THE EROTIC RITES OF FRANKENSTEIN (1973)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *metaphysical*

Though I rated Jess Franco's previous Franken-film low on my mythicity scale, I must admit that I liked that one better than this one, and that's after giving EROTIC RITES OF FRANKENSTEIN two recent screenings.

I suppose RITES could be loosely in continuity with DRACULA PRISONER OF FRANKENSTEIN. Doctor Frankenstein (Dennis Price) seemed to perish in an explosion at the end of PRISONER, but in movie-land everyone's a master of Explosion-Escaping 101. The only other thing that links the 1973 movie to the 1972 one is that the nominal "sympathetic guy" Doctor Seward is still hanging around whatever East European country the action takes place in, and is still played by the same actor. However, there's no reference to the evil doctor's encounter with vampires. Instead, his PRISONER plan to take over the world with some superhuman race is more or less taken over by his new foe, Cagliostro (Howard Vernon). This actor, by the way, has apparently been freed from whatever exigencies kept him nearly immobile in both PRISONER and the subsequent DAUGHTER OF DRACULA.)

There's no clear indication that this bizarre modern wizard is linked to the 18th-century occultist of historical record. As usual Franco doesn't care much for exposition, but he does make some abstruse comment about how Cagliostro appears on the scene as if he called himself out of some "vasty deep" of evil beings. This has a nominal resemblance to some lines in PRISONER, where some gypsies talk about how Frankenstein's evil experiments with vampires can and do call forth countervailing forces.

However, Price's Frankenstein doesn't get a chance to do much of anything. In the opening scene he's in his lab, working on a brand-new Monster-- this time, complete with a weird silver sheen-- when two agents of Cagliostro burst in, killing both Frankenstein and his assistant Morpho (who also didn't die in PRISONER, I guess). One of the agents is just a brutish guy, but the other is Melissa (Anne Libert), a hybrid between human and bird, complete with irregular blue feathers compromising her near-nudity. One line indicated that Melissa was one of Frankenstein's failed experiments, and she's not slow to take out her "daddy" by laying his throat open with her teeth. 

Just as the Frankenstein of PRISONER wanted to create a new race of superhumans to dominate the world, Cagliostro has the same basic idea. The wizard, however, has actually read Mary Shelley's novel, in which the author expressed fears of a new demon-breed resulting from two artificially-created Monsters. So the villain sends the Monster out to collect nubile young women, whose parts Cagliostro will use to make a Bride of the Monster and Mother of a New Race.

Who will stop the fiend? For a little while, it looks as if Vera, daughter of Frankenstein, will become the movie's hero, because she uses mad science to resurrect her dead father in order to identify his murderers. However, Vera all-too-quickly falls under Cagliostro's mental control and becomes his right-hand woman in charge of making the New Bride. Eventually Doctor Seward gets wind of the evil activities and takes action by intruding on Frankenstein's domain. His main function is to turn the Frankenstein Monster against Cagliostro's forces, and he succeeds, killing Melissa and almost killing the wizard (though the Monster lets the villain go for reasons unknown). Cagliostro tries to escape in a modern-day car and the car crashes over a cliff, but Seward is certain he'll return some day.

The most interesting thing about RITES-- which isn't particuarly erotic, even with a whipping scene that Franco later re-worked for GOLDEN TEMPLE AMAZONS-- is Melissa. There aren't a lot of bird-women monsters in cinema, and her main purpose in the story is utter a lot of pseudo-poetic gibberish. It's possible Franco had some idea of her being an oracle who could see the future, since in ancient Greece "meliisae" was a plural name for the priestesses of the oracular deity Apollo. And though "melissa" means "honeybee," the oracles at Delphi and Dodona had some bird-associations, since doves were often sacrificial animals at such temples. Maybe Franco happened to read something about the topic just before making RITES, but if so, there's only a dim suggestion of mythopoeic meaning here.