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Frankenstein Meets the Spacemonster starts at Cape Kennedy as NASA unveil Captain Frank Saunders (Robert Reilly) as the man to pilot the spaceship Mayflower 2 to Mars, Frank seems alright but what the press don't know is that he is in fact a synthetic android designed, created & operated by Dr. Adam Steele (James Karen) & his female assistant Karen Grant (Nancy Marshall). The day of the launch arrives & everything goes smoothly at first, then an alien spacecraft blows the Mayflower 2 up fearing it a missile. The survivors from an atomic war devastated planet the aliens intend to land on Earth & steal our women to repopulate their own planet!
Directed by Robert Gaffney (it looks like his brother Ross Gaffney did the music) this infamous 60's sci-fi flick can be viewed in either one of two ways, it's either a horribly made incompetent waste of celluloid or it's a highly entertaining slice of 60's sci-fi fun. I think it all depends on your personal taste & mine dictate that I thought Frankenstein Meets the Spacemonster was a total hoot from start to finish & a extremely entertaining way to pass 75 minutes. Yes that's right, Frankenstein Meets the Spacemonster only lasts for 75 minutes, it certainly moves along at a snappy pace & the story is so silly that I couldn't help be entertained by it. There is no on screen writers credit but three names credited with the 'story' including George Garrett who went on to become the Poet Laureate of Virginia! Sometimes truth is indeed stranger than fiction. Anyway, I must confess to liking Frankenstein Meets the Spacemonster quite a lot. It's utterly silly with a bunch of aliens kidnapping girls in order to repopulate their planet (despite what the IMDb say the name of their planet is never mentioned & Mars is only used as a destination for Frank), sure you can poke holes in it & laugh at it all day long but that's half of the entertainment value for me. The dialogue for the majority of the film is OK & it's only occasionally that it becomes unintentionally hilarious, the story has a few sub plots going on & is surprisingly better than a lot of sci-fi cheapies from this era & the whole film has a certain likability about it.
Director Gaffney does OK, there's nothing that one might consider totally incompetent here. OK some of the special effects of the time don't stand up to today's scrutiny but that comes from the time it was made rather than pure incompetence or bad film-making. The Spacemonster itself is known as Mall & I have to say I thought it was a decent looking monster, I'm not saying it's going to impress anyone in 2008 but as far as men in rubber monster suit creations from the 50's & 60's go it looks pretty good. Despite near top billing in the title it only appears for about five minutes & doesn't get to do much, I liked the way Gaffney filmed it as well with extreme close-ups & shots from low down looking up at it. One thing that stands out in Frankenstein meets the Spacemonster is the extensive use of stock footage, for a film that lasts for 75 minutes probably about a third of that run time is stock footage. Having said that the stock footage at the end of the army is actually quite well edited into the film. The aliens look silly, they all have unconvincing bald caps on & daft looking Mr. Spock style pointed ears. There's quite an effective early scene when Frank (the tenuous link with the Frankenstein title) has the skin on his scalp pulled back & he has half a brain & a lot of valves & circuitry, when he crash lands back on Earth half his face is melted & goes on to kill a man with a machete for no reason, scenes which would probably have been quite strong & graphic scenes back in '65 although these days they are tame.
With a supposed budget of about $60,000 the film looks alright, the black and white cinematography & camera-work are both acceptable & the Puerto Rican locations where some of the film was shot look nice. There's an early film role for the Return of the Living Dead (1985) star James Karen while Lou Cutell as the alien Dr. Nadir puts in a performance you have to see to believe. The rest of the cast vary, some are predictably terrible while others are nowhere near as wooden as I expected.
Frankenstein Meets the Spacemonster doesn't feature Frankenstein at all & the Spacemonster only appears for five minutes so don't believe the title, however I throughly enjoyed every minute of it. I'm not saying for one second that Frankenstein Meets the Spacemonter is a good film, what I'm saying is it's an entertaining one with lots of charm & laugh value. Put it this way & call me mad if you want to but I would rather watch Frankenstein Meets the Spacemonster any day of the week than some critically acclaimed boring drama say for example No Country For Old Men (2007) which won four Oscars last night including Best Picture.
score 6/10
poolandrews 25 February 2008
Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw1826802/ |
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27-2-2021 18:08:04