2022 A month of Halloween movies -- October 5th

Frankenstein 1970 (1958) [HBO Max]

Not what I expected.  I guess I wasn't paying attention.  Seeing it in HBO Max's offerings, I just kind of figured this was a Hammer Frankenstein with a title format akin to Hammer's Dracula A.D. 1972, with the action and excitement of a classic Universal monster translated to the hip counterculture scene of swinging London in the 1970s.

Nope.  This is a 1958 indie feature starring Boris Karloff as the Mad Scientist, not the Monster, only (spoiler) it turns out he's also the Montser kind-of-not-really.  What I mean is that in-movie the Monster doesn't winds up with Frankenstein's Butler's brain and in-the-real-world the Monster is played by some tall-ass dude, but the big reveal (seriously, spoilers galore if you can even spoil a movie that's almost half a century old at this point) is that the Mad Scientist Frankenstein made the Monster a Monster Frankenstein with his own face because somehow he thought that would preserve the Frankenstein name or bloodline or I don't even know.  Not that his plan succeeds, because Mad Scientist Frankenstein plans never succeed, but if it had succeeded, it seems to me like he would have just ended up with a really tall lookalike who'd only be employable as a not very bright manservant.  I'm probably overthinking this.

Anyway, yeah, so the year thing.  Man, that's weird.  The filmmakers in 1958 figured that 1970 was the future, and by then you'd be able to just order an atomic reactor from a catalogue or whatev and have it delivered.  This business about Mad Scientist Frankenstein wanting an atomic reactor for his experiments has nearly nothing to do with the plot other than taking up space in it for the first twenty minutes or so of the movie and offering up the Monster Killing Whachamaguffin at the end of it in much the same way old Universal Frankenstein's would finish off the Monster with a burning windmill or a fall into a glacier; Monster Frankenstein is exposed to radioactivity instead of villagers with pitchforks because the movie was made in the Atomic Age and took it for granted the future would be atomic.

The rest of the plot has a TV crew making a TV show over at the Frankenstein Place (there's a light on).  Or they're talking about it.  Or planning a live broadcast.  Or something.  There's a lot of talk about doing a TV show and it's why half the cast is standing around waiting to be killed, but it's a lot like the atomic reactor business: it's a MacGuffin, but not much of one.

Honestly, the most interesting thing about this movie is the entire bait and switch of it being set in the 1950s (I mean, come on, mail order reactors or not, it's the '50s, dude) but being called Frankenstein 1970 to give it a polished veneer that was rubbed off before I was born.  For much of my lifetime you could watch 2001: A Space Odyssey and it was already unlikely we'd have Moon colonies and of course Pan Am was historical fiction after 1991, but the year 2001 was still the future sometime until we all lapped it.  The brilliant far-off future of 1970 that Frankenstein 1970 isn't really set in was never my future at all.  Time's a funny thing.

I made a list for this movie-a-day Halloween project; some of the movies on it are things I'd seen before and some aren't.  So far the only rewatch (I know I didn't mention this) is The Bat, and I haven't quite decided if that will be the last one and the rest will be never-seens or if there will be further rewatches.  It may fall down to my moon on a particular day.  I'm always good for Curse of the Demon, Cat People (the original; haven't seen the remake, which is on the list), Let the Right One In, and The Haunting, not to mention Halloween, and it's been awhile since I've seen those.  It's also been too long since I've given Lake Mungo a watch.

I digress about this because Frankenstein 1970 tonight was almost George Romero's Martin, a bleak and nasty little low budget chiller about a sad young man who thinks he's a vampire and kills accordingly.  But I couldn't get the bleeding Plex home server to work and that has me all kinds of irritable.  The machine that is actually supposed to be hosting the Plex server is the same machine that was insisting it couldn't find the server, which is an annoyance.  Whether it's enough of an annoyance when you have more streaming services than you can actually watch, and when many of them are offering up the movies you went to so much trouble to rip from DVD onto the home server, well.  Very probably not, although Martin is superior to Frankenstein 1970 in nearly every respect except maybe, maybe the acting.  Still, I'm glad I watched Frankenstein 1970, perhaps ironically: it was a movie I'd never seen, and now I have.