Frankenstein Island (1981)

From my favorite movies..

The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

The biggest problem with this movie is it’s a little better than you think it might be, which somehow makes it worse. As in, it takes itself a bit too seriously, which makes most of the movie feel kind of dull.

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

Frankenstein Island is an incomprehensible mess of a movie. Anyone rating it higher than I have is kidding themselves. There may be a laugh or two in the "so bad, it's good" sort of way, but this doesn't make up for the overall disaster than is this movie.Most any review you'll read on Frankenstein Island will point out the numerous faults in the film. While I'm not going to even attempt to go over all of that well-worn ground, a few things really hit me that I want to mention.1. Plot – What a disaster! Frankenstein Island feels like someone took about five movie plots and tried to jam them into one movie. Plot threads go nowhere and are never resolved. And in the end, we're left with a movie that has no ending. No attempt was made to wrap things up with any explanation or resolution. It just ends.2. John Carradine – He may be listed as one of the stars, but he's never really in the movie. A poorly projected image of Carradine rambling on about a golden thread and power inserted about every 20 minutes doesn't' really mean he's in the movie. The 8X10 glossy of Carradine conspicuously placed in a number of shots doesn't cut it either.3. Cameron Mitchell – Poor, poor Cameron Mitchell. He really must have been in a hard way to appear in this thing. He's one of my genre favs – love him in Blood and Black Lace. His role here is embarrassing.I could go on and on, but there's really no point. I could write pages about things like: Sheila Frankenstein's name and hair, zombies dressed like WWII French resistance fighters, Amazons in leopard skin bikinis (where were the leopards?), Steve Brodies ridiculous one-eyed Jocko, a "backup" brain, building a raft when you already have a raft, long stretches of film with an uncomfortable lack of dialogue, etc. There's just too much.

With other bad films the novelty wears off fast. Not this time. True the budget is low, but not so low that new crazy elements can't be sprung on the viewer in every scene. Some of the props are not impressive. For example a barely-altered plastic devil fork (used as a magic wand?) and department store mannequins (experimented on?). Don't be deterred though, the sets and costumes are all fun and the plot moves fast.John Carradine is in this movie less than any top-billed star has been in any movie. You will see that he was no doubt not on the same set. In fact, you will see his performance does not even demand that he be on any set.The very end is so cheap that it will make you mad. Still, this movie pleased me and I laughed a lot.

I saw this movie when I was in the Navy in the early 80s. I still remember every horrible detail. The long hair of the soldiers. No two uniforms were the same. "The Power of the Golden Thread"... which was never explained. The aparition of Dr. Frankenstein, or his son, or grandson, or whoever. I prayed to God that something would make sense before I left the theatre. It never did make sense. I assumed as I left the theater, that some director's 14 year old son wanted to direct his own movie, and did so with about $5,000 of daddy's money. This is horrible even for an inexperienced 14 year old on a $5,000 budget.YOU MUST SEE THIS MOVIE to appreciate how truly bad it is. You will be embarrassed for all associated with it. You will be angry with yourself for wasting your time to watch it. I can't believe I'm wasting my time writing about this horrible horrible movie. Can one suffer from PTSD merely from having watched a bad bad movie?

This thing is so mind-boggling that words almost fail me. I literally spent 80% of it with my jaw dropped in utter disbelief, punctuated by bursts of incredulous laughter. Nothing in it makes ANY SENSE AT ALL! I mean, our castaways arrive on the island in a perfectly serviceable rubber raft, and the first thing they do is set off in quest of wood **to build a raft with!** Anytime anyone mentions a specific place name (i.e., Kansas City) they suffer stabbing pains in the right forearm for absolutely no reason whatsoever! Do I even need to mention the frequent cryptic appearances ("The golden thread! The power! The power!") by the Floating Head of John Carradine, the tribe of leopard-bikini-clad island girls who are really aliens, the mad doctress Sheila Frankenstein (also a Van Helsing relative) and her platinum Tammy Faye Bakker wig, a 200-year-old colleague of the original Doc Frankenstein, and a whole lot of skulls, tarantulas, blood transfusions and rocks? Or the climactic grade-Z kung-fu battle between the ski-hat zombies, our heroes, the jungle girls and the completely ineffectual Frankenstein Monster (yeah, he's in here too)? --Hysterically funny and a DO NOT MISS for any fan of the really, REALLY bad.