Nobody would know that the unassuming doctor everyone respects is creating a monstrosity in his hidden lab during off hours, but that is exactly what Dr. Frankenstein is doing. What lies within that hidden chamber is a man made up of other men, a creature the good doctor calls Mosaic. Sometimes Mosaic goes out at night and when he does, some poor woman is going to die. Does Mosaic know what he does or is his mind simply too broken to understand? Whatever the answer, it matters not and soon he is being hunted and Dr. Frankenstein is under investigation.

Often, a film will veer from the source material to make it either wholly original or completely unrecognizable. Frankenstein ’80 falls somewhere in the middle. The bones are there – the doctor looking to create life from the dead by creating a monster made up of stitched-together body parts and that is essentially where it ends. The basic plot is not a bad one, it has been used in nearly every single Frankenstein movie there is, but what surrounds it once fleshed out could have been a little bit better, not that it was all bad. A plot device is introduced early on in the film in the form of a special serum, one that will prevent organ rejection and it is something that Dr. Frankenstein could sorely use for his creation. He steals it of course and later on in the movie, a reporter looks for the same magical liquid to save his dying sister, thereby uncovering the crimes of the monster and his creator.

Though not exactly a picture that is hard to watch, it does test one’s endurance as it tends to get a little boring throughout. Director Mario Mancini, one would assume, does his best with the material but fails to cut the chaff from the film and it ends up being somewhat bloated and overlong. The story itself is fine but needed to be tightened up to create a more memorable experience, not to mention one that would engage the viewer. Due to this, Mancini, perhaps realizing this or simply wanting to do so, would pepper the film with a fair amount of nudity. True, it would break up the monotony of it all and make the audience take notice as those moments would also coincide with an attack from Mosaic wherein he would end up killing the women, almost always preceded by him raping them. Unlike most Frankenstein films, this one is quite sleazy and exploitive and sometimes feels dirty. There is a fair amount of violence, though little blood and when there is, the practical effects are so shoddy as to be laughable. If any of this was meant to be erotic, then Mancini failed admirably and if it was to be simply horrific, he achieved that in the end but it could have been far better than it was.

Frankenstein ’80 is not the worst version of the classic property that has ever been put to film but it is by far from the best. Starring John Richardson and Gordon Mitchell among others, the acting from the players involved was not all that it could have been and the dialogue was poor. Everything that went into this movie was less than optimal so hoping for a better result was merely wishful thinking. Like all films, there was some good and there was some bad, it is just a little tragedy that it had more of the latter rather than the former.

2 out of 5