A rampaging mummy infects a number of victims with a virulent green mold in Tom Kennedy’s TIME WALKER. (When this film was shown on MST3K as BEING FROM ANOTHER PLANET, VIDEO WATCHDOG got a name check!)
interesting career) interviewed by VW’s Nathaniel Thompson. Filmed in Italy as La figlia di Frankenstein, Welles’ effort fits into a mini-cycle of 1970s runaway productions which seem equally influenced by the Ham- mer and Universal Frankenstein series: notably, Paul Morrissey’s FLESH FOR FRANKENSTEIN, Jesús Franco’s THE EROTIC RITES OF FRANKENSTEIN and Robert Oliver’s FRANKENSTEIN’S CASTLE OF FREAKS. In THE FRANKENSTEIN CATALOG, Don Glut raises the possibility that Edward Di Lorenzo’s script, pur- portedly based on a story by Dick Randall, was an unauthorized adaptation of “For the Love of Frankenstein,” a VAMPIRELLA comic book story written by Bill Warren and drawn by Jack Sparling. A mooted Corman-pro- duced sequel didn’t show up, but Randall did go on to produce FRANKENSTEIN’S CASTLE OF FREAKS, which has a similar, comic bookish approach to the material. This release supersedes
several previous LADY FRANKEN- STEIN DVDs, which have pre- sented only the Corman cut. That familiar version is included, but an alternate option is to view it with the Corman-excised scenes restored; this material comes from several different sources, evidently a Swedish-subtitled VHS and a European cable broadcast—the fact that quality is so markedly inferior serves the useful purpose of highlighting the trims that Corman chose to make. Chief beneficiary of the restoration is Mickey Hargitay as Captain Harris, an unusually broad-shouldered policeman who plods about, investigating incidental crimes and harassing horny body-snatcher Tom Lynch (MARK OF THE DEVIL’s Herbert Fux). It’s nice to have the film at full length, but (as many who’ve undergone the Corman pruning have been forced to admit) LADY FRANKENSTEIN plays better in its pacier, shorter cut. Though the restored sections are in rough-to-atrocious shape, the
bulk of the film looks fine in its 1.78:1 transfer—certainly less battered than previous home video releases.
Character names like Harris and Lynch seem to suggest the film takes place in Victorian En- gland, but details like police uni- forms and the use of liters rather than pints contradict this—which sets it in an alternative world akin to the Universal and Hammer films, where Swiss, German or Ruritanian aristos sound like En- glish drawing room theater refu- gees and the peasants mutter with Dickensian British accents. After a long and frustrating ca- reer in nearly creating life, Baron Frankenstein (Joseph Cotten) overrules crippled assistant Dr. Marshall (VAMPYROS LESBOS’ Paul Muller) and takes a shortcut that Colin Clive could have warned him against. When Marshall com- plains that the Baron can’t use a damaged brain in his latest ex- periment, Frankenstein snaps “Instinct changes the world, not thought—and my instinct tells
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