Flesh for Frankenstein

1973 – Paul Morrissey – Italy

One of two quirky, baroque horror films made back-to-back by Italian producer Carlo Ponti and written and directed by American Paul Morrissey, Flesh for Frankenstein gave Morrissey a chance to get out of New York and to begin gently cutting Andy Warhol’s apron strings. It was filmed at the legendary Cinecitta studios in Rome, making extensive use of its vast interior sets, and features a delicate, sober classical score by Claudio Gizzi and special effects by Carlo Rambaldi, (who would go on to engineer creatures for E.T. and Dune.) It is a truly bizarre and unique work, a comedy without jokes, with situations so extreme that – as in Kubrick’s films – you laugh at the general tragic absurdity rather than particular gags. Udo Kier immortalizes himself as a cult icon as Baron von Frankenstein, a frail, bug-eyed, histrionic, incestuous aristocrat obsessed with creating a master race with flawless Serbian features, especially the all-important “nasum.” Craving a man with an ample libido to facilitate all of the breeding he’ll need to do, Frankenstein decapitates a man coming out of a brothel for this purpose, comically unaware that the innocent guy was only there with a friend and was firmly asexual and intending to become a priest. The “head donor’s” friend, played by Joe Dallessandro, ironically would have been the better choice. Dallessandro is a farm hand who preaches about the coming Bolshevik revolution while bedding servants, prostitutes and even the lonely Baroness Frankenstein. The contrast between Kier’s and Dallesandro’s appearances and performances is one of the highlights of the film; with Kier’s anemic, Eurotrash lunacy matched against Dallessandro’s monosyllabic and blunt virility. The film seems to be Morrissey’s treatise on the breakdown of values and tradition in the 20th century, especially the desensitization brought on by street drugs and the counterculture of the late 60s. He was a reactionary despite his affection for the avant-garde and for the sleaze on display in most of his films. From its artificial production design and script full of anachronisms, (such as Dallessandro’s Brooklyn accent and the Marxist references), Flesh for Frankenstein is on that short list of movies that have to be seen to be believed, alternately gorgeous and repulsive, and a relic of its time, a film ostensibly set in old Europe but all about 60s/70s America.