Frankenstein Island Reviews

Delirious, kid-friendly fun, Frankenstein Island was the last in a line of cheap crackpot flicks from Z-grade entertainment specialist Jerry Warren. While Warren is famous for padding his films with extensive footage borrowed from foreign features, Frankenstein Island was one of his few completely "original" productions and is otherwise typical of his mind-numbing oeuvre. Veteran film stars slum for quick cash (Cameron Mitchell, Robert Clarke and the eternal John Carradine), disparate elements are pulled from assorted genres at random and reassembled into something wholly confusing, and the cast is costumed in garage sale castoffs. As it was Warren's first film in many years, Frankenstein Island has the tone of an earlier era, but the film's quaintness bumps noggins with the sheer weirdness of the action. The audience witnesses bloodless zombies bearing plastic pitchforks, a disembodied brain preserved under glass, a 200 year old mad scientist and alien cavegirls worshipping rubber skulls. Though he plays the titular doctor, Carradine appears only sporadically as a strange disembodied vision projected onto the wall. The eccentric character actor was ill and living in Mexico at the time, so Warren made the trip to shoot him in unrelated scenes, grimacing and prattling on about "the power of the thread." Dr. Frankenstein's famous monster shows up as a deus ex machina at the climax, stomping gingerly about the set in laughable makeup as everyone else engages in one of the slowest fistfights ever filmed. Frankenstein Island is played straight, but no one is taking it seriously, so its ridiculous qualities are charming enough to work as boneheaded psychotronic fare. After a healthy run of junk cinema classics like Face of the Screaming Werewolf, Invasion of the Animal People and The Wild World of Batwoman, Jerry Warren capped off his career with one of his most enjoyable calamities.