When director Richard E. Cunha (She Demons (1957), Giant from the Unknown (1957)) left Screencraft Enterprises in 1958, he set up shop with producer Mark Frederic as Layton Films, announcing an ambitious slate of 10 films over the coming 24 months. In the end, they shot just three – Frankenstein’s Daughter was the first with its double-bill mate Missile to the Moon (1958) and The Girl in Room 13 (1960) following shortly afterwards. Frankenstein’s Daughter immediately established the template from which Layton were planning to make all their films – shoot ’em cheap (Frankenstein’s Daughter cost the princely sum of $65,000) and sell them off to distributors Astor Pictures for a quick profit (they paid $80,000 for this one.) So it’ll come as no surprise to learn that Frankenstein’s Daughter is as impoverished as it gets, shot in just six days, primarily at the home of its producer.

It begins with an arresting sequence that makes promises the rest of the film can’t make good on, with teenager Trudy Morton (Sandra Knight) dreaming that she transforms into a monster by night. She insists that her night time rampages are actually happening much to the dismay of her friends and boyfriend Johnny Bruder (The EOFFTV Review regular John Ashley). She’s right, the victim of Oliver Frank (Donald Murphy), the lab assistant to Trudy’s uncle Carter Morgan (Felix Maurice Locher) who has been secretly experimenting on her using a formula that he and Carter have developed. While Carter is reduced to breaking into Rockwell Labs in search of Digenerol, a chemical vital to his work, Oliver – actually a previously unremarked member of the Frankenstein family – is setting about building the “perfect being,” and all he needs now is a brain. Said organ comes from Trudy’s friend Suzie Lawler (Sally Todd) which Frank implants into his artificial body only for it to embark on a murderous rampage.

There are so many things wrong with Frankenstein’s Daughter that it’s hard to know where to begin. The make-up effects are notoriously awful, particularly those for the eponymous creature. The monster looks nothing at all like Susie which should come as no surprise as it’s now played by a man, British-born acromegaly sufferer Harry Wilson and make-up artists Harry Thomas and Paul Stanhops hadn’t been told that the creature was supposed to be female. The lumbering brute that rises from the surgery table couldn’t have any less like actress Sally Todd if they’d tried.

There’s also the not inconsiderable question of why Frankenstein wanted Susie’s brain in the first place. She’s not the brightest of God’s little sunbeams (the film is largely populated by characters who are terribly slow on the uptake) so what did he stand to gain from transplanting her brain into the head of his patchwork creation?

Performances are at best perfunctory, at worst terrible, Locher being the worst offender. Though in fairness what were they supposed to make of the terrible screenplay by frequent Cunha collaborator H.E. Barrie (he also wrote She Demons, Missile to the Moon and Girl in Room 13)? Peppered with tin-eared dialogue, it’s ultimately the script that does for Frankenstein’s Daughter, much more so than the shoddy effects. It’s hard to imagine how any actor could have pull off lines like “You’ve always treated me as a monster, Trudy – now you’re going to be one” or “The way the female’s brain is conditioned to a man’s world. Therefore it takes orders where the other one’s didn’t” with any sense of conviction.

The script also takes off at odd tangents which seem to be there just to get the film up to 85 minutes. It’s 1958 so of course we call in at a youthful party where teenagers enthusiastically cut a rug to the strains of a clean-cut rock quartet, Page Cavanaugh and his trio, who belt out a couple of non-descript ditties (Daddy-Bird and Special Date) – with Harold Lloyd Jr, son of the legendary silent film comedy actor – that pads out five minutes of screen time before we get back to the monster nonsense. And Frankenstein’s original research involving the formula that periodically transforms Trudy into a nocturnal monster is dropped very quickly, never to return.

Frankenstein’s Daughter is a decidedly minor effort – it was released the year after Hammer showed how Frankenstein should be done with The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) – and exists really just to prop up a double bill for drive-in bookings. It’s barely distinguishable from any of the plentiful drive-in fodder of the time and, talking to Tom Weaver in his book Return of the B Science Fiction and Horror Heroes: The Mutant Meldings of Two Volumes of Classic Interviews, Cunha was dismissive of the film, mainly blaming the effects for its failings (“we just didn’t have enough money to create a monster that would represent Sally Todd.”)