"Frankenstein's Daughter does move along at a nice pace, and with only four principals and limited sets, is easy on the brain..."

When the cinematic Dr. Frankenstein made a female monster in the Thirties, the result was Elsa Lanchester with a few scars and a chic hairstyle.  Things changed in the Fifties, when the result could only be termed as...

By DON MANKOWSKI

(Here again, we are happy to introduce a new writer to HORROR-WOOD. Don Mankowski was born in Chicago in the Fifties, and has thus been devoted to "the classics" for over 40 years!  By day he's a rocket scientist.  (No fooling--he writes software for a NASA contractor.) His other interests are sports and chess: watch for his upcoming book Personal And Impersonal: An Eccentric Look At Baseball History Via The Numbers, and his computer implementation of Julian Compton's Data Boxing.  No chess books yet; he's not very good at that.)

Guilty pleasure confession alert!

It was well after midnight, one night sometime in the middle 1960s.  It must have been a weekend, because in those days, only then did one daring channel schedule all-night television programming.  In Chicago, it was WMAQ, the NBC affiliate on Channel Five.

I had a small black-and-white set in my bedroom, without which I could have never attempted such foolishness.  Home video recording was yet unheard of.  When a favorite film came on at an inconvenient hour, one rearranged plans, or sleep cycles, to view it.

So, there I was, watching House Of Frankenstein, the 1944 classic, for maybe the third or fourth time in my young life.  I love the film, which has from three to five (depending upon one’s attitude) of the famous Universal monsters, Boris Karloff, Lon Chaney, Jr., and an all-star supporting cast.

Still, I found myself getting a little bit impatient with the film.   I was actually waiting for it to conclude, so that I could watch the second feature of the all-night show: a 1958 turkey buzzard named Frankenstein’s Daughter.  (What manner of double feature this?!  Some third-shift stiff in the station’s programming department must have paired these based solely upon their titles.)  I had seen the latter picture but once, in a theater, and I somehow felt that it would prove more entertaining that night.

I was right.

In Frankenstein’s Daughter, we find Oliver Frank, an ambitious young mad scientist carrying out his forbidden experiments in a borrowed basement laboratory (and a bargain basement one at that).  By day he assists Carter Morton, a befuddled older researcher, who is trying to find a cure for all of man’s ills, something like that.  By night, Oliver stitches together the inevitable creature, aided by Elsu, a renegade groundskeeper with the inevitable Baltic accent.  Along the way he tests dangerous potions upon his mentor’s pretty daughter, Trudy.

Trudy Morton is thus periodically transformed into a bushy-browed, bug-eyed, fang-toothed maniac, but fortunately she merely scares people and gets home safely. Sandra Knight, who sleepwalked through Roger Corman’s The Terror (1963) is the daughter.

Oliver uses pieces from a former girlfriend (Sally Todd) dispatched via vehicular homicide to complete the creation--a hulking thing with a scar-tissue face and the gait of a wind-up toy, who nevertheless is supposed to have a feminine nature.  Theory is that she/it will be more submissive, due to her blonde brain.  I am not making this up.   (By the way, "she/it" is a joint pronoun, not a reviewer’s assessment of the picture.   Well, then again, maybe.)

The femonster is put together in Oliver’s spare time, wheeled out of a secret passage whenever Carter is out of the lab.  The secret passage is not explained.  It must have been constructed earlier on the same time-sharing plan.

Oh, did I mention that Oliver Frank, the insane creator, is a descendant of the original Frankenstein?  The role is played by one Donald Murphy, whom I have seen neither before nor since.   Small wonder.  The man appears to have attended the same acting school as William Shatner, and there’s only room for one of those in this galaxy. 

The henchman for Frank (Don’t-call-me-Frankenstein) is enacted by Wolfe Barzell.    “Frankenstein is a very honorable name,” he tells his boss.  “I was just a boy when your grandfodder first created life from the dead.  But I helped your fodder.”  Except for his foreign accent, he comes off as pretty mundane.  Consider this exchange.  The patchwork zombie has escaped, and Oliver is anxious to locate her. 

“This is serious,” says an agitated Oliver. 

“We have looked all over,” moans Elsu.  “Now I’m tired!  I’m hungry!”

“Get something to eat and go out again!” orders this generation’s Master of Life and Death.

“But I’m tired!  Er, I’ll fix a sandwich and go out again,” is the reply, once he notes that they are overheard.   

Father and grandfather my ass, I can’t imagine Colin Clive, Basil Rathbone, or Sir Cedric Hardwicke giving either of these guys spare change, never mind jobs.

Barzell does have one fine, creepy scene wherein he appears quite suddenly to offer Trudy a rose. “Evening, Miss Trudy...from the garden.  I didn’t like killing it...some things are more beautiful in death.”  The girl is understandably spooked, but not quite so much as Uncle Carter, who intrudes and tells the gardener to get lost.  (“Your place isn’t here.   Go back to your room--and use the back stairway!”)  Although this wretch blithely arranges auto accidents and spirits away body parts for Oliver’s use, later in the picture Elsu turns genuinely protective of Trudy when his impending sacrifice needs a hasty justification.

Carter Morton is portrayed by Felix Locher, whom I understand is the father of one-time action star Jon Hall.  As Hall himself was a has-been by this time, you can imagine the status of his old man. Confused Old Carter has a no-questions-asked but quite cantankerous relationship with smarmy Young Frank.  Their exchanges are hilarious.  Carter even dozes off when the plot requires it.  Locher can be seen (and heard, wiz ze French accént) in Curse Of The Faceless Man (1958).

There’s a horrible catalytic substance known as “digenerol,” the very name of which makes each speaker flinch.  This MacGuffin distillation is eagerly sought after by both scientists.   When his sample gets spilled down a drain, the mild mannered Carter will resort to breaking into a corporate lab to steal some more of it.

Johnny Bruder, Trudy’s boyfriend and rescuer is played by John Ashley, a sort of poor man’s Elvis whom you might recognize from a few American International teen-monster flicks.  It was his wretched musical number in How To Make A Monster (1958) that drove that picture’s protagonist to destroy the studio.  John later fled to the Philippines to work for the illustrious Eddie Romero.

Ashley doesn’t sing or dance in Daughter, praise the Lord.  The songs are by The Page Cavanaugh Trio, who really did make records (I saw one once), and Harold Lloyd, Jr., presumably the son of the silent comedy legend. 

Now, I ask you, how can you go wrong with Jon Hall’s father and Harold Lloyd’s son?  Easily, if you’re director Richard Cunha.  (Now, Sinbad And The Eye of the Tiger (1977) had John Wayne’s son and Tyrone Power’s daughter to no particular effect, but at least had Ray Harryhausen’s animation to compensate.)  Voltaire Perkins, whom you might recognize as the judge on the old “Divorce Court” has a small role in Daughter.

Given his heritage, Lloyd Junior must have felt right at home with the film’s updated version of the Keystone Kops.  During one of Trudy’s atavistic romps, she inflicts some scratches on a shrieking woman.   This is enough provocation for the film’s two cops to open fire on her when she shows her Mr. Hyde face, even though they have earlier expressed the belief that it’s probably just a kid in a Halloween mask.   That’s about the only thing they get correct in the entire venture. 

When Oliver grabs one of the detectives by the arm in trying to hustle him away from some mayhem, he is lectured thusly.  “Mr. Frank, I don’t like being handled that way--and I’m not talking as a policeman!”  This sounds vaguely homophobic today, but was probably just tough talk back then.

Have I convinced you that the film is chockfull of incongruities?  

Frankenstein's Daughter does move along at a nice pace, and with only four principals and limited sets, is easy on the brain.  There's certainly something disquieting about the idea of a stranger having an unknown monster lab tucked away in the recesses of one's very own home.

The she-monster commits several murders, one particularly nasty for the time, squishing an innocent fellow with a door behind which he is seeking refuge.  During the final confrontation, Mr. Frank gets hit in the face by acid, and his briefly glimpsed countenance is pretty disturbing.   Harry Thomas did a good job on makeup with limited resources, but then he’s an Ed Wood veteran.

Harry Thomas applies the monstrous touches to Sandra Knight.

Finally, the wretched creature bumps into a Bunsen burner left lighted for no particular reason by some idiot (no one practices lab safety in these stories), and goes up like a torch.

I recommend the picture highly.  I managed to tape it off a local broadcast some years ago, but found it on a Rhino Home Video release more recently, hostess-ed by none other than Elvira, Mistress of the Dark.   Don’t be put off by this: Elvira does her things--er, thing--and lets the picture play uninterrupted.   I understand that there's a DVD release available as well.

Thanks, Don, for sharing this "guilty pleasure" with us.  The best thing that can be said for Frankenstein's Daughter is that there was no sequel--and don't you get any ideas, Wes Craven!

Article copyright © Don Mankowski

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