I couldn't quite decide which quote to open this with - it was a tie between "We don't care about live people - we only fool around with people who are dead!" and "He wants your body for his wife... he wants to bring her back to life!", the latter being from the rather extraordinary theme tune by Claude LeHanaff and the Hard Roaders. I should like a band name like that.
Mary Shelley's tale of Frankenstein has gone through many cinematic permutations over the last century or so (113 years since the first silver screen version, if we're being pedantic [and I'm in that sort of mood, so I am]), from James Whale's legendary Boris Karloff-starring Universal classic through Gary Conway's 'teenage' monster to Toho's gigantic Baragon-battling kaiju version and many many others. One variation on the Frankie theme that I was intrigued by as a youth was Dr Hackenstein, the VHS box for which I often saw on the video shop shelf but never saw. I think I tried once, and when the store owner pointed out that I couldn't rent it because it was rated 18 and I was clearly under ten I angrily protested that I'd been getting 18 certificate films from his shop since I was six - which prompted a shushing that I shouldn't say that when there were other people in the shop and I was palmed off with a free lend of American Rabbit or somesuch. Anyway, here we finally are.
Not really worth the 30-plus year wait is the short review. But it was a laugh so we'll try like the good doctor himself to stitch a bit more flesh on the bones than that.
Helmed by first time director Richard Clark (and his only directing credit until the short Bookworms a decade later, which was his last), our story opens in 1909, at what the captions helpfully inform us was the 'dawn of modern science', where our eponymous antagonist/protagonist Dr Elliot Hackenstein (David Muir) is getting up to some very Herbert Westian shenanigans reviving a stitched together hairless rat. To briefly address the Lovecraftian nightmarish elephantine beast from beyond the limits of fragile human understanding in the room: this film is obviously inspired by Stuart Gordon's masterful rendition of Reanimator of a few years earlier (seriously, why aren't I reviewing that instead? Maybe in the new year I'll do a piece on the whole trilogy), but in timey-wimey (stop that at once! - Ed.) fashion is more similar to Bride of Reanimator which wouldn't emerge until two years later.
Skipping ahead to 1912, we meet the awful Trilling siblings Wendy (Dyanne DiRosario), Leslie (Catherine Davis Cox) and Alex (John Alexis) who with their likable cousin Melanie Victor (Stacey Travis, who two years later would go on to star in Richard Stanley's brilliant Hardware [no really, why aren't I reviewing that instead? (Because you actually like that film and would have to do more than make some crap jokes?)]) are drunkenly tooling around the country lanes in a sprightly vintage roadster (copyright Terrance Dicks, like so much of my standard phraseology) just like McCulloch, Carlson, Bastedo et al at the outset of 1975's The Ghoul. Just like that party of passengers, vehicular bother leads to them seeking shelter in the nearest Old Dark House.
This is of course the rural residence of the hack-happy doctor, who welcomes in the trio of nubile young ladies - and the unfunny injured comedy stooge they're bearing - without mentioning the preserved head of his late wife (who he claims lost her life and the rest of her by falling into the sea during the maiden voyage of the Lusitania and getting minced in the ship's propeller, whereas she very much lost her head at her husband's hands) kept in cold storage in his upstairs laboratory with which he frequently has conversations like a cross between Baghead Jason from Friday the 13th Part II and Ed Gein (or Ezra Cobb from Alan Ormsby's Deranged, to continue the movie comparison). Elliot is very soon eyeing up the young ladies - and who can blame him? - for parts to stitch together a new body for Sheila's bonce: he sets out to take Wendy's legs, Leslie's arms and has his eye on Melanie Victor's eyes. I guess because Bette Davis' and Gary Gilmore's weren't available.
Whilst all off this is going on, we have comedy from Logan and Anne Ramsay (yes, she of The Goonies and Throw Momma From the Train fame, sadly in her final performance - the film being released posthumously and carrying a dedication to her [I'm sure she'd be thrilled]) as a comedy graverobbing / bodysnatching couple, similar to the characters played by Dennis Price and Joan Rice in Hammer's 1970 The Horror of Frankenstein, silent comedy-style slapstick with Hackenstein's deaf and mute maid (Cathy Cahn) and a shrill turn from Phyllis Diller as the Trillings' overbearing mother. I mean, I say "comedy" but the quotation marks are appropriate.
All of it - basic plot, gore effects, humour - were done far better in Bride of Reanimator, frankly. Still, at least I've finally seen it. One more off the list.
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