christopher-underwood When I think of some of the barely visible 3rd generation copies of Jess Franco's films I've seen over the years and now here is a pristine, all bright and shiny Blu-ray. Also, this is a film that was very hard to get to see in any shape or form, for good or bad i will leave to you. Actually, considering what this sets out to do, a Universal Studios rip-off in full colour with full frontal nudity, some gore and a little S&M, this succeeds rather well. Dennis Price probably comes back to life a few too many times and I never did work out why the monster was painted silver but it is light hearted fun with some magically lit scenes. Neither was I sure why Howard Vernon had to stand by as many of his 'instructions' and guidance were spoken by his half bird, half woman side-kick but never mind. The film doesn't waste time getting going and keeps up for the duration with plenty of bloody scenes and lots of skin. The aforementioned S&M quota come curtesy of a fairly lengthy sequence where a completely naked man and women are tied back to back while the silver monster lashes them severely leaving rather theatric bloody stripes. Not bad at all.

Nigel P This is the 1973 Spanish cut. It features less flesh than the alternative 'The Erotic Rites of Frankenstein', but features inserts of Franco favourite (and future wife) Lina Romay as a gypsy girl.To cast Romay and then almost completely obscure her with over-darkened day-for-night filming is an interesting directorial choice. It's equally 'brave' to show close-ups of the Frankenstein Monster's eyes, which brazenly exposes the limitations of the 'head piece' and the lack of effort made to marry it up with actor Fernando Bilbao's face. Forget the lumbering gait of traditional Monsters – this one moves quickly, leaping and snarling as he does so.My favourite scenes involve white-cowled figures passing ghost-like through a misty woodland. These people appear to be followers of Cagliostro (Howard Vernon), who now controls not only Frankenstein's Monster, but also Melisa (Anne Libert), a blind, shrieking vampiric bird woman with plumes of green feathers adorning various portions of her body. Vernon and Libert are probably the best and least restrained actors here, providing an arch and perverse double-act that could only thrive in a Franco film. Cagliostro plans to create a female creature in order to procreate with the original Monster to create a super race. Ah yes. That old chestnut.Dennis Price, whose cultured, recognisable voice is bizarrely dubbed by some inferior actor, gives a scattered performance here as Doctor Frankenstein – that is, a performance that is scattered throughout the film in brief scenes where he is forever on the edge of death (and then beyond, M. Valdemar style) without ever having the good grace to actually expire before much of the film is done (in a scene that can most kindly be described as 'unlikely').The film's reluctance to pursue any level of coherent storyline makes a lot of it fairly ponderous viewing, and yet I rather enjoyed this. Like Frankenstein himself, Franco has stitched together bits and pieces haphazardly to form a whole. It won't sway anyone uncertain about Jess Franco's talents as a film-maker, but it reaches levels of pleasingly frightening weirdness.

Glen McCulla More movie-making madness from the archfiend of Iberian exploitation Jess Franco. This movie, known variously in its alternate guises as "The Erotic Rites of Frankenstein" and "The Curse of Frankenstein" (not to be confused with the Peter Cushing Hammer classic of the same vintage), re-utilises a great deal of the same cast and characters of Franco's roughly contemporaneous "Dracula, Prisoner of Frankenstein", but is thankfully a more coherent film than that effort.That's not necessarily to say that it's good, mind...The plot, such as it is, involves Dr. Frankenstein (Dennis Price once again slogging the twilight years of a once-promising career away in Eurotrash exploitation) and his assistant creating a bizarre silver monster, before being attacked by Melisa the flesh-eating bird woman (the lovely Anne Libert, also to be seen in Franco's "A Virgin Among the Living Dead"), resplendent in green feathers and not a lot else. Melisa is the slave of the immortal Cagliostro, played with relish and garnish on the side by the godlike genius of Howard Vernon, who wants to mate the creature with kidnapped lovelies such as Britt Nichols. Well, you would, wouldn't you? Meanwhile, Esmerelda the gypsy (future Mrs. Franco Lina Romay) is having her own ponderous and largely irrelevant adventures in the woods, chatting away to a batty old crone who doesn't seem to realise that she's even in the film. Understated just doesn't cover it. Cagliostro is in the meantime summoning an undead army of darkness (ie: extras wearing Halloween skellington masks and cloaks), resulting in some quite atmospheric and haunting shots of these revenants drifting through a mist-shrouded forest. Sadly, however, these dreams of conquest are destined to never come to fruition, and Cagliostro winds up plummeting over the edge of a precipice for no other reason than that the film's run-time is almost up.A truly trippy and hallucinatory experience that must be endured to be believed, this is another true Franco classic that combines the kind of story-line you made up when you were too young to know any better, needless nudity of hot chicks, and editing seemingly done on the hoof by a blind man. And a green-feathered flesh eating bird woman. What's not to love?

hulstra This picture is utterly weird. Between unbelievably dull scenes (filmed without any inspiration) we find some of the most extraordinary scene's ever. It uses characters and idea's that were known at that time (and are therefore not introduced), but since comics like Crepax' Valentina are sinking to obscurity, girls who are actually birds and a monster of Frankenstein who whips a couple while they are standing above a field of sharp pins aren't daily routine. I was lucky to find a copy on VHS, so it exists!