Frankenstein 2000 - Ritorno dalla morte

This was Joe's last try at a horror movie and it's an average one. The film starts out very, very slow and then after the halfway point, it gets a little more exciting when the actual horror plot kicks in. At that point it got a little nostalgic, I felt like I was watching the Euro-trash that came out in the early 80's. That was a nice feeling.

Georgia (Cinzia Monreale) is a woman with psychic abilities who is always having premonitions of her son being beheaded. One day she is attacked at home by some kids who belong to a local biker gang and is saved by Ric (Donald O'Brien), a former boxer turned handyman. When the corrupt local authorities place the crime on Ric, he hangs himself in his cell. That is okay because Georgia, who is now in a coma, somehow reanimates his dead body and uses him as an instrument for revenge.

By the time the '90s had rolled around, the Italian exploitation industry was petering out. Nowhere was this more apparent than in this Joe D'Amato horror effort that is better suited by its original, more literal title (RITORNO DALLA MORTE meaning RETURN FROM DEATH). Folks hoping for an exciting variation on the Mary Shelley legend will be sadly disappointed in this one as the "monster" doesn't appear until an hour in and this is more of a variation of PATRICK (1978) than a mad scientist. This is strictly by the numbers for D'Amato, who already seemed to have his foot out the door to return to the much more lucrative porn business (he would release one more horror film, THE CRAWLERS (1993), but that was shot before this). I will say the look of O'Brien, who apparently had a stroke before filming this, is pretty good with his skull held on by big clamps and there are some goofy gore effects in the last half hour. The biggest kick I got from it was D'Amato - who famously had Americans watching the Super Bowl in tuxedos in MONSTER HUNTER (1981) - showing he still has no clue about other cultures by having a group of neo-Nazi bad guys having a costume party.

Generally speaking, I am a huge admirer of the late Joe D'Amato. His greatest films, "Buio Omega" (1979) and "Antropophagus" (1980) are absolute highlights of disturbing Italian Horror exploitation, and many of the other films that earned this highly prolific filmmaker his reputation as the King of Sleaze, are also essential for any fan of Italian Exploitation cinema. That being said, he is also responsible for a number of stinkers, and his latter day Horror film "Ritorno Dalla Morte" aka. "Frankenstein 2000" of 1991 is definitely one of the very crappy films in D'Amato's impressive repertoire of almost 200 films. D'Amato had his heyday in the 70s and early 80s, when the Exploitation cinema was booming. In the early 90s, when the great days of Horror and Exploitation were generally over, D'Amato's work had also become less valuable, and by the mid 90s he switched to directing porn only.

"Ritorno Dalla Morte" obviously had an extremely low budget, even for the standards of D'Amato, who usually knew how to make the best out of a low budget. Even so, D'Amato, a true master of exploitation, still manages to put in some gore (although it's very tame for his standards). The movie was probably shot within a few days and doesn't even bother to come up with logic in its plot. Nevertheless, the film is quite entertaining. It was a great treat to see Donald O'Brien, the great star of many Italian Westerns, Horror films and Exploitation flicks star in one of his last roles here. The cast furthermore includes another regular of Italian cult cinema, Maurice Poli, who is probably best known for his role in Mario Bava's "Cani Arrabiati".

Another funny point for me was that the movie is set in my home country, Austria, somewhere in the countryside. The many absolutely ridiculous aspects of this film make it therefore especially funny for an Austrian. An entire little town is run by a rich guy and his private security firm, for example, and there is a bizarre disco named 'Heil', decorated with swastikas, in the middle of town (the display of Nazi-symbols has been banned in Austria since 1945). Horror fans will also recognize some plot similarities to a true Gothic Horror great, the Hammer Studios' "Frankenstein Created Woman" of 1967.

D'Amato has directed masterpieces like "Buio Omega", but also many stinkers, and "Frankenstein 2000" definitely belongs to the latter category. Nevertheless, it is fun to watch for Italian Horror buffs even if only for its fun value and for its star, the great Donal O'Brien in the lead. 3/10

You'd think that after directing so many movies, Massacessi would have managed to learn SOMETHING about the art of film-making. However, this is clearly not the case. FRANKENSTEIN 2000 really stands out as being a spectacularly terrible effort from a film-maker whose career has plumbed the depths of ineptitude on more than one occasion. The acting is possibly the worst I've ever seen, as unlike most of the old Euro-horrors, the dialogue seems to have been recorded real-time rather than dubbed afterwards. I can only assume that many of the actors couldn't actually speak English, as their delivery of some of the lines is absolutely HILARIOUS. The special effects are utterly abysmal. During an autopsy scene, you can clearly see a "corpse" breathing; the animal offal draped over its abdomen undulating suspiciously.

Hilarious, and probably worth a look to see just how bad a rushed film can turn out.

Until I checked here, I had no idea that Frankenstein 2000 was the work of Joe D'amato, the prolific director once again hiding behind one of his many pseudonyms; it all makes sense now, the inane script, the poor direction, the lousy acting, Laura Gemser as costume designer—all the evidence points to the King of Italian sleaze.

Sadly, this is far from prime D'amato, lacking the outrageous sex and gore that typifies his most popular flicks. The plot is both derivative and preposterous, a desperate mix of psychic and physical horror that rips off several other movies, most notably Aussie horror Patrick. D'amato's direction is at the lower end of his ability, years of working on hardcore porn having clearly dulled his artistic acuity. The film is also severely hampered by the foreign actors in his cast who fail to display any emotion in their lines and repeatedly stall while delivering them, sounding like Speak and Spell machines as a result.

Those who enjoy really crap Italian horror will undoubtedly glean some enjoyment from the sheer ineptitude of the whole thing and there is some fun to be had with the laughable gore—a few brief decapitations and a hilarious scene in which a guy has his head crushed, the eyes popping from the sockets—but hardcore D'amato fans will be severely disappointed.

Frankenstein 2000 gets a 4.5/10 from me, generously rounded up to 5 for several really dumb moments that beggar belief: a Mick Fleetwood lookalike chasing an irritating blond moppet with an axe; a fancy dress party at an Austrian nightclub adorned with swastikas; and a terrified woman, menaced by the 'monster', climbing onto a sofa for safety rather than legging it.