The director, Jerry Warren, woke up one day and saw some hot air balloons from his window. He picked up his potato camera, pushed the rec-button, and maybe hoped he could use it in some future project. And so he did. C o o l.
Then we cut to a group of middle-aged men who have crash-landed with the balloons on some island. After some exploring, they stumble into some natives who only consist of young, slim ladies. They only cover their tits and asses with some leopard-bikini-clad. And they seem to have easy access to shampoo. Welcome to the wildlife.
You are pretty, one of the ladies says. And no, this is not really a porno, this is supposed to be a Sci-Fi horror film, if you haven’t already figured it out. They have some weird ritualistic dances as if they were high on bath salt while our group of men drools at them. Every man’s wet fantasy seems to have come true … or maybe not. Because there is a shocking secret to be revealed about these ladies later. One of the ladies gets suddenly kidnapped by a goofy-looking guy in jeans and a beanie who looks pretty much like the twin brother of Bubbles from Trailer Park Boys.
It’s impossible to try explaining what’s really happening here. The film is so bafflingly absurd that anyone would get a serious brain fart if trying to find a breadcrumb of logic.
Our men get met by two other dudes who just randomly pop up behind some bushes – one old bearded grandpa with a cane and a guy with a pirate patch. And both of these guys look like two hardcore alcoholics who have zero business being on a movie set. The strong odor of piss, sweat, booze and old spice really reeks. The one with the patch laughs all the time, drinks from every bottle he can find, and I would assume that the guy was completely hammered for real during the filming. Oliver Reed would be impressed. Because there is no freaking way that any actors near this production could act drunk so naturally as we see here. There’s also a scene where he seems to black-out as he sits by a table and the camera just keeps rolling in case he wakes up. Spoiler alert: some ten moments later he wakes up, just barely.
400 words in, and I haven’t even got to break down the premise. Maybe because there hardly aren’t any. But like in a crowded bar somewhere in Wisconsin on a Wednesday night, a lot of unpredictable shit is bound to happen. And if a celluloid can get drunk, here you have the result. It’s incoherent, messy, absurd, bizarre and out-of-control all the way to the very last pub goer who refuses to leave after closing time. Just one more drink. One more. Burp. Okay then: We have a cheap-looking lab where an old and-ready-to-die Dr. Von (yes, with an o) Helsing lies in a hospital bed, looking confused. Who could blame him. We have some random silly scenes with more Trailer Park Boys-looking weirdos who swing with the cheapest Halloween Devil Fork the budget allowed to spend. We see a glimpse of some creepy mannequin, just because, some drops of acid-trip images, and, of course, we have Dr. Frankenstein, the man of the hour himself. Here he’s played by John Carradine, where he only pops up randomly as a hologram while he’s rambling a string of demented and nonsensical words. If his lines weren’t cryptic enough, they always end with The power… The power… The power… The power…!
Man, this movie…
And yes, we actually have a Frankenstein monster shoe-horned in here, just to put the little, golden raspberry on the top. He pops up randomly just in time to join the classic fight scene in the laboratory. And this fight scene is something else, where the retard-o-meter goes all up and even through the ceiling. It’s even worse than the catfight scene in Manos: The Hands of Fate. The best way to describe the insanity is as if there was a blind dance coordinator on the set instead of a stunt/fight coordinator. The monster also keeps arm-swatting constantly as if there was a fly in front of his face that wouldn’t leave him alone. I wouldn’t be surprised if he accidentally smacked several of his co-actors. And the legend says that he’s still to this day trying to swat that fly.
The film is written, directed and produced by the same mastermind who made Teenage Zombies (1959), The Wild World of Batwoman (1966) and other public-domain classics. The most amusing thing here is that Frankenstein Island was made after Jerry Warren took a ten-year hiatus from filmmaking. And during those ten years, plus five years prior, he didn’t watch a single film and had zero sense of the pulse of the horror movie business – other than he had heard rumors that horror films were profitable again (thanks to the rise of the slasher genre). The guy clearly lived in his own small bubble, completely out of touch deep in a fantasy world where the only movies that existed were his own, and thought that a film like Frankenstein Island would rise his ego. Never heard the term zeitgeist either, I would guess. The even more amusing, if not just tragicomic, is the matter of fact that Frankenstein Island looks like something from the 1950s alongside with Teenage Zombies, produced by Ed Wood. It’s so hilariously and just painfully dated, almost to an impressive level. Without knowing any of this beforehand, I’d rather believe that the Earth is flat than that this was made the same year as Halloween II.
Warren also wanted to make a sequel to Frankenstein Island which he described as “more up-to-date, not so campy and old-time.“ I would even pay a hundred bucks to see that film, but unfortunately Warren died in 1988, two months before John Carradine. Double RIP. The one and only DVD release of the film is out of print and very pricey. It’s also available on Tubi.
Writer and director: Jerry Warren
Country & year: USA, 1981
Actors: Robert Clarke, Steve Brodie, Cameron Mitchell, Robert Christopher, Tain Bodkin, Patrick O’Neil, Andrew Duggan, John Carradine, Katherine Victor, G.J. Mitchell
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082410/
