You can file tonight's film under the Deceptive Title category. It was called "Frankenstein Meets The Spacemonster"(1965), but unlike "Teenagers From Outer Space", the deception was not a good one. Frankenstein turns out to be a metaphor, and you don't get much Spacemonster. As the movie opens, we are looking at Earth from the viewpoint of a flying saucer, captained by Egyptian Princess Marcuzan. She and her lieutenant, a pointy-eared fruitcake named Nadir, are studying the planet as a potential supply depot of women. All females on their home planet of Mars have been wiped out in a Nuclear War. They need replacements and Earth looks like a good bet.
Sounds pretty campy so far, but let's continue. Down at Cape Kennedy in Florida, NASA is holding a press conference to announce their latest mission into space. General Bowers (David Kerman) introduces Col. Frank Saunders (Robert Reilly), the astronaut who will be manning the controls. As he answers questions from reporters, he suddenly freezes up like a mannequin. The General calls a quick end to the conference and summons Dr. Adam Steele (James Karen, actor in millions of films) to the podium. They carry Col. Saunders out of the room and take him to the base hospital. There, we discover what the problem is.
Dr. Steele has opened the top of Saunders' head to reveal vacuum tubes, transistors and wires in addition to brain matter. Col. Frank Saunders is an Android. Steele guesses his freeze-up was caused by the Florida humidity. After repairing his brain, Steele and General Bowers prepare him for liftoff. No one from the media is the wiser. By all appearances, Col. Saunders looks like the model of a sharp young astronaut. All systems are go, the rocket is launched and Saunders is headed into orbit. But just as the last stage detaches, his capsule is blasted out of the sky by a ray from the Princesses' Space Ship. He crash lands in Puerto Rico (Coco Beach, Fla.). The Princess and Nadir land their ship and send out soldiers to check the crash site. Lo and behold, Col, Saunders is still alive. He climbs out of his capsule and is immediately shot by one of the soldiers, whose Ray Gun burns half of Saunders face to a crisp, leaving him looking like Frankenstein on one side. So there's your metaphor. There's no actual Frankenstein in this film, like there is in other "Frankenstein Meets" movies (i.e."Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man", "Mummy", et al).
Being changed in this way affects the behavioral circuits in Saunders' brain, so he runs around the beach strangling people for a while. The Princess has her minions out searching for him, but Dr. Steele and the General might get there first. Meanwhile, Nadir is directing the extraction of bikini-clad young women from Coco Beach. The Princess wants to examine them for possible transfer to Mars. After the beach raid, her soldiers are ordered to an outdoor Dance Party. Shades of "The Creeping Terror"! It's a good thing he's not in Florida, or someone would've been eaten, maybe even the Princess herself. Anyway, the dual sorties net about twenty female specimens for the Princesses' perusal. She and Nadir are so busy with their exams that they've failed to notice Dr. Steele has found Col. Saunders (aka "Frankenstein") and is using him to track the location of their spaceship. When he pinpoints it, Steele sends the coordinates back to General Bowers by shortwave radio. Bowers then calls in the Air Force, which will make for a spectacular ending to an otherwise threadbare story.
There really isn't much to "Frankenstein Meets The Spacemonster", plotwise, except the shootdown of Saunders' capsule, the race to recover him by Steele and The Princess, and her need to acquire women which distracts her from the recovery mission. The Final Showdown with the Air Force accounts for Act Three of the picture, and does make up for the plodding storyline of the first two acts. Steele also has a personal stake in stopping The Princess, who's directed her storm troopers to take his girlfriend hostage at the last minute. But he must also convince the General to order a cease fire, lest the spaceship be blown to pieces with his gal still inside it.
The last fifteen minutes involves some of the best use of stock footage we've ever seen. Director Robert Gaffney got ahold of some reels of what looks like Army and Air Force training exercises. So when "General Bowers" - a fictitious character in the movie - calls for an air strike on the spaceship, all of a sudden the director cuts to an actual air strike, conducted as an exercise somewhere in Florida and filmed by the military. He then edits the two scenes together so that it looks like a real strike against the Princess and her ship, with two dozen F-104s firing Sidewinders at the thing. Unfortunately, the missiles have no effect. They explode but are damped out on contact with the ship's surrounding Force Field. Nadir, however, knows it's only a matter of time before the General calls for stronger measures.
"My Princess! They have nuclear weapons and will deploy them next! We must depart with the specimens right away". He initiates the computer sequence to prepare for liftoff, but just before they can get away, Col. Frank "Frankenstein" Saunders appears in the cockpit. I don't wanna tell you exactly what happens, but if you've been wondering all this time about the Spacemonster, you're finally gonna get your two minutes worth. To be precise, we have already seen him - two separate times - in the cage he is kept in onboard. Each of those appearances, though, only lasted about ten seconds. I guess the producers decided they owed the audience a bit more than that if they were gonna put the Big Guy in the title, so we get a very brief showdown at the end. The filmmakers can claim truth in advertising I suppose. No one is gonna get their ticket refunded because "Frankenstein" aka Col. Saunders does indeed "Meet the Spacemonster". But he only meets him for a minute or two at the very end of the movie. I have no idea why they didn't make more use of the Spacemonster. He's a pretty terrifying dude as these creatures go. Maybe he was asking for too much money and they decided to cut his scenes.
All told, there are several reasons to recommend this movie despite it's lack of story. Lou Cutell is great as the pompous but prissy Nadir, coming on like a cross between "Dr. Evil" in "Austin Powers" and Pee-Wee Herman with Vulcan Ears. The makeup job on Robert Reilly as "Saunders/Frankenstein" is also very well done. He looks like The Incredible Melting Man on his bad side. There's also a great, imitation-Beatles song played twice in the soundtrack, that reminds you of the Fab Four's "Latin" sound circa 1964. Director Gaffney uses it as background music for scenes of Steele and his girlfriend cruising the beachfront on a Vespa. All of a sudden you think you've been transported to a Godard flick, lol. The main reason to watch this movie, though, is the previously mentioned Air Force attack on Princess Marcuzan's spaceship. It's an all out assault, well edited to look like the real thing, with lots of added shots from inside an actual USAF flight control center.
I'm gonna give "Frankenstein Meets The Spacemonster" Two Solid Thumbs Up for these reasons. The story is tedious but it's visually inventive and definitely worth a view. /////
That's all for the moment. See you in a while at the Usual Time!
Tons of love. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
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