Another bad hair day, Franky. How are you gonna pick up chicks looking like this?
Very briefly, because it hurts my brain, Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster (1965) spins the tale of a cyborg spaceship pilot named Frank, who is being used, under the cover of being human, as the pilot of an experimental spaceship. On his first flight, however, an alien spaceship destroys the ship, and Frank escapes by using a parachute. The aliens track him down and blast him, but not being biological, he’s only damaged, and, after killing a few locals, he finds a cave to hide in.
You see, your Highness, if we spring a leak, we’ll die and they’ll survive, thus depriving them of our demonic presence! Or is it “presences”? LINE, dammit!
Its scientist-creators and their general are looking for him, but the aliens, meantime, are engaged in the traditional alien invader past time of kidnapping Earth women for use as cattle in order to rejuvenate the alien race, which has basically blasted itself into near-extinction in an internecine nuclear war. As the harvest continues, various Earth men get in the way and are blasted into little pieces. They didn’t seem too bright, so I wasn’t all broken up over them or anything. Maybe I giggled a bit, I don’t remember. See? The drugs are working.
One of scientists gets caught in the roundup and actually has the temerity to fight back and not be totally compliant in every possible way, especially when the alien Princess demands to know just what the hell the device used for tracking Frank is for. For that rebellion, she’s imprisoned in a cage, just out of range of the long, pointy claws of the similarly imprisoned …
Space Monster!
Spock’s older brother, Big Hand. He never made it out of Vulcan kindergarten, sad to say, and his parents never spoke of him.
Doesn’t that fill you with feelings of wellness? Not to draw this out, word gets to the American military of the presence of a spaceship, they presume alien intentions are bad intentions and launch ineffective rockets at it, while Frank, led to the spaceship by the other scientist, is dragged in, breaks free, gets all the surviving prisoners out, and, as the spaceship is leaving, shoots the Princess and her evil minion, a guy made up to look like a young Uncle Fester from The Addams Family and who left his toothmarks all over the bloody scenery. And Frank has a wrestling match with the …
Space Monster!
Yeah. No. No. No. The cinematography was nice. The bikinis were skimpy. They did OK with the stock footage of actual rocket launches. The Space Monster was almost well-managed in my perennial ode to Burke’s idea of the sublime: we never see the Space Monster in its entirety, just semi-horrifying, semi-silly hints. But the Evil Minion was really creepy. And didn’t have Uncle Fester’s essential innocence. The rest of the acting was dull. The plot sucked rocks. Maybe they were trying to play it for laughs. After all, the evil minion / young Uncle Fester is named Dr. Nadir.
Give this one a skip.
