Frankenstein Island: I watched the Rifftrax version of this. It really didn't help. This is awful. Really awful. Yes, there are girls in leopard skin bikinis, one of the main characters sports an ascot and there is a disembodied Carradine head. It just doesn't help. This is Mysterious Island with a fifty dollar budget. Don't get me wrong the boys at Rifftrax get some good lines in and it is almost worth the watch just for that. But there are simply moments of soul draining boredom that the riffing cannot soothe. Not quite to the Hamlet or Red Zone Cuba levels but certainly close. The irony is the movie has a cast and premise that could easily have been turned into watchable trash. It is just too incompetent for its own good.Worth a glance if you are brave and have a book nearby to read during the slow bits with the Rifftrax. Hopeless movie without.

Frankenstein Island is an incomprehensible mess of a movie. Anyone rating it higher than I have is kidding themselves. There may be a laugh or two in the "so bad, it's good" sort of way, but this doesn't make up for the overall disaster than is this movie.Most any review you'll read on Frankenstein Island will point out the numerous faults in the film. While I'm not going to even attempt to go over all of that well-worn ground, a few things really hit me that I want to mention.1. Plot – What a disaster! Frankenstein Island feels like someone took about five movie plots and tried to jam them into one movie. Plot threads go nowhere and are never resolved. And in the end, we're left with a movie that has no ending. No attempt was made to wrap things up with any explanation or resolution. It just ends.2. John Carradine – He may be listed as one of the stars, but he's never really in the movie. A poorly projected image of Carradine rambling on about a golden thread and power inserted about every 20 minutes doesn't' really mean he's in the movie. The 8X10 glossy of Carradine conspicuously placed in a number of shots doesn't cut it either.3. Cameron Mitchell – Poor, poor Cameron Mitchell. He really must have been in a hard way to appear in this thing. He's one of my genre favs – love him in Blood and Black Lace. His role here is embarrassing.I could go on and on, but there's really no point. I could write pages about things like: Sheila Frankenstein's name and hair, zombies dressed like WWII French resistance fighters, Amazons in leopard skin bikinis (where were the leopards?), Steve Brodies ridiculous one-eyed Jocko, a "backup" brain, building a raft when you already have a raft, long stretches of film with an uncomfortable lack of dialogue, etc. There's just too much.

Jerry Warren is known best for his awful '50s and '60s B movies, though his last movie "Frankenstein Island" was made in the '80s after a long break from his other efforts. You might have thought he would have learned something during the years of inactivity, but apparently he didn't. For one thing, you could almost swear this movie was made in the '50s, with the music, attitude, and cheap special effects. (I might have been fooled if the movie had been shot in black and white.) Anyway, you might think that this would be a campy exercise, but it isn't - it's pretty painful to sit through. The first twenty or so minutes are passable and are pretty easy to follow, but after the twenty minute mark the movie slowly starts to collapse and become a mind-numbing mess that makes no sense. Why do the protagonists decide to build a raft when they already have a raft? Why were they hot air ballooning over the ocean? Why do they not question the shipwrecked sailors immediately after they encounter them? Why is the all-female group a primitive tribe when they are descendants of space aliens? Why are the protagonists so blasé about practically everything they witness? Why does John Carradine barely appear in the movie? Why is the movie so DULL? I could go on and on, but you get the picture.

This stupid movie is about a group of guys who get stranded on an island run by Ms. Frankenstein (her name is really Van Helsing, but she hates to use her real name (?!) They get tangled up with lots of island freaks and a guy who could be Frankenstein's monster at the end of the film. What irritates me most is to feel ripped off when I watch a flick, so when top-billed John Carradine only shows up in dreamy flashbacks and Cameron Mitchell only has a few lines I was thoroughly let down. I was also astonished that anybody would want to waste good expensive film on such nothing. The "evil guy with a loud laugh" gave me a headache. Not even good camp, just a wasted one hour and a half of my life. I want my life back!!!