Category Archives: Thaumatophilia

Flesh for Frankenstein III — dénouement

Of course, since Paul Morrissey is writing the script, Flesh for Frankenstein does not turn out well for Frankenstein or anyone else.  Indeed, it ends in a final tableau that would seem excessive in a an Elizabethan revenge tragedy, with only one adult character left, and in a pretty delicate position (bondage enthusiasts take note):

That’s Nicholas the stableboy (played by Joe Dallesandro, who sounds like he got to Frankenstein’s castle by way of Arthur Avenue).  And he’s being contemplated by the two children of the Baron Frankenstein’s incestuous union, still alive after all the drama and two of the creepiest kids you’ll ever see on screen.

Note that one of them is already holding a scalpel.

Pity there’s no sequel.

Flesh for Frankenstein II — The eros of mad science

Paul Morrissey grasped the concept of mad science as erotic long ago.  Here is a close-up on the face of his Baron Frankenstein (played by Udo Kier) in the middle of work on one of his reanimation-bound corpses.  His facial expression pretty much tells you what you need to know about what he’s experiencing.

Like master, like student.  Frankenstein’s assistant Otto (played by Arno Juerging) will want in on the act eventually.

Squick inded, although perhaps not without it’s squee element.  Which is an irony.  Morrissey is a self-identified cultural conservative, and the standard critical view is that Flesh for Frankenstein is a critique of hedonism and a technophile approach to life.   As Maurice Yacowar comments in his short essay on the movie for the Criterion Collection:

Paul Morrissey’s Flesh for Frankenstein is one of the goriest film comedies ever made. Yet despite its schlocky sensationalism, it’s still a Paul Morrissey film. That means it has some passionately felt things to say about how we live—and mainly waste—our lives today. Specifically, it blames sexual liberty and individualistic freedom for destroying our personal and social fibre by turning people into commodities.

Yeah, yeah.  As an exposition of auctorial intention that’s probably close to right.  But the funny thing is that for people with the right (or wrong) outlook, movies like this inevitably escape auctorial intention.  I must confess that the harder that Morrissey tried to make Baron Frankenstein a villain — a depraved incestuous homicidal madman — the more I found myself rooting for him.

It’s the risk you run, being (or trying to be) an artist.  Your villains turn into the Draco in Leather Pants.  Probably someday, somewhere, someone will read the Gnosis scripts not as a celebration of mad science-driven erotic adventure but as a critique thereof…

Flesh for Frankenstein I — cool lab

Coming up now, a trio of posts on Paul Morrissey‘s Flesh for Frankenstein (1973), sometimes known as Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein.  This a a seriously weird version of what is already a strange story.  Even if we never were to get in the lab, we have a setting of adultery, murder, and incest (Baron Frankenstein is is married to his sister) in a crumbling castle set (presumably) somewhere in the Balkans.

Of course, since we’re into the mad science here, our first stop should be Frankenstein’s laboratory.

Baron Frankenstein’s objective here is not just to re-animate the dead, but to create a mated pair of creatures (notwithstanding the two children he’s had with the Baroness).  This pair are to become the progenitors of a master Serbian race.  Why Serbian?  Some things only the screenwriter was meant to know.  In any event, this means making a female half of the pair, which gives director Morrissey an opportunity to provide an early live-action variant on the tube girl meme, as our female half (played by Dalila Di Lazzaro, if you must know) is preserved in a vat of something.

Once she’s lifted out we see a laboratory setup which is one of the coolest we’ve seen since James Whale was directing Frankenstein movies.

Of course it wouldn’t be a Frankenstein movie without electricity providing the spark of life.

It gets squickier tomorrow, I promise.

Amazing photo gallery

It all started when i tried tracking down the provenance of this image, which I originally saw elsewhere.  (My original though was just “Wow, what an amazing sex machine!”)

Sometimes virtue is something more than just its own reward, because I found its apparent home in this wild “Не серьезно” gallery at the Russian-language site razooma.net.  It’s sort of a photo-alter dream for thaumatophiles, so if you like this site, I strongly encourage your surfing over there and looking for, among other things, some swell woman-to-instrument transformation pictures, as well as a photograph that might have been taken from my own infantine butterfly-transformation fantasy.

And there’s a bonus for you Russophone readers.  “Andrey Razoomovsky” is a slightly eccentric transliteration of  “Андрей Разумовский.”  Can you spot the Slavic root in that artist’s surname?  It’s разум, meaning “reason, mind, intellect,” which is pretty cool for a site with so much implied mad science, yes?

Happy Thanksgiving!

Well, now in the United States we have reached the annual Thanksgiving holiday.  A time to get together and feast.

The original significance of Thanksgiving seems to be religious in nature — giving thanks to God for the good stuff in our lives.  (Should people who are having wretched lives stage some sort of anti-Thanksgiving?  Discuss.)

Now for reasons that longtime readers of Erotic Mad Science will have figured out, I can’t really cotton to anything other than a secular Thanksgiving.  Let it not be said that Faustus is an ungrateful fellow.  There are many people to whom I’d like to give thanks in this context:

  • To the many friends who have given me support and encouragement in starting up this project, most especially Bacchus at ErosBlog, who has been a constant source of support and good advice;
  • To my commenters and correspondents here, who have been a source of both friendship and learning;
  • To the artists who have graciously accepted my commissions and applied their talents to building what we have here;
  • To all the many, many people who have pioneered making their own on the Internet, and who are a source of both encouragement and joy to me;
  • To all the engineers and programmers who created this vast system of communications which enables so many communities of erotic interest.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone! Enjoy your turkey!


What, you mean it’s not that kind of turkey?  Ah, crumb.  I need to work harder to learn the concept…