Lady Frankenstein (ICWXP)

Film Year:  1971
Genre:  Horror
Director:  Mel Welles
Starring:  Joseph Cotton, Rosalba Neri, Paul Muller, Peter Whiteman

The Movie

About as good as any horror movie you can imagine that was directed by Mr. Mushnik from Little Shop of Horrors, Lady Frankenstein tells the tale of Frankenstein...with a lady.  Baron Frankenstein's daughter Tania arrives home and discovers her father's ghastly experiments:  bringing corpses back to life.  On the night of his greatest success, Frankenstein's monster turns on his master and kills him, and in turn rampages through the village killing his creators...and couples having sex.  CHASTITY!  Meanwhile Tania uses her father's experiments to conspire to give his partner a youthful body and have her way with him.

I'm a fan of Frankenstein tales, having spawned my favorite films of the Universal Horror franchise, consistently enjoyable entries in Hammer's output, Mel Brooks' Young Frankenstein, and the greatest of them all, Toho's Frankenstein Conquers the World.  Mystery Science Theater 3000 has riffed several films with mad scientists with experiments on corpses (such as The Brain That Wouldn't Die and The Atomic Brain), but they had never really took on an actual Frankenstein movie.  Leave it to the Incognito Cinema Warriors to dig one up (Cinematic Titanic would later do Frankenstein's Castle of Freaks and Rifftrax would tackle Frankenstein Island).  The movie they found was an Italian production most likely produced to capitalize on the popularity of Hammer's Frankenstein films, being released as it was winding down.

Lady Frankenstein mostly takes the Frankenstein tale, simplifies it, and adds gratuitous nudity to spice it up for the pre-internet-porn market.  There is a lot of ass in this movie, more ass than there is Frankenstein.  And then they top that with ass of Tania Frankenstein to balance it out.  If you thought your movies featuring corpse monsters stumbling around needed more nudity, then Lady Frankenstein is the movie for you.

Lady Frankenstein is a very upfront movie.  It doesn't really have anything new to add to the Frankenstein legacy, it just uses it to make a "whatever sells" horror movie.  Sometimes it becomes a tad incoherent as it utilizes its need to please moviegoers, such as the film's finale sex scene where the participants engage in intercourse while the building is burning down around them and the man strangles the woman, which is just bonkers.  It's not very engaging otherwise, though I can't say I was bored watching it.

The Episode

I think it was safe to say that I wasn't a fan of the previous Incognito Cinema Warriors episode.  After all of these years of hearing what an amazing fan project this was, watching and critiquing Bride of the Gorilla was a disappointing experience.  But for better or for worse, I've vowed to go the whole nine yards on their series of riffs.  Who knows, maybe they'll get better.  Given that ICWXP creator Rikk Wolf would prefer that I have started on episode two anyway, I guess maybe Lady Frankenstein is something of a second pilot for them.  So should I put Bride of the Gorilla behind me and listen to his advice?

I gotta admit, Mr. Wolf isn't wrong.  Lady Frankenstein is a vast improvement over its predecessor.  I started to be a bit more at ease with ICWXP when they got an early laugh out of me by riffing a curious background extra in the film with "Stop looking at the camera, please!  Thank you."  This is a riff that's better executed than anything they did in their first effort, well delivered and delivered with impeccable timing.  As they continue to watch this crazy Frankenstein feature I find that they've eased back on their overzealous delivery that annoyed me in Bride and settled back into a delivery system that, while it feels quite scripted at times, has a much better flow to it.  I enjoyed riffs on the monster itself, as well as a slight running gag about a missing staircase.  The jokes on Thomas, the mentally challenged manservant, borderline a bit tasteless but are largely hilarious.

That said, ICWXP does have a tendency to overshoot the target at times.  There are a few riffs in the episode on a character that they seem to think resembles Mr. Burns from The Simpsons.  While certain angles do work in their favor, for the most part the playing up of the resemblance becomes a huge stretch (I think he looks more like Gene Hackman than Mr. Burns, personally).  There are also points where they use the Benny Hill and Alfred Hitchcock Presents themes at times that don't quite work, which give me the feeling they put them in because they had nothing better to do at these moments.  But these are nitpicks since even the best riffing projects can have flat moments like these in them.

There is a bit of a change in the theater silhouette to further try and differentiate ICWXP from MST3K.  Now instead of theater seats at the bottom of the screen Rick and the Bots sit in a balcony...in theater seats at the bottom of the screen.  I'm glad they furthered themselves a bit more, but I'm not entirely sure the image works, since traditionally a balcony is above the screen and not below it.  Though I suppose one could make the argument that the projector is behind them and that's how they cast the shadow.

The host segments drop the laugh track, and I'm thankful for it.  For the most part I don't think the host segment scripting is a huge improvement over the last, though there are some quite funny moments in them.  This episode contains an arc about another survivor taking refuge in the theater, and pretty much being a freeloading slob.  Almost all of the segments are devoted to this, and not all of them are funny.  The best bit at his expense is the final segment where he begins dating a zombie girl off the street, which I'll admit had me laughing.  But the best segment of the bunch had nothing to do with this storyline at all, where Rick and the Bots make a charity promo for overprivilaged children.  This was well-written and pure gold.

I finished watching Bride of the Gorilla with the feeling that I experienced it just so I could add it to the blog.  When I finished watching Lady Frankenstein I felt like I actually had fun and would watch it again.  Lady Frankenstein is a massive improvement for the ICWXP gang, though they still have some kinks they need to sort out.  But I have more belief in this riffing team than I did when I started the episode, which is saying something.  This episode starts off with them riffing a trailer to their next movie, Bloody Pit of Horror (which as luck would have it was also riffed by Rifftrax).  I now look forward to reviewing that episode the next time ICWXP hits my rotation (as well as comparing it to the Rifftrax version at some point in the future).

Good

The DVD

Unlike Bride of the Gorilla, Rikk Wolf still offers Lady Frankenstein on DVD through icwxp.com as both a single disc and as a "Season 1 Collection" with Bloody Pit of Horror and Werewolf in a Girl's Dormitory.  The picture on the disc is an improvement over Bride of the Gorilla, with a bit more sharpness in the host segments.  Host segments are still in widescreen, though non-animorphic, while the theater segments are in full screen.  The disc has no special features.