“Hey, Joel Schumacher, ease up on the ass shots!”
I first saw Frankenstein’s Castle Of Freaks back on video in the early '90s courtesy of the good folks over at Sinister Cinema. When I popped that ol’ VHS into the VCR, I thought for sure that I would soon be knee-deep in premium Italian cheese. As it turned out, I was only half-right: it wasn’t cheese, but I was definitely knee-deep in it!
At the time, a cable station known as The Comedy Channel (later Comedy Central) was airing this completely new and off-beat show called Mystery Science Theater 3000, wherein the silhouettes of a man and two robots sat in a row of theater seats and proceeded to make fun of the movie they were watching. It was nothing short of genius.
One day, the thought hit me: “Dude, Mystery Science Theater 3000 should totally do that awful Frankenstein’s Castle Of Freaks movie!” Like all thoughts that entered my head during that particular time period, it soon left… and the dream of seeing one of Italy’s dumbest exploitation movies ever given a good riffing went with it.
But now, thanks to the diligent service of the brave men and woman of Cinematic Titanic (MST creator and former host Joel Hodgson along with writers/performers Trace Beaulieu, Frank Conniff, J. Elvis Weinstein, and Mary Jo Pehl), Frankenstein’s Castle Of Freaks may at long last be viewed with the relentlessly cruel bashing it so appositely deserves.
And to think, it only took about twenty years to happen!
I suppose just one of the many plausible reasons that none of the former MST3K crew ever so much as bat an eye at Frankenstein’s Castle Of Freaks in the past could be due to the fact that, as is the deal with most Italian exploitation flicks, nudity is a key feature. In fact, the promise of extreme nekkidnes in this film is undoubtedly what turned many a hapless viewer onto it in the first place (too bad there isn't that much). However, thanks to the advent of this whole technology thing, this problem has been, ahem, “fixed” here via what is referred to as a “Breast Blimp” (the profile of a radio controlled blimp comes down and covers up the movie’s scenes of nippledom — irritating, but cute in a “Well, I wondered what they were going to do there” sort of way).
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