(1958/Astor Pictures) DVD / VHS
Rave Reviews
“Incredibly shoddy teenage-monster movie."
—Michael Weldon, The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film
“A dismal clunker … the real monster is the repellent script."
—S.A.D., Los Angeles Herald-Examiner
“Wretched Grade Z flick, so compellingly awful it’s required viewing for schlock fans."
—John Stanley, Creature Features Movie Guide Strikes Again
Plot, What Plot? An ultra-low-budget 1958 drive-in quickie, Frankenstein’s Daughter features a creature so laughably unterrifying that you’ll be surprised they ever let you have a good look at her. But the makers of this film are so unaware of their own ineptitude that not only do they frequently show off their “monster" in extended close-ups, they do so for the first time less than a minute into the film—supering their main title over what looks like Marjorie Main with Brooke Shields’s bushy eyebrows and those wax “vampire teeth" we all loved chewing on as kids at Halloween.
But idiotic as their central character is, she’s a Rhodes scholar compared to the mad scientist slowly turning her into something only Boris Karloff could love. The kicker is that the creature being created by “Dr. Frank" was made from the only subject he could find … his own teenaged daughter! And he’s doing so by injecting her without her knowledge, while she sleeps at night.
Since the transformations get worse as the project progresses, eventually leaving teen Trudy with Ping-Pong balls for eyes and Chiclets for teeth, the film could be seen as some kind of Frankensteinian treatise on teen awkwardness, or that bane of all teenage banes, acne. You think that’s a silly notion—wait’ll you hear Dr. Frank and his Señor Wences soundalike sidekick Uncle Carter discuss their work. “You fool!" the bad doctor berates Carter. “You’ve wasted my time. It’s a head I need! Everything’s ready except the brain!”
Speaking of having no brain, one of this film’s subplots involves a citywide “manhunt" after a newspaper headline screams “WOMAN MONSTER MENACES CITY." Heading up the investigation is a detective who could’ve taught Donald Trump a thing or two about the art of extreme comb-overs, with his own sidekick who looks like a crosseyed Al Gore. When first told of the marauding “monster," the detective declares, “I might be out of my mind but… I believe her!" The other subplot involves Oliver and Carter working on a second “monster" that looks like a melt-faced robotic Santa Claus and walks like Bela Lugosi with lumbago.
Like Eegah, everything in Frankenstein’s Daughter culminates at a poolside barbecue, this one featuring two musical numbers by the Page Cavanaugh Trio. As the Trio sing, “I’m hip, Daddy Bird, let’s flip, Daddy Bird, let’s hop all day and fly away tonight," both creatures converge on Dr. Frank’s patio. The bad doctor is forced to confess, “I’m not just Dr. Oliver Frank—I am Oliver … Frankenstein!" But seeing both of his experiments ruined reduces Dr. Frank-enstein to Scooby Speak, getting in one last dig at those darn teenagers: “You satisfied now, you meddling kids?!?"
Barely 85 minutes long, produced on a $60,000 budget using plywood sets and props probably cadged from local trash cans, Frankenstein’s Daughter is a delightfully dimwitted example of that now dead 1950s film genre: the make-out movie. Find yourself a date with ultra-bushy eyebrows and check it out.
Dippy Dialogue
Dr. Oliver Frank (Donald Murphy), addressing the body on the slab in his lab: “Tonight, you’ll be alive again … you little vixen!”