It’s low budget when you have to wear your badly painted motorcycle helmet on your head.
It’s the night of the unsightly fusion when Jesse James Meets Frankenstein’s Daughter (1966) crosses the screen. On the one hand, we have a fairly reasonable Jesse James, on the run after his gang has been slaughtered, with Hank Tracy (aka The Steriodal Monster, as my Arts Editor described him) tagging along as they meet up with another gang in order to ambush a Wells Fargo stagecoach. In a nice plot twist, the drunken, resentful brother of the head of the other gang betrays them to the marshal, so WATCH OUT, IT’S AN AMBUSH. As this was at a mountain pass, we had the ambushers of the ambushers hiding in the rocks, and the ambushers of the stage coach also hiding in the rocks. Soon, ambushers are falling like crazy.
Capiche?
On the other hand, we have a standard-fare mad scientist movie, as the daughter of Dr. Frankenstein, Frau Doctor Frankenstein, and her brother or uncle (I was unclear), Rudolph, have moved to the Old West to continue their quest to replace a human brain with an artificial brain. When James shows up with a wounded Tracy in tow, she cannot resist Tracy’s muscular build and dull speech patterns, but it fails to go well with him, as he eventually, after having a pie plate sewn into his skull, ends up killing Rudolph, then the Frau, before having a go at James and the sheriff; only the arrival of James’ girlfriend saves the latter from the clutches, literal, of James’ former friend.
Yeah, it’s not particularly good nor awful enough to be fun. At least Jesse James really did look like Jesse James might have looked like. A sad day when that’s the best to hope for.
