Soul Cinema - Blackenstein!

Blackenstein (don't you just love the title) is a flick I've been eager to see for many, many moons. I caught part of it one night on a late-night fright show once years ago, but by and large the movie has escaped me. Every once in a while, I get on a Frankenstein kick and want to check out all the versions I can and this one was always a gap in my knowledge. But no more!

Now despite starring a Lone Ranger, the ironically named "Ivory Stone" and the perfectly named "Roosevelt Jackson", I cannot say this is in any way a "good" movie by any measure normally applied to cinema. But it's a pretty nifty diversion and offers up a "Frankenstein" who is almost noble and a "Frankenstein's Monster" who is especially sympathetic. A woman (Ivory Stone) wants her boyfriend, a veteran horribly wounded in Vietnam to get special medical treatment and her former mentor (John Hart as "Dr. Stein") has just the right techniques to possibly help if he will. He does, and does so with the appropriate and balanced motivations, to help a patient in pain and then to further his understanding of the science he is seeking. Others such as his not-so-nice butler Malcom (Roosevelt Jackson no less) manage to corrupt that process and of course as in every such movie mayhem erupts.

"Blackenstein" is played by Joe De Sue, a hapless non-actor who just sort of looks out of his face most of movie, even when he's nibbling on a victim (yes, this Creature is a cannibal). That and the mostly catch-as-catch-can sets really limit what can be seen, that and the meager lighting in any scene not on an interior set (or room). The tried-and-true Frankenstein electrical equipment fashioned by Kenneth Strickfadden so many years before for the Universal classics and I guess will be used a year later in Young Frankenstein by Mel Brooks. Blackenstein is not a good movie, but it's still fun to watch.

On another note, the DVD I watched had a lot of information about the producer of the movie, a guy named Frank Saletri, who was a known Hollywood lawyer and who might just have had ties to the mob that got him murdered in the early 80's. One great detail about the movie is that much of it was shot in Saletri's house which had been originally owned by Bela Lugosi and is a wild bit of architecture. The house has since been razed to make room for roads. The bodacious Liz Renay also makes an appearance in all her bosomy glory. This is a movie that's worth seeing for a lot of reasons. 

Note: This post originally appeared at Rip Jagger's Other Dojo. 

Rip Off