FRANKENSTEIN MEETS THE SPACEMONSTER introduces us to Princess Marcuzan (Marilyn Hanold) and her bald, pointy-eared, leering henchman, Dr. Nadir (Lou Cutell). Right away, we know these two are up to some shenanigans, as they're orbiting our planet, blowing up our missiles. Meanwhile, on Earth, Col. Frank Saunders (Robert Reilly), who is preparing for his flight to Mars, has some sort of breakdown. Actually, it's more of a malfunction. Yep, Saunders is an android! After a quick tune-up, Saunders is off to the red planet. NOTE TO FUTURE SCHLOCK DIRECTORS: Always play awesome rock music during all liftoff stock footage! Oh no! Something goes wrong! Saunders' craft crash-lands, sending him on a dizzying rampage of doom! It's the princess and Nadir again. We know this because of Nadir's annoyingly sinister cackle. Forced to land on Earth themselves, Marcuzan's minions must face a gun-toting hillbilly! Oh, and they have a pet monster on board their ship. Somehow, this all leads to the showdown of the title. This is one funny movie! Cheap, but cheeeze-rich, Nadir steals the show w/ his hysterical speeches, packed w/ histrionic blather that Bill T. Shatner would envy! His weird, dislocated stares are perfect, giving him an air of slight brain damage. The princess holds her own, mostly due to her magnificent headdress (a tablecloth w/ pipe-cleaners sticking out of it). As for Saunders, his melted face is pure magic! EXTRA CREDIT: For the aforementioned music, along w/ all the glorious tunes in this film! Co-stars James Karen (POLTERGEIST, RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD) as Dr. Adam Steele, who nearly runs off w/ the movie during the sudden, "motor-scooter-of-love" sequence!... EXTRA-EXTRA CREDIT: For the "pool-party-alien-assault" scene! The dancing! The music! It rivals the hootenanny in THE CREEPING TERROR! If only the girl in the gold pants were there!...

When I started watching this, I wasn't sure whether it was the genuine article, or a well-made parody of campy 60s films. Just the name, "Frankenstein Meets The Space Monster", reeks of a bizarre 60s film milking the Frankenstein name for all they could. Somehow they don't even get that right, and 'Frankenstein' is not Frankenstein's monster, but a malfunctioning android called Frank who is compared to Frankenstein's monster!The plot will be familiar to anyone (Oh no, X is kidnapping our women, and we can't stop them!), but particularly those who have seen Devil Girl From Mars (1954), which this film rips off. Aliens from a planet devastated by war, led by a seductive villain, come in search of breeding stock. You can't make this up any more, because it's so clicheed it is embedded into our collective culture!Finally, Frank has a fight with the close-up camera angle monster on the ship and everything on the ship is destroyed, leaving everyone else to ponder what just happened, and how this idea ever got any funding. It's a film that is fundamentally broken, yet still somehow entertaining. Worth watching, but not for the reasons people usually watch films.

Why am I watching these terrible movies?I guess someone has to.Anyway, this is my third or fourth Frankenstein movie and none of them actually had Frankenstein in them.How is that even possible?I assume they lie about it to trick people into watching their bad, bad movies.It worked on me.So some aliens are hovering over Earth and shooting down our rockets.The aliens have Spock ears but each ear is completely different.The main alien has one almost good Spock ear and the other one looks like it was made by a 5 year old who had never seen Star Trek.The aliens need to repopulate their planet, and of course women of a different species will do just fine, so they have come for the Earth women.At one point a military guy calls another military guy and says they just got a twix from Washington.Washington sent them the candy bar with the cookie crunch??He continues to say that strange looking humans were reported in Puerto Rico and the other guy says it's probably Castro.Seriously?A high ranking Army official doesn't know the difference between Puerto Rico and Cuba?What about the fool who wrote this movie?What about the hundreds of other people who worked on the movie?None of them knew the difference?I have been thinking there was something wrong with people in the past but now I have a new theory.People in the past were stupid.Old people aren't becoming worse, they were never great people.But the movie just gets worse.They have no problem kidnapping a dozen women.The women and their men never put up a fight.But when the main female character and her companion split up(because that's what you do in bad movies), it takes three aliens to drag her into their ship.Even worse, they decide they want to capture Frank.What is the logic behind that?Does he look like a woman to them??So they attack Frank, a guy who has proved he can easily kill people by barely touching them, and he puts up less of a fight than the woman.What?That really just happened and I didn't turn off this movie?This guy got shot in the face and then beat the alien to death while it was wearing a helmet but suddenly he can't fight? Bad acting and a worse plot combine to make you wish you had never watched this movie.I give this two stars because sadly, there are worse movies.I almost forgot that I think I learned something from this movie.It was made by a company with Futurama in its name and a guy in the movie said "robit".The Professor on the cartoon Futurama says "robit" all the time.This had to be where that came from.I don't understand why this was deleted. The mods clearly didn't read it.

The film involves a mission to Mars scheduled to be manned by a single crewmember, Capt. Frank Saunders. Like many a low-budget sci-fi film, NASA is run by two or three people at the most. In NASA's headquarters, which bears a striking resemblance to any given high school with a "John F. Kennedy Space Center" banner drapped over the entrance, Frank is unveiled in a press conference the day before the historic mission to no less than three, semi-attentive reporters. In the middle of the conference, Frank completely freezes, and is rushed off by two scientists. The reporters are curious, but quick thinking General Bowers offers them drinks, and their desire for a good story is outweighed by the urge to get some free booze.It turns out that our boy Frank is really a half-man robot (pronounced "robut" by his creator, Adam Steel), a sort of modern Frankenstein, if you will. Despite the fact that Frank has malfunctioned and become completely unresponsive two minutes into his unveiling at a press conference, he is sent out into space the next day as planned after some mild tweaking.Meanwhile, a malicious, insipid race of aliens is coming to Earth for a single purpose. It seems their planet has been destroyed by a nuclear holocaust, and these saps are the lone survivors. The aliens are led by, Princess Marcuzan (who, you would think would be queen now) and Dr. Nadir, who informs the crew: "We are extinct as a race, unless of course we can find some good breeding stock to repopulate the planet." Wow.The aliens mistake Frank's spaceship for an attack, and blow it up. Frank crashes somewhere in Puerto Rico, where he emerges damaged and begins to wander the countryside attacking random people. (Incidentally, Frank at no point resembles a classic Frankenstein or the guy on the cover of the DVD – he looks more like a bargain-basement version of Batman villain Two-Face than anything else.) The aliens also land in Puerto Rico, and start capturing girls that don't look Puerto Rican in the slightest.The film's idea of incorporating a Puerto Rican into the story comes when hero-scientist Adam Steel (love that name!) needs to make a phone call and struggles to communicate with a native. "Telephone?" Steel says, and the native is confused. Steel puts his hand to his ear in traditional phone-mime and says, "El telephono?" and the guy understands. Yikes. I'm one of the whitest white people alive and I'M offended.Fortunately for our evil alien friends, all the Earth girls are remarkably easy to capture, and beyond shrieking periodically they provide no resistance whatsoever. The first girl is caught while on a beach in a bikini, sees her boyfriend edited out of the movie before her eyes (I think it was implied that he was blown up via ray gun), and once on the ship is totally compliant and mute. She doesn't even get cheesy lines like, "Gee! Are you from outer space?" Instead, she just kind of stands there and does as she's told as the Princess and Dr. Nadir leer at her in creepy, exploitation movie fashion.It goes without saying that the aliens have themselves a monster locked up in a cage, which looks like a Mexican wrestler in an ornate costume.Naturally Steel and Karen find Frank in some isolated cave and calm him down a little, leading us to assume that his killing spree is over and he's somehow "good" again.Steel sends Karen off to get help, but she is nabbed by those pesky aliens and taken to their spaceship. Speaking of the spaceship, it's one of those cases where the exterior makes the ship appear no bigger than a one bedroom efficiency, but the interior seems to have endless room for cockpits, hallways, and holding cells. Then again, we're talking about Frankenstein Meets the Spacemonster, so who am I to complain about such technicalities? The pulse-pounding chuckle-inducing conclusion sees Frank freeing the Earth girls and Karen, and fighting the spacemonster. This is where the title feels like false advertising, because Frank and the spacemonster do not meet, per se, as the title promises; they just start fighting. What a rip-off! One can only imagine the stimulating conversations these two might have, but instead they do some lackluster fighting that would have benefited from REAL Mexican wrestlers in those costumes. Frank finally gets a ray gun and starts firing randomly, until he blows up the whole idiotic alien race in what is intended to be a self-sacrificial moment.The special effects are pretty hideous even by B-movie standards. I know they had no budget, but the spaceship in flight appears to resemble a Christmas ornament leaking gas. The director intersplices stock footage of the military liberally, which only makes his sets and actors look all the more fake. To really put things in perspective, Frankenstein Meets the Spacemonster was released in 1965. Four years later, Stanley Kubrick's epic 2001: A Space Odyssey was made, with special effects that hold up better than the "state of the art" digital effects in Star Wars: The Phantom Menace.This cheap, exploitative schlockfest actually tries to deliver an anti-nuclear war message, a la a genuinely excellent science fiction classic The Day The Earth Stood Still (1951). Sadly, such attempts are thwarted by the fact it is a dim-witted movie titled Frankenstein Meets the Spacemonster. If you are a Mystery Science Theater 3000 fan (like me), or if you enjoyed Ed Wood's Plan 9 From Outer Space (like me), you need to see this movie. For the rest of you: Stay very, very far away.–Daniel J. Roos (film.ispwn.com)