Yes, today on ‘Why Watch Theater’ we have the notorious Monstrosity, which before a 2003 Something Weird DVD I knew only as The Atomic Brain, a regular interloper on late-night TV broadcasts. The basic synopsis makes us expect the weirdest movie ever made. But we’re incurable optimists.
The things that happen in an old house somewhere in the Hollywood hills! Dotty old Hetty March (Marjorie Eaton) pays the bills of Dr. Otto Frank (Frank Gerstle) so he can run an atomic lab in her basement. He’s transplanting brains; Hetty hopes he’ll succeed so she can continue her life living in a young body … which she’s already picked out. Nina Rhodes (Erika Peters), Bea Mullins (Judy Bamber) and Anita Gonzalez (Lisa Lang) arrive from Europe, and Hetty chooses Bea’s body as the one she’d most like to seduce with. But other issues could gum up the works. Hetty’s gigolo-lackey Victor (Frank Fowler) hangs around, letching after the three body-donors-in-residence. A couple of Dr. Frank’s first-try transplant mistakes wander about the estate, too. A werewolf-like creature is chained in the garden.
This is the aimless mad doctor movie in which a cat’s brain has been transplanted into the head of a woman, who subsequently prowls about doing a laughable cat imitation, including eating a mouse. This is also one of those ‘narrated films’ with a superfluous, often confusing voiceover that comments on what we’re seeing. The unidentified narrator makes snide observations about the characters, to no coherent purpose. We soon realize that the filmmakers don’t understand what an audience expects of a horror film, and have no faith in what they’re doing. It’s as if they expect the film to direct itself.
Tom Weaver’s commentary confirms some of our guesses. Director Joe Mascelli is indeed the author of a well-known book on feature cinematography, despite having only a few credits on his résumé more competent than Monstrosity. But we had no idea that writer & co-producer Dean Dillman Jr. was the brother of the well-known actor Bradford Dillman.
The disc restoration of Monstrosity is so good that we can appreciate its few good points while wincing at shots that are out-of focus. As Weaver remarks, the rank incompetence odd visual style here is even more blatant than that of an Ed Wood movie. The editor occasionally inter-cuts material shot at night, with material filmed in broad daylight. Viewers are instantly transported to the sanity-challenged 2 a.m. Z-movie zone … where nothing is real.
The actors are mostly professionals, which helps quite a bit. Established actress Marjorie Eaton is a cranky old sicko who delights in watching her young female guests try on clothing, so she may gaze upon the body she’ll have after the brain transplant. This goes on for reels, while the clumsy doctor fails to get consistent results from his (unseen) brain-swapping procedure. It’s anybody’s guess why the three houseguests don’t freak out when they meet his previous patients — the cat-woman and the fanged thug tethered on a chain. Gerstle’s instant atomic transplant recipe finishes in an atomic oven, which in the prologue reduces a girl to a smoking skeleton. Oops. I wouldn’t be surprised if most of the budget went into the film’s solid-looking atom furnace. Famed prop-fabricator Kenneth Strickfadden is credited with some of the sparkly-flashy electrical effects, but the nude women are ‘reenergized’ by being elevator-dunked into the atomic pile. It’s the trademarked Fukushima/Chernobyl process.
Frank Gerstle is an easily recognized character actor and bit player with a huge number of film appearances on his dance card. I remember him well as the lab technician who tests Edmond O’Brien for ‘luminous poisoning’ in the frantic noir D.O.A.. Gerstle’s hard-edged ‘Sgt. Rock’ face is ideal for military men. Walt Disney chose him to command the first rocket to the moon in the landmark TV info-tainment special Man and the Moon. His Dr. Frank putters about, discussing his completely irrational mad surgery plans. He complains every time Hetty drops in to see what’s cookin’ in the old cyclotron. At one point he appears to hold a brain in his hands, only it looks like two little animal brains.
The actors never give up. In the case of Erika Peters and Judy Bamber, the show got more help than it deserved — the actresses try to stay in the moment no matter how pitiful the scene. Although the producers would never consider sex scenes or nudity, the sleaze factor can be felt in their suggestive voiceover narration. A key film still ( ↓ ) appears to have been taken on the sly between film takes, to catch one of the actresses in a pose with more cleavage. Actors Frank Fowler and Marjorie Eaton are turning to go back to ‘position A,’ and the actress is caught putting her dress back on to roll the scene again. A crew member is on the left. Were the filmmakers too repressed to simply ask for some sexier poses?
Weaver reports that the production folk admitted that they had no affinity for horror and just wanted something that would sell. The disjointed continuity suggests that nobody was in full charge — perhaps co-producer Jack Pollexfen shot the day-for-day inserts for night scenes, figuring that the lab would make them work somehow. Some of the mismatches remind us of groaners like Mesa of Lost Women: the show occasionally cuts to near-extraneous material, almost as if that’s what the editor found next in the trim bin, ready-to-go. Surrealists can get behind that kind of cinematic logic.
The amusing thing is that the excellent finishing job appoints the show with handsome, technically clean dissolves and fades. The editor TRIED to make it all look like a movie!
When in Doubt, Crib from the Best.
In terms of genre DNA, Monstrosity would seem to be yet another surgical horror opus inspired by Georges Franju’s Eyes Without a Face. The timing established by Tom Weaver fits, if the filmmakers saw Eyes in Europe or at a film festival — or even if they read a synopsis in a trade brochure. The similarities are certainly in evidence. Semi-prisoner females are used as guinea pigs and sacrificial victims to restore youth and beauty to another woman. One victim falls from a high window trying to escape. Another is chlorformed in a parlor. The earliest transplant victim, reduced to a serene zombie, for a while wanders around the house in a nightgown. She’s perhaps echoing Edith Scob’s haunting, poetic scenes in Eyes Without a Face, but Joe Mascelli’s imagery doesn’t even begin to approach that of George Franju. More mutilations follow before the final curtain rings down with a Z-movie thud. The sexiest of the three ladies loses her life trying to retrieve one of her eyes from a lab table.
Of the “Z” grade mad-surgery Franju imitators, only Joseph Green’s The Brain That Wouldn’t Die dove into the sleaze-shock DNA pool and came up with something truly artistic, even if much of its cinematic appeal is accidental. Monstrosity is a clumsy footnote, one of those oddball independent productions that made its mark because content-hungry TV stations of the 1960s would run most ANY horror item.
If you’re a horror fan in love with counter-intuitive cultural cinematic weirdness, this show was made just for YOU.
