Why in the hell would anyone ever
put their faith in an assistant? They
are a uniformly untrustworthy breed of employee, as just about every version of
the archetype has proven in both prose and visual media. Fortunately, they are typically also deformed
physically so as to show us their unfaithfulness without dint of anything
approaching proof of any variety.
Unfortunately for the mad scientists and so on who hire them, the
assistant is also craftier than his/her master.
And while the boss may wield the full powers of the supernatural from
his very fingertips or be able to breathe the spark of life into a corpse (or
collection of corpses), the assistant knows how to procure the raw materials
needed to achieve the master’s goal.
Ever tried making veal piccata without the piccata? Assistants are usually so sycophantic,
because they want what their employer has, and as the old saying goes, if you
can’t be an athlete, be an athletic supporter.
Besides, who knows better how to topple a giant than someone who knows
the weakest spots on its body?
Naturally, the other side of this
coin is the assistant who actually values his/her master’s well-being above all
else (think Waylon Smithers), though this makes them no less dangerous to other
people (who have the major disadvantage of not being the boss). The relationship between master and assistant
is singular (just pray you’re on the master’s good side, though that doesn’t
guarantee your safety, either). Imagine
my surprise, then, when Count Frankenstein (Rossano Brazzi) in
Dick Randall’s Frankenstein’s Castle Of Freaks (aka Il Castello Della
Paura aka Terror Castle aka The House Of Freaks, etcetera,
etcetera) has not one, not two, not three, but four assistants, all of them
creepy, duplicitous, and ugsome(except for Gordon Mitchell’s
Igor, who is the very exemplar of a Mitchell-ian granitic performance).
The film opens in media res with
a bunch of villagers (including one in a pair of designer blue jeans and a
plain white dress shirt) surrounding and being attacked by a caveman (Loren Ewing) who
is later named Goliath. Once the
creature has been felled, Frankenstein and his cronies make off with his corpse
and perform some enigmatic procedure on it.
They next dig up a woman’s corpse for some nebulous reason, though dwarf
Genz (Dr. Loveless himself, the Oscar-nominated Michael Dunn) just
can’t stop himself from groping one of her breasts. The Count’s daughter Maria (Simonetta Vitelli)
soon shows up with beau Eric (Eric Mann) and
friend Krista (Christiane Rücker),
and things turn even odder.
It’s interesting to me; for as
much as the very concept of sleaze is important to this film (I would even
argue it was the chief reason it was produced in the first place), the
filmmakers didn’t go for the brass ring like they could have. The women get naked throughout the film, and
there’s some groping and mud bathing, but it’s also some pretty chaste
stuff. Considering the movie came from
Italy (though admittedly [and curiously] directed by an American), home to some
of the great cinematic sleaze-meisters, one would think the kinkier aspects would
have been played up more. Nonetheless, the
film feels as though they wanted to go for it, but they held back for some
undisclosed reason. Genz watches
Frankenstein’s daughter and guests from behind the walls of their rooms. He’s called a necrophiliac outright, though
the only nod we get to this particular quirk is the aforementioned feel-copping. The majority of the film’s skeeziness comes
from the voyeurism of its characters, not their overt participation in specific
acts, and the majority of this voyeurism is partaken by the uglier male
characters. Because they are
unattractive, the implication is that they are impotent. Ergo, their only source of sexual
gratification is the act of gazing at better-looking (I won’t say “beautiful,”
per se) people having successful sexual encounters or reveling in the
sensuality of their own bodies (like in, say, a milk bath). Naturally, the act of looking will eventually
give way to action, but even with their ardor up, these males prove as
incompetent as they are flaccid.
The film goes to great lengths to
emphasize the doings and intrigues of what we would normally consider to be the
background characters over bestowing any sort of depth to the main
characters. Bug-eyed Hans (Luciano Pigozzi)
hates Genz and wants him gone.
Hunchbacked Kreegin (Xiro Papas) is
secretly tagging Hans’s homely wife Valda (Laura De Benedittis),
who, incidentally, likes her loving a bit on the rough side. It’s almost like a gothic soap opera, just
with Frankenstein and live cavemen in the mix.
In this sense, it truly is a castle of freaks, since it’s the bizarre
assistants who are the focus. They’re
the only characters who seem to display any type of emotion. Despite the cooing and lovemaking in which
the “normal” people partake, it is they who are cold and fairly soulless, on
the whole. The Frankenstein’s Monster
facet of the film, which one would think is the whole reason to make a film
with the Baron’s/Count’s name in the title in the first place, is not only
secondary to the film entirely, but it comes within a hair’s breadth of being
superfluous in total, except for the required finale carnage quotient (try
saying that three times fast) he fulfills.
Frankenstein’s Castle Of Freaks is an outré mashup of clichés, and
there is much in it that is simply unexplained.
Where did this Goliath come from?
Where did the other caveman, Ook (played by Salvatore Baccaro
under the outstanding pseudonym of Boris Lugosi; the only thing that could make
this cooler would be if Fleming played Goliath under the name Bela Karloff),
come from, and do the two cavemen know each other? What happened to the woman’s corpse from the
film’s opening scenes? Why is there a
mineral bath in the middle of Ook’s cave, and why is it okay to bathe in for
only short periods of time, and how did Ook never discover this before if Maria
likes going there so much? The
filmmakers bring up these oddities, drop them onscreen, and then just leave
them dangling in the wind without explanation.
The audience begins to connect dots in their minds which may or may not
actually be present in the work (more than likely not), and damn it all if
these ludicrous elements don’t make what is essentially a slipshod piece of
schlock filmmaking into a bona fide curiosity.
It may never make any sense whatsoever in the grand scheme of things,
but it still compels as a filmic anomaly, a Fiji mermaid to be marveled at from
one side of the glass, studying the obvious stitching while willing it to be
the genuine article.
Make Or Break: The very
first shot of the film thrusts the viewer into an outlandish tableau, and it is
our choice to either accept it and go along or to laugh and dismiss everything
that follows. Oddly, either reaction
would be valid with this particular piece, and it could even be argued that
these reactions may co-exist in the same moments throughout. This is trash, but it’s oddly engaging trash.
MVT: The best bits of this
film are those which are the most abstruse, specifically because they resist
being defined or even acknowledged. I
mean, who would ever think to put Neanderthals in the same movie with Doctor
(sorry, Count) Frankenstein and a pervy, pint-sized necrophile? The makers of this little gem, apparently.
Score: 6.25/10
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