just watch it!

Good story, Not enough for a whole film

Not sure how, but this is easily one of the best movies all summer. Multiple levels of funny, never takes itself seriously, super colorful, and creative.

Great movie. Not sure what people expected but I found it highly entertaining.

After having seen my first ever Jess Franco title, (the fun,but very flawed Women Without Innocence)I decided,that with still having great memories from Danny Boyle's excellent adaptation,that I would take a look at Franco's take on Frankenstein's creature.The plot:Taking possession of a man's mind and body,a demonic spirit called Cagliostro decides to take control of a corpse,that has recently been re-animated by a local doctor called Frankenstein.Celerbrating his success,Frankenstein's cerebration's are cut short,when Cagliostro, (and a group of fellow demonic spirits that he has brought with him) take control of the creature,and force it to kill its creator.A few days later:Attending her father's funeral,Frankenstein's daughter Vera is told by a former friend of her dad's, (Doctor Seward) that he has fears that her fathers final,mysterious creation may have gone terribly wrong.Being determined to track down the person who killed her dad,Vera soon finds out that Cagliostro is planning to use her dad's creation,for a creation that her father could never have imagined.View on the film:For the soundtrack and distinctive appearance of the film,writer/director and co-star Jess Franco closely works with composer Daniel White to soak the movie in a hauntingly surreal atmosphere,with echoing voices and distorted screams rippling across the screen.Emphasising the soundtracks features,Franco gives the movie a strikingly avant-garde look,with Cagliostro's "cult" and the residence of the village being set a against a trance style backdrop,which help to give the film a wonderfully chilling feel.Despite Dennis Price giving a fun performance as Dr Frankenstein,and Lina Romay making her film debut, (in the composite cut) the screenplay by Franco is sadly unable to match the confident appearance that he displays in his directing,with Franco mostly leaving the creature/monster roots of the story behind,and instead trying to target everything from occult terror to murder mystery chiller, without ever really being keep in step with Frankenstein's creation.

More movie-making madness from the archfiend of Iberian exploitation Jess Franco. This movie, known variously in its alternate guises as "The Erotic Rites of Frankenstein" and "The Curse of Frankenstein" (not to be confused with the Peter Cushing Hammer classic of the same vintage), re-utilises a great deal of the same cast and characters of Franco's roughly contemporaneous "Dracula, Prisoner of Frankenstein", but is thankfully a more coherent film than that effort.That's not necessarily to say that it's good, mind...The plot, such as it is, involves Dr. Frankenstein (Dennis Price once again slogging the twilight years of a once-promising career away in Eurotrash exploitation) and his assistant creating a bizarre silver monster, before being attacked by Melisa the flesh-eating bird woman (the lovely Anne Libert, also to be seen in Franco's "A Virgin Among the Living Dead"), resplendent in green feathers and not a lot else. Melisa is the slave of the immortal Cagliostro, played with relish and garnish on the side by the godlike genius of Howard Vernon, who wants to mate the creature with kidnapped lovelies such as Britt Nichols. Well, you would, wouldn't you? Meanwhile, Esmerelda the gypsy (future Mrs. Franco Lina Romay) is having her own ponderous and largely irrelevant adventures in the woods, chatting away to a batty old crone who doesn't seem to realise that she's even in the film. Understated just doesn't cover it. Cagliostro is in the meantime summoning an undead army of darkness (ie: extras wearing Halloween skellington masks and cloaks), resulting in some quite atmospheric and haunting shots of these revenants drifting through a mist-shrouded forest. Sadly, however, these dreams of conquest are destined to never come to fruition, and Cagliostro winds up plummeting over the edge of a precipice for no other reason than that the film's run-time is almost up.A truly trippy and hallucinatory experience that must be endured to be believed, this is another true Franco classic that combines the kind of story-line you made up when you were too young to know any better, needless nudity of hot chicks, and editing seemingly done on the hoof by a blind man. And a green-feathered flesh eating bird woman. What's not to love?

To all of you out there who think that the likes of Steven Soderbergh and David O. Russell epitomize independent film-making: go rent this film and let the scales fall from your eyes. Made during director Jess Franco's amazing early 70's period, post Harry Alan Towers and pre-porno, The Erotic Rites of Frankenstein is a surrealist masterpiece, poetic, perverse, comic, and mesmerizing. Shot for next to nothing on location in Portugal, the film is full of evocative, wide-angle, hand held imagery that must have appeared jaw-droppingly innovative at the time, and still astounds today. Daniel White's atonal, experimental score skillfully enhances the film's nightmarish languor, and the roles, particularly Anne Libert's blind cannibalistic Bird Woman, and Howard Vernon's strangely sexy Cagliostro, are performed with aplomb and conviction. You won't soon forget the scenes of white-shrouded undead gliding through a mist-laden forest, the strange, red-lit shots of Cagliostro's acolytes blithely staring at cruel tableaux orchestrated for their perverse amusement, or a shrieking, silver-skinned Frankenstein's monster relentlessly whipping a man and a woman tied together over a bed of spikes. Anyone who doubts Jess Franco's talent should rent this DVD, and then ponder the pettifogging morass that independent cinema has become.

This picture is utterly weird. Between unbelievably dull scenes (filmed without any inspiration) we find some of the most extraordinary scene's ever. It uses characters and idea's that were known at that time (and are therefore not introduced), but since comics like Crepax' Valentina are sinking to obscurity, girls who are actually birds and a monster of Frankenstein who whips a couple while they are standing above a field of sharp pins aren't daily routine. I was lucky to find a copy on VHS, so it exists!