Spider-Man (E. W. Swackhamer, 1977)

Spider-Man '77

"I heard that you were feeling ill / Headache, fever and a chill / I came to help restore your pluck / 'Cause i'm the nurse who likes to..."

So quoth Stephanie Blake (who, according to journal of record imdb would go on to star in the 1990 opus Invisible Maniac as well as having a small part in Ken Russell's Whore [steady on at the back: any jokes you're thinking I have already contemplated myself]) as the strippogram nurse from John Hughes' seminal 1986 design for living guide Ferris Bueller's Day Off.  Having had experience of the NHS of late, I have to be the bearer of the bad news that diligent and caring though the staff may be, I was not availed of any like services.  I knew I should have gone with BUPA.  In the remote vicinity of the topic at hand, though, whilst I was lollygagging around incapacitated I found my mind wandering to the strangest of places.  Movies, mainly, as per usual - hence the above thought idly worming my way through my head - and increasingly so drifting back ("Back, Doctor!" cried Morbius, luring me into the loving arms of Morpheus, "Back to your beginnings!") to the time I wrote a piece for the lovely website We Are Cult (right here: http://wearecult.rocks/the-original-dr-strange-and-other-stories-marvels-phase-zero) suggesting the existence (like the fabled 'Season 6B' of Doctor Who fandom) of a Marvel Cinematic Universe 'Phase Zero', comprising the initial run of made for television films showcasing the mighty heroes of Marveldom in the late 1970s and 1980s.  Oh, and into the '90s, too, including the last few Hulk outings and the Hoff-tastic Nick Fury: Agent of SHIELD.  If we must.

And so we take a peek back into a webhead world pre-Sam Raimi (still presumably in Michigan with the idea dawning that this short Super-8mm horror flick he'd shot in the woods might make quite a good ultimate experience in gruelling cinematic horror, maybe).  Pre-Mark Webb's abortive attempts at a Sony-centric Spiderverse.  Pre-.... whoever did Homecoming (oh, all right, Jon Watts).  I speak, of course, of the wonderfully-monikered Egbert Warnderink Swackhamer's trailblazing 1977 opus Spider-Man.

(I'm slightly sad that I initially misremembered the release date as a year or two later than it was, as I really wanted to title this piece 'Spiderman '79' after the Veruca Salt song.  Ah, well.)

Opening to the driving strains of Johnnie Spence's funktastic horn-driven title theme, the energy of the movie feels as much like the '70s TV action thrills of Starsky and Hutch as comic book superheroics - a feeling that grows with the opening shots of the gritty streets of late 1970s New York: all grey concrete towers and yellow taxi cabs.  As the opening minutes pass, we see first a doctor's office in which the physician suddenly breaks off his consultation with a patient the instant the clock hits 10.45 a.m. and leaves the stricken man baffled with the blood pressure monitor still strapped to his arm (the doc's suddenly becoming a wordless, mindless zombie and striding out of the surgery will doubtless have done his hypertension no good at all); meanwhile, in a Manhattan courthouse, a lawyer freezes in the midst of his summation to the jury as the clock strikes eleven and he wanders out much to the fury and contempt of the judge.  This pair of under the influence pillars of the community wordlessly team up to rob a bank, the doc serving as getaway driver whilst Mr Attorney dons a gas mask and walks into the building with a gun, a gas grenade and a briefcase that he soon emerges holding now filled with liberated money.  All of this done silently and emotionlessly, they drive through the streets to an obviously preset destination where they drive the car straight into a brick wall.  A pair of goons (the lead one being played by the instantly recognisable angular-faced character actor Len Lesser) then emerge from hiding, taking the golden briefcase as well as the distinctive circular pins that each man is wearing on his jacket lapel, and disappear.

Don't you just love the personal touch of a hired goon?

Across the mean streets, at Midtown High University, science student Peter Parker (Friedrich Von Trapp himself, Nicholas Hammond) is trying both to control his allergic sneezes and gain his PhD along with fellow student ("Greetings, fellow students!") Dave (actor and professional magician Larry Anderson, who would shortly go on to make a cameo at the end of the aforementioned 1978 Doctor Strange movie and later be the original pre-shooting in the face Michael Knight [nee Long] in the pilot episode of Knight Rider before regenerating into the Hoff).  After a bizarre experimental laboratory task involving remotely manipulating an Erlenmeyer flask full of toxic waste (what sort of module did these guys pick?  How do you do a proper Intro-Hypothesis-Method-Procedure-Results-Conclusion write-up on that?) results in the spider who hangs suspended from his strand of web within the container getting nuked, the unfortunate atomic arachnid gets one good bite in on the oblivious Parker before crawling off to fade away and irradiate.

As Peter leaves to head home to his Aunt May, another robbery is in progress as a Cameron Mitchell-looking motherfucker (who soon turns out to be a high court judge) holds up an armoured car and makes off with the big bux in the same robotic manner as the previous miscreants, his kamikaze driving taking him straight towards Pete and pursuing him straight down a blind alley to plough into the cold cement at the end of the tunnel - prompting the panicked Parker to instinctively leap and crawl up the wall to safety before breathlessly staring at his hands (spider-hands, spider-hands, do whatever a spider can) once he reaches the top.  After trying to explain the circumstances of the crash  and subsequent disappearance of the cash to the gruff police captain Barbera (Michael Pataki, who has had a fist fight with Scotty as the boorish Klingon Korax in 'The Trouble with Tribbles', been the owner of Zoltan, Hound of Dracula and been the medical carer for the boogeyman in Halloween 4 in his long and varied career), Parker heads to the offices of that great bastion of the Fourth Estate The Daily Bugle.  Proprietor and publisher J. Jonah Jameson (David White, who played Darrin Stephens' boss Larry Tate in the long-running magicom Bewitched) is already at his bellowing blusterous best over the inexplicable rash of robberies when a television newscaster - played by "surely that's a porn star name?" Ivan Bonar - relays the information that in "one of the most bizarre crimes in the history of this city" (big words, pal.  This is Noo Yawk) a ransom demand is being made of New York City by the shadowy mastermind behind these events.  This mysterious supervillain is holding the city to extortion by stating that ten individuals throughout NYC have been pre-programmed to commit suicide unless he is paid the sum of FIFTY MILLION DOLLARS.

This being the case, neither the volcanic Jonah nor his more cool-headed editor in chief and moral conscience Robbie Robertson (Hilly Hicks) are minded to pay Parker the money he's asking for the photographs he took of the almost fatal crash ("A wreck is a wreck is a wreck!" J.J. growls in a Gertrude Steinian bout of solipsism), and are more interested in the tales of a so-called "Spider-Man" ("That's what these drunks call him") reportedly spotted scaling the sheer walls of buildings.  And so our friendly neighbourhood student-cum-freelance photographer begins to practise and hone his new-found spidery skills - waiting until Aunt May (Jeff Donnell, yes she's a woman called Jeff, so what?) is out, he climbs out of his bedroom window and scales the eaves, gables and balustrades of the house in a heartwarmingly nostalgic display of the naive '70s enthusiasm for {and belief in the abilities of) CSO / Chromakey / bluescreen.  After somehow managing to stitch himself together a pretty impressive costume for a homemade effort (perhaps his other major was in needlework?  At any rate, he'd be a hit a few decades later when the cosplay thing kicked in), our nascent Spidey utilises the preset timer function on his camera to capture a few happy snaps of his costumed self pulling some wall-crawling moves and gets them to the Bugle sharpish.

Whilst J.J., Robbie and Peter are in the newspaper office, a report comes in of yet another mystery crime following the zombified robbery/crash into a wall/cash goes missing template, the target this time being a factory payroll.  After Jameson orders Robbie to put their top snap-man MacNeill on the job only to be told that he's already out on an assignment, the eager Peter is dispatched to the scene of the prang to find Captain Barbera and his sidekick Monaghan already there ("A professor who steals a Payroll?  They don't make crooks like they used to!").  The "crazy lone wolf" - as Barbera calls him - semi-conscious behind the steering wheel is the respected Professor Noah Tyler (Ivor Francis), a teacher at the university, and Peter accompanies his daughter Judy (Lisa Eilbacher) to the hospital.  Watching on is Len Lesser's Chief Goon, who radios his shadowy boss - whose face remains unrevealed like a pre-You Only Live Twice Ernst Stavro Blofeld - to inform him that the plan has gone awry as Tyler has survived.

At the hospital, after Judy and Peter are asked to leave the amnesiac Prof alone to rest, the goon slips in disguised as a doctor to place another of the strange pins on the Tyler's lapel whilst the villain in his shadowy base manipulates whirring machinery with the inputted order 'NOAH TYLER - DESTROY'.  The frail academician suddenly finds himself clambering out of his sickbed and climbing to the window for a spot of leg-dangling upon the sill as he readies himself to hurl his body down, down to dash upon the ground down below.  This is Pete's time to rise, and so off he dashes to the bushes to strip into his red and blue union suit and scale the hospital wall to intercept the suddenly suicidal doc and carry him all the way up to the roof and hand him over to the cops before skittering away before the eyes of Barbera - "Who is that character anyway?" he asks.  I dunno, man.  Is it Ben Reilly, the Scarlet Spider?

When Judy later confides in Peter about a secretive self-improvement group that her father had joined and that she thinks the other group members might have information that can hep understand what's happened to him, Parker agrees to accompany her to the group session (well, she is very attractive... oh.  Not that kind of 'group session'.  Right).  There they meet the charismatic cult leader Edward Byron (Thayer David, the eminent Professor T. Eliot Stokes of long-running gothy horror soap opera Dark Shadows), who allows them to sit in on part of the meeting but politely asks them as they are not full members to leave before the private part of the conclave.  This is the part where they all throw their keys in a bowl, isn't it?  But, wait, no: it isn't.  This is the part when Byron darkens the lights and flashes disco strobes into the eyes of his assembly whilst intoning hypnotic suggestions over an echoing tannoy that makes his low bass rumble sound as though it were coming from beneath the sea.  Then he issues pre-programmed instructions for a number of them to kill themselves the instant they are issued the command.  Which, like, completely harshes the mellow that he had going on, man.

Paying a return visit later in his more comfortable clothes Spidey capers across the rooftops of nearby buildings, leaping o'er the chasms between them as if skipping over puddles to clamber into a high office window.  Ol' Webhead carefully makes his way through the silent and empty chambers of Byron's sanctum, searching for any evidence and then OMG NINJA ATTACK!!  Out of nowhere a trio of Kendo killers armed with heavy bamboo staffs and snarling threatening guttural warnings advance.  A man in a lycra gimp suit tussling with a large shaven-headed man with a moustache?  Nothing homoerotic here - move along.  Using his powers to his advantage, Spidey has the high ground as he scampers along the ceiling and walls to evade the "HAI!!" thrusts and swings of the mighty bo (Donatello's just can't get the staff these days) and leaves the martial artists encased in the sticky white goo he squirts over them (steady on, this ain't webbukkake.com) before making his egress from the roof by shooting a webline to a nearby flagpole and swinging to another building, and all without being made of CGI.

As the deadline of noon on Friday looms, Peter believes that he's made a breakthrough when his lab equipment picks up a strong microwave transmission sequence that he works out to be the method utilised by Byron to activate his somnambulist sleeper cells.  Hurrying to the police precinct to give this vital information to Captain Barbera, he is overcome by the hypnotic wave when the badge pin that Byron attached to his jacket earlier is activated.  As The Ten, all triggered and ready for noon doomsday, make their ways to their designated places of self-destruction (a man stops his car in the middle of a bridge and exits the vehicle to hurl himself over the side, a woman stands atop a skyscraper, the lovely Judy waits upon the edge of a subway platform ready to fall 'neath an oncoming train) Peter sleepwalks his way into the Empire State Building, makes his way into the lift, ascends to the eyrie of the viewing platform and readies himself to climb over the protective railings and drop into the abyss.  However, the caprice of fate intervenes and as Byron types in the 'PETER PARKER - DESTROY' command (perhaps 10 PRINT 'PETER PARKER - DESTROY' 20 GOTO 10 RUN would have worked better?) and Peter attempts to obey, the prong of a rail catches the pin badge and it falls off, snapping him out of Byron's spell.  Rushing in costume to Byron's base, just before the clock strikes 12 Spidey fires off a web that ensnares the broadcasting aerial dish atop the roof and tears it down - causing Byron's hypno-machine to start sparking and spitting like Kenneth Strickfaden arc generators and Tesla coils and turning the ray on him, reducing him to a zombified catatonic state.  Finding him in this more suggestible condition, Spider-Man prompts him to make his way to the precinct and hand himself in to Barbera, as the hypnotic victims snap back to their senses and make their way to safety.

As Byron and his goons are hauled in by Barbera and his officers, Peter meets with Jameson and hands over a sheaf of photos of Spidey standing alongside the now genial ninjas.  Amazed, the spluttering publisher can't believe his luck.

"How come you're the only one who can get a picture of him?"

"Simple," says Peter.  "I believe."

And as he takes Judy's arm and they walk off together into the bright Manhattan afternoon leaving the apoplectic newspaper man with all his questions behind them, you know what?  So do I.

The Fly (Kurt Neumann, 1958)

For the Vincent Price blogathon, 17th to 19th April.

Sweet genes, Vincent.

I may only (only!  I turned 41 two weeks ago!  Aeeeeiiii!!!) have been born in 1979, but - perhaps strangely - I was very familiar with The Fly by the time the David Cronenberg re-version came out in 1986.  Which I know, because I have quite a strong memory of watching a movie on VHS with my dad, and one of the trailers was for said upcoming Jeff Goldblum Brundlefly vomit-drop flavoured movie.

"Look, Dad - they're doing a new one!"  I cried with glee.  Because I had fond memories of watching the original, that said father had dutifully recorded for me during some late night airing a year or two before: that eerie title sequence intro with a sort of psychedelic honeycomb with a fly (or flies?) emerging through holes.  I'm so glad I didn't suffer from trypophobia - i'd probably have been traumatised instead of spookily intrigued.

I had also, in the interval between seeing the two films, read the original George Langelaan short story upon which the movie was based.  Perhaps those pulpy old paperback Pan and Fontana books of horror and ghost stories edited by Herbert Von Thal weren't the thing for parents to buy five or six year old children - but reader, I loved them, and my parents would pick me up second hand copies if they happened upon them.

(Slightly confusingly, I distinctly recall that another volume of one of those books contained a different story - by a completely different author - also titled The Fly, which obviously meant that this small child was baffled a bit.)

Penned by Langelaan - a fascinating character in of himself, being an ex-spy and acquaintance of infamous occult master of dark magicks Aleister Crowley - The Fly was first published in the June 1967 edition of the Hefmeister's Playboy magazine, back in the pre-Flynt aeons when porn was fancy.  With a screenplay by James Clavell (of King Rat, Shogun and Tai-Pan fame), the film opens in the eerie twilight hours of a dark, dark night in deepest Francophone Canada at a factory belonging to the Delambre Freres corporation where ageing night watchman Gaston (Torben Meyer) finds the fresh mortal remains of his employer Monsieur Andre Delambre crushed beneath a hydraulic press.

The mystery of this tragedy compounded both by his having heard the press operate not once but twice and seeing the newly-widowed Madame Helene Delambre (the delightful Redmayned red-maned Patricia Owens) fleeing the scene, Gaston reports these strange occurrences to the still-extant member of the Delambre brothers Francois (genre legend Vincent Price) - his message coming immediately after Francois receives a call from Helene calmly informing his that she has terminated their brother and sister-in-law relationship in a pretty final manner.  Attending the scene of the crime, Francois and police inspector Charas (Herbert Marshall, not a stranger to the sci-fi/horror genres, having starred in bizarro robots-run-amok shocker Gog for veteran schlock-helmer Herbert L. Strock four years previously) try to fathom what's occurred - Francois maintaining Helene's inability to have possibly worked the lethal equipment whilst the pair are baffled by the evidence of the late Andre's head and left arm being twice-crushed by machinery set to impact zero level with its base to utterly destroy the cranium and limb in question.

Visiting an almost preternaturally calm Helene, who happily admits to killing Andre - but not murdering him - the sleuthing pair find the circumstances growing curiouser and curiouser as Helene informs them how she operated the press and that Andre voluntarily placed himself beneath it while all the time being distracted to the point of obsession by a housefly buzzing around the room, before examining it closely and then suddenly losing all interest. Placing Helene under the watchful care of police nurse Andersone (Betty Lou Gerson - the voice of 101 Dalmatians' Cruella De Vil herself), Charas follows Francois down to the manse's mysterious basement laboratory where Delambre is baffled to find rooms filled with strange and unfamiliar equipment that appears to have been deliberately smashed and sabotaged. "This is the work of a madman!" he expostulates, whilst Nurse Andersone has to deal with a lunacy of her own when she swats at a fly causing Helene to drop her calm and placid demeanour and erupt into uncontrollable hysteria.

The mystery of her fly fixation deepens when young semi-orphaned Philippe (Charles Herbert), who's being looked after by Uncle Francois, asks how long flies live and conveys the information that his mother has been searching for a very particular insect: one with a white head and one white leg.  When Francois goes to Helene with the ruse that he's found and captured the errant bluebottle, she begins to unfold her tale in flashback - wherein we finally meet Andre (an immediately engaging and reliably likeable performance from David Hedison [but you can call him Al, as he was still trading under his first rather than middle name at the time] - still one of only two actors to have played Felix Leiter in the Bond franchise more than once - in a role originally considered for Michael Rennie and turned down by Rick Jason).

"This is not a confession.  Although I killed my husband, I am not a murderess.  I simply carried out his last wish."

The Delambres' happy family life is interrupted the day that Andre excitedly leads Helene down to his lab to show her the fruits of the research that has kept him busy for weeks on end: the end results of the work he has been doing for the Canadian air ministry into faster forms of travel is his patented matter disintegrator-reintegrator - or teleporter to you and I - which he explains to his baffled spouse in the same terms as Willy Wonka explains the concept of television picture transmission to Mike Teevee.  Andre hopes in future to have a network of his machines installed around the globe - nay, where stop there?  The universe - to set up an instantaneous means of travel at the speed of light much like the transporters from Star Trek or the T-Mat system from Doctor Who's 'The Seeds of Death', not just as a method of conveyance for people but a cheap and instant means of moving food and other goods from place to place and perhaps end any future fear of famine or shortages around the world.  This Utopian hope is soon dashed, however, when Helene amusedly points out that the ashtray that he has teleported across the lab as a demonstration now has the 'MADE IN JAPAN' print on its underside reversed - prompting a suddenly despondent Andre to plunge back into his notes.

A further setback occurs when he attempts his first transmission of a living organism in the cuddly shape of the family cat, Dandelo, who vanishes in the disintegration module to never reappear in the reintegration receptacle, existing only as a haunting ethereal miaow ("Into space...a stream of cat atoms.  It'd be funny if life weren't sacred" he laments).  Certain that he's finally perfected the system, Andre celebrates by treating Helene to an evening at the ballet followed by an evening in sipping the finest vintage of chateau d' teleport: a chilled bottle of transmitted bubbly.  Life seeming back on track, after an idyllic summer morning in the garden Andre asks Helene to invite Francois over to show him the machine only for the two of them to later find Andre's lab door locked with a hastily-scrawled 'DO NOT DISTURB' note on the door.  Pinning it down to the doc's usually eccentric way of working, the pair don't listen to young Philippe excitedly telling them that he has caught a strange insect in the garden on his bug hunt: a fly with a strange head and leg, which he is casually - an tragically instructed to take back outside and let go.

When Andre's behaviour grows increasingly odder - remaining unseen and non-speaking whilst passing notes beneath the laboratory door asking for bowls of rum-laced milk and demanding that a white-headed fly be captured safely, and only showing himself to Helene silently and with a towel draped over his head and his arm tucked beneath his coat - Helene's increasing despair, fear and curiosity build up to the iconic scene reminiscent of Mary Philbin's unmaking of Lon Chaney in the classic 1925 Phantom of the Opera as she tears the cloth from him to be confronted by the visage of a monstrous fly, mandibles twitching,the image of her screaming face reflected and refracted in its golden multi-faceted eyes.

Not to attempt to post spoilers for anyone who may not have seen it, but it is a pretty famous plot point that Andre has transmitted himself without realising a housefly was inside the booth at the same time as him - leading to their hybridisation and swapping of noggin and hand.  Convinced that they will never again be able to locate the fly and terrified that his intellect is going, his mind being taken over by the savage impulses of the insect, Andre resins himself to destroying all evidence of his work and the monster he has become by leaving the wrecked lab under the cover of night and taking Helene to the factory - instructing her in how to operate the press to pulp him (especially his insectoid parts), an action that the agonised woman has the repeat after his monstrous limb slips out from 'neat the device first time.  As we return to the present and Helene has finished relating her fantastic tale, the disbelieving duo of Francois and Charas wonder what to make of such a strange story that still seems to fit the known facts - a wonderment brought to an end when Francois discovers the sought-for fly/human hybrid caught in a spider-web in the garden, it's miniature human head screaming "Help me"! Help meee!" as it is consumed by the web's arachnid inhabitant.  Price famously revealed in raconteur style how neither he nor Herbert Marshall dared to make eye contact during this scene as they kept cracking up throughout repeated takes, before the little creature is dispatched via euthenasia by means of brick.

Sumptuously photographed in CinemaScope and DeLuxe Color unlike its two monochrome sequels and sporting fine performances from Price, Hedison and Owens, The Fly stands as a great example of the silver age of science fiction and horror.  A Feast for the senses.  Just don't drink the milk - I think a fly vomited in it.

"He died because of his work.  He was like an explorer in a wild country where no-one had ever been before.  He was searching for the truth - he almost found a great truth - but for one instant he was careless... The search for the truth is the most important thing in the whole world.  And the most dangerous."

Frankenstein (David Wickes, 1992)

The Gothic horror tradition in both film and literature can ultimately trace, if not its genesis, then its apotheosis back to that legendary storm-wracked three day weekender on the shores of Lake Geneva at the Villa Diodati in the haunted summer of 1816 when the legendary 'Mad, Bad and Dangerous' George Gordon, Lord Byron gathered together the elements of himself, his fellow Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, Shelley's soon to be wife Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, and Byron's personal physician Dr John Polidori - and together they infused the spark of undying life into the nascent Gothic genre.

The horror movie's debt to literature was recognised in James Whale's seminal 1935 The Bride of Frankenstein, which opened with a prologue set at the Villa (recast as the standard Universal Horror storm-lashed turret upon a craggy peak) with Mary (Elsa Lanchester) recounting her tale to Byron (Gavin Gordon) and Shelley (Douglas Walton), a scenario fully fleshed out on film by Ken Russell in Gothic (1986) - a superlative filmic fictionalisation of the epoch-making events of that eventful evening.

There have of course been many filmed versions of Frankenstein, from the Edison Company's silent 1910 short to the Boris Karloff-starring 1931 Universal Pictures classic and its many sequels, through the Eastmancolour Gothic chills of the Hammer horrors of the 1950s through to the '70s.  In the early 1990s a few Frankenstein films emerged blinking into the light including Roger Corman's 1990 Frankenstein Unbound and Kenneth Branagh's much-trumpeted lavish 1994 rendition that proclaimed itself to be Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.  Betwixt the twain nestled a largely ignored made for cable television movie directed by David Wickes, who had previously helmed the 1988 Michael Caine miniseries Jack the Ripper - noted for Armand Assante's scene stealing turn as Victorian thespian Richard Mansfield performing his famed transformation from Dr Jekyll to Mr Hyde - and had cast Caine again two years later in the titular role(s) of 1990's Jekyll & Hyde.

Beginning, as some adaptations do, in the book-accurate preamble setting of the wild and savage frozen North we open with a wild sled-chase across the ice as creator and creation pursue each other in a frenzy of destruction before encountering the pack ice-stranded ship of Captain Walton (Roger Bizley).  There, the rescued human contingent begins to unfold his tale in flashback to the University of Ingolstadt where the young Dr Victor Frankenstein (Patrick Bergin, who just the year before had starred as Robin Hood in a film my schoolboy self far preferred over the contemporaneous adventures of Kevin Costner's incarnation of said merry man) goes unrecognised by the chancellor (oh look, it's Vernon Dobtchef!) for his work in the field of anatomical medicine as the school prize goes to a theological professor for his feats in the field of the imaginary.

Ingolstadt is in the midst of a cholera epidemic, and Victor is berated by his friend Henry Clerval (Lambert Wilson, in a performance so wet as lettuce it's hard to imagine he screen tested for James Bond) for putting himself at risk by working to help the sick - you know, being a doctor.  They didn't have any Personal Protection Equipment back then, you see (topical!).  Victor takes Henry back to his lab, and shows him how he is trying to make life in the time of cholera - his lab contains cages filled with grotesque animal hybrids such as a snake with a cat's head and a rabbit's head upon the body and quills of a fretful porcupine, like creatures from a mediaeval bestiary made manifest in stitched-together flesh.  This of course - this being the early 1800s - brings Clerval out in a religious terror of foaming "You're not God!" proclamations.  Good thing, then, that he leaves the premises before Frankenstein unveils his ultimate creation, floating in a tank of primordial ooze (a vivarium vitae) like a monstrous embryo is a man that he has created in his on image and from his own very essence.

Of course, it's the same old story: the experiment goes awry and the newborn creature flees out in to the night of this strange new world abandoned and alone as the ill Frankenstein is taken home by Clerval to the arms of his beloved Elizabeth (Fiona Gillies).  As Victor recovers his health and wits in the care of his beloved and his family, the creature (Randy Quaid, in his intermediate period between being Cousin Eddie from the National Lampoon's Vacation movies and being an actual full-on mentalist) wanders in the wilderness harassed and hounded by humanity.  In a nice reversal of the classic "drowned little girl" (better known as "the flower that wouldn't float") scene from the Karloff classic, the monster actually dives into the water and rescues a drowning young girl called Amy (played by Quaid's real-life daughter Amanda) but is then shot and wounded by hunters and left be swept away down the river rapids.

A neat innovation of this adaptation is taking the "two sides of the same person" notion of the doctor and the daemon hinted at by previous films and making it literal - there is a real connection between Frankenstein and his monster, Victor feeling the pain whenever his progeny is hurt.  The standard meeting with the blind man De Lacey (Sir John Mills, who found out that he himself was going blind at around the time of filming) occurs, with some genuinely moving interactions between the old man and the sea creature as they help each other and the monster learns speech, only to be driven off again into solitude by the hunters (and neither of them even has the decency to be played by John Carradine).  The connection betwixt the twain drawing them together like magnets, it isn't long before creation finds the home of creator and begins his furious revenge, killing first a more aged-up than usual William Frankenstein (Timothy Stark, in his twenties at time of filming) - Victor's younger brother - then then father Alphonse (Ronald Leigh-Hunt in his final film role), Clerval and last of all Elizabeth.

Just as vengeance-consumed as his rage-filled genespawn, Frankenstein begins his pursuit vowing to follow the creature to the ends of the Earth if necessary in order to destroy him (sadly without a Feyd Rautha style "I WILL KILL HIM!", but close enough) which brings us back, back to our beginnings upon the icebound boat where Frankenstein father and son have their final confrontation.  Responding to the anguished cry of "Help me!" from the monster, Victor vows to help the both of them and then crashes into the bulky behemoth and throws both of them into the frozen Arctic beneath the cracking ice sheet and angel down they go together: two halves of of one man entwined, he dies twice in the ice.

Imperfect - as all adaptations are - this is an interesting version of the oft-told tale (with an interesting cast, including as the Arctic ship's boatswain the late Michael Gothard in his last role) that i'd recommend to anyone who's a fan of the original story and might be seeking out a version they haven't yet seen.