Monsters! Cowboys! How Can You Miss?

First-time visitors to Experiment House are always impressed with my large DVD collection. At least, that is, until they get a look at most of the titles, which include:

The Thing With 2 Heads
The Giant Gila Monster
The Killer Shrews
The Abominable Doctor Phibes
Frankenstein Created Woman

While many of our guests are shelling out big bucks for another pointless "two disc special edition" of the latest Hollywood blockbuster, I can spend the same exact money and get two or four pictures from the drive-in era of yesteryear. So although it appears that I’ve put a lien on the house to fill my DVD shelf, that just isn’t the case. I just spend a lot of time slumming it at the $5 bin at Wal-Mart. Where I scored a copy of Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell, by the way!

With everyone else on a shopping excursion this afternoon I popped one of my favorite bad movies in the DVD player: Jesse James Meets Frankenstein’s Daughter. As you have probably gathered from the title, it’s a part of the James Gang’s story that usually doesn’t make the cut in documentaries on The History Channel.

The title alone is a classic. It sounds more like a parody of a horror film that would have appeared in something like Mad Magazine when it was still funny (meaning not in the last 25 years). But I imagine that the concept sounded pretty promising when this film was made in 1965, given the number of westerns that were glutting the TV airwaves and the popularity of monster magazines and toys on the market at the time. I can imagine a cigar-chomping mogul at “Circle Productions” slapping his head and exclaiming, “Cowboys and Monsters together would be dynamite!!!”

The movie looks and sounds like an old episode of The Cisco Kid, only with lower production values. All the hallmarks of the low-budget film are in evidence, including atrocious day-for-night scenes, actors who stumble on their lines but still make the final edit, and overbearing stock music. My favorite parts were:

• The inability of the thunder sound effect to be in sync with the lightening.
  
• Acting so wooden the director could have just dressed up logs in cowboy hats.
  
• The exterior of Frankenstein’s Castle represented not by a model or even a matte painting, but by a watercolor. And a not-so-great one at that. I'm talkin' paint-by-numbers here!
  
• An eye-rolling performance by Narda Onyx, who plays Dr. Maria Frankenstein.

The plot, such as it is, concerns Frankenstein’s (grand)daughter's attempts to create a monster for no discernable purpose. She experiments on a guy by putting him in a rainbow-striped helmet with neon tubes and a telsa coil sticking out of it. The 98 lb. weakling pretty much dies instantly. She decides that she needs a stronger body to work with, and into the movie strolls Hank, a member of the James Gang, who is as strong as an ox and unfortunately as dumb as one. That’s the first five minutes. Add in an Indian attack, some gunfights, and the requisite stock western characters and you can probably imagine the rest of the film yourself. Heck, you probably just imagined a much more interesting film that this one.

In its original release it was a double feature with Billy the Kid Versus Dracula. Fortunately the films did poorly enough at the box office that movie going audiences were spared Buffalo Bill Versus The Hunchback of Notre Dame or Annie Oakley Meets The Phantom of The Opera.