FLESH FOR FRANKENSTEIN

Baron von Frankenstein (played by unhinged Euro-cinema icon Udo Kier) labors to create a pair of perfect male and female specimens from parts of the dead in this flagrantly unfaithful reworking of Mary Shelley’s classic horror novel. Filmmaker Paul Morrissey was a key member of Andy Warhol’s art scene at the Factory and directed such Warhol-produced classics as FLESH (1968), TRASH (1970), and HEAT (1972). Featuring really gorgeous people and outlandish gore, this film certainly doesn’t tackle the Frankenstein story in a conventional way but its inventiveness and insanity help make it a one-of-a-kind cinematic experience.

"It’s impossible to listen to Paul Morrissey talk for longer than five minutes at a time, but it’s so easy to get lost in the worlds of his movies. These saloons of beautiful junkies, shit-talking queens—vixens and studs of their own imagination—light up the screen with their outsider star power. Here we have Udo Kier as the mad scientist with all the animated flustered fury of Daffy Duck, Joe Dallesandro as a confused American adonis caught in this European art film tableaux, and Monique van Vooren as a cuntess of Fassbinderian makeup. They’re all wonderful. Morrissey might’ve thought the whole scene was trash—endemic of a world ready to be 'flushed down the drain with all the shit of modern life'--but his films were beautiful in their own way." - Willow Maclay