Halloween Month rolls along here at Balladeer’s Blog with a look at two notoriously bad horror movies which use Andy Warhol’s name despite him not really having anything to do with them and credit Antonio Margheriti as the director even though Paul Morrissey wrote and directed them.
Sophia Loren’s husband Carlo Ponti co-produced both films.
ANDY WARHOL’S FRANKENSTEIN (1973) – Also known as Flesh for Frankenstein, this 3-D monstrosity and its sister film, Andy Warhol’s Dracula (aka Blood for Dracula) used to be among the most well-known “So Bad They’re Good” movies. Oddly, they fell pretty much off the radar long ago, but get rediscovered every so often and enjoy a brief surge in notoriety from successive generations of horror fans.
The making of these two grossout movies, which were filmed back-to-back in Italy, would make a better movie than both of them combined in my opinion. Criminal charges, false screen credits and much more behind the scenes lore would help put such a flick up there with Ed Wood and The Disaster Artist.
These two movies are also like 1970s time capsules, too. Recently relaxed standards for what could be shown on the big screen yielded a LOT of cheap films that were clearly made just to see how much gory violence and kinky titillation the creative teams could get away with.
Attaching Andy Warhol’s name to this pair of Paul Morrissey flicks helped appeal to pretentious Warhol fans and gave some critics the excuse to read deeper meanings into the sophomoric productions. Suddenly, awkward grossout scenes, idiotic dialogue and non-existent scares were being interpreted as “deconstructions of the Universal monster movies” or as “director/writer Paul Morrissey skewering the very countercultural sex revolutionaries that were among his biggest fans …”
Sheesh! At least purely mercenary splatter film legends like Herschell Gordon Lewis never pretended that their flicks were anything but cash-grabs that piled on the blood and gore.
Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein and Andy Warhol’s Dracula deserve my usual warnings to horror fans who really hate extreme violence and bizarre sex. Don’t go below the “Continue reading” line or you’ll probably regret it. These films are mild compared to Headless or Father’s Day or others I’ve reviewed, but are stomach-turning nonetheless.
So, let’s dive into two of the strangest Dracula and Frankenstein pairings this side of Blacula and Blackenstein. Continue reading
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