The pressbook for Frankenstein’s Castle of Freaks is only four pages, 11 by 17 inches, but the illustrations are really pretty good and they help sell a movie that needed more visual and script goodness devoted to it. As it stands, assuming you don’t poke your eyes out half-way through, it is a fun romp with a little alcohol consumption to loosen up your critical faculties. It falls into the category of it’s really bad, but cheeky enough to make it worthwhile to see. If you can see it with friends, even better. Make a party of it, pour the wine but hold the cheeses. The movie has enough of them. How you can put Michael Dunn and Rossano Brazzi together and come away with this weird tale is a self-study course in what bad movies are all about. Even the director, Dick Randall, is questionable. No one really knows who directed it. Dick’s a fake (now I’m thinking how many times I can say Dick in this article and get away with it, all legit like).
So what if it’s “one of the trashiest horror movies produced in Italy in the 1970s” (Roberto Curti, Italian Gothic Horror Films, 1970-1979), trash can still be fun. What does Roberto know that we don’t? Well, yeah, he’s an expert film historian and all that. But anyway, what’s very interesting is the stapled, typed notice on the cover. There’s some questionable moments in the movie that are definitely not PG, so not sure who went to lunch during the ratings screening, but the note is a tad off.
Ook, the giant running amok killing people, is Salvatore Baccaro, but they gave him the name Boris Lugosi in the credits. Now that’s a movie I’d love to see: someone cloning Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi and a tragic lab accident renders them one-half each of the same body. Wild, right? I got dibs on the screenplay.
