Horrorfest 2014: Flesh for Frankenstein

It's that time of the year again! October's here so let's get started with Horrorfest, where I challenge myself to watch and write about 31 horror movies in 31 days. I usually try to watch movies I haven't already seen. This year I'm finishing off Time Out's list of scary movies and watching the remainder of the titles on the list that I haven't seen yet. There weren't enough to fill up the month, though, so I'm supplementing with a selection of titles currently streaming on Netflix with the high Tomatometer scores.

What better way to start the month than with a Frankenstein flick, this time FLESH FOR FRANKENSTEIN. Andy Warhol produced this 1973 Italian and French co-production, though who knows what he actually had to do with it (if anything).

Udo Kier stars as the titular doctor who plans to create two monsters – a male and a female – so he can breed them and create his own race of super beings. Unlike some Frankensteins, this one's married… with children. Monique Van Vooren stars as the crazed doctor's bored wife, who seeks solace in the arms of an oversexed stable boy (Joe Dallesandro).

Frankenstein's plan involves finding the horniest brain possible so that his male monster will definitely want to bone his female one (Dalila Di Lazzaro), and there's a little mix up when he thinks the stable boy's virgin buddy (Srdjan Zelenovic) is a horn dog, instead of a dude who wants to become a monk.

So, the movie's weird. It does not shy away from the gore, like most Frankenstein flicks do, and clearly shows the doctor and his assistant (Arno Juerging) stitching bodies together, severing limbs, all that kind of stuff. This serves to underline just how disturbing Mary Shelley's original premise was – in the Universal or even Hammer Frankenstein flicks, even though you know the doctor is digging up bodies and stitching them together, you don't really have to watch it happen. In this one, Frankenstein's got a pile of limbs in the corner of his lab. Yuck.

This flick also plays up the sexual aspect of the proceedings, with Frankenstein himself being a bit of a necrophiliac. The less said about how this development leads to the weirdest sex scene in cinematic history, the better.

Probably the best thing about this movie is Udo Kier's performance as the mad doctor. He really throws himself into it, no matter how ridiculous (or gross) the movie gets. On top of that, Kier's a German actor, so we get the bonus of a Frankenstein who actually speaks with a German accent. I was surprised to note as I was watching the film that this is probably the only time I've ever actually seen an actually German Frankenstein. And I have to say, the shit mad scientists tend to say sounds even crazier in a German accent.