the doctor. In one scene the duo kidnap a girl from town, tie her up, rape and kill her. Genz tells Ook, "I'm going to teach you the pleasures of life!" Meanwhile, Goliath (Loren Ewing) escapes and starts killing and townspeople with torches show up for the finale.

Helen Keller must have been serving on the MPAA ratings board when they gave this nudity and sickness-filled effort a PG rating. All in all though, it's a pretty silly combo of tried and true exploitation elements from the period and nothing much surprising happens.

Score: 3 out of 10