by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The first film shown at
last night’s Mars movie night (http://marsmovieguide.com/)
was a true oddity from 1965 called Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster (imdb.com lists the title as Frankenstein Meets
the Spacemonster, but that’s just an overly
literal reading of a badly lettered title card) produced by Futurama
Entertainment Corp. (“‘Entertainment’ — that’s a matter of opinion,” I couldn’t help but joke as
the final credits rolled) and Vernon-Seneca Films, directed by Robert Gaffney
from a story by George Garrett. Apparently the original screenwriters —
Garrett, R. H. W. Dillard and John Rodenbeck, the last two uncredited —
intended the film as an out-and-out comedy — and a deliberately funny version would have been considerably better
than the one we have — but the producers wanted a “serious” horror/sci-fi film.
They got something that was funny, all right, but purely by unintention, a mess
of ill-matched footage that makes Plan Nine from Outer Space look like a deathless masterpiece by comparison.
After some blurry stock scenes that purportedly represent an alien spacecraft
in orbit around Earth, we cut to a plywood set supposedly representing the
ship’s interior and a curious gnome-like creature with big, pointy ears talking
to a woman who appears to be in command of the operation. The gnome-like
creature is the appropriately named “Nadir” (as in “low point”) and is played
by Lou Cutell — I couldn’t help but joke, “At the top of the list of
science-fiction film characters with pointy ears is Mr. Spock in Star Trek, and at the bottom is this guy” — while the
commander is listed as “Princess Marcuzan” in the closing credits but is never
addressed by anything more than “The Princess.” She’s also played by Marilyn
Hanold, who can’t act but at least is marginally enough better than the rest of the cast that we don’t think she flunked out of drama school on her first day. She,
Nadir and their crew are preparing a secret plan that involves kidnapping Earth
women and mating with them because a nuclear war back on their home planet —
which the official synopsis says is Mars but that’s nowhere stated in the movie
itself — killed off all their own women. When the Princess announced that the
war killed off all their women, the one woman in our audience asked, “Then what
are you?” — though it’s possible we
were supposed to assume she’d already gone through her species’ version of
menopause. The same woman in the audience laughed when I joked, when the
Princess confronted one of the blonde, bikini’ed Earth girls they’d kidnapped,
the victim would say, “You don’t fool me! You’re Harvey Weinstein in drag!”
Meanwhile, NASA is planning its first manned mission to Mars — well, sort-of
“manned”; they’ve built a one-man spaceship and to fly it, scientists
Dr. Adam Steele (James Karen) and Karen Grant (Nancy Marshall) have
bio-engineered a creature from bits and pieces of recently deceased humans but
controlled by an electronic brain inside — and the scene in which they cut their
creature open (he’s malfunctioned and frozen up at a press conference
introducing him, which director Gaffney represents by an oddball freeze-frame)
and it looks like somebody left a computer circuit board in the middle of the
merchandise at a meat market, is the grossest in the film. They call their
creature “Frank Saunders” — as in “Frankenstein,” get it? — and duly shoot him
off in his rocket to Mars, only the people in the spaceship that’s orbiting
Earth from wherever decide it’s a human counterattack and shoot it down. It
lands over Puerto Rico (as if the island didn’t have enough problems!) and the
Princess and Dr. Nadir send out three goons from their spaceship who wear
metallic spacesuits and hold ray guns that look like hand-held vacuum cleaners
to hunt down the intruder — who in the process of crash-landing has badly
burned half of his face and lost all his morals, since he spends most of his
time cornering people on the beach and killing them at random. The pity is that
Robert Reilly, who plays Saunders, was a quite handsome and striking-looking
man in his opening scene and it’s a pity that thereafter we see him only with a
lot of crud stuck on half his face to make him appear “monstrous.” While all
this is going on Drs. Steele and Grant do a lot of riding around Puerto Rico
(or actually Cocoa Beach, Florida, where the film was shot) on a Vespa motor
scooter (one wonders if Vespa got product-placement money — or if they offered
the filmmakers a bribe not to include their product in the film?) listening to a pop-rock song
called “To Have and To Hold” by a group called the Distant Cousins, produced by
Bob Crewe (who was best known as a principal songwriter for the Four Seasons:
he wasn’t a performing member but he and Bob Gaudio, who was, wrote most of
their hits). It’s not all that great, but the film’s other song, “That’s the
Way It’s Got to Be” by The Poets (another Crewe-produced group), is a nice
little piece of proto-psychedelic rock and the film brightens up considerably
when it appears on the soundtrack.
Alas, that’s about the only good thing you
can say about Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster: it’s the sort of movie in which the stock footage
has better production values than the new shooting, and there’s a reason why you’ve never heard of anyone in it. In fact, I
found it so dull I literally fell asleep halfway through it and have no idea
how it turned out — though I’m sure the ending had something to do with Mull,
one of those tacky monsters endemic to bad 1950’s and 1960’s sci-fi films whose
costume looks like it was made of carpet samples and who was on board the alien
spacecraft as a sort of enforcer and hit person (or thing), confronting Frank
Saunders on a beach somewhere (just about every exterior in this film takes place either on a
beach — James Karen and Nancy Marshall even get to copy the famous seashore
embrace of Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr in From Here to Eternity — or on a road leading to a beach) and having it
out with him in a final confrontation imdb.com reviewer “Space_Mafune” called
“disappointing.” As an out-and-out spoof Frankenstein mission cMeets the
Space Monster might have been genuinely
entertaining — one of the gags from the comic version that never made it into
the film was that Frank Saunders’ legs had come from a recently deceased tap
dancer, so he’d have broken uncontrollably into a tap dance every time he heard
the song “Sweet Georgia Brown” — as it was it was just another dumb thing that
probably got shown mostly at drive-ins to teenage couples who were too busy
necking (or more) to notice how bad the movie was!
