I WAS A TEENAGE FRANKENSTEIN (1957)
"After I've grafted on your new face, life for you will really begin."
The iconic American International Pictures, or AIP, was only in its third year of turning constant profits on low-budget genre pictures like Day the World Ended and It Conquered the World when either producer Herman Cohen, producer Alex Gordon, or AIP co-founders James Nicholson and/or Samuel Z. Arkoff (depending on whose story you believe) shrewdly decided to kill two birds with one stone. "I had heard that 62 percent of the movie audience was between fifteen and thirty," Cohen recalled, "and I knew that the movies that were grossing well were horror and rock'n'roll pictures. So I decided to combine them with an exploitation title."
The result was AIP's most successful movie for many years to come, 1957's I Was a Teenage Werewolf. The movie catapulted star Michael Landon to fame as Tony Rivers, a student with serious anger management issues who, on the advice of police Detective Donovan (Barney Phillips, long a Ranting Russell fave), becomes a patient of "prominent" consulting psychologist Dr. Alfred Brandon, played by Whit Bissell. Outwardly warm and sympathetic, Dr. Brandon is in fact diabolical and quite mad ("Mankind is on the verge of destroying itself. The only hope for the human race is to hurl it back into its primitive dawn, to start all over again!") and uses hypnosis, scopolamine and his secret serum to "regress" Tony into his primitive state - a werewolf. As a werewolf Tony has even worse anger management issues and kills five (including Brandon, his assistant, May 1957 Playboy playmate Dawn Richard and a dog) before Donovan and an officer shoot him dead. "It's not for man to interfere in the ways of God," says Donovan, echoing Harvey B. Dunn's infamous line at Bride of the Monster's conclusion, "He tampered in God's domain."
The profits piled up so immediately that the sequel was out within a scant five months. Directed by Herbert L. Strock (who went on to direct, uncredited, 1980's Monstroid, which could really use a special edition Blu-ray release at this point), I Was a Teenage Frankenstein finds Professor Frankenstein (no first name) plotting to construct "a youth" out of various body parts. Attentive viewers will note that Professor Frankenstein is played by none other than Whit Bissell, who played Dr. Brandon in I Was a Teenage Werewolf. Different movie, same whack-job scientist. So same, in fact, that Bissell paraphrases himself from the earlier movie. "You've been more than an assistant on other occasions," he browbeats Joseph Mell in I Was a Teenage Werewolf. "Accomplice would be a better word!" Then five months later: "...That other experiment that you assisted me about a month ago," he browbeats Robert Burton in I Was a Teenage Frankenstein, "made you my ally. Of course I could you another and uglier word - accomplice. But I won't."
Appropriating the mangled corpse of a teenager who was conveniently thrown from his car in a head-on collision right in front of his house, Professor Frankenstein determines all he needs are two hands and a right leg to complete his patchwork youth. And hey, presto! A local track team's chartered plane crashes into a nearby mountain. The Doctor and his assistant, Dr. Karlton (played by the aforementioned Robert Burton), steal the needed limbs from the cemetery in the dead of night, attaching them to their "teenage marvel" in record time. The marvel's face, however, is a still a disfigured, grotesque mess from the accident. A replacement face is needed, so the Professor has his teen creature kill a boy at the local lover's lane.
And this is where we arrive at our Man Without a Body, disembodied-head moment. Back at the Professor's house, he and the creature stand next to a covered birdcage. The Professor uncovers it to reveal the head of the freshly-killed youth:
This face is quickly grafted onto the creature, completing his transformation into Professor Frankenstein's ideal young man:
What struck the Ranting Russell staff about I Was a Teenage Frankenstein was how much further it pushed the envelope than its predecessor. I Was a Teenage Werewolf ran afoul of church groups and moralists during this era of juvenile delinquency fears, but I Was a Teenage Frankenstein is far more graphic and mean-spirited. Professor Frankenstein is a bona fide sociopath, with no thought or empathy for anyone but himself. He delights in
inflicting pain on his creation to remind it who's in control. He slaps his fiance (Phyllis Coates, four years after playing Lois Lane in The Adventures of Superman) for no real reason and has the creature murder her later, feeling absolutely no remorse. Killing a boy necking with his girlfriend is simply a justifiable means to an end - his glory, when the scientific world sees his achievement. Incidentally, he can only reveal his achievement by taking his creation back to England, because here in the States he'll be convicted of first-degree murder once the lover's lane kid's parents see their boy's face on this towering scientific feat. Frankenstein's solution is to dismember the creature and ship it across the Atlantic in crates with false bottoms. Easy peasy.
And the gore: he bullies Dr. Karlton into helping him with his deadly project, and we watch them remove the car crash victim's hand and leg with a bone saw:
And a distinct Man Without a Body-type illogic and surrealness pervades the picture. Professor Frankenstein is English but has no accent. He rents a house, yet has somehow managed to build a basement morgue and alligator pit below the morgue without the owner knowing. The alligator pit is, naturally, where he dispenses with all human detritus. The severed limbs get thrown in, as does his fiance's body, as does the Professor himself when the creature turns on him in the film's final minutes. Follow the logic here: it's less work digging out an alligator pit, filling it with water and stocking it with an alligator (why would that raise any eyebrows?) than to simply dispose of the severed limbs in a dumpster or out in the desert.
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| Whit Bissell: just plain evil |
Additionally, the only thing the Professor replaces on his teenager's body are the hands and a leg. Yet, the reanimated corpse, which speaks and remembers the Bible, is otherwise a blank slate. Why doesn't he have his old personality?
Because this is the Disembodied Head Craze of 1957 - 1959 kids, and the finer details don't matter. Critics may have dismissed these movies, but Herman Cohen's target audience ate it up and AIP laughed all the way to the bank. They were certain that so long as there were mad scientists, disembodied heads and pretty dames, the rest would take care of itself. And boy howdee, did it ever. The "I was a teenage..." moniker became part of the cultural landscape, and continues to be utilized in various forms to this day.
One last curious aspect of this film is that despite its status as a commodity created solely to sell tickets for AIP in 1957 before moving on to the next commodity, it remains, thanks to a nearly throwaway Whit Bissell line, a remarkably topical and culturally relevant movie here in the 21st century. "I plan to assemble a human being using parts and organs from different cadavers," Professor Frankenstein tells Dr. Karlton in the movie's opening minutes. "...Simply an intelligent adaptation of the principle of selective breeding. After all," he continues, "if you breed morons you beget morons. But when brilliant people mate..."
The Professor has waded, however briefly, into the seismic controversy of eugenics, the shame of a nation whose infamy reverberates to this very day. Did writers Herman Cohen and Aben Kandel (credited under the pseudonym Kenneth Langtry) intentionally embed a swipe at socialists in Frankenstein's dialog? Is the Professor himself - narcissistic, callous - a stand-in for America's liberal elite, and Karlton the moral opposition (the hapless Karlton, all but extorted into assisting Frankenstein, has had enough by movie's end, telling the Professor he's "inhuman" and won't be part of his "fiendish plan" to dismember the creature)? Karlton, after all, survives, and Frankenstein gets fed to the alligator. As we've always maintained, that's the beauty of true art: it operates on numerous levels all at once.
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