Flick

In this offbeat film set in the swingin' 1960s and barely released in 1970, Viktor Frankenstein (Robin Ward), a descendant of the infamous scientist, finds himself expelled from an Austrian university, apparently due to excessive sword fighting. He relocates to a Canadian university during the days of campus protests, free love, and counter-culture movements. In Canada, he complains that "people here expect me to have a bolt through my neck to keep my head on." His academic pursuits lead him into the realm of mind control, competing with a professor over experiments targeting the brain's trigeminal nerve, on which the use of electricity and brain implants is Viktor's main obsession.

The film, which teeters on the absurd, is laced with intentional and perhaps unintentional humor. Scenes oscillate between chaotic sequences set in a club filled with marijuana smoke, mystical discussions, and bizarre activities like hard hat head-butting; Frankenstein's faux idyllic interludes with love-interest Susan (Kathleen Sawyer), who spends most of the movie undressed; to lab-based pseudo-scientific dialogues about the problems of brain experiments.

Professor: It's all very good working with these pickled monkey brains.

Frankenstein: You mean you want to use my brain?

Professor: It's not as sinister as it sounds.

Viktor's antics, including a marijuana scandal, soon get him expelled once again. In his revenge, using a mind control device, he manipulates fellow student Tony, the nominal "Frankenstein's monster" of the piece who is also an expert in tae kwondo, to eliminate his adversaries with a single deadly kick or chop to the neck. These efforts eventually backfire on Mr. Frankenstein quite badly.

Throughout, Ward portrays Frankenstein with a staring, detached bemusement, maintaining a stoic indifference even in the most bizarre or intimate moments. A few veteran actors -- such as Austin Willis and Sean Sullivan -- admirably chew the scenery here and there, with Willis relishing an extended rant calling Frankenstein and a group of rowdy, unruly students "a morally useless collection of ne'er do-wells."

After being kicked out of his Austrian university for fencing (don't even ask),a descendant of Frankenstein ends up in a Canadian university during the turbulent late 1960's era. It's fashionable today to mock this period its and counter-culture campus protesters, but at least in the US there were real issues involved then like civil rights and the Vietnam War. If this movie is to be believed, the campus protesters in Canada were nothing but a a bunch of neo-Luddites upset about things like the proliferation of computers(!) This does kind of tie into the bizarro plot, however, because the undergraduate Frankenstein (he's not technically a doctor here) is competing with his professor on mind-control experiments involving the "tri-genital" area of the brain (I don't even want to know what that is). Frankenstein tests his device out first on his girlfriends' pets, causing the cat to somehow kill the dog. Then, after he ends up in the school paper for a marijuana scandal and gets expelled from school, he uses his device on dim-witted a tae kwan do expert and forces him to murder all his enemies. There's a real hairpin twist at the end though that calls into question about everything that's happened previously.

This movie is obviously meant to be less than serious, but how much of the humor is intentional is hard to tell. Obviously, the plot is completely absurd. The funniest scenes might be the ones with Frankenstein and his sexy blonde girlfriend. The only reason this makes it as a "sexploitation" film is because the girlfriend typically wears only sunglasses and the (same) pair of panties regardless of whether they are in bed, in their living room, or outside. This is quite a contrast to Frankenstein who refuses to take his clothes off ever! (There's a very weird explanation for this later). She also has ridiculous bimboesque dialogue even by bimbo standards, while he is given to pompous speeches and reciting poetry. "What is wrong with the world?" the girlfriend asks at one point, and Frankenstein goes off quoting Wordsworth, "The world is too much with us. . ." which under the circumstances is apropos of nothing (but is pretty funny). She is also hilariously blase when he pits her pets against each other in a duel to the death via mind control.

You get the idea this is a very strange movie, which may or not appeal to everybody, but I found it (pretty) funny and (sort of) entertaining.

A largely forgotten little Canadian film, and definitely a product of its era, FLICK/DR. FRANKENSTEIN ON CAMPUS is a 'turned-on' sexploitation/horror/counterculture oddity which is often referred to as "one of the worst ever" by people who most likely haven't seen it. Truth is, it's not nearly as bad as legend illustrates, but it does have a frustrating self-composure uncommon to the praxis of sex-infused horror cinema, and therefor comes off feeling somewhat like a chaperoned date.

Formulaic Frankenstein jive personifies our ubiquitous mad doctor as a young med school student. Not surprisingly, he's been up to the usual diabolical scientific dabbling, and finds trouble with the school faculty who ultimately expel him. Wonted chaos and killing result, but only when the film manages to take a few breathers between softy sex scenes.

This is a modestly amusing time-capsule for its admixture of B-horror, go-go club psychedelia, and college campus activism. Centrally, however, FLICK is a rather buttoned-down and by-the-rules project, which may be why it has never galvanized some sort of cult fan-base. Creditable production values and an attractive cast certainly don't hurt matters, and while its not exactly a winner, it might be agreeable enough fodder for archaeologists of the ultra-obscure.

4/10.