YOU WON'T BELIEVE YOUR EYES by Mark Thomas McGee & R J Robertson

Author:Mark Thomas McGee & R J Robertson [McGee, Mark Thomas]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: BearManor Media
Published: 2013-06-08T22:00:00+00:00

I Was a Teenage Frankenstein

Herb Strock, a more pliable director, was hired to helm Cohen’s next three pictures: I Was a Teenage Frankenstein, Blood of Dracula (both 1957), and How to Make a Monster (1958). Teenage Frankenstein shifted the focus from the teenage victim to the adult despot who is obsessed with obedience. This served as the blueprint for almost every Herman Cohen film that followed.

There are no healthy relationships in Cohen’s misogynistic, sadistic films, which sheds more light on his psyche than he probably realized. The women in his films are always depicted as deceitful, emasculating shrews. When asked why he killed the innocent young ingénue at the end of Konga (1961), Cohen replied, “I wanted to use my carnivorous plants. She was a very pretty girl and very sexy and I thought the audience would get a big kick out of seeing her killed…” Obviously he did.

Whit Bissell played a modern day descendant of the Frankenstein family in Teenage Frankenstein, obsessed with creating a teenage boy. “I shall use only the ingredients of youth, not the worn-out body inhabited by an over-taxed brain,” he tells his reluctant assistant, Robert Burton. (The assistants in these films were always reluctant, spineless wimps.) No sooner is this statement out of his mouth than a teenage hot-rodder (Gary Conway) is killed in a car accident right outside his door. If the film had any wit, the body would have been hurled through his living room window. In no time flat, the doc’s stitched-together teenager, dressed in a pair of Ivy League slacks and a form-fitting T-shirt, is happily lifting weights in his secret laboratory, waiting for Frankenstein to replace his hideous face.

Herbert Strock said, “We did a scene where Whit Bissell cuts a leg off with an electric saw. You didn’t actually see it. You heard the sound of the blade cutting through the bone and then he picks up this phony leg and holds it in front of the camera with blood all over it. The censors said, ‘You can’t show him cutting off a leg on camera. You’ll have to cut the scene.’ I argued that it took place off camera but they insisted they saw him cut into the leg. I had to run the film for them again.”

The critic for The New York Times said, “It forces one to acknowledge the impression that such films may aggravate the mass social sickness euphemistically termed juvenile delinquency.” If he meant the kids might be provoked into tearing the theater apart because the film was so lousy, there might be something to what he said.

The picture was already in production, scheduled for a January release, when a conversation with Bob O’Donnell — the owner of a chain of theaters in Texas — threw everything into fourth gear. O’Donnell was outspoken in his support for little companies like AIP and Allied Artists, and over lunch one afternoon, he told Nicholson and Arkoff that he was tired of being gouged by the major studios.

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