Baron Frankenstein (Joseph Cotten) and his assistant, Dr. Charles Marshall (Paul Muller), are finally ready to create a living creature from body parts, when Frankenstein’s daughter, Tania (Rosalba Neri, using the name Sara Bey), returns from medical school. More strong willed than expected, She plans to follow in her father’s footsteps. When the Baron’s creation runs amuck, Tania comes up with a plan to make her own creature, one that can kill the first one.
The ’70s marked the rapid decline of the gothic horror films that had dominated the previous decade. In the ’60s, England’s Hammer studio had made its mark with new versions of the Universal classics, and AIP had placed Vincent Price in a string of Poe-inspired movies. The third source for gothic films was Italy, where the subgenre was filled with incoherent, but richly textured, semi-erotic pictures. A late entry, Lady Frankenstein is a pretty standard example.
For the first third of its short running time, Lady Frankenstein feels like a Hammer film, with Cotten taking over the Peter Cushing role, and wondering the whole time how he went from Citizen Kane to this. The film is played seriously; there are no frights and little tension. It has the rich colors and frequent fog banks so common in the English gothic films. The acting isn’t bad, nor particularly good. The sets are low-budget, but functional. And I couldn’t think of a reason why the world needed another, slow, retelling of Frankenstein.
Things get much better, and much worse, once the Baron makes his monster. Since Karloff gave up the role, most designs for Frankenstein’s monster have ranged from atrocious to “my God, that isn’t seriously in a movie.” I’ve seen worse, but this big-headed, fake-eyed, mutant version is closer to the “my God…” end. This is a monster that should never have been filmed in bright light, yet he’s always popping up in daylight to kill naked girls who are lying about with clothed men. These scenes also appear washed out, as if no one adjusted the cameras after shooting the indoor scenes (don’t even think about color correction).
Continuing on the “much worse” side, the movie wastes large chunks of time on a police investigator that has no effect on the rest of the movie. He is prone to huge mental leaps. “Hey, there’s a big ugly guy killing people. I bet the graves are empty. Yup. I bet that Frankenstein guy, who is not known to work on humans, made a monster from corpses.”
On the “much better” side, the film switches its focus to Tania, who is the only interesting character in the film. You don’t see many female mad scientists, and she’s sympathetic, obsessive, and perverse. Playing the role is Rosalba Neri; beautiful and sexy, she is a far better actor than anyone else in the film (yes, that includes Cotten). If only the rest of the people involved with the project could have been at her level.
The movie’s high point is Tania’s seduction of a dull-witted servant. As she straddles him, her assistant strangles the hapless man to death, which she finds quite “exciting.” While much of the film can and should be missed, that’s one scene everyone should see.