Lady Frankenstein (La Figlia di Frankenstein, 1971) opens in a graveyard by night. The graverobber (Herbert Fux) transport corpses to the castle of Baron Frankenstein (Joseph Cotton).

The Baron's daughter Tanya is herself a super-intelligent scientific sort who dislikes being left out of the loop for her father's horrific experiments. Daddy thinks she's too goody-goody to be exposed to such horrors, but in reality she has in mind certain innovations that are beyond the pale.

This is not half bad as an original & occasionally sincere take on the Frankenstein legend. Cotton, a fine actor, certainly doesn't do his best work in this thing, but he's more than reasonable even while slumming. Rosalba Neri (credited as Sonia Bay) as Tanya is on the other end of the scale; she's not a fine actor at all, but she throws herself into the tacky role with such relish that she comes off pretty damned thrilling.

The movie image of reanimation by means of electricity is revisited in Lady Frankenstein; there was no such event in Mary Shelley's novel but cinema has made it standard. When the hideously disfigured corpse-built monster rises, it immediately kills its creator.

As the runaway monster (Paul Whiteman) tracks down anyone with a connection to his painful resurrection, Tanya Frankenstein continues her father's experiments, with plans for a new & improved monster.

Her father's long-term gimpy unattractive assistant, Dr. Charles Marshall (Paul Muller), has long been in love with Tanya, but she has the hots for the hunky retarded laborer who works on the castle estate. She plans to put the intelligent doctor's brain in the stupid laborer's body & voila, she'll have both physical & intellectual stimulation from one man!

That a monster always destroys its creator in these films is taken for granted, but not usually for the safety of humanity.

copyright © by Paghat the Ratgirl