me to transplant that brain right now!” The bulbous-headed crea- ture (Peter Whiteman), who looks like a scarred, fangless, grown- up IT’s ALIVE baby comes to life in the laboratory, and promptly crushes its creator to death in a ferocious hug before setting out, like many a previous monster, to terrorize the countryside. The high concept is that the Baron’s even more ambitious daughter Tania (Rosalba Neri, billed as “Sara Bay”)—“You know, Father, the name Franken- stein still echoes through the halls of
the university”—puts the brain of the impotent Marshall, who adores her, into the per- fect body of a simple-minded gardener (TENEBRAE’s Marino Masé). “Physically, he’s perfect,” Tania says of the gardener. “His body’s strong and beautiful. Be honest, wouldn’t you like to have such a body?” Ostensibly, this composite’s job is to track down and wrestle the original monster but actually he’s sup- posed to satisfy her perverse sexual fantasies in a manner which was the film’s selling point (“Only the monster she made could satisfy her strange desires!”).
It’s always struck me as odd that neither Tania nor Marshall even consider using their mad science skills to transplant the still-warm Baron’s brain into a new body—though plainly this isn’t the sort of picture that would tackle an incest taboo along with its other transgressions. (The kink high-spot has Tania orgasm as she straddles the imbecile she is murdering to procure a new body.) A watchable if scarcely inspired programmer, LADY FRANKENSTEIN lacks the robust debate about scientific ethics found in the Hammer series and is mostly timid about its sexier aspects. The sly-lidded, lithe-un- der-period-frocks Neri certainly doesn’t get a sex goddess role to
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equal her vampire vixen in THE DEVIL’S WEDDING NIGHT. As performer and director, Welles (who dubs Fux) specialized in black humor, but this follows the Hammer format of confining the laughs to the doings of earthy low characters, while the starched- shirt mad scientists take things seriously. It’s possible that dubbed lines like “I find your probing thoroughly impertinent!” and “That Mrs. Marshall, I didn’t like her—she’s the kind that could destroy a man and enjoy it!” were intended to raise a smile, but equally it could be that this was a rush-job and the film- makers were happy with whatever response they got. The goonish monster make-up is textbook unintentional humor, thanks to Whiteman’s fixed smile and pop eyes. The climactic monster-on- monster tussle is tame, suggest- ing that priorities were with the bedroom action rather than the horror stuff. Besides the restored footage, the extras are a TV spot, a trailer and a photo/ad gallery. The second disc double-bills a pair of lesser efforts which show how the production of program- mer horror had declined by the 1980s. Tom Kennedy’s TIME WALKER, scripted by Tom Fried- man and Karen Levitt from a story by FLESH GORDON star Jason Williams, is a rare attempt at using the “mummy’s curse” format outside the Universal or Hammer franchises but makes surprisingly little of its unique spin on the basic premise.
Discovered tucked away in a hidden chamber of Tutankha- men’s tomb, the mummy of Ankh-Venaris (Jack Olson) is transported to the California In- stitute of the Sciences for study by curly-haired macho Professor Doug McCadden (GEMINI MAN’s Ben Murphy). Big Obnoxious Man on Campus Peter Sharpe (HELL NIGHT’s Kevin Brophy)
rifles the sarcophagus and finds five jewels, which he hands out to various acquaintances. The mummy rises and glides about, infecting folk with a green mold that might have killed King Tut in the first place, and retrieving the jewels. One-time-only direc- tor Kennedy stages it all flatly (there’s no great call to locate the pre-Corman longer cut of this thing) and the big surprise, that Ankh-Venaris is an alien, is tele- graphed by the film itself and all the publicity. The trailer, amus- ingly, reveals that the monster is an alien but does its best to con- ceal the fact that he’s also a mummy, suggesting how old hat Egyptology horrors were thought to be in the 1980s in the wake of SPHINX and THE AWAKENING. To be fair to Kennedy, the script is pretty useless, wasting time on campus hijinx (a mummy- themed toga party) and studded with dud lines (“Suzy, I want you to go to the astronomy center and see what you can find on ancient phenomenons”; “Maybe you’ve discovered the first civili- zation to use polyester!”; “Hey, man, I was in a frat. I know what it’s like. Slow night. Have a few beers. Steal a mummy?”). TIME WALKER is notable for the re- union of Austin Stoker and Dar- win Joston, the stars of John Carpenter’s ASSAULT ON PRE- CINCT 13, who eye each other warily in one scene. The cast also includes Nina Axelrod (CRITTERS 3), James Karen, Antoinette Bower (PROM NIGHT), Melissa Prophet (FATAL GAMES) and Shari Belafonte. A touch of class, as in so many low-budget ’80s films, comes from Richard Band, who provides a Hammery, Egyp- tian-flavored score. After the big reveal, as the mummy fades into an alien once he has collected all his mystic jewels, the hero is ambiguously zapped elsewhere, the supporting characters all
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