Andy Warhol was the Sixties and Seventies Pop Artist who made a mint out of Campbell Soup cans and Marilyn Monroe montages and "experimental" films that even the avant- garde found a bit punishing to watch.  He seemed the last person to make a Hammerish period flick about Frankenstein and his Monster-making.  Yet, he did, and the result is so kinky, gory, and over the top that it almost defies description.  Join us as we cast a gimlet eye at where the Art House meets the charnel house in...

By ROB CRAIG

(Note: This is the first installment of a series that looks at Andy Warhol's two campy contributions to the horror film.  The series concludes with a look at Andy Warhol's Dracula in the next issue.)

Andy Warhol was one of the first artists to successfully present society’s flotsam (artists, lunatics, junkies, freaks, prostitutes, etc.) as both significant cultural icons, and romantic heroes of the tragic school.

Taking folks like Damon Runyan one step further, Warhol imbued his urban losers with an accessible mythology all their own, making them not weak or even pitiable, but vital, dynamic, even glorious in their reckless self-delusion and fatalistic predilections.

Warhol and Morrissey’s film experiments began as shocking, free form art brut for the underground community. After some early acceptance, the Factory films segued into shock-culture camp. Soon, the films descended into heroin-chic and pop culture kitsch. Finally the last Warhol/Morrissey features ended up being to many just another form of eclectic, genre-splicing "badfilm".

Yet, Flesh For Frankenstein (AKA Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein) is a huge aesthetic departure for Warhol and company, as it is essentially a big-budget, lavish "art film" which dares to be both shocking and sentimental, avant-garde and wholly traditional.

In many ways, Flesh For Frankenstein is remarkably like "regular" horror films of the period, most notably the gothic horror shockers from Hammer Studios in the UK. From the romantic music score to the Victorian period setting to the lavish costuming and evocative, location settings to the sexual intrigue to the over-the-top gore, Flesh For Frankenstein looks like Peter Cushing, Caroline Munro or Christopher Lee might step out at any moment.

Even more so than the Hammer films, there is another source that may have given Warhol/Morrisey food for thought. When one thinks of overwrought period melodrama in a generic horror context with gratuitous gore, one name comes to mind: Andy Milligan.

Milligan’s ultra-real, micro-budget horror films like Bloodthirsty Butchers and Torture Dungeon take generic horror elements to truly subversive levels, and are seen by many as a missing link between the mainstream horror film and the underground art film.

Indeed, Milligan’s first widely-seen feature, VAPORS, was considered an underground art masterpiece, and for a brief time, Milligan seemed poised to be an actual competitor with Warhol and company in the lucrative world of NYC art film.

Additionally, as Warhol/Morrisey were both known to be bad movie buffs, and could often be found taking in exploitation film fare at Gotham grind houses, it is highly unlikely that the two did not stumble onto an Andy Milligan movie or two.

Finally, Warhol was a notorious style and theme thief (as are many great artists), and it is inconceivable that he did not know that Milligan was, at one time, a potential threat to him. Milligan’s horror output was widely seen in NYC in the late Sixties and early Seventies.

When one takes the campy characterizations, perverse sexual intrigue, convoluted family politics, and gleefully theatrical gore of an Andy Milligan horror film, and compare them to the shockingly similar content of Flesh For Frankenstein and BFD, one could easily come to an unsettling conclusion: the Warhol/Morrisey horror films are multi-million dollar, well-scrubbed rip-offs of Milligan horror films.

As Milligan was (and still is, largely) unknown, Warhol/Morrisey surely felt confident that their zeitgeist theft would go unnoticed. Milligan suffered for his art, literally starving to create it, while Warhol and company went on to cushy corporate fame, so the Milligan "influence" is by now long forgotten.

At any rate, Warhol/Morrisey got the joke: film a super-lurid script with a big budget and handsome locations, and you have Poor White Trash meets Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls.

Flesh For Frankenstein revels in what is now common knowledge: horror is essentially erotic. The calamitous electricity of sex, not violence, is the prime theme fueling most horror literature and film. It is the dynamic of lust (both fulfilled and thwarted), not the battle twixt good and evil, which gives modern horror its energy and overriding motif.

The first Universal horror films (Dracula, Frankenstein, and The Mummy especially) admitted eroticism, but in deeply buried, coded form, where it added significantly to the dramatic tension.

As film horror progressed, peaking with the highly sexualized Hammer films, the erotic became more overt, and even punctuated many a storyline. Attraction combined with revulsion. Longing dancing with hatred, this is what gives modern horror its meaning. Flesh For Frankenstein takes this revelation and revels in it, celebrating illicit and dysfunctional sex as a prime mover of men and gods.

Thus, it is ironic when we note that Flesh For Frankenstein is not an literal extension of his earlier film projects, but more an example of his life-long homage to pop culture. Flesh For Frankenstein is a filmic version of the Campbell’s Soup Can, or the Marilyn Monroe silk-screens; the "horror film" revisited through the eyes of radical Art.

Flesh For Frankenstein and Blood For Dracula/Andy Warhol’s Dracula are Warhol/Morrisey’s loving imitation of the horror movie genre; beautiful, big-budget period melodramas filmed in evocative locations.

The script for Flesh For Frankenstein, however, is visionary and self-conscious, knowing and satirical. It revels in the excesses of lurid plot development, as well as the introduction of new a horror archetype; Gay/Proto-Germanic.

The Frankensteins are, at root, a garden-variety middle-class couple, bickering, hateful and unfaithful, self-absorbed and endlessly blaming, in short, dysfunctional and very familiar.

Baron Von Frankenstein (Udo Kier) is a domestic fellow, kind of an exotic "everyman." Katherine (a magnificent Monique VanVooren), is an over-sexed, under-loved shrew. Warhol/Morrisey give both Frankensteins thick foreign accents and a lot of dialogue, to ensure some badfilm guffaws, along the lines of a badly dubbed foreign film.

Dysfunctional couples are a Warhol tradition, and Flesh For Frankenstein has its share. The Frankensteins, certainly. Kathy Frankenstein and hustler Joe. Frankenstein’s male and female creatures, nude and innocent and beautiful, his own avuncular Adam and Eve. There is even a very child-couple, who may be the real puppet masters of the whole gruesome scenario.

The melodrama of Flesh For Frankenstein unfolds like a horror soap opera; thus Warhol gives an obligatory nod to "camp". Warhol poster boy Joe Dellesandro, resplendent in his glistening, awkward boy-hustler image, lends a liberal dash of "trash kitsch" to Flesh For Frankenstein, as a wayward ragamuffin and "cock for hire".

Frankenstein kills Joe’s companion, and makes him an ersatz "new citizen", decreeing that the only way his new creation will survive is by sex. When sister Katherine tries to seduce the Adonis Monster for her own sexual purposes, we come to the film’s essentially one-joke premise: the monster can’t get a boner. This is mildly funny, but also quite revealing of a basic Warhol theme; attempting to create a healthy sexual dynamic in a corrupt, decadent environment is nigh impossible.

The impotent, disgraced monster rips himself apart, in a very tragic, and again very Warholian act, in its innate loathsome self-destruction. The film ends as the evil children continue to torture hustler Joe, predicting that familial loyalty and genetic madness rules over all. This is Andy Milligan philosophy, pure and simple.

Curiously, Flesh For Frankenstein shows a technical polish that is virtually ahead of its time, in stark contrast to the avowed ultra-primitivism of Warhol/Morrisey’s earlier cinematic output. Frankenstein’s laboratory is fairly cheesy, though not without a certain evocative period charm.

For all its well-scrubbed quality, Flesh For Frankenstein has more than its share of stunning, disturbing imagery. A scene of a young, naked body being raised out of the primordial ooze and given new life is a shocking image and a significant revision of horror film tradition. As we get closer to the glistening body, we see hideous, gory gashes on both front and back, a gruesome hyper-reality which reveals that Beauty has become the Beast! Here, Warhol/Morrisey present genre convention in a totally new way.

The Baron then shocks us again by slowly, belaboredly cutting open bloody sutures, showing a medical procedure that one isn’t likely to see outside of a medical environment, reminding us that the most unsettling gore by far is that showing invasion of the body in a non-violent, non-hostile act.

These strong yet theatrical gore effects, combining the ultra-real with the patently fake, work to startling effect, very similar in shock value to strong and theatrical sex scenes. Again, we see the shadow of Andy Milligan in these wildly visual and gratuitous shock scenes.

Throughout the film, Frankenstein and Otto are seen achieving sexual release as they cut and probe and grope the undeads’ entrails. Frankenstein’s "work" is clearly an erotic act. While this does add a nice perversity to the script, the surgery-as-intercourse metaphor does gets a little heavy-handed after awhile.

Many of the lab scenes, emphasizing fake body parts in a sterile, antiseptic medical setting, are clearly reminiscent of similar scenes in The Creation Of The Humanoids, a 1962 science-fiction film, and according to many, Andy Warhol’s favorite movie.

As well, much of the heavy-handed philosophical dialogue seems inspired by Jay Simms’ visionary script for The Creation Of The Humanoids. Specifically, the Baron’s megalomaniacal plans to create a world of obedient robots smacks of the nihilistic eugenic politics of the "Clickers" in The Creation Of The Humanoids.

Another nod to filmic camp is the curious interjection of wholly gratuitous 3-D scenes, some effective, most merely amusing. We get a gory close-up of bloody guts; children are attacked by bats; an old woman is disemboweled; Frankenstein is speared, and his heart hovers on the spear before us.

Finally, Flesh For Frankenstein is a curious anomaly, a film that is somehow less than the sum of its hastily stitched parts. It is both parody and homage to its intended genre, and a most odd fluke for an admittedly visionary "artiste". Is Flesh For Frankenstein Warhol at his peak, or is it a slick and soulless sell-out of all that made Andy the bad boy of Twentieth Century Art? Perhaps only another thirty years will tell!

(Rob Craig is the brains behind a fantastic Website that pays tribute to one of the most neglected genre film icons of them all: K. Gordon Murray, the man who brought Mexican horror and kiddie flicks to Baby Boomers back in the Sixties and Seventies.  You can visit Rob's amazing Website here.)

Thanks, Rob.  Although it seems odd that a serious artist like Andy Warhol could have been influenced by the shabby work of Andy Milligan, you make a strong case.  Hmmm... Andy 'N' Andy's Frankenstein?  At any rate, we were fortunate enough to see this truly outlandish flick in a theater in its original 3-D format and it was one time when the blood and gore really did seem to "fly."

Article copyright © Rob Craig

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