Frankenstein's Daughter (1958)

Purely Joyful Movie!

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

I have seen the majority of Frankenstein movies and this is nothing like any of them. It's very similar to lots of other movies though. The end was ridiculous but it's still a decent Stein movie.

FRANKENSTEIN'S DAUGHTER is a hammy horror B-movie that fits right in at the tail-end of the 1950s. The story is cheesy and amusing and impossible to take seriously for a moment, but there's something irresistable about watching a misshapen beast roaming the town and busting up unsuspecting townsfolk. The film sees a descendant of the original Frankenstein now holed up in small town America, where his nefarious experiments transform a young woman into a snarling, scowling, and very ugly creature (played by a man, oddly enough). John Ashley, later of THE MAD DOCTOR OF BLOOD ISLAND infamy (as well as a producer of THE A-TEAM), plays the clean-cut hero.

Take a screenplay written with every monster movie cliché imaginable and from any other genre that came in handy, an unimaginative director, $60,000, and you'll get a movie like Frankenstein's Daughter. Really, the actors, several of which I recognize from TV shows of the time, gave performances as good as any others could have done with the material given them. There isn't a believable situation in this lovable, laughable turkey. This one had me smiling, laughing under my breath, or laughing out load throughout.Oliver Frank is quite a piece of work. He pushes his boss, Prof. Morton, around, and patronizes him. When he isn't hitting hard on Morton's granddaughter, Trudy (played by Sandra Knight, who can also be seen in "The Terror"), he's dosing her with a drug that makes her horrible looking. Everyone patronizes her. Frank's also carrying on the Frankenstein tradition in Morton's laboratory. He runs down a girl who brushes his high school masher moves off, takes her brain, and puts it into his monster. The monster moves spastically, like a battery operated robot I had as a kid, though mine tipped over all the time. The monster's only victims had to help by standing still or cornering themselves. As per formula (Teens to the rescue!), Trudy's boyfriend (played by John Ashley, who costarred in the equally funny "The Eye Creatures") destroys the monster, and Frank dies in the hilarious climatic scene in the laboratory.I downloaded a copy from The Internet Archive. It's full-frame (4:3) rather than at the original aspect ratio. I looked around for a copy for sale at the original aspect ratio without luck.

This is the movie that almost killed me. Watching it many years ago, at NYC's Thalia Theatre, as part of an amazing double feature with "The Monster From Green Hell," I laughed so uproariously that I really thought I was going to rupture my spleen. It has been my favorite "bad movie" ever since, and I love it to this day, for many reasons. First of all, we have to wait a mere 20 seconds or so before we see one of the film's two impressive monsters. That first one is Trudy, who, when we first see her, is an ugly, bucktoothed, bushy-browed horror in a nightgown. Come morning, Trudy is as pretty as can be, but retains memories of the previous night. Could all this have something to do with the presence of her uncle's research assistant, Otto Frank (nee Frankenstein), in the house? What would you think? As it turns out, ol' Otto, the grandson of the original good Dr., is using Uncle Carter's lab for some projects of his own. The creature he ultimately creates looks like a wrinkled mass of toadstools, while the monster's female brain "is conditioned to a man's world; therefore takes orders where [19th century ones] didn't." (This line always brings the house down in theatres!) Fifties stalwart John Ashley provides his usual sturdy support to the befuddled Trudy, director Richard Cunha remarkably brings in his fourth awesome film of 1958 ("She Demons," "Giant From the Unknown" and "Missile to the Moon" being the others), and the Page Cavanaugh Trio performs two swinging rock 'n' roll numbers. Indeed, the song with the refrain "Shaba-labba-lop, bobba-lobba lobba-lop" (which I now know to be called "Daddy-Bird") was the one that almost killed me back at the Thalia. This really might be the most entertaining teen/horror/rock 'n' roll movie ever made, nicely presented on this crisp-looking Image DVD.