Cinematic Titanic: Frankenstein's Castle of Freaks

A review by Nick Peron

Right off the bat, I'm going to say that I've already reviewed the movie Frankenstein's Castle of Freaks, because there has already been a DVD release (undoubtedly many actually) by Shout! Factory entertainment as part of their Elvira Movie Macabre DVD releases. In fact, to date, Cinematic Titanic had done three movies which were featured on Movie Macabre and have been released on DVD by Shout! Factory. Including Frankenstein's Castle of Freaks, these movies are The Doomsday Machine , and Legacy Of Blood . It's just an interesting coincidence I suppose.

So how does Cinematic Titanic stack up with this their sixth release? Well it's pretty funny stuff. Since I've already did a review of the movie on this site, I'll skip that and talk about the CT production in particular.

The first thing that I've noticed is that they got a really good print of the film, the Movie Macabre release is a beat up and scratchy old print of the film (but for all intents and purposes, I think that's part of the point/novelty/charm of those releases) With each CT release there are little tweaks and changes to what they do with each episode.

The one thing I've noticed is the change in Joel Hodgeson's seating. It's changed three times since the first release. Originally he was sitting in an office chair like Mary Jo and Frank, then a couple of episodes through he was standing at a podium, then most recently (I think it was in the Santa Claus Conquers the Martians release) he settled for having a railing to stand by (Like Josh and Trace)

The other thing to point out about this episode is that the intermissions are almost all gone. In the first release they interrupted the course of the film three times with intermissions -- usually relying on the black silhouettes to use sight gags that had some relation to the movie. But since the last few releases they have been sparse and few. Which is fine with me really, because on the other side of the fence, Mike Nelson and Co. don't do them anymore (last time they did it was for their short lived Film Crew DVD's) So is it a necessity? No, I don't think so. At least under one condition: That the movie riffing is consistently funny, and the movie is entertaining enough not to bore you to tears.

I'm going to have to say that, Frankenstein's Castle of Freaks is a stretch for entertainment value, it's a dreadful film that takes a lot of crazy liberties with the original Mary Shelly story. It's also one of those Italian horror films that really objectifies women. Since Joel Hodgeson and his group of riffers are usually the more conservative group, it was interesting to see what they would do with this element of the film because (1) CT plays the film in it's entirety and (2) Joel Hodgeson and Co. are usually the more conservative riffers. Well when I popped in the DVD I was informed in the opening sequence exactly what they were going to do: censor it.

But even this was done with an interesting twist, using the typical prop-inspired silhouette, they have a blimp that flies in and covers the offending parts of the female anatomy that are displayed in the film. The really question is, why are they censoring the film? These are in house DVD's that are directly released, and they aren't being developed for television. So why do this? I suppose the real reason probably boils down to the fact that the CT crew might want to make their product as accessible to the youngest audience possible without hampering their style of comedy. And really, when you think of censorship in the United States these days, people are less worried about the occasional swear word (occasionally the word "shit" is tossed into CT) than they are by a pair of breasts. God can only figure out why, the logic behind why violence and course language is more acceptable than parts of our own anatomy just boggles my mind.

But on the other hand, if you bought the movie to see a pair of sweet Italian gams, then you bought the wrong DVD and should have settled for buying the original movie itself. I think the "employers" on Cinematic Titanic put it well when they said the censorship balloon wasn't to censor the nudity because it was offensive, but because they didn't want future generations to think that we are all perverts. It's an interesting commentary on the logic of censoring the bare breasts in the film, and really if you take the concept of CT (The fact that they are riffing movies for future generations) it kind of makes a sort-of sense. With the proliferation of media content in the world today (especially the internet) look how much nudity is out there, another civilization looking back at everything we've recorded could easily come to that very conclusion.

But anyway... Is this edition of Cinematic Titanic funny? Yes, yes it is. Not one of their best works however (In my opinion their funniest to date was for Legacy of Blood) If you are a die hard fan of Cinematic Titanic, I don't need to tell you to pick it up. However, if you're new to CT and you want to get something really funny, I'd recommend picking up either their rendition of The Doomsday Machine, the aforementioned Legacy of Blood, or The Wasp Woman .

And that concludes my review of CT's Frankenstein's Castle of Freaks, but I am not done talking about riffing just yet, for this particular update of Micro-Shock.com I'm doing a tribute to Riffers, so follow along with me as I do a review of Incognito Cinema Warriors XP's Bloody Pit of Horror, as well as our review of Mystery Science Theater 3000 Vol. 14, and Rifftrax Best of Shorts Vol. 1.