In March 1973, Andy Warhol alumni Paul Morrissey and Joe Dallesandro decamped for the Cinecitta studios in Rome to make a brace of high camp horror spoofs that were sold in the States with Warhol’s name attached but which the New York artist seems to have absolutely nothing to do with whatsoever. First on the studio floor was Flesh for Frankenstein which came about after Roman Polanski suggested to producer Carlo Ponti that Morrissey might be the right person to make a 3D Frankenstein film. What he came up with was a beautiful looking film (thanks mainly to the ravishing photography of Luigi Kuveiller an the art diretion of Enrico Job) that begins well enough but very quickly runs out of steam.
Udo Kier is a seriously deranged Baron Frankenstein, obsessed with finding the perfect head for his “male zombie”, the companion to his already built and ready to be revived “female zombie” (Dalila Di Lazzaro). He finds it in the shape of a local youth, Sacha (Srdjan Zelenovic) who he mistakenly believes is a stud (he spots him stumbling out of a local brothel but fails to understand what he’s actually seeing) but who actually just wants to be a monk. A series of not-terribly-convincing plot developments finds Sacha’s best friend Nicholas (Dallesandro) taking up employment as the Frankensteins’ new servant, looking after their creepy, near-silent, voyeuristic kids (Marco Liofredi and Nicoletta Elmi) and sexually servicing the Baron’s bored wife/sister, the Baroness Katrin (Monique van Vooren). It all ends in tears of course as well as gallons of blood and an awful lot of entrails spilled on, thrust into and waved at the camera in glorious SpaceVision 3D.
What the horrified, pearl-clutching critics who swooned over the sex and violence that Hammer introduced to the Frankenstein story sixteen years earlier in The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) would have made of the far more explicit Flesh for Frankenstein boggles the mind. Carlo Rambaldi’s gleefully over-the-top gore effects make full use of the 3D process to allow the entrails of a disembowelled maid (Liù Bosisio) to drip through a grille in the floor and onto the lens, the Baron’s own internal organs, skewered in a sharp spike by his vengeful male creature, to hover just inches in front of the eyes of a startled audience and his toadying sidekick Otto (Arno Juerging) to proffer a handful of offal in extreme close-up. The effects are certainly very impressive (apart from a ludicrous severed head) but Morrissey just doesn’t know when to reign them in and allows some of the set pieces to lumber on long after they’ve had the desired effect of grossing out the more sensitive members of the audience. A bizarre, censor-baiting scene in which Frankenstein explores his female creation’s “digestive parts” with an increasing sexual fervour, leading him to have sex with her while fondling her internal organs through a large scar on her torso seems to go on forever.
It leads to the film’s best known and most oft-misquoted line: “to know death, Otto, you must fuck life in the gall bladder.” It’s a funny line but sadly there are precious few others in a film that isn’t anywhere near as funny as everyone involved with it seems to think. The humour is often juvenile, frequently falls flat and requires better performances from actors who actually understood the jokes for it to work. Kier seems to be having the best time, deadpanning his way through the Baron’s ludicrous dialogue, mangling almost every word with his peculiar pronunciation and he’s easily the best reason for watching the film. But most of it just isn’t that funny and by the time we reach the almost Jacobean finale (those worryingly children advance on a chained up Nicholas with scalpels, stepping over a pile of bodies that include their mother, father and both of his creations, suggesting that the next generation of Frankensteins are going to be just as crazed) one can’t help but breath a sigh of relief that it’s finally all over.
Had Morrissey (and uncredited collaborators Tonino Guerra and Pat Hackett) put as much effort into the jokes as he did into the gore scenes we’d have had a better film. Morrissey has always been a lover of the British Carry On comedy series though that love sadly doesn’t translate into any real understanding of what it was that made them work (for further evidence of this witness his dreadful Sherlock Holmes spoof The Hound of the Baskervilles (1977)). Anything good in Flesh for Frankenstein comes not from Morrissey but from his talented Italian crew who make the film look and (thanks to Claudio Gizzi’s marvellous score) sound as good as it does. Antonio Margheriti shot a couple of scenes (the close-ups of the disemboweled but still breathing lungs, a couple of scenes involving the children) and ended up getting sole director credit on the Italian prints to help it comply with Italian quota regulations.
Flesh for Frankenstein was followed by the better Blood for Dracula and both were released on video in the UK in September 1981 but only Frankenstein made it to the “video nasties” list. The British Board of Film Censors had removed 8 minutes of the more excessive moments from the film’s 1975 theatrical release and the initial Video Gems release was fully uncut. It was all too much for the protectors of our moral values who not only banned the full version but also a 1982 release by VIPCO that contained the BBFC approved shortened version.
The EOFFTV Review 