HAMSTER RATING:
When rabid Indians attack
From the title, I expected this 1966 piece of work to be either a comedy (like Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy) or a seriously impaired genre crossover action flick. Having seen it, I must admit that I'm not sure exactly what it is. If nothing else, the film certainly takes its crazy premise quite seriously. It opens in a small Mexican town, at the home of the Lopez family, who are the only people left in the neighborhood since a mysterious disease has driven everyone else away. The "disease," though, is actually a cover for the insofar unsuccessful experiments being conducted by Maria and her reluctant brother, Rudolf Frankenstein, the infamous Baron's grandchildren (so why does the title refer to Maria as his daughter? No clue). When Maria's current test subject, the Lopez' son, dies on the table, Maria consults her handy textbook and discovers she's been making a critical mistake in her procedure and needs someone full grown, a big, strong man to make it work (that's why most scientists read the instructions before cutting people's brains out, Maria).
Enter Jesse James and full grown, big, strong sidekick Hank Tracy. After a stagecoach robbery goes foul and Tracy gets shot, James and he hit the road, running into the Lopez family, whose surviving daughter, the lovely Juanita, offers to take James and Tracy back to the Frankensteins' house for medical care that Tracy needs. There, Jesse James does indeed meet Frankenstein's (grand)daughter, who not only decides Tracy is ideal for her artificial brain experiment, but that James would make an ideal life-long campanion for herself.
No thanks, I had brains for lunch.
Whew! This whole set up takes about 1/3 of the movie to establish, during which there is a heck of a lot of talking and only a sprinkling of the kind of action one would expect from a 1960's western. Of course, there is a fistfight, a shootout and the obligatory Indian ambush, but these events are short and relatively unimportant to the story, which also includes a pair of dogged, perceptive lawmen and a love triangle. Maria's reasons for wanting to put pulsating artificial brains into human beings are pretty weak, and when she finally does get the thing to work, she doesn't seem to know what to do with it aside from siccing her creation on unsuspecting visitors.
That said, I have to admit that I enjoyed "Frankenstein's Daughter" on some level. The acting was pretty good, the Lopez family spoke real Spanish and I kept myself entertained by imaging Captain Kirk materializing out of the air with pistols to tame the Frankensteins and set the local inhabitants on the path to enlightenment. Considering the premise, "Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter" is surprisingly ungoofy and does a good job of actually keeping you somewhat interested in what's going on (mostly trying to figure out exactly what the filmmakers were going for, I think!).
