La fille de Frankenstein

One of my sci-fi/horror/fantasy reviews written 50 years ago: Directed by Richard Cuhna; Produced by George Foley and Marc Frederic, for Astor Pictures release. Screenplay by H. E. Barrie; Photography by Meredith Nicholson; Edited by Everett Dodd; Music by Nicholas Carras. Starring: John Ashley, Sandra Knight, Donald Murphy, Sally Todd, John Zaremba and Harold Lloyd Jr.

Quickie sci-fi/horror of campy interest due to its rank stupidity and cruelty to characters and the non-aficionado audience. An American son to Dr. Frankenstein is added to the story conveniently by an old coot who helped the original as a youth in feeding the Jekyll & Hyde notion to a dumb young girl who galliants monstrously about the countryside. Not content with this white nightgown special, he grafts another young woman's head onto the body of a spare parts monster, and the old coot declares of her: "Frankenstein's daughter".

Along with SHE DEMONS, this is one of those movies that used to scare the heck out of me as a kid in Brooklyn watching Chiller Theater on Channel 11 on Saturday nights. It was part of the new hybrid of films that came in during the mid-to-late 1950s, horror movies aimed at a teenaged audience. Movies like FRANKENSTEIN'S DAUGHTER were of the low-budget 'schlock' variety, made on shoe-string budgets by poverty-row independent studios. Now, as an adult, it's fun to pop these movies in and have a good laugh at the sometimes over-the-top performances cheesy sets and 'special' effects.

Watching the movie this time, I was aware of its incredibly slow pacing, which seemed to be exacerbated by the incredible awful performance of Felix Locher as Carter Morton. He seems to be reading his lines phonetically off of cue cards, as though he's never seen them before in his life! I don't mean to speak ill of the dead, but I'm sure his is the WORST performance I've seen in ANY film, ANYWHERE, EVER!!!! He's so bad that he makes everyone else look brilliant!

This film has several 'horrors' on offer - the two 'monsters,' Locher's performance, and two dreadful teenage musical numbers. Take your pick!

**1/2 out of ****

My earliest memory of seeing FRANKENSTEIN'S DAUGHTER was somewhere back in the early 1970s when I was very young. I was living in Queens, New York and back in those sweet days I used to bounce between TV stations to catch a Saturday night horror film on either Channel 5's "Creature Features" or Channel 11's "Chiller Theatre." Well, "Chiller" won out on that particular evening. It was the heart of summer and my street was having a festive block party. I can still hear the sounds of music and kids laughing and playing, as someone would frequently run inside and ask me why I wasn't outside joining in all the fun. As much fun as I knew the family and neighbors were having outside, I couldn't have cared less; I was riveted to an old-fashioned television set watching FRANKENSTEIN'S DAUGHTER and adding this night to my memory banks. I'm sure they've all since forgotten their block party...

It's strange to think that this film was only a dozen or so years old when I first saw it! Since we weren't yet too jaded by gore and splatter, I found some genuinely powerful moments in FRANKENSTEIN'S DAUGHTER: There was blood on some of the the victims, we got a glimpse of a dismembered hand, and we were also treated to mangled and meaty body parts. The icing on the cake was a shot of a character's face virtually melting away after being splashed with acid. Pretty potent stuff compared to what I was already accustomed to.

The 1958 feature seemed very relative to me at the time. My Queens block looked very much like the residential streets in the movie, and the basement laboratory could very well have been my own cellar, had I dressed it up with some test tubes and a large table. The added fact that the story was about teenagers (okay, so they looked more like thirty-something's) also gave me a point of identification. A backyard barbecue scene again struck a chord, and was particularly appropriate on this festive evening where a noisy shindig was actually occurring a few feet away, just outside my own screen door.

The movie starts with a pre-credits sequence: Sandra Knight is prowling the neighborhood in cheap (but effective) monster make-up, with bushy eyebrows and decaying buck teeth. One of her girlfriends (the sultry Sally Todd) is just getting home from a date with her boyfriend and screams at the very sight of her. The next morning, Knight awakens as a normal-looking girl with no memory of what went on the previous evening, though when she meets Sally for tennis, her friend insists that she saw some sort of monster last night. This strange revelation triggers memories of bad dreams for Knight, and she soon thinks that she could have been the creature in question.

Meanwhile, Knight's elderly Uncle (played with hilarious ineptitude by the always-funny Felix Locher) is experimenting with a formula to render man ageless. He has acquired a young assistant named Oliver Frank (short for Frankenstein, of course) who is supposedly aiding him, but who would rather see the old man dead so he can gain full use of the laboratory to concentrate on his own masterful experiment. Donald Murphy plays Oliver, and he's one of the most detestable snakes ever to slither down the Frankenstein Family Tree. He's a joy to watch at work, using the "nutty old man's" formula on his own niece by spiking her nightly glasses of fruit punch, thereby turning her into the grotesque monster from the opening sequence!

Later, Oliver connives his way into a date with Sally Todd and tries in vain to make out with her, only to be slapped across the face by the stuck-up vixen... "Hey," Oliver protests from Lover's Lane, "you agreed to park here with me!" Soon he has a better idea: he gets even by mowing her down with his car as she tries to run away! Then, taking her body to the basement lab, Frank decides to use her head on the hulking carcass he's assembling behind the old doc's back. When the automation comes to life, it's actually a male actor (Harry Wilson) who portrays her with a toasty-looking face (reportedly, nobody bothered to tell makeup artist Harry Thomas that the monster was to be female, so he solved the dilemma by smearing some lipstick on its kisser!) Amidst the rampages of Frankenstein's Daughter, we are treated to the aforementioned evening backyard barbecue. Still wondering where their friend Sally Todd vanished to, the other teens ease their pain between hamburgers and frankfurters while enjoying the live music of "Page Cavanaugh and His Trio". The band treats us to two '50s gems: "Daddy Bird" and -- my own guilty favorite -- "Special Date." I have since memorized all the words, and it's a riot!

With lovable horror clichés, gooey monsters, and funny dialog, this is a cult classic of its type from director Richard Cunha. It's a lightly-paced thrill ride from start to finish and one of the best teenage monster movies of them all. It's easily Cunha's masterpiece (if such a word applies here). At its worst, FRANKENSTEIN'S DAUGHTER is a harmlessly funny exploitation farce; at its best, it's one of the most underrated monster classics of the 50s. I'd love to give it three or four stars just based on sheer cheesy enjoyment value!

Well, words are hard to come up with to describe this routine premised monster film of the 50's. A descendant of the late Victor Frankenstein, his son Oliver to be exact, is hiding his identity and working as a lab assistant for a kindly scientist. The scientist is working on something beneficial to mankind, whilst his assistant secretly works his own experiments on his benefactor's niece. These experiments hideously disfigure her face and cause her to walk the streets scaring people at night. But soon we see that all this is really secondary to Oliver's real plans of recreating life...keeping the family tradition alive so to speak. With the aid of a disgruntled gardener related to Igor(or someone like that), Ollie and friend end up killing people and fusing dead body parts with the end result being the creation of a barely woman-like played by man being. Ollie is not just worried about creating life, however. He is a randy sort of chap who has the hots for the delectable niece and then her also delicious friend, played by playmate Sally Todd.

The rest of the film is how he is discovered by the niece and her boyfriend, with some implausible and disgusting music sequences thrown in. The acting is decidedly over the top by most concerned. Donald Murphy terrifically hams it up as Ollie. John Ashley is painful to watch as the boyfriend. Saying he has limited acting ability would be an understatement! Notwithstanding the complicated, highly ridiculous plot, the hammy performances, the cheap sets, the bizarre make-up, this is a fun one to watch. It grabs you early, has some fun sequences, and some lovely, lovely heavenly bodies to feast your eager eyes on.

Frankenstein's Daughter (1958)

* 1/2 (out of 4)

Dr. Frankenstein's grandson (Donald Murphy) moves to L.A. where he becomes an assistant but in his off time he is creating another brutish monster. This film runs 86-minutes and I can't help but think it would have been much better had twenty-minutes been edited out. As it stands, this is a mildly entertaining film that has a few 'so bad it's good' laughs but in the end there's just not enough going for it to be rewarding in its running time. What does work are the monsters, which includes the one the doctor is making but we also have a second one involving a young woman (Sandra Knight) who is being drugged by the bad doctor, which transforms her into a beast. The make up effects are rather silly looking but they do create a couple interesting monsters, although it's very hard to believe that actress Sally Todd is behind the main one. Now, what really kills the film is that the two monsters get very limited screen time as most of it focuses on the doctor, the young woman and her boyfriend. All the teen drama stuff just doesn't work and I'm not sure how many scenes we need with people not believing who or what the monster is. John Ashley, Knight and Murphy turn in decent performances but quite often they garner laughs due to the rather weak screenplay they're working in. Harold Lloyd, Jr., has a small role here but doesn't impress too much either.