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mst3kproject · 4 years

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I Was a Teenage Frankenstein

Have I somehow not already reviewed this? Shit, I better get on that. If the title alone weren’t enough, I Was a Teenage Frankenstein has Gary Conway from The Viking Women and the Sea Serpent, Phyllis Coates from Invasion USA, and sure enough, Whit Bissell from I Was a Teenage Werewolf playing more or less the same mad scientist character. Though sadly, there was no part for Pepe the Latino-Transylvanian janitor.

Professor Frankenstein, yet another modern descendant of the fabled Baron, is looking for medical applications of his ancestor’s work. He thinks he can bring dead tissue back to life, and allow it to be used in organ transplants. Naturally Those Fools at the Academy tell him it’s impossible, so he’s determined to Show Them All. Conveniently, shortly after this declaration a car full of drunk teenagers crashes just outside Frankenstein’s home. He and his buddy Dr. Carlton sneak off with one of the corpses, and over the next few weeks they assemble bits and pieces into a boy. Problems arise when Frankenstein, true to form, refuses to acknowledge the humanity of his creation. The boy wants to see the world outside the lab, the Professor’s fiancée Margaret is getting curious about what goes on down there, and Carlton is having more and more qualms… there are many ways this can end, but none of them are happy.

We’ve got some awesome mad science going on here, with a lab full of blinky light machines and a secret stock-footage alligator pit that, yes, the mad doctor does get chucked into at the end. Lots of severed body parts are thrown around, all of them enormously fake but pretty gruesome nevertheless. The horrible, horrible monster mask falls into this same category. My favourite moment in the film is when Frankenstein takes his creature out to pick out a new face, and comes back with a severed head in a birdcage! My second-favourite is the traumatized witness to the car accident wailing “what a crash!” I’d be hard-put to choose between the two for a stinger. And at the end, the movie does the same thing as War of the Colossal Beast, suddenly switching from crisp black and white to shitty desaturated colour, and it has the same effect.

But none of that is what the movie is actually about. If there’s one thing I want to say about this film, it is the truly astonishing fact that I Was a Teenage Frankenstein appears to have been written by somebody who actually read Mary Shelley’s book. This is not a claim that can be made of many Frankenstein movies, and certainly not of any that previously appeared on this blog. I’m not sure the writer of Frankenstein Island had even seen any of the movies. Although I Was a Teenage Frankenstein borrows only the barest of bones from the book’s plot, the emotional center of both is the doctor’s relationship with his creation.

The reason it’s a teenage Frankenstein, by the way, is because the professor believes one of the reasons his ancestor failed at creature-creation is because he used old, worn-out parts. By choosing bits from young men cut down in their prime, he feels the result will be healthier and more resilient both physically and mentally. He seems to be right, too. His creature is not a shuffling abomination, but an intelligent and articulate young man who longs to ‘go out among people’ and is absolutely crushed to find that the ones he meets are terrified of him.

The Professor is proud of the progress he makes in teaching his creation to do things like walk and speak, but he seems entirely uninterested in the boy’s happiness or personality. When he sees his creature crying, he is pleased that the tear ducts work. When Margaret expresses fear of the ‘monster’, Professor Frankenstein tells her to think of him as something ‘like a machine’, a creation of science. Finding he needs to get his creature out of the country in a hurry, he has no qualms about taking the boy apart to ship and reanimate later. He never even bothers to give his creation a name, addressing him simply as ‘my boy’ – never just ‘boy’, but always ‘my boy’. The possessive is important here.

Indeed, as his creature gains humanity, Professor Frankenstein seems to lose his. At the beginning of the movie, the Professor (who never has a first name, either – he is a scientist, not a human being) seems very much in love with Margaret. As events progress, he becomes colder and colder towards her, and eventually manipulates his creation into murdering her. Shortly thereafter is a tense moment in which we worry that the same thing will happen to Dr. Carlton.

Don’t think Frankenstein started off as a good person, though. Though he claims to love her, he slaps Margaret when she asks what he’s working on in the basement. When he first describes the experiment he’s about to perform to Dr. Carlton, he says he’s using the ‘principle of selective breeding’, choosing the best parts to put together into a human body. This will be a step towards ‘perfection in the human race’. That’s the sort of language that should worry just about anybody, especially when it’s coming from somebody with a German name. Unfortunately, the movie shies away from actually exploring the issues of eugenics or racial purity that it seems to bring up here. You can see why they might not want to go into that, but it’s a shame they left it hanging there.

With this for his upbringing, the creature is not a model of morality either. He eventually escapes from the lab and goes outside to interact with human beings. The first person he sees is a girl sitting and brushing her hair – when she notices him, she screams, and he accidentally kills her as he tries to make her stop. The incident clearly has a terrible effect on him, but this has far more to do with the way people reacted to his face than with the fate of the dead woman… the creature never seems to feel a moment’s guilt about the latter. Perhaps this is because of the way Frankenstein raised him, or maybe it’s because, being a reanimated corpse himself, the boy does not think of death as a permanent fate. Again, the question is not explored.

That’s the main problem with I Was a Teenage Frankenstein – it keeps suggesting things it doesn’t want to follow up on. This becomes a particular problem at the ending, which is very unsatisfying. Frankenstein sets about taking his creation apart for transport, the boy objects and kills him, and then commits suicide by electrocuting himself. Throughout the movie, the only thing the creature has expressed a desire for is to interact with people who aren’t afraid of him. Having just removed that stupid monster mask had his plastic surgery, he is on the cusp of being able to do so… but he never gets the chance.

Not only is this disappointing in itself, it also leaves another plot point unsettled. In order to get a normal-looking face, Frankenstein and the creature killed and beheaded a young man named Bob, traumatizing Bob’s girlfriend Arlene in the process. We see Arlene’s mother describe the incident to police officers, and offer them a photograph of Bob so they can identify him if they find him. All these characters then simply vanish. The next scene is Frankenstein telling Carlton that they’re going to take the creature apart for shipping, and then the movie ends.

What I wanted to see at this point was the creature going out and talking to people like he always wanted. It would seem to be going awkwardly but not bad, but then he would run into Arlene, who identifies him as Bob and tries to spread the word that he’s still alive. This would make the creature feel that he has to kill her to keep her quiet, and ultimately bring the police to Frankenstein’s door. Instead, the movie goes with an ending that feels like kind of a cop-out, like they ran out of time and just had to finish the story as quickly as possible. We don’t even get a decent explanation of how he knew the two scientists were going to take him apart.

This is doubly disappointing because they could have had time. There are early, talky scenes that could have been cut down a little in order to show us things we’d rather have seen. The movie doesn’t drag much, but there are bits where it lingers on stuff we don’t need to see, like Margaret getting the key to the lab copied, or establishing that Frankenstein knows where the Lover’s Lane is. Alternatively, since it wasn’t going to make a plot point out of Arlene, they could have cut that scene with her mother talking to the cops entirely… that would have made the ending feel less irrelevant.

In the end, I Was a Teenage Frankenstein reminds me a lot of another favourite bad Frankenstein movie of mine, Lady Frankenstein. The two films share a lack of ambition. Both have everything they need to be a much more interesting and thought-provoking take on the original material, but Lady Frankenstein chose to be about Rosalba Neri’s tits and I Was a Teenage Frankenstein tosses ideas around willy-nilly without ever giving any of them a chance to stick.

The weirdest thing about the movie is that it doesn’t even make any effort to appeal to teenagers! You’d think a movie called I Was a Teenage Frankenstein would feature the title character interacting with teenagers, or trying to do ‘teenager’ things from the 50’s, like go to sock hops or race cars. But no, besides the creature, all the major characters are adults. The closest they come is by encouraging teenagers to identify with the boy as he chafes against parental restrictions. I Was a Teenage Werewolf was about actual teenagers. Why didn’t this film, obviously a partner to it, do the same?

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