FRANKENSTEIN ISLAND
Jerry Warren's FRANKENSTEIN ISLAND is pretty much one of those flicks you have to see yourself. Apparently "finished" around 1981 it really seems much more like something from the 50's, but not in a good way. I doesn't make any kind of sense, it's more like something you dreamed after a bottle of Nyquil and while suffering a high fever. Like you're fading in and out of consciousness and someone is whispering phrases to you that have a suggestive effect on tour dreaming. Things like balloon, Sheila, Carradine, Frankenstein, Poe, Amazons, golden thread and so on. Your clouded mind then brews it up into a plot of sorts. Believe or not, around the mid-eighties this was on at about 3:30 in the morning and that's where I first saw it. It sorta goes like this: a group of idiots, allegedly in a balloon, come ashore on what we're told is an island. We see a balloon in the sky, then guys in a rubber raft on a beach. They wander around looking for stuff to build a raft despite the fact that they were just in a raft. They come across some fake primitive girls in leopard print bikinis doing some sort of rite of passage. Occasionally,a projection of John Carradine appears and blathers on about something. It may be Carradine footage from THE WIZARD OF MARS but I'm not positive. There's some girl go-go dancing back at their village. There's some crazy old guys running around too. The girls also seem to take bong hits out of a skull. They eventually find a jailed Cameron Mitchell who rambles on about "Lenore". You kind of feel bad for Mitchell. Anyway, Mitchell had been imprisoned for seventeen years and has been giving blood for experiments. The weird old guys seem to work for Sheila Frankenstein. Her real name is Van Helsing but she prefers "Frankenstein". There's also a force field on the island that causes pain when someone mentions a geographic place. The basic plot reminds me of TV's "Lost". Turns out Sheila wants to use the castaways to repopulate the native girls who are at least partially alien, I think. Frankenstein's assistant is a really old guy in a bed, with Frankenstein being John Carradine, who only appears as a projection or a photograph in a frame. There's some guys in knit caps who are apparently zombie slaves to Sheila. There's a brain on a dish that may be Frankenstein's and seems to run the place. The actual Frankenstein monster shows up at the end and knocks over some tables before a really lackluster brawl between cave girl/aliens, zombie henchmen and the castaways. One of the zombie guys threatens people with a plastic toy pitch fork. The brain gets disconnected and the castaways are able to escape. Watch, this will be EXACTLY how "Lost" ends. They try to return later with the army but can't find the Frankenstein house or any people.Or maybe none of that happened, I can't be sure anymore. This contains almost all original footage which is rare for a Jerry Warren effort. Take from it what you will.
