Nuts and Bolts:  The radioactive heart of the Frankenstein Monster grows into a giant cave-boy who fights a spiky dinosaur guy in the mountains of Japan. Karloff wept.

Summary: If I had a time machine, I would go back to the early 1700s, find Mary Shelly, sit her down and make her watch all 93 minutes of Frankenstein Conquers the World. After which, I would take her in my arms and console her as she heaved up big, wet sloppy tears of sorrow onto my shirt. Then I’d fuck her. Don’t you judge me! Were you in my shoes, you would do the exact same thing. Who wouldn’t want to be able to brag to their buddies about fucking the chick who created Frankenstein? What can I say? I set the bar pretty low. Kinda like the creators of this movie!

The set-up to this flick actually starts off mildly intriguing. It begins in 1945 with a group of Nazi soldiers busting up into some scientist’s crib and hijacking all his shit. Doc has enough time to take the disembodied (yet still juicy) heart of the Frankenstein Monster and place it inside a special cryogenic container. The Nazis take it aboard their submarine, but on their way back home, a Japanese sub intercepts them and they confiscate the heart. Returning it to Japan, the military plans on using Frankenstein’s methods to create unkillable soldiers. But then, everything goes to shit. Ya see, it’s August 6^th, 1945, and anyone who was ever sober during 5^th grade history knows that August 6^th, 1945 was a really shit day to be in Hiroshima. The prologue concludes with a giant A-bomb explosion. Doesn’t sound bad so far, eh? I mean… ya got Nazis! Any movie with Nazis in it automatically goes up a notch in the Headhunter’s cool-o-meter. These guys make great villains! You can do anything you want to them in a movie and don’t have to feel guilty about it. Plus, you’ll make the ADL happy, and that’s no small feat in this day and age. Why am I talking about the significance of the Third Reich and its influences on pop culture Asian cinema you might ask? Hell, I’ll wax intellectual about anything if it takes my mind off this fucking turd of a movie.

Anyway, we flash our brainpans forward fifteen years and we have ourselves a group of scientists working in Hiroshima studying radioactivity and its effects on bomb survivors. Our main cast consists of the pragmatic Doctor Yuzo Kawaji, the compassionate Doctor James Bowen, and playing the part of “token Japanese chick #1” is Doctor Sueko Togami. Yeah, I know. It sounds sexist. Hell… it is sexist! But I don’t make the rules here, I just watch and report. These three spend some time racing about the room at breakneck speed without ever saying a word or even making a sound. Wait a sec… that’s not what really happened. That’s just me leaning on the fast forward button. Why? Because who gives a shit what the boring-ass scientists have to say? Let’s get to the monsters!

A young teenage mutant caveboy is seen popping in and out of local areas causing all manner of distress. First, he abducts some poor schmuck’s dog and eats him. Later, he breaks into an elementary school, eviscerates a rabbit and leaves its dismembered carcass on the floor for the children to find (I actually got quite a chuckle out of that part). The scientists and a group of locals eventually corner the kid in his private cave and drag him back to the Radiation Institute. They quickly determine that this kid is somehow Frankenstein and that he has been mutated due to living in the radioactive shithole that was once Hiroshima. They cram his mongoloid ass into a cage and Sueko develops some weird psycho-sexual kinship with the freak. “He’s not bad. He’s just misunderstood”, she seemed to think. Well, you know what they say: once you go Frankenstein, you never go…uhh.. backenstein… I guess.

The three scientists even go to Frankfurt Germany to find the wacky bastard that originally worked on Frankenstein’s heart during the war. The scientist tells them that so long as Frankenstein’s heart continues to receive protein, it will live forever. Further, the heart has unbelievable restorative properties and it will even regrow lost tissue including severed limbs. The scientist theorizes that even the severed organs might take on a life of their own. In order to prove whether the mongoloid in captivity is in fact Frankenstein, the scientist suggests cutting off his arms and legs. If they grow back… then you know that he’s really Frankenstein. What a fucking genius! What if they DON’T grow back, asshole? What then? You’ve just tortured and permanently maimed some poor kid whose already got enough shit going on in his life. 

Before long however, Frankenstein begins to grow. [Must… resist… cloyingly… obvious… pecker joke…] He grows and grows and grows until finally he is too big to sit inside the cage. The manacles are so tight that they are actually biting through his skin. Frankie finally loses it and tears through the manacles, thus severing his hand and bursts out of the cage. Standing north of twenty feet, he grunts and squeals, then begins tearing ass across the city. His hand meanwhile, having adopted a life of its own, begins crawling away. The scientists chase after it and find it hiding beneath a drainage grate in the cell. And yes… it really is just as funny as it sounds.

So now that we’ve got a three-story sasquatch running around, we need a monster for him to fight, right? After all, this just simply wouldn’t be an Ishirô Honda film without some schmuck in a giant rubber monster suit. Enter: Baragon! Baragon is basically a big, spiky armadillo with bat ears and a glowing horn on his nose. He shoots red raybeams out of his mouth and is really good at burrowing underground. Physically, Baragon bears a strong resemblance to one of Godizlla’s less-accomplished opponents, Anguirus. In these sort of flicks, there’s usually a character who provides an explanation as to a creature’s name, but the geniuses behind this cinematic miracle don’t really bother with any of that. About three quarters of the way through the film, Doctor Kawaji just starts calling him Baragon for no real reason. Oddly though, everyone seemed to know who he is talking about. I guess it’s like those astronomers who find a comet. The first one to spot it gets to name it, and their decision is beyond reproach. I’ll have to remember that the next time a giant armadillo with bat ears begins tearing its way through my home town. It might cost me a house, but damn it, my name will live in infamy as the first guy to identify Spikyarmadilloearhornguy!

The rest of the film proceeds in the manner that one might expect. Frankenstein and Baragon grunt, whistle and howl at one another, then begin swapping punches. They carry their fight way up into the mountains, which is a real pain in the ass for the human characters in this drama, for now they have to take an expensive helicopter ride up into the hills just to keep abreast of the action. Frankenstein even demonstrates his humanitarian side by rescuing Doctor Kawaji after he takes a spill down the side of the mountain. Ironically, this is the same numbskull who wanted to cut off Frankie’s arms and legs to see if they would grow back. I suppose I should also point out that at this point, Frankenstein has shed his former waif clothes in exchange for a furry loincloth. I’m not sure where this happened, or what he used for material, but I do find it odd that a creature who is not even capable of forming a coherent thought is modest enough to know to cover up his Frankenjunk.

Anyway, I don’t think I’m spoiling anything by telling you who wins this little donnybrook. Yup. It’s Frankenstein. He grabs Baragon in a chokehold, snaps his neck, and then pitches his dead carcass off the side of the mountain. Then… a giant octopus appears from out of nowhere and attacks Frankenstein! Seriously, I’m not making this up. A giant octopus crawls out of the sea, climbs up the side of an extremely tall mountain and says “Fuck it. I’m gonna go rassle Frankenstein.” Now Frankie is already pretty tuckered out after dealing with Baragon, so he is in no shape to grapple with a giant testicle and eight flopping penises. Octagon wraps his little meat feelers around Frankenstein and the two topple off the side of the mountain to their ever-loving doom.

Acting/Dialogue: It’s next to impossible to gauge the acting quality in foreign language films. Whether you watch the film with subtitles, or dubbed voices, you still suffer a great disconnect. With subtitles, it is difficult to keep the emotional cadence of the actor’s voice in context with the written words, and with dubbing… well, I don’t think I really have to go into how crappy dubbed voices are. It’s particularly weird watching the waspy Aryan peckerwood speaking in Japanese. The actors of this film also seem to have a problem with making eye contact with the camera. But that’s probably out of a sense of shame I’m sure.

Gore: Like most Kaiju films, there is almost no gore, so it is perfectly safe for your withdrawn, socially inept child to watch without risk of damaging his ever-so-precious psyche. The most gratuitously jarring scene is that of the dismembered rabbit on the classroom floor. But that’s nothing really. Let’s face it, what child on either side of the Pacific hasn’t dismembered a rabbit in the middle of their classroom?

Guilty Pleasures:  Surprisingly, this movie doesn’t offer a whole helluva lot in the way of guilty pleasures. Most kaiju flicks will provide you with endless fits of laughter, but this one is primarily just dumb with very little accidental humor. One bit that does kinda stick out involves a scene where a hungry Baragon terrorizes a horse stable looking for a little lunch. Now the production crew could have easily used a real horse for the close-up shots, but instead, they used some fake, furry toy horse that just moved up and down. I guess after spending all of their dough on rubber props and dopamine for the actors, all they had left was enough for a spray-painted My Pretty Pony.

The Good: Now, I would be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge that Frankenstein Conquers the World does in fact tote a fair measure of pure comic brilliance. When we catch our first real look at teen-Frankenstein, he is clearly portrayed by a Japanese actor, albeit with a terrible wig and shitty make-up. His keeper explains to his colleagues, and thus the audience, that this twat was originally a Caucasian boy whose body had been radically mutated by the radioactive fallout. Yes… you read that correctly. Atomic bombs turn white people into Asians! Oh, sweet irony! No wonder so many Japanese kids are running around singing bad American karaoke tunes and dying their hair pink. They’re really just radioactive closet honkies! (Which would be a really awesome name for a rock band I might add. Gotta copyright that.)

There is another scene in this movie that I simply cannot wrap my head around. It’s just… bizarre. Perhaps its Ishirô Honda’s maladjusted attempts at humor again. If so, then I give him two hearty thumbs-up for his efforts. Frankenstein is loping down the street when a car runs him down and speeds off. Doctor Bowen and Sueko hear him screaming in pain and they look outside their apartment window where they see the kid lying there on the street clutching his leg. So what do they do?  They throw him a bag of meat! Seriously, Sueko goes into the freezer, grabs a bag of some indiscernible food item and lobs it onto the ground. She doesn’t even throw it within arm’s reach of the kid. The poor bastard has to drag his broken ass across the street, thus risking being struck by another vehicle, to retrieve an item that isn’t going to do him any damn bit of good anyway. And what do the doctors do after witnessing this painful tableau? They close the curtains and go about their business. What a bunch of sick fuckers! Normal people would at least call an ambulance. To make matters worse, they do the EXACT SAME SHIT later on in the movie; except this time they have to drop bags of meat to him from a helicopter. Not to fear though, after seeing this flick, I now keep a stock of various frozen prime cuts in a cooler in the back of my truck… just in case of a roadside accident.

So what else classifies as “good” in this movie? One frame. It can all be summed up in one frame. There is a scene near the beginning where Frankenstein, having just about outgrown his cage, is squashed inside this thing, growling at a troupe of reporters. For one brief, shining moment… nothing looked fake. It looked pretty damn authentic. Now admittedly, I have never actually seen a twenty-foot tall palsy victim with missing teeth sandwiched inside of a 9x15 prison cell, but if I HAD… if I had… then  I would have to say that the visual effects guys for this flick were dead-on target. How genuine! How authentic! How REAL! Yup. They pretty much shot their celluloidal load with that one shot.

 
The Bad: When I was a little kid, I was a real Star Wars nut. I had everything: the action figures, the spaceships, even the playsets. My next door neighbor Jimmy on the other hand, had this perverse fascination with Micronauts. Admittedly, and I’m sure to Jimmy’s eternal shame, he had the most complete Micronauts collection I had ever seen. It was like a parent’s sad yard sale gone wrong. Anyway, one of us got the brainy idea of having a massive Star Wars vs. Micronauts game in my front yard. I don’t recall the actual play experience myself, except for the fact that it eventually devolved (as these things tend to do) into a debate as to which franchise was cooler, Star Wars or Micronauts. Now while this may seem like a no-brainer, I have to concede that Jimmy put up a strong argument. After all, Micronauts had a more intricate design and they had greater points of articulation. Put simply, you could bend a Micronaut’s elbows. This was unheard of in the Star Wars action figure community with our sad-ass Kenner Star Wars toys with plastic capes and unbendable arms and legs. This revelation hit me like a shot to the testes, and I probably would have beat the shit out of Jimmy had he not possessed a solid foot and a half advantage over me and was three years my senior (which, in retrospect, makes him even more of a loser for liking Micronauts). The overall point I’m trying to make here is: Unlike a delectable Reeces peanut butter cup, some flavors simply don’t mix well together. Star Wars should not mix with Micronauts, and Frankensteins damn sure have no business playing first string in a low-rent wannabe Godzilla film.

Before even going into this, it should be known that, like many Toho Productions films, this flick is known by several different names including , Frankenstein Conquers the World, Frankenstein vs. Baragon, Frankenstein vs. the Subterranean Monster and Frankenstein Meets the Giant Devil Fish. Personally, I love that last one. Still, it gives one pause. Can you really put a lot of faith in a movie if the production crew can’t even make up their minds on the title?

But that’s not even the biggest mis-step of this production. Truthfully, the fight sequences in this film are no better or worse than what you would see in any other kaiju. No, the biggest letdown sadly is the main character himself: Frankenstein. First off, he doesn’t even look like a movie monster. He just looks like some over-sized retarded kid with Down syndrome. Plus, he has this wildly distracting gap where his front tooth should be. Didn’t the scientists in this flick say that a healthy Franken-heart will rejuvenate all damaged bone and tissue? I guess that doesn’t include missing teeth. He can regrow a severed arm, but his advanced recuperative abilities peter out when it comes to dental hygiene? What the shit is that? This is the guy whose ENTIRE BODY grew from his disembodied heart. HIS WHOLE FREAKING BODY!!! Is there some kind of money back guarantee? Or perhaps the missing tooth was meant as some kind of metaphor. Like, the gap in his mouth represented the hole in his soul, or something like that.  Or perhaps it represents the endless vacancy found in the script’s plot as well as the main character’s head. Hey, we might be onto something here. It’s a visual haiku, that’s what it is! Alas, I fear that it is really just there to distract us from the extremely shitty forehead prosthetic used to give him that traditional Frankenstein box-head look. Either way, the guy looks terrible. I’d go on and make fun of the really hideous wig they have strapped to the poor cretin playing this gig, but I suspect that it might actually be the actor’s hair.

But crappy make-up effects and wig malfunctions aside, there is an even bigger problem with this character. Not only does Frankenputz have the ability to grow and grow and grow… so do his clothes! So now I’m supposed to believe that the mysterious radioactive powers of Frankenstein’s immortal heart extends to fabric as well? Hell, I eat a chili-burger and my t-shirt is bursting at the seams. This Neanderthal grows thirty-feet high and barely tears his pants! This only compounds the stupidity of the character. He should have patented that shit! Can you imagine? Clothing that will expand, stretch and grow to suit your needs! He could have made billions off that idea! But does he do that? No! Instead, he jogs around the forest, picking his ass and pitching elm trees at seagulls! Stupid Frankenstein.

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Overall Rating: 2 out of 10 severed heads. And I’m only giving it that high of a mark because of the surprise killer octopus ending.

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