Actuakers One of my all time favorites.

Jonah Abbott There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

Fatma Suarez The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

Marva It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

Red-Barracuda Back in the early 70's there was a spate of very strange cinematic versions of the famous Frankenstein tale. There was Frankenstein '80 (1972) which was a detective story where the monster was a serial killing sex offender; there was also Flesh for Frankenstein (1973), the schlock-fest produced by Andy Warhol, featuring delirious performances from the likes of Udo Kier and Joe Dallesandro; and then there was Frankenstein's Castle of Freaks (1974) in which the good doctor was accompanied by an evil dwarf, a Neanderthal man improbably called Lugosi and a monster named Hulk. Well, given this fashion for sexploitation/trashfests based on the famous old story it surely comes as no surprise that that king of the Eurotrash horror film himself, Jess Franco, got in on the act and delivered his own take on this most specific of ideas. And so we have The Erotic Rites of Frankenstein. Oh, one can only wonder what Mary Shelley would have made of such adaptations of her little Gothic novel.Anyone experienced with Franco films must surely go into a new one with an element of trepidation. Old Jess certainly knocked them out fast and sometimes with hilariously little care, so you never know for sure if what you are going to get is going to be good or terrible. Well, pleasingly, this flick is one of the better ones. It's from his early 70's period when he was ludicrously prolific and naturally it has a very low budget. But this one contains lots of the very weird style that the director is perhaps most loved for. It also has a great deal of his more notorious techniques, such as copious zooms and lots of out-of-focus shots. While regular collaborator Daniel White provides one of his better scores, even if jazz does seem a little ill-fitting to a story set in the 19th century.I'm not going to recount the story as there simply is no point but needless to say this is a surreal, sexploitation costume horror with enough genuine strangeness about it to ensure it is always interesting. The most obvious thing to do will be to simply recount some of the strange highlights of this film. Firstly, we have a strange blind, vampiric bird woman who kills Dr Frankenstein within the first five minutes; she is so bizarre a character, a whole film could easily have been based around her. She is played by Anne Libert, who played another very odd character in Franco's A Virgin Among the Living Dead (1973). She appears to be the muse of a sorcerer called Cagliostro played by legendary Franco regular Howard Vernon, who once again puts in a commendably serious performance despite the essential nonsense of the storyline. Then there is the unexplained fact that the monster itself is silver. I have no idea why this is but it's brilliantly bizarre. He even gets to viciously whip a naked couple who are tied together above some spikes. This constitutes one of the sadomasochistic erotic rites of the title I think. They all begin with the white gowned undead walking through a misty moonlit forest on their way to Cagliostro's castle; once there, these strange creatures observe the rites. All of this stuff is really great and show Franco at his best. While this rather strange stuff goes on other things happen too, such as Dr Frankenstein's dead body hilariously being periodically reanimated by his daughter simply in order to get information and then there are several scenes involving Lina Romay as a gypsy girl called Esmeralda who has several one-way discussions with a very old woman, these scenes seem to have no relevance to anything else really and are in here for reasons only known to Franco. And why is Dr Seward from the novel Dracula involved in all of this? Your guess is as good as mine.In summary, this is psychotronic nonsense of the first order. But if you have a taste for the bizarre and appreciate Mr Franco's eccentricities then I think this is one that you will get a kick out of.

Michael_Elliott The Erotic Rites of Frankenstein (1973) *** (out of 4)Dr. Frankenstein (Dennis Price) finally makes his monster human after putting a brain into his skull but shortly afterwards the doctor and his assistant are murdered and the monster stolen by a mysterious bird woman who was sent by the evil Cagliostro (Howard Vernon). Soon Dr. Frankenstein's daughter (Beatriz Savon) seeks revenge for the death of her father.Jess Franco's THE EROTIC RITES OF FRANKENSTEIN is without question a rather wild, over-the-top and downright batshit crazy film that rarely makes a bit of sense but that's what makes it so darn entertaining. The movie is a complete head-scratcher and it makes you wonder what must have been going on inside of Franco's mind but there's no question that it's a major improvement over his Dracula, PRISONER OF FRANKENSTEIN.This film here, like most of the director's work, is available in two versions. The French version is also known as the "hot" or the "nude" version as as you might guess it contains a lot of female and male nudity. This here is certainly the version you'll want to check out because, well, if you're going to watch an "erotic" movie then it might as well feature nudity. This version adds a lot of erotic stuff, which adds up on the camp factor but with that said there's still reasons to watch the non-nude Spanish version. The Spanish version has Lina Romay in the role of a gypsy and this is missing from the French version.Again, if you're coming to this film expecting something normal then you might be as nutty as Franco himself. The plot of this thing is rather crazy and all over the place. The fact that there's a bird woman here with green feathers on her body is a clear indication that you're not meant to take this too serious. The silver toned Frankenstein monster is another interesting visual but so is a sequence where all sorts of masked weirdos are watching the events. Add in some bizarre torture scenes and some really whacked out scenes of Dr. Frankenstein being brought back to life and you've got a wild little picture.

MARIO GAUCI This one's undoubtedly superior to Dracula, PRISONER OF FRANKENSTEIN (1971) – displaying a fair evidence of style throughout (notably some Bavaesque lighting).It utilizes a lot of the same cast as that film: Dennis Price, in fact, returns as Frankenstein but gets little to do (this is his least performance in a Franco film – especially embarrassing when his character is regenerated); Howard Vernon now turns up as Cagliostro (I had been underwhelmed by his performance when I watched the Spanish version a few years back, but he's actually quite commanding); Anne Libert gets her most impressive role as Melissa, the blind and eccentric "Bird Woman" in Cagliostro's service (though the mysterious zombie-like figures who witness the titular events from behind bars are just as grotesquely made-up); Britt Nichols is underused, but her luscious figure gets exposed this time around (and, in any case, she's perfectly cast as Cagliostro's proposed bearer of a new master race); Alberto Dalbes also returns as Dr. Seward where, again, he's the hero; ditto Fernando Bilbao as Frankenstein's monster (given a curious silver make-up here); Luis Barboo is on hand as well but, now, he plays Cagliostro's henchman rather than Frankenstein's (the latter role is taken all too briefly at the very start by Franco himself); Daniel J. White also gets more screen-time than in the previous film (where he was just an extra) as a Police Inspector.Missing here – consequently, the film runs for a mere 70 minutes! – is the irrelevant gypsy subplot (featuring Lina Romay) filmed some time later and eventually incorporated into the Spanish variant, dubbed LA MALDICION DE FRANKENSTEIN aka THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN...though the English-language edition I watched also bears this title!! Still, the would-be erotic rites (presented clothed in Spain) are silly rather than titillating: actually, there's only one (in which the monster is made to whip the naked figures of Barboo and Frankenstein's daughter in a dungeon with a spiked floor), as the intended procreation scene involving Bilbao and Nichols is ultimately interrupted by the heroes. Cagliostro's flight at the end, then, suggests that a further instalment may have been intended – but it never transpired.Opinions about this particular version seem to go from one extreme to the other: it's neither one of Franco's top efforts nor among his worst, hence the middle-of-the-road rating I gave it. On the other hand, everybody seems to agree that the alternate Spanish release is a lesser achievement – even so, it's not that the loss of the tacked-on footage (or, for that matter, the benefit of nudity) dramatically alters the quality of the finished product!

mord39 MORD 39 RATING: 0 (of ****)I have no objections to low-budgeted horror films of the foreign nature...but when they're boring beyond endurance, it's mind-numbing.Jess Franco is one of the worst directors in the horror genre (I'll give him respect by not saying "of all time"), but this piece of garbage makes his COUNT DRACULA (1970) look like a masterpiece. I can't critique this film very well, as I literally had no idea what I was looking at. The monster is painted silver, someone gets whipped, and that's all I am sure of. Dull, dull, dull.A sort of companion piece to this dreck was DRACULA, PRISONER OF FRANKENSTEIN. While it too was poor, it was far less plodding than this one. As of this writing, EROTIC RITES OF FRANKENSTEIN is not easy to find...and that's the best thing to be said about it.