cinema history class: frankenstein's daughter (1958)

The session: Freaky Frankenstein's
Keith shows us four oddball interpretations of the Frankenstein story 

As always, there may be spoilers here. And the trailer may be NSFW and/or NSFL.

Week 1: Frankenstein's Daughter (1958)
Directed by Richard E. Cunha

My Level of Prior Knowledge:
Completely unfamiliar.

Plot Synopsis:
A teenager discovers that her uncle’s sinister laboratory assistant has been secretly drugging her and turning her into a monster. The assistant is actually the grandson of Dr. Frankenstein, and his efforts to continue the family legacy culminate in his creating a murderous female monster from stolen body parts.

Reaction and Other Folderol:
Frankenstein’s Daughter is pretty good. Not great, but pretty good.

This is classic 1950s science-fiction/monster-movie stuff: mad scientists, bubbling laboratory equipment, questionable science, teenagers, monsters, and people making decisions that no actual human being would make.

It is, however, a decidedly odd entry in the Frankenstein family tree. Especially at the beginning, when the movie seems to have wandered into werewolf territory. Trudy is given an experimental drug and periodically turns into a hairy, snarling creature who roams the neighborhood at night. Eventually we get back to the more traditional Frankenstein business of assembling a human being out of spare parts, but for a while there it feels as though somebody shuffled two monster-movie scripts together.

There is also, because it is the 1950s, a musical interlude. The teenagers have a pool party and suddenly we stop the monster movie so somebody can sing a song. Presumably this was there to fill a few minutes of running time and give the kids something hip to listen to. The annoying thing is that the musical number is actually pretty good. I was prepared to mock it. The movie denied me the opportunity.

Donald Murphy, as Oliver Frank, has excellent crazy eyes. He looks a little like the Professor from Gilligan’s Island if the Professor finally snapped after one too many failed attempts to get off that damned island and decided that building a woman out of corpses was the next logical step.

Bobbo and Keith both agreed that, whatever the movie looks like to an adult in 2026, this thing was genuinely frightening for a kid. And I can see that. The monster isn't particularly convincing by modern standards, but it is certainly grotesque.

Which raises an obvious question: Why is Frankenstein's daughter so incredibly ugly?

Keith supplied the answer. Apparently the production originally intended the creature to be male. They had already designed the monster makeup when somebody decided that, hey, the movie is called Frankenstein’s Daughter, so perhaps Frankenstein ought to make a daughter. Thus the production changed the monster's sex but essentially kept the male monster makeup.

And suddenly a great deal about this movie makes sense.

Anyway, Frankenstein’s Daughter isn't a lost masterpiece of horror cinema. But it is a thoroughly enjoyable specimen of the 1950s monster-movie genre, with enough weirdness to distinguish it from the hundreds of other movies involving a mad scientist and a laboratory full of equipment purchased from the local Radio Shack.

I liked it.

Joe would have given it a 10.