Tag Archives: weird movies

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.

Halloween squick or squee week I: The Brain That Would Not Die

Seeing as we’re in the week running up to Halloween (I have my mad scientist’s costume ready!) I’ll be running a series of mad-science related images, at least some of which might seem a little disturbing.  Provenance will be pretty variable.  Some I know well, and some are from dusty corners of my hard drive that I’d forgotten about until recently, and on which diligent image searching has failed to reveal much of interest.  I promise to do my best.

So let’s get Halloween Week underway, shall we?  Squick or Squee!

Yes, that really is a pair of mad scientists conferring over a woman’s head in a pan.

A living, fully-conscious head in a pan.  An expressive head in a pan.

The more radical amputation fetishists should be squeeing, at least.  The screenshots are from The Brain That Wouldn’t Die (1959), a movie that’s gleefully demented and exuberantly sleazy in the same way Invasion of the Bee Girls or Humanoids from the Deep are, and thus a must-view for any thaumatophile.  It really probably deserves its own post, but the short summary of the plot is this:  Jan, the girlfriend of brilliant but ethically challenged Dr. Bill Cortner, is decapitated in a grisly automobile accident.  (Her body is burned beyond useful restoration.)  Dr. Cortner takes Jan’s severed head to the nearby country house where he is conducting his experiments, wherein he succeeds in reviving her (it?) in a pan of special fluids with the aim of keeping her alive while he goes out to troll for a new donor body.  It’s a brilliant plan except for two tiny flaws (1) Jan is very unhappy about what she’s been reduced to and (2) she’s figured out a way to communicate with the results of Dr. Cortner’s previous…experiments, which are locked in the closet of said country house.  Uh oh.

You can apparently see the whole movie at the Internet Archive (and excellent late-night viewing it is) here.  It was also the subject of one of Mystery Science Theater 3000‘s best sendups:  YouTube video appears to begin here.

Happy viewing!

Flatlining

Combing through my memory for influences I came up with a 1990 film, Flatliners (1990), which I remember, just barely, seeing at a matinee showing in some urban multiplex back when it came out.  Something about it, but somehow it was disappointing…so I got hold of a DVD and checked my memory.  Confirmed.  It was an influence, and disappointing in the end all at once.

It starts so well.  Faustian medical student Nelson Wright (Kiefer Sutherland, reminding me how much I like Kiefer Sutherland when he isn’t friggin’ Jack Bauer) concocts a simple plan to explore what might lie beyond death.  With the help of his friends, he’ll induce his own cardiac arrest and then be revived after a few minutes of clinical death to report on his experiences.

He explains his enterprise with a soliloquy that deserves to live forever in the annals of cinematic mad science.  Why is he doing what he’s doing?

nelson

To see if there’s anything out there, beyond death. Philosophy failed. Religion failed. Now it’s up to the physical sciences. I think mankind deserves to know.

Oh fuck yes! This hits the right notes for the Promethean mad scientist. All for knowledge!

And, with some reluctance on the part of his friends, he jumps in with both feet and pulls it off.

Nelson has some strange experiences that he can’t quite understand.

But I don’t mind, possibly because I’m distracted by all the action taking place in amazing atmospheric settings of creepy medical school architecture and some of the most lovingly-photographed urban decay you can see in cinema.

But it gets better from there.  While the revived Nelson deals with his own exhilaration at coming back form the dead, his friends head out to pick up beer and snacks.   While this is going on, one of the friends and fellow medical students Rachel (played by Julia Roberts) ponders what has happened and comes up with her own imperative.

rachel

I would like to go next.

Nanetta Rector, we have met your cinematic foremother.

But Rachel doesn’t quite get to go next, because she’s outbid by other male members of Nelson’s twisted little team, including Joe Hurley (played by William Baldwin), who spends his (copious, apparently) free time as a medical student as a serial seducer who surreptitiously videotapes his conquests.  His near-death experience consists of an erotic montage which provides the movie’s true Erotic Mad Science moment:

Maybe death is worth it.

Sadly the movie goes south from there, into a story of atonement and personal redemption that couldn’t be more bathos-laden if it had been written by Oprah herself.

My advice to thaumatophiles:  watch the first hour or so of this movie, on a big screen if you can arrange it.  It will worth the price of your ticket.  Then head out and enjoy the remaining hour in a nice cozy nearby bar.  That will also be worth it.

Splice

I finally got around to watching Splice over the weekend, which is something that I qua thaumatophile am practically obliged to do.

I must confess I was rather less impressed by this than I had hoped to be.  Hotshot bioengineers and lovers Clive (Adrien Brody) and Elsa (Sarah Polley) create a creature out of genetic material from a variety of different animals — including humans.  Well, one specific human, actually.  There’s an appealing Frankenstein-like element here — take things from many things to make one thing — as well as an appealing element of rebellion, since the creature is made in secret and in defiance of corporate bosses (Simona Maicanescu plays the corporate chieftain with an icy self-possession that makes me positively squee).

I have to admit that the creature they produce, whom they name “Dren” does, as a child, make one of the cutest l’il monsters you’ll ever see.

 

And I guess there’s a sense in which there’s mad science going on in this movie.  There’s a willingness to flout moral conventions, lobs of laboratory equipment, and the “science” itself is appropriately crack-brained.  And Dren grows up fast, which leads to something either squee or squick, depending on your tastes in such matters.

But somehow this movie didn’t really grab me.  There are hints at mad science motivations:  Elsa had some sort of miserable childhood and there are hints that her motivation for making Dren might have something to do with compensating for this (in part), although this stab at the mad scientist as Wounded isn’t really played out satisfactorily.  And there are the obligatory Promethean recitations (think of all the good our discoveries could do for mankind!) although these often have the feel of rationalizations, and half-hearted ones at that.   When things spin out of control (as they inevitably do), the supposedly brilliant and strong-willed characters act disoriented and helpless.  What the movie really feels like is Our Dysfunctional Relationship played out in a mad science setting.  I don’t have any objection to entertainment about Our Dysfunctional Relationship, but really, isn’t there enough of that already?  A proper mad scientist needs to be more decisive, willing to cross the line from normality to Beyond-Good-and-Evil Land with verve and commitment.

I’ll confess, though, that the way the movie ended did redeem it for me, because Elsa does finally grow a pair, uh, grow the beard, uh…jump in with both feet.  I won’t give away how the movie ends, except to hint that it owes more to Humanoids from the Deep than the people who made this movie would probably like to admit.  So you might as well go watch it.

Altered (liquid) States

The weakness of human memory means you’re often surprised when re-encountering your influences.

I saw Ken Russell‘s movie Altered States (1980) sometime when I was in high school, I think by passing myself off as a student at a local college and attending one of its film society’s screenings (I did that a lot — it made adolescence vastly more bearable).  And I recalled thinking at the the time that it was weird and sort of interesting and then largely forgot about it at least consciously.

Just this weekend I re-watched for the first time and realized that it must have lodged a lot more deeply in my subconscious than my conscious mind.

William Hurt played a psychology professor named Edward Jessop who was obsessed with the idea of finding deep secrets from the human evolutionary past — perhaps the universe’s entire past — buried within the self.  He thought he could do this by inducing various altered states of consciousness.  One of his initial techniques involved the use of sensory deprivation tanks, which meant a real mad-science setting.  His initial experiments were with student volunteers, and then he began trying out the apparatus himself.

A psychology professor who’s something of a mad scientist who experiments on his students using a fluid-filled tube.  Looks like that was something that would be popping back out of my own consciousness later on.  In addition, we get to see an example of William Hurt as a tube guy.

Later on Jessop will travel into central Mexico and experiment with hallucinogenic mushrooms.  He has an erotic vision of his wife Emily, played lusciously by Blair Brown.

In the course of the vision “Emily” is covered by some sort of blowing sand or dust, which gives an A.S.F.R. feeling to the whole vision.

That’s something that would return to my erotic consciousness later on.

Putting the magic mushroom juice together with the isolation tank produces very strange results — a man who begins dissolving into something like primal protoplasm:

And eventually into a swirling vortex of liquid, before being reconstituted into his normal self, or at least, as normal as his self ever really gets.

Obviously that’s also something that will be back for me as well.

I could probably go on mining this movie for plenty more if I really wanted to try to decode all its drug imagery (I can’t help but note that crucifixions are common).  But for now I’ll just leave with a bit of dialog that left me drop-jawed.  It’s Emily early in the movie, talking to Jessop.

emily

You don’t have to tell me how weird you are.  I know how weird you are.  I’m the girl you bedded the past two months.  Even sex is a mystical experience for you.  You carry on like a flagellant which can be very nice but I sometimes if it’s me that’s being made love to.  I feel like being harpooned by some raging monk in the act of receiving God.  And you are a Faust freak, Eddie.  You’d sell your soul to get the Great Truth.

And she’s delivering this remarkable speech in the course of proposing to Jessop that he marry her. Talk about a girl willing to jump in with both feet!

On making your own III: Fetish Fuel Mining

From the title of the post, what did you think I had in mind?

(Found on a pop-up laden site I shan’t link to.)

Actually it was something a little different.

However strange you are erotically, you’re almost certainly not alone.  There are people like you, and they have been creating stuff in the past.  And now it’s buried.  It might be buried because it really was erotic in some way and the creators had to get it past the censors somehow.  Or it might be buried because it isn’t erotic to many people but it is to some.  Or it might just be lost, because it’s stuck inside popular culture that isn’t really very interesting or very good on the whole and so is largely forgotten.

But whatever it is, it’s out there, and if you’re diligent you can go out and dig it up and bring it back to life.    If you’ve been following Erotic Mad Science for any length of time you’ll have noticed my doing it a lot.  I’m into this weird thing with mad science.  The evidence is strong that there were a lot of people in the past who were as well.  But of course they were weird and unacceptable and so they had to get their crap past the radar somehow if they wanted it to see the light of day.

Crap past the radar: The tube girls are a good example.  If you were a sci-fi or fantasy editor working in mid-twentieth century America, you sure couldn’t get away with putting a naked girl right on the cover of a magazine.  But a tube, properly constructed, has some interesting properties.  It’s transparent, but on obvious way of constructing one involves segments held together by metal rings.  So you can put a naked girl in one, and of course her naughty bits will just happen to align with the metal rings.  And of course, the tube will play a part in the story:  she’s in cryo-sleep!  Being abducted by horny aliens!  Undergoing a transformation experiment!  Presto:  your porny art fantasy slips past the censor and onto the cover, which I am sure is most gratifying for both the viewer and for you.   Before you know it, there are tube girls everywhere.

Half a century later, a weirdo like me an go collecting them in service of his own ends.

Forgotten fetish fuel: The “personal identity porn” thing is probably not unique to me (I’ll admit it’s weird as a subset of my weirdness) and people who were making movies like The Four-Sided Triangle or Frankenstein Created Woman probably didn’t have weirdos like me in mind when they were filming (although you never really know).  They were making movies to make money.  Like most pop culture, they were mostly forgotten in a while.  But they were not gone, and they were there for me to mine up.  Watching these movies, and then being to explain what I think is interesting about them from a thaumatophile perspective, allows them to live again under a new interpretation, which is itself a form of creative act.

Of course, to perform that creative act, finding the little gems of eros amidst the dreck of mostly-dead popular culture can be a dirty business.

(Found on this Russian-language site.)

But don’t let that deter you.  The amount of material in the world is massive.  I’m willing to be even in my small, strange corner of the erotic world I’ve barely scratched the surface of what there is to know.  So get Googling!  And then share your finds and your new interpretations with the world. What you find will amaze you.

And arouse you.

Vulnavia

The titular character of The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971) surely counts as a mad scientist, though he’s surely unique in the mad science canon.  Not only is he the only one I can think of who has a doctoral degree in theology (*) of all things, but he’s a mad scientist with curiously limited objectives.  He wishes to inflict bizarre deaths on the eight doctors and one nurse who were part of the surgical team that failed to save his wife’s life, deaths modeled upon the ten plagues God inflicted on Egypt to compel the Pharaoh to release the Israelites.  (Take religion seriously –> become homicidal lunatic.  Shades of Colonel Madder!)

There’s plenty in Phibes that is entertaining, but that which really catches my attention is Vulnavia, who appears to be some sort of creation of Phibes’s.  She was played by Virginia North, an actress we sadly see very little of outside this movie.

She might be some sort of clockwork, but she’s good enough as a seductress to help suborn at least one of Phibes’s victims.

Seductive indeed.   Enough to propel Phibes from just mad science into outright Erotic Mad Science.  Vulnavia’s nature is mysterious.  I have a difficult time fathoming even the meaning of her name, although it might be derived from the Latin vulnero, meaning “to wound.” (Phibes himself is clearly wounded by life.)

Obviously she wouldn’t be complete mad science creation if she didn’t help out in the lab.

Wow.  I suppose I could go no further than cite El Santo’s remark in the course of his review of Phibes.

I always thought it would have been fun to be an evil genius when I grew up, and now that I know one of the fringe benefits is the possibility of having Virginia North for a pet, I’m really thinking I need to find myself a university that offers a graduate program in Advanced Evil.

You and me both, pal.

(*)  Though I am aware of course that my illustrious namesake did at least study theology, though he didn’t seem to get as much out of it as Phibes.

Habe nun, ach! Philosophie,
Juristerey und Medicin,
Und leider auch Theologie!
Durchaus studirt, mit heißem Bemühn.
Da steh’ ich nun, ich armer Thor!
Und bin so klug als wie zuvor;
Heiße Magister, heiße Doctor gar,
Und ziehe schon an die zehen Jahr,
Herauf, herab und quer und krumm,
Meine Schüler an der Nase herum –
Und sehe, daß wir nichts wissen können!

Text source here.

Update 20100913: The phrase “Vulnavia’s nature is mysterious” originally read “Vulvania’s nature is mysterious,” and this mistake has now been corrected.  It was Vinnie Tesla who discovered the mistake.  In his gentlemanly fashion Vinnie suggested in comments that this was a typo, but looking at it, I think it more likely that I made a Freudian slip. one rather obvious when you think of the context.