The World Holds It’s Breath: Frankenstein Lives!
This German poster for Ishiro (Inoshiro) Honda’s Frankenstein Conquers The World (1965) features a striking blood-splash background and The Monster’s face painted so as to suggest an exaggerated simian profile, no doubt to justify the unusual title that translate roughly as Frankenstein, The Fright With The Ape Face.
Related:
The Covers of Frankenstein: Famous Monsters of Filmland No. 39
The prestigious Nebula Awards were handed out in Los Angeles on April 25, 2009. Pride and Prometheus, by John Kessel, a wonderful story mashing Jane Austen and Frankenstein, was voted in as the year’s Best Novelette by the members of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.
Kessel's story is also nominated for a Hugo Award, to be presented at the World Science Fiction Convention to be held in Montréal in August.
- Read Pride and Prometheus.
- Author John Kessel’s homepage.
Related: Frankenstein Meets Jane Austen
A legendary Beat era hangout in Laguna Beach, California, Café Frankenstein opened in 1958 under the stewardship of folk singer Doug Myres, writer George Clayton Johnson (of Twilight Zone fame) and artist Burt Shonberg. The building housed a “European” coffee shop, a bookstore and a leather goods and sandal shop.
Shonberg contributed an interior mural and a fabulous stained glass front window featuring the Frankenstein Monster. You can glimpse the window art in color, as seen from inside the club, in the picture here, if you can peel your eyes away from model Barbara Kellogg.
The nude photo session, in fact, brought charges of “lewd and obscene conduct” against the Café’s owners, just one of the many attacks by a very conservative community against the alternative club and its bohemian clientele of beatniks, surfers and folksies. It is said that two of the Café’s regular clients were undercover cops on the lookout for illegal activities and that both men eventually became supporters of the club.
Squaresville opposition to the hep establishment reached its hysterical apex when a local Church group protested against the window art on the grounds that stained glass was an art form exclusive to churches. Shonberg greeted them with a threat to erect a crucified Frankenstein.
Café Frankenstein was sold in 1960 and operated as Club 480 until 1962 when it was demolished, along with the Shonberg art, to make room for a parking lot.
The images here are from a wonderful article on early Pop Surf Culture posted on Dumb Angel. Click through to read the Café Frankenstein story in greater detail along with more pictures, including one of the building itself.
Burt Shonberg painted murals for coffee shops, bars, restaurants and Beat clubs up and down the coast. He contributed covers and illustrations to science fiction magazines. His art was also used on an album by Arthur Lee and Love and a commissioned set of paintings was famously featured in Roger Corman’s Fall of the House of Usher (1960).
Here’s Shonberg's website, with a gallery of paintings that includes the House of Usher art.
Here’s a trailer that has been a bit of an Internet sensation this week. Vampire Girl vs. Frankenstein Girl is the straightforward title for a very twisted film by special effects expert Yoshihiro Nishimura of Tokyo Gore Police fame. Co-directed by Naoyuki Tomomatsu, and based on a manga by Shungiku Uchida, it’s a transgressive love triangle story featuring teenage girls with special powers vying for the love of a boy.
Eri Otoguro plays Keiko, the Frankenstein Girl, stitches and screws holding her face together.
Please be warned, the trailer features way over the top gore with exploding heads, hacked limbs and industrial strength arterial spray. It’s something like a live action Itchy and Scratchy cartoon and all very funny if you’re in the right mood. The only really offensive thing about it is the blackface character.
The film is currently in production and should premiere in North America at Montreal’s Fantasia film festival in July.
Here’s the trailer, on YouTube. NSFW.
Fangoria Online has a set report and a gallery of stills.
Produced in February 2008, this adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was a collaboration, under director Laurie Sampson, of Northampton UK’s Royal and Derngate Productions, and the celebrated physical theater company Frantic Assembly.
In this version, written by Lisa Evans, a new layer is added to the book’s nested narratives, a contemporary framing story of a woman, Mary, held in an insane asylum for the murder of her own child. She is fascinated by Mary Shelley’s book, perhaps trying to understand the monster within herself. Reviewing the play, Robin Simpson of Cultural Dessert writes, “it is a magical moment when she first opens up the book and the characters explode through a trap door onto the stage to play out the drama in front of her. The links between Mary's story and the book are subtly strengthened as she takes on some of the roles in Frankenstein's narrative.”
Tellingly, one of these roles is that of Justine, the servant unjustly accused and executed in the death of the boy, William, killed by Frankenstein’s Monster. Another interesting connection comes when the body of The Monster’s mate is thrown into the sea, transforming into Mary, the asylum patient, harming herself in the shower. Actress Georgina Lamb’s performance was, according to Sid Langley of The Birmingham Post, “movingly realised.” Caroline Morris of The Stage pronounced it “haunting in the extreme.”
Though critics were generally impressed by the production, energetic to the point of sensory overload, the overall effect of the play was, according to Sam Marlowe of Times Online, “disappointingly tame. If this is not an electrifying evening, though, it is by and large an elegant and diverting one. But it never once freezes the blood.” Lyn Gardner of The Guardian said, “This one has lashings of atmosphere and a few moments to make you jump, but it still falls far short of the imaginative heart of a tale that should be as apt for our own era as it was for the Age of Enlightenment.”
All the reviewers were in agreement over the outstanding performance of dancer Richard Winsor as The Monster, moving Sid Langley to rhapsodize that “There won't be a more effective entrance on any stage in the world this year than the monster's arrival at the Royal. People literally jumped out of their seats at that moment.” Robert Simpson noted, “an amazing physical performance… (Winsor) is compelling throughout, commanding the stage and acrobatically cantering up and down the set.” The Times’ Marlow said, “(Winsor) gives a persuasive account of the creature’s physical and mental torment, flinging his body about as if he longs to be rid of it.”
Winsor’s previous credits include a world tour playing the frankensteinian Edward Scissorhands on stage.
Photograph at top by Richard Haughton.
Reviews quoted: Cultural Desserts, The Stage, The Birmingham Post, Times Online, The Guardian.
BBC audio coverage.
Royal and Derngate Productions.
Frantic Assembly’s Frankenstein page.
Video designs for the play by Mesmer.
Here’s another beautiful foreign poster with vivid colors and wonderful hand-drawn lettering for Son of Frankenstein (1939), known in Spain under the evocative title of The Shadow of Frankenstein.
This one uses elements from the American advertising campaign, featuring the gesticulating Monster with figures in the foreground, either Basil Rathbone and Josephine Hutchison as shown here, sometimes accompanied by Bela Lugosi’s grimacing Ygor, or a laboratory scene of Rathbone and Lugosi attending a resting, comatose Karloff.
Related:
French Son of Frankenstein Poster
A headband hiding the electrodes in his head, Bob Sapp, flanked here by Jasper Redd and DeRay Davis in Frankenhood, joins a long list of king-sized athletes cast as The Monster. Previous sports figures drafted for the part include Primo Carnera, Kiwi Kingston, Dave Prowse, Mike Lane, Bo Svenson and Gerardo Zepeda.
Frankenhood also stars Charlie Murphy as a mad scientist who revives a hulking corpse using the battery from an old AMC Gremlin. Murphy is no stranger to Frankenstein shenanigans, having essayed The Monster on TV’s Chappelle Show.
Sapp's Frankenhood Monster is recruited into a three-man streetball team playing for high stakes. Hilarity ensues. The film comes to DVD on May 5.
Trailer for Frankenhood.
Charlie Murphy as The Monster in a short excerpt from the Chappelle Show.
A Patchwork of Flesh is an intriguing new art project run by UK artist Paul Cooper.
The plan is to collect portraits of Frankenstein’s Monster by artists, amateur or professional, done “trading card size”, 2.5 by 3.5 inches. The art sent in will be displayed on Cooper's blog and perhaps, eventually, in a gallery.
The project is just getting underway, but this is one we’ll definitely keep an eye on.
Cartoonist and animator Doug Gray keeps a lively blog called The Greatest Ape where he posts classic humor comics by the likes of Carl Barks, Walt Kelly and Harvey Kurtzman. Gray is currently showing some of Dick Briefer’s lighthearted Frankenstein stories.
There are classic strips here, like Frankenstein and The Mummies, and Frankenstein and The Terrible Werewolf. Check out the insane Frankenstein and The Time Machine where our hero and Professor Goniph careen through time, forwards and backwards, colliding with martian invaders along the way. Briefer dresses The Merry Monster in a futuristic costume and as a musketeer, and there’s even a “it’s a bird, it’s a plane” joke thrown in.
It’s fabulous, wigged-out stuff and the scans are gorgeous, the colors really pop. You'll come away just shaking your head at how brilliant Dick Briefer was.
Russian-born artist Marina Bychkova creates delicate porcelain dolls as visual narrative. These figurines are meant to tell stories, haunted fairy tales if you will, or perhaps inspire observers to imagine their own scenarios.
The stunning and highly original Bride of Frankenstein doll has pale blond hair and a Steampunk headpiece that powers her brain. She wears a wedding gown, after Erté,
that reveals the cruel scars where her heart was put in.
Bychkova writes that the figure was inspired in part by the comics and paintings of fellow Vancouverite Camilla d’Errico, and the romantic fantasy art of James Christensen.
Bychkova builds every doll from scratch, designing, sculpting and casting the body parts, firing and finishing each piece.
The dolls, 34 cm high (13.5 inches), are meticulously assembled using spring-loaded ball and socket joints that allow for intricate posing. Painting and hair complete the figure, sometimes further embellished with jewelry and elaborate costumes. The entire process is explained in detail, with images, here.
Marina Bychkova’s website, Enchanted Doll, is packed with information, a blog, and an extensive gallery of her astounding work.
Another sensational foreign release poster for Son of Frankenstein (1939), this one by Guy Berjab for the French version, advertised as one of Universal’s “Gold Series” of films. A seal at the bottom reads, “See this Universal Super Production!”
The stylish and dynamic illustration, taken from the film’s action-packed climax, has The Monster literally straddling the poster. It’s a nice change from the usual static cameos of characters gazing anxiously into the distance. Artist Berjab uses an unusual palette, with a green glow at the top suggesting the smoking sulfur pit, and a cool blue base and purple logo at the bottom. Likenesses are excellent, with Atwill’s Krogh recognizable in profile and the terrified child emoting more than Donnie Dunagan did in the film.
Guy Berjab was an accomplished artist who, from the late Thirties onward, painted several movie posters and illustrated children’s books.
Two projects, same title.
Pictured above, the stitched-up creatures giving stiff-arm salutes and wearing Nazi-like X-insignia armbands are from Dutch director Richard Raaphorst’s Army of Frankenstein, a reboot of the previously announced but stuck-in-turnaround zombie epic, Worst Case Scenario.
The Gorehound Films site has two trailers for Worst Case Scenario. The first one sets up the story with equal measures of humor and creepiness, and the second one, more enigmatic, is genuinely chilling.
The distressed war poster, found on Michael May’s Adventureblog, announces the other Army of Frankenstein, a story arc for Crawl Space, the horror comic by Rick Remender and Kieron Dwyer, published by Image.
On his blog, Shadowplay, film critic David Cairns writes:
“One of the many agreeably odd things about the Edison Company’s 1910 FRANKENSTEIN is the way the story is told entirely in a series of intertitles, with the imagery merely fleshing out the textual description.”
This astute observation is followed by a very entertaining "reading" of the venerable film.
I also recommend Cairns' sharp and funny review of the distinctively Frankensteinian science-fiction thriller, The Colossus of New York (1958).
Shadowplay is always a great read.
Marred only by a curiously crude drawing apparently dropped in, lower left, as an afterthought, this fine Swedish poster features a stark two-tone effect, hand lettering, and a bold closeup of The Monster.
Son of Frankenstein celebrates its 70th anniversary this year.
Led by Barbara Bourget and Jay Hirabayashi, the Vancouver-based Kokoro Dance Theatre Society has been creating, performing and teaching their distinctive brand of multidisciplinary dance theatre since 1986. The company also spearheads the Vancouver International Dance Festival.
At this year’s festival, in March, Kokoro premiered a new multimedia piece called F that uses Frankenstein as a springboard for a cautionary tale exploring humanity’s capacity for creation and destruction. Among the questions raised: How do soldiers returning from war reconcile the horror of titanium limbs with their fragmented psyches? How do we take responsibility for the ongoing and incessant trauma we inflict on our bodies? What is our fate?
Performing in the sometimes grotesque and disturbing butoh style of corporal expression, the dancers are accompanied by narrators, musicians and projected images. Pictured above, Jay Hirabayashi portrays the stitched and tortured Monster and Barbara Bourget appears in front of a wall of electronic equipment.
In a very positive review, The Georgia Straight calls the piece “a Mary Shelley nightmare recast as an abstract-art installation.” A much less enthusiastic review in Plank Magazine provokes an interesting reply from choreographer Hirabayashi.
Kokoro Dance website.
The performance listed on the Vancouver International Dance Festival website.
