Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster (1965)
Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster is the most awful, hilariously incompetent alien invasion movie since Plan 9 from Outer Space. In some ways, it’s worse than Plan 9 from Outer Space; Ed Wood was an inept filmmaker, but at least we got the sense, however faint, that he was trying. And he never made reference to an unrelated story. To say that Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster has absolutely nothing to do with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein would be like saying the surface of the sun is warm. The closest it gets is an opaque comparison between Shelley’s Monster and a half-man, half-robot astronaut made partially from spare human parts. Oh, and his name is Frank. Get it? What a sense of humor this movie has!
We very quickly learn that Frank – or rather, his alias Colonel Frank Saunders (Robert Reilly) – is part of a covert NASA program to explore space without risking the lives of full flesh-and-blood astronauts. His latest mission is interrupted as soon as his rocket blasts off; he’s shot down by an alien spacecraft, who mistakes his rocket, and seemingly all other rockets, as a missile. Frank crash lands in Puerto Rico, sustaining damage to not just half his head, now a revolting mass of burnt synthetic skin and a few fried wires, but also to his programming. He’s now sought after by the American government, along with the scientist who created him (Jim Karen) and the scientist’s obligatory emotional female assistant (Nancy Marshall), who of course has learned to think of Frank as a man with human emotions, not just a programmed laboratory creation.
The trigger-happy spacecraft, it turns out, is piloted by the few survivors of an alien race whose unnamed home planet was ravaged by nuclear war. By ravaged, I mean that all their women were killed. Well, almost all their women; the aliens, who look like Count Orlok without the fangs, are accompanied and continue to be ruled by a sultry, strangely humanoid princess (Marilyn Hanold). Her mission: To repopulate her planet by invading Earth and capturing women of childbearing age for breeding purposes. Perhaps because she’s an evil draconian princess, I guess her minions were too afraid to tell her that, as a female, she can help her planet by taking part in her own mission. More likely, the filmmakers didn’t have the time, money, and intelligence to fix or even notice their canyon-sized gaps in logic, such as twice using what’s obviously the exact same footage of the princess ordering a rocket destroyed.
The laughable plot pales in comparison to the painfully amateurish way the film is shot, edited, and acted. It goes beyond an Ed Wood movie with its overuse of stock footage, consisting entirely of rocket launches, military planes, helicopters, army bases, and soldiers milling about. I would wager the film contains more stock footage than original material, given the fact that the stock footage is not only constant but also has noticeably better production values. And don’t get me started on the makeup and special effects. With the Orlock-esque aliens – especially the maniacal Dr. Nadir (Lou Cutell), the princess’ right-hand man – you can actually see where the pale bald caps and pointed ears end and the actors’ real skin begins. As far as the title space monster is concerned, essentially the bodyguard of the princess, it’s just a person in a hilariously unconvincing costume, which looks like Bigfoot, a skeleton, and a fish were genetically spliced together.
Puerto Rico is an island nation of over two million people. But on the basis of this film, it’s virtually uninhabited and consists only of shorelines, muddy fields, dirt roads, and a forest of palm trees. Just two people are seen on a fairly expansive beach. One is a portly middle-aged man and the other is a bikini-clad young woman, who are presumably a couple and yet speak no lines and regard one another with awkward, suspicious glances. There’s also one shot of a woman sweeping her back porch. The only scene featuring a crowd is a poolside dance party – which is interrupted when the princess’ minions, clad in very Earth-looking spacesuits, barge in and forcefully drag away all the women. The men, apparently unfamiliar with the concept of chivalry, make no effort to stop the minions, or even to look shocked.
On the same token, the rounded-up women don’t seem to comprehend that they have been kidnapped. As they’re systematically processed in the princess’ geodesic spaceship – which, incidentally, contains rooms and corridors it doesn’t have the space to hold – their faces show not a trace of emotion, or even basic expression. They’re like lobotomized drones. Even when they’re forced to lay on a metal slab, get covered with what’s obviously a frilly tablecloth, and are slid into an offscreen room, they neither fight back nor bother to make a single sound. Not so much as a, “Let go of me!” or, “Who are you?” or, “Where are you taking me?” I suspect this was done to cut down the budget even further. Actors, and I use that word loosely in this case, don’t have to be paid as much when they’re given no dialogue.
Filmmaking is hard. Independent filmmaking is even harder. But if you’re going to pour your heart and soul into an art form and fight for every cent of the necessary money, shouldn’t you have something worthwhile in mind, something artistic, something that’s just basically thought through? Why aim so low? Ed Wood may have been sincere in his efforts, but his films, which show no discernible talent at work, make it clear that he didn’t learn this lesson. And neither did Robert Gaffney, the director of Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster. He seems to have operated under the assumption that B movies about aliens and monsters should have no standards at all. I submit The Blob, Village of the Damned, and even The Creation of the Humanoids as evidence of how wrong this assumption is.
