FRANKENSTEIN’S ARMY (2013) – Halloween Month continues here at Balladeer’s Blog with this odd mish-mash of a film. Frankenstein’s Army is one of those horror movies which is presented as Found Footage for no reason and even though it’s set during World War 2 it’s being filmed in color for no reason at all and it’s being filmed by a Russian film crew for ABSOLUTELY no reason at all.
Okay, to be serious I will admit that having the story told from the perspective of a Russian army unit is a nice novelty. I think most viewers are pleased that they don’t have to endure yet another group of armed American stereotypes fighting a war while bantering with each other.
It’s the closing weeks of the war in the European Theater of Combat and our Soviet soldiers are on a secret mission to extract Dr Victor Frankenstein, the latest mad scientist descendant of that infamous family. Little do they know they’re in for a nightmarish battle against re-animated, refitted and mechanized corpses even stranger than Herbert West’s creations.
Dr Frankenstein has been doing experiments for the Germans, working on those Top Secret “wonder weapons” that Hitler and his propagandists kept reassuring the suffering German civilians about. Stalin wants our heroes to determine the nature of Frankenstein’s creations and take him into custody to continue his work for the blood-soaked Soviet dictator.
You’d think the camera crew would be along to film ONLY Frankenstein’s work but no, they film EVERYTHING, making this yet another Found Footage flick to piss away its pacing with interludes that are as dull as real life. There are some decent renderings of the nearly post-apocalyptic German countryside but the color footage reveals how inauthentic the movie’s Russian and German uniforms are. Continue reading
Let’s cheat a little. Take the title of the song Layla, then add an “H” in honor of Halloween to make it LAYLAH as in Aleister Crowley’s work The Book of Lies. 
TIME PERIOD: The Man Who Laughs has the action set mostly in England in 1705. For Gothic Horror I prefer that time period to the late 1400s, when The Hunchback of Notre Dame takes place. 
Halloween Month plactan jremm! 
THE SOUL OF KOL NIKON (1913) – Written by author, poet and librettist Eleanor Farjeon as a serial in 1913. Later novelized. Halloween Month rolls along with another look at a neglected tale of horror. 
THE GALLOWS MAN – This is another neglected American horror legend which has been presented in many different versions over the years. Ralph Sutherland was born in 1702 in either New York City or a town near the Catskills, depending on the version. 
THE CENTENARIAN (1822) – Written by THE Honore de Balzac. Thirty-one days of Halloween continue here at Balladeer’s Blog! The Centenarian or The Two Beringhelds was one of the “quickie” novels that Balzac wrote in his early career, this one under the pseudonym Horace de Saint-Aubin. 
The Centenarian leeches out the vitality of his victims but NOT by sucking out blood like a vampire. He drains their life force via alchemical means with his “medical” equipment. By the time of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, Count Maxime has grown a bit weary of his eternal life in typical Gothic style. 
Balladeer’s Blog’s month-long celebration of Halloween continues with this song. Everyone remembers Alice Cooper’s youthful depiction of Eddie Haskell on Leave it to Beaver. (I’m KIDDING!) Here’s Cooper with his song No More Mr Nice Guy. 
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