theater of guts: Flesh For Frankenstein

Wednesday, September 11, 2013

Flesh For Frankenstein

Flesh For Frankenstein (Andy Warhol's Frankenstein) Directed By Paul Morrissey, Starring Udo Kier (1973).

I've always been confused by what people see in Andy Warhol/Paul Morrisey films and I'm not one to snub arthouse, I've embraced the ineptitude of the cinema of transgression! Sometimes being a film nerd takes alot of patience, let me tell you! I know many people that have had issues with Flesh For Frankenstein. It has lulled most into a coma from which it takes aeons to emerge from and yet Criterion restored both this and Warhol's Dracula, are they trying to bore people to death or could this be another reason to catalog art for Warhol's sake?

I think I figured out the reason why people like this film, because it's completely fun trash! Maybe this summer is special, one of re-evaluations. At any rate, I think many have seen only the excised versions not the complete ones with all the carnage intact! They missed everything!

On my third attempt, I figured, I'd just fall asleep like usual, but something odd happened, I didn't! I'm glad I stuck it out because you'd be hard pressed to find another flick that has as many gut bursting scenes used as a sexual device (we're talking 1973, pre-Buttgereit and Peter Jackson)!

The stake goes in the heart not in the rear!

Udo Keir (who I normally hate and his voice makes my skin crawl), plays an extremely perverted rendition of Doctor Frankenstein, he proceeds to fondle a dead corpse with a scalpel, pull out her internal organs and have sex with them a few at a time, than he says one of the oddest lines in film history "To Know Death, You Must Fuck Life In The Gallbladder"! You don't hear that everyday!

I'm the CEO, people are hot and dry, they want something cold and wet!

I started the Netflix version of the film currently streaming and got bored once again, I mean the president of Netflix is a complete fucktard! I hear he's the main inspiration for Jimmy Wichard from King Of The Hill. It's as if he found the shoddiest copy of "F for F" and said as he gulped down more thorazine, "People deserve the worst quality, so this bashed in video copy I found in a dumpster will suffice". I usually detest Udo Kier, I liked him in Mark Of The Devil, but here he comes off as ultra campy and makes the film seem self aware. Why else would there be one character with a thick bronx accent among a Victorian setting, Joe Dallesandro plays Nicholas the lowlife farmer (he was in almost all of the early Paul Morrissey/ Warhol productions)! I'd describe his voice as 70's street hustler.

All through out the film, there's an underlying message of denial in the upper class (the children witness all the perversion and stare ominously from windows, they've most likely seen this before). The Baron is married to his sister, The Baroness Katrin (played by browless tranny Monique Van Vooren), she's a cougar and later humps the Bronx kid. When they get into a slap fight she calls him a "lowlife Farmer", the worst insult she can think of!

someone hand me a Sharpie for my eyebrows

The Baron is obsessed with Serbia and wants to create a new race with lineage to ancient Greece using corpses found along the countryside. Udo fishes a lifeless body out of a huge water tank (used later in Coppola's Frankenstein) as a pile of more pretend to be dead (one is smirking).

Where's Chris Hansen, when you need him?

When the Baron disgustingly fingers the female monster's stitches and opens her chest cavity, she opens her eyes as if she's enjoying the prodding. The actress who plays the Baron's necrophiliac conquest is Dalila Di Lazzaro (who later ended up in Phenomena). He takes his assistant Igor (this time named Otto) and takes him to a brothel in search of new flesh, the Baron remarks on how he hates giant boobs! Otto looks like a mentally retarded version of Ray Davies and seems shocked by his master's antics. They find their specimen, who coincidentally is friends with the Bronx kid and wrench his head off with rusty clippers! Don't waste your time with the Netflix version, which totally omits the Carlo Rambaldi gore effects! There's some choice meatiness, like vital organs dangling in your face, tailor made for 3D.

Steak-Um meat in 3D!

The children lurk around the lab (the redheaded girl Nicoletta Elmi was Deep Red and The Night Child) and find a disembodied, breathing pair of lungs. The Monster and his mate look more like Euro-trash models than the classic Univeral Studios types, they wear body and neck braces (to keep their parts from flopping off)!

I can't unsee what I've just seen

The lowlife farmer knows the monster when he was alive and tries to persuade his old pal to turn against his creator, but he betrays him and is later ordered to have sex with the baroness.

Otto oversteps his sex boundaries and kills the female monster, Warhol's Frankenstein is the first and last film to fetishize evisceration as a method of sexual excitement (not even Nekromantik went that far)! I have to say, I was totally off base for never giving this a chance and censorship in any form robs the artist's original intent. In today's judge everything by a tiny jpeg of the cover art or in the case with Netflix search around for hours until you find something half way decent to watch, I'm glad I gave this Frankenstein flick another shot, it was well made, repulsive and had enough offal to make it a worthy addition to gut aficionados world wide! For awhile in the 70's among all the other "studio executives were on Coke when they greenlit this shit", there was a barrel full of kinky Frankenstein epics, for more see Lady Frankenstein and House On Bare Mountain, oh and don't forget John Wayne Bobbit's Frankenpenis. Well see you at the movies!