La maldición de Frankenstein

Dr Frankenstein : Dennis Price and his assistant Morpho : Jesús Franco, are attacked by the giant monster : Fernando Bilbao , as soon as he is brought to life. Then the monster is taken by the immortal magician Cagliostro : Howard Vernon , and his helper , the witch Melissa : Ana Libert . Cagliostro's goal is to create a new master race and turn over the World. Then Dr Stewart : Alberto Dalbes to do battle against the forces of evil and once again decides it's time to wipe them off the Earth , unfortunately his is attacked by Frankenstein monster .They have awakened .. and they are the sound of terror!

Typical Jesús Franco of the Seventies , this time revisiting Frankenstein creature . This is the follow-up to "Dracula versus Frankenstein" 1972 with similar techinician and artistic team, adding Paca Gabaldon and shot in same scenarios from Sintra , Lisboa , Portugal . Here shows up ordinary actors of the Jess Frank factory , giving lousy interpretations , such as : Howard Vernon, Dennis Price , Anne Libert , Britt Nichols , and film debut of Lina Romay , Jesús Frank's future wife and his muse.

It packs an atmospheric and passable cinematography by Raúl Artigot . Being shot on location in Barcelona, Alicante, Murcia and Sintra, Lisboa , Portugal. As well as atonal and weird musical score by Daniel White, Jesús Franco regular . The motion picture produced by Franco regular producers Arturo Marcos and Robert De Nestle who financed him several movies in the Seventies . The flick was lousily directed by Jesús Franco in his usual style . This La Maldición de Frankenstein or Erotic adventures of Frankenstein was one of a multitude of terror films directed by the hack Jesus Franco, such as : Miss Muerte or The Diabolic Dr Z , Gritos en la Noche , La Mano del Hombre Muerto, Count Dracula , Jack the Ripper , Vampyres Lesbos , Dracula versus Frankenstein , The erotic rites of Dracula , Los Demonios , Mansion of the Living Dead and Doctor Orloff Saga that includes : The Awful Dr Orloff , Secret Dr Orloff , Sinister Dr Orloff , Orloff's Invisible Monster , Faceless . Rating 4/10 . Inferior and below average horror movie . Exclusively for Jesús Frank completists .

To all of you out there who think that the likes of Steven Soderbergh and David O. Russell epitomize independent film-making: go rent this film and let the scales fall from your eyes. Made during director Jess Franco's amazing early 70's period, post Harry Alan Towers and pre-porno, The Erotic Rites of Frankenstein is a surrealist masterpiece, poetic, perverse, comic, and mesmerizing. Shot for next to nothing on location in Portugal, the film is full of evocative, wide-angle, hand held imagery that must have appeared jaw-droppingly innovative at the time, and still astounds today. Daniel White's atonal, experimental score skillfully enhances the film's nightmarish languor, and the roles, particularly Anne Libert's blind cannibalistic Bird Woman, and Howard Vernon's strangely sexy Cagliostro, are performed with aplomb and conviction. You won't soon forget the scenes of white-shrouded undead gliding through a mist-laden forest, the strange, red-lit shots of Cagliostro's acolytes blithely staring at cruel tableaux orchestrated for their perverse amusement, or a shrieking, silver-skinned Frankenstein's monster relentlessly whipping a man and a woman tied together over a bed of spikes. Anyone who doubts Jess Franco's talent should rent this DVD, and then ponder the pettifogging morass that independent cinema has become.

MORD 39 RATING: 0 (of ****)

I have no objections to low-budgeted horror films of the foreign nature...but when they're boring beyond endurance, it's mind-numbing.

Jess Franco is one of the worst directors in the horror genre (I'll give him respect by not saying "of all time"), but this piece of garbage makes his COUNT DRACULA (1970) look like a masterpiece. I can't critique this film very well, as I literally had no idea what I was looking at. The monster is painted silver, someone gets whipped, and that's all I am sure of. Dull, dull, dull.

A sort of companion piece to this dreck was DRACULA, PRISONER OF FRANKENSTEIN. While it too was poor, it was far less plodding than this one. As of this writing, EROTIC RITES OF FRANKENSTEIN is not easy to find...and that's the best thing to be said about it.

More hot hacienda action the ol' Franco way, featuring many of the sets, actors and characters from "Dracula: Prisoner of Frankenstein". "Curse" does in fact exist in two versions, as the "proper" version is called "The Erotic Rites of Frankenstein" and is roughly the same as "Curse" aside from that fact that in several scenes the characters have miraculously lost all of their clothes. Curse is the censored and "clothed" one, which also unfortunately includes an additional number of scenes not present in "Erotic Rites" which depict a gypsy girl called Esmeralda wandering around a wood and talking to an under-acting old woman who doesn't even appear to realise that she's being filmed. Needless to say these scenes have absolutely sod all to do with anything else and, in an act of pure sadism, Tartan Video decided to release this longer version onto DVD.

Being fair to it, "Curse" is a lot better than "Dracula: Prisoner" and with some alterations could even have made a tolerable 70s horror film in its own right. Its core plot isn't too far removed from the Hammer films being churned out at the time and there's some vaguely interesting stuff going on in it. However, that doesn't mean to say it's any good. Mercifully, Franco has vastly cut down on the number of crash zooms though still seems to have problems in focussing the camera a third of the time, and most exterior footage seems to suggest that every building in Spain is situated on an ungodly ground subsidence. The musical score is also questionable, giving us some nicely eerie tunes here and there and then assaulting us with jazzy percussion tempos during key action scenes, such as when Frankenstein's monster breaks into a poor young lady's bedroom and leaps on her on the bed. Ah yes, there's some naughty hijinks going on in this film – including a truly nasty whipping scene that goes on for too long (and is even worse in the "Erotic" version, simply because one of the people being whipped is a nude 50 year old man – urgh…) – but certainly nothing to get heated about. Then again, Franco's idea of erotica seemed to be to just point a camera at a naked woman and stay there for 30 seconds a throw. Ho hum.

Dr Frankenstein (Price) is reanimating a somewhat shinier version of his monster, with help from his assistant, Morpho (what is Franco's fetish with the name 'Morpho'???). Despite playing the title character, Price is killed approximately two minutes into the film. Now, poor old Price's characters often have a run of bad luck. I've seen him getting throttled, impaled, drowned, drained of blood, tipped into acid and "excited to death", but I think I wouldn't be wrong in saying that Curse gives us the most novel method of Price dispatchment: bitten and bled by a blind and cannibalistic bird woman. Mmm. There's something to write home about. The bird woman and a gurning helper steal Frankenstein's monster and take him to the true villain of the piece, Cagliostro: a ranting nutter who doesn't blink (yes, it's Howard Vernon again, far better playing some bloke we've never heard of than the legendary Count Dracula). Cagliostro initially seems to want the monster to steal lots of virgins for him but then decides that he wants to create the ultimate woman as a bride of sorts for the monster. Quite why I don't know but I'm sure if he had the chance he'd list his reasons. Frankenstein's daughter, Vera, comes to pay her respects at her dad's funeral, following which she steals the body and reanimates it back at the "castle" to learn who did the poor bugger in. Eventually she reasons that the best way to get her revenge on Cagliostro is to let herself get captured by his monster and… um, get hypnotised into being his completely willing slave. Yes. Erm, not quite sure what she was getting at, there. In any case, that's the status quo and it's not even including the activities of the good Dr Seward, wandering around the plot and chatting to people (probably looking for Bram Stoker for an explanation as to what on Earth he's doing there).

I said it wasn't as bad as "Dracula: Prisoner" and that's true. For a start, it can only tarnish the memory of one horror staple rather than three, but aside from that it at least seems to know where it's going half the time. Most of this is thanks to the dialogue, in stark contrast with its prequel; yes, this time characters actually talk to each other, a revolutionary concept if ever I've heard one. Dr Seward actually gets stuff to do here and even comes across as a decent enough hero character (even if he does try to chat up Vena at her dad's own funeral – yes, really), having a hand in the baddie's downfall as opposed to his spare part status in "Dracula: Prisoner". Dennis Price appears several times throughout the narrative despite the seemingly overwhelming drawback of having been killed but spends most of the time lying on a bed, twitching spasmodically and rambling about his monster and Cagliostro. From what I can make out, Price seems to be giving an… interesting performance (in other words, going over the top to exceptional degrees) but as it's dubbed in Spanish with English subtitles I can't really tell. Eventually Frankenstein dies after one ramble too many, only to come back from the dead as a (somewhat mincing) zombie who staggers into the next room to have a go at strangling Dr Seward. Price's demise is finally made certain when a police inspector chucks a container of acid over him, which seems to disintegrate Price's head in 0.5 seconds. Golly.

And then, 20 minutes later, it sort of... stops. I ought to be grateful that it ended at all.

This one's undoubtedly superior to Dracula, PRISONER OF FRANKENSTEIN (1971) – displaying a fair evidence of style throughout (notably some Bavaesque lighting).

It utilizes a lot of the same cast as that film: Dennis Price, in fact, returns as Frankenstein but gets little to do (this is his least performance in a Franco film – especially embarrassing when his character is regenerated); Howard Vernon now turns up as Cagliostro (I had been underwhelmed by his performance when I watched the Spanish version a few years back, but he's actually quite commanding); Anne Libert gets her most impressive role as Melissa, the blind and eccentric "Bird Woman" in Cagliostro's service (though the mysterious zombie-like figures who witness the titular events from behind bars are just as grotesquely made-up); Britt Nichols is underused, but her luscious figure gets exposed this time around (and, in any case, she's perfectly cast as Cagliostro's proposed bearer of a new master race); Alberto Dalbes also returns as Dr. Seward where, again, he's the hero; ditto Fernando Bilbao as Frankenstein's monster (given a curious silver make-up here); Luis Barboo is on hand as well but, now, he plays Cagliostro's henchman rather than Frankenstein's (the latter role is taken all too briefly at the very start by Franco himself); Daniel J. White also gets more screen-time than in the previous film (where he was just an extra) as a Police Inspector.

Missing here – consequently, the film runs for a mere 70 minutes! – is the irrelevant gypsy subplot (featuring Lina Romay) filmed some time later and eventually incorporated into the Spanish variant, dubbed LA MALDICION DE FRANKENSTEIN aka THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN...though the English-language edition I watched also bears this title!! Still, the would-be erotic rites (presented clothed in Spain) are silly rather than titillating: actually, there's only one (in which the monster is made to whip the naked figures of Barboo and Frankenstein's daughter in a dungeon with a spiked floor), as the intended procreation scene involving Bilbao and Nichols is ultimately interrupted by the heroes. Cagliostro's flight at the end, then, suggests that a further instalment may have been intended – but it never transpired.

Opinions about this particular version seem to go from one extreme to the other: it's neither one of Franco's top efforts nor among his worst, hence the middle-of-the-road rating I gave it. On the other hand, everybody seems to agree that the alternate Spanish release is a lesser achievement – even so, it's not that the loss of the tacked-on footage (or, for that matter, the benefit of nudity) dramatically alters the quality of the finished product!