FLESH FOR FRANKENSTEIN (1973)
Starring Udo Kier and Monique Van Vooran
Like its companion piece, "Blood For Dracula," which was by the same director and featured many of the same stars, "Flesh for Frankenstein" was X rated and was originally released as a kind of Andy Warhol film.
It was originally entitled "Andy Warhol's Frankenstein," even though Warhol had virtually nothing to do with the production. Previous to this film, Morrissey had also worked with Warhol on the cult classics "Trash" and "Heat."
It was also originally
released in 3-D, pretty unusual for a flick in the 1970s, and helps explain why so many
scenes feature guts falling into the camera. A cut, R-rated version of the film was
released to theaters again in the 1980s, during the resurgence of the 3-D craze.
Kier is a perverted version of the Mad Doctor who is having an incestuous relationship with his sister and gets off on screwing dead bodies. "To know death, Otto, you have to fuck life in the gall bladder," he tells his assistant before mounting a corpse.
The film isn't as fun as "Blood for Dracula," despite some terrific dialogue, the welcome presence of Joe Dallesandro as a studly field hand and some incredibly sick gore scenes, mostly involving intestines spilling into the camera. But it is a classic, and is among the funniest Euro-trash films you'll ever come across. Although technically an American movie, it's cast is for the most part European. Produced at a time when the public's fascination with "X-rated" movies actually meant that real movies could be made with X-rated subject matter, "Flesh for Frankenstein" also boasts plenty of material that will enrage feminists, including Dalessandro treating women like dogs, turning them on as a result. His American accent differentiates him from the rest of the cast, and gives the film a John Waters-esque edge.
Once
relegated to the porno sections of video stores, "Flesh for
Frankenstein" has since risen to the art-house cinema ranks, and came out
under "Criterion Collection" monicker on DVD in the late 1990s.
