FRANKENSTEIN 1970 (1958) wasn’t the first recursive horror film – that is to say, the first horror movie to employs in its plot an awareness of the genre’s standard tropes, gimmicks and guidelines within its plot to both inform and satirize the conventions of the genre (AIP’s HOW TO MAKE A MONSTER beat it to the streets by three weeks) but it certainly does deserve a modicum of credit for bringing onboard one of the greatest (and quite possibly the greatest) horror icons of all time…

Mind you, Karloff “the Uncanny” was at this point almost 30 years past his career-making prime as the Monster of James Whale’s groundbreaking, trend-setting FRANKENSTEIN (1931), which in concert with Tod Browning’s DRACULA (1931) effectively created the horror genre as a going box office concern in America.  Karloff had been well into his forties when he got his big break at Universal as the Undying Creature, which means that by 1957, when he stepped before the cameras to shoot FRANKENSTEIN 1970, he was approaching 70.  Chronologically, anyway; physically, his body was older, crippled, infermed, used up.  Smoking had given him emphysema, he had destroyed his back playing the Frankenstein Monster three times over the course of a decade (the get-up added 65 lbs. to Karloff’s slim, non-muscular form), and arthritis was curling him up like a dried up leaf.  He played his final films from a wheelchair but he played them to the hilt.  Karloff’s professionalism, his trouper spirit, probably shaved years off the end of his life, but Karloff could be no one else but Karloff.  Sick in body and disgusted with the degraded quality of the horror genre, he nonetheless took the gig.  And surely FRANKENSTEIN 1970 must have seemed to the actor to be just another job.  Though he had been nominated for a Tony award for his performance in the 1955-56 Broadway adaptation of THE LARK (with Julie Harris and Christopher Plummer), Karloff’s “Dumb Things I Gotta Do” list was richer in prominent appearances in such duds as THE MONSTER ISLAND (1954) and VOODOO ISLAND (1957).  At least  FRANKENSTEIN 1970 was shot in the relatively comfortable environs of the Warners lot in Burbank, which would have caused the budding septuagenarian a minimum of inconvenience and discomfort.  And perhaps Karloff found it somewhat interesting to be sporting the Frankenstein moniker again.

The film begins well, with a corny but vividly photographed (in CinemaScope, by Carl Guthrie, whose career had begun in 1932 working on the black and white unit of Michael Curtiz’ DOCTOR X) scene of a monster (face hidden but big, bent and beclawed) chasing a distressed damsel through the woods and into the steaming waters of an inky tarn, where he advances on her most menacingly…

… and ultimately throttles her senseless and sinks her body beneath the still waters.  Matinee audiences full of 10 year old kids must really have been eating this up – the scene has everything – but before you can say “Wicked kewl” we cut to a reverse angle and…

… the whole set-up is revealed to be bogus, false, fake… the product of a Hollywood movie crew which has decamped in Transylvania (or wherever this is supposed to be) for the purposes of making a TV special about the 230th anniversary of Frankenstein.  Now, I have to pause for a minute to cogitate upon how the filmmakers arrived at that particular number.  Mary Shelly’s novel Frankenstein was published in 1818, so it’s 230th anniversary would be in 2048.  But FRANKENSTEIN 1970 doesn’t take the novel into account, presenting the scenario that Dr. Frankenstein – Dr. Richard Frankenstein – really lived but his birth date is clearly shown…

… as 1702, which means the 230th anniversary of Dick Frankenstein’s birth would be 1932.  (His death date wouldn’t work either – you do the math.)  So in all honesty, I don’t know what 230th anniversary is supposed to mean, but innumeracy is really the last of FRANKENSTEIN 1970’s problems, as I shall endeavor to prove.

Now, I don’t like to get all up in Karloff’s grill about acting in crap movies because a crap movie within Karloff in it is so often more fun to watch than a very good movie without him in it – but I don’t know if I can make that argument here.  FRANKENSTEIN 1970 certainly had potential.  The domination of television by Reality TV over the past few years has given the film a context it may have lacked fifty years ago – TV once boasted of the ability to bring the world into our homes while now it tends to drag our homes into the world to see our multiple sets of multiples, our addictions, our inadequate housekeeping, our disobedient children and incontinent pets.  This is the plight of Karloff’s Victor Frankenstein, a heavily scarred (physically and emotionally) concentration camp survivor who got along with his warders by performing certain “unholy operations,” even as they destroyed him physically. (Victor’s speech about this early in the film has an undeniable poignancy to it, reminding the educated viewer of how making a name and a fortune for himself cost Karloff dearly in the long run.)  To pay for an atomic reactor, Victor has leased his house and grounds for use in the crass television production.  Once that particular piece of machinery is on set (so to speak), various members of the cast and crew begin disappearing, as Victor beavers in his downstairs laboratory to … well, I’m sure you can figure it out.

This could have worked.  The clash of cultures, of values, and the juxtaposition of the cut-throat Hollywood mentality to capture and preserve on film a simulacrum of life with Frankenstein’s bent to create life from death – the pitch meeting must have been positively electric.  (“And we’ve got Karloff onboard – Frankenstein himself!”)  There’s even a funny (not ha-ha funny, but kind of cool) scene late in the film, in which the TV show’s cameraman Morgan (FROM HERE TO ETERNITY’s John Dennis, taking a break from playing his usual stock-in-trade of morons, rubes and bullies) captures Victor’s man-monster in his viewfinder…

… that looks ahead to the camcorder horrors of THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT (1999), [REC] (2007), QUARANTINE (2008),  DIARY OF THE DEAD (2007) and CLOVERFIELD (2008), to name but a few titles in a horror subgenre that’s proving as fertile as the Frankensteins.  But flashes of cool do not a happy horror make (it doesn’t help matters that the monster looks like he has a bucket where his head should be) and FRANKENSTEIN 1970 bogs down in the second act because there is essentially no script, despite four writers receiving credit – among them George Worthing Yates, to whom we all owe at least partial thanks for THEM! (1954), IT CAME FROM BENEATH THE SEA (1955), EARTH VS. THE FLYING SAUCERS (1956), THE AMAZING COLOSSAL MAN (1957), ATTACK OF THE PUPPET PEOPLE (1958) and KING KONG VS. GODZILLA (1962).  Another gripe I have with the film is that it seems poised to say something about man’s abiding need to create something bigger than himself, be it a work of art (“Like a Rembrandt,” the director says, flattering no one so much as himself after a take of the TV production-in-progress) or a living man stitched together from the component parts of the dead.  This needn’t have been a big deal, just the suggestion that we’re all Frankensteins after a fashion – yet Koch et al never develop this.  Worse yet, the filmmakers don’t even know what to do with Karloff…

… who is etched as both sympathetic and hateful, proud and bumbling, aloof and lecherous and both reluctant to harm innocent people and hand-rubbingly hee-hee-hee maniacal about obtaining his sought-after vital organs from the assorted Angelenos camped out within the walls of his schloss (whose rooms he has bugged so that he can listen in, Mabuse-like, from the cellar).  Koch even bungles Karloff’s introduction, establishing his character with a rear view medium shot so that the first thing you see is the actor’s painfully humped back – Karloff doesn’t get his first close-up until well into the film, which seems a stupid way to treat the star of the show, especially one with such an expressive face.  But worse still is that, while Victor’s bandaged monster-in-progress goes about the castle rounding up organ donors, Karloff is beached in the basement turning dials and flipping switches like a ham radio operator while spouting quasi-medical and scientific terminology.  In the end, the monster grabs the girl, jerkwad director Don “Red” Berry becomes something of a hero (though I’m sure I’m not the only viewer who wanted his car to fly off the cliff rather than interrupt Victor’s big experiment),  sparks fly, plumes of smoke (or “radiation”) billow skyward and Victor and his creation are destroyed together, pushing the narrative to a “shock” conclusion you shouldn’t have any trouble seeing coming a mile off.

Throughout, Karloff is the total professional and he does what he can with the material.  He’s got a couple of effective moments, brushing the cheek of a clay bust of his younger self and smiling bittersweetly and, later, cousining the leading lady over a scarf lost by a character Victor has, shall we say “repurposed” in his lab.  Smilingly sinisterly, Karloff wraps the tartan muffler around his own neck and turns away to bang on the 88 keys while the girl leaves the room, confused and concerned… and then Karloff’s expression darkens, as if Victor understands that he has crossed a line he never thought he would.  Karloff’s ministrations can’t and don’t save FRANKENSTEIN 1970 from being the dud most critics claim it to be but if you’re a Karloffan you might find the experiment of some lasting scientific value.