Frankenstein Island (1981)

"The backup brain was hidden years ago, just in case!", 11 June 2015

Frankenstein Island is an incomprehensible mess of a movie. Anyone rating it higher than I have is kidding themselves. There may be a laugh or two in the "so bad, it's good" sort of way, but this doesn't make up for the overall disaster than is this movie.

Most any review you'll read on Frankenstein Island will point out the numerous faults in the film. While I'm not going to even attempt to go over all of that well-worn ground, a few things really hit me that I want to mention.

1. Plot – What a disaster! Frankenstein Island feels like someone took about five movie plots and tried to jam them into one movie. Plot threads go nowhere and are never resolved. And in the end, we're left with a movie that has no ending. No attempt was made to wrap things up with any explanation or resolution. It just ends.

2. John Carradine – He may be listed as one of the stars, but he's never really in the movie. A poorly projected image of Carradine rambling on about a golden thread and power inserted about every 20 minutes doesn't' really mean he's in the movie. The 8X10 glossy of Carradine conspicuously placed in a number of shots doesn't cut it either.

3. Cameron Mitchell – Poor, poor Cameron Mitchell. He really must have been in a hard way to appear in this thing. He's one of my genre favs – love him in Blood and Black Lace. His role here is embarrassing.

I could go on and on, but there's really no point. I could write pages about things like: Sheila Frankenstein's name and hair, zombies dressed like WWII French resistance fighters, Amazons in leopard skin bikinis (where were the leopards?), Steve Brodies ridiculous one-eyed Jocko, a "backup" brain, building a raft when you already have a raft, long stretches of film with an uncomfortable lack of dialogue, etc. There's just too much.

1/10