That title is pure, unvarnished Hollywood Old School Ballyhoo. It is the sort of title that is calculated to pry coin from unsuspecting pocket, that causes children everywhere to breathe, "Cool! I gots to see that!"

Well, me, anyway.

For some reason, NASA's space launches keep blowing up, so short-tempered scientist James Karen creates an android named Frank to pilot the next shot. What he doesn't know is that a group of displaced Martians are sabotaging the missions; when the Martian Meanies blow Frank out of the sky, they only manage to damage his electronic brain and disfigure him, turning him into... "A Frankenstein! (sic)"

Incidentally, the Martians are so cranky because they just had an atomic war that wiped out the planet, so the icy Princess Marcuzan and her henchman Doctor Nadir (love that name!) also want our bikini-clad women to continue their race. And they brought a space monster with them. So "Frankenstein" can meet him, I guess.

Gadfries, how I love this movie. It is all that is right in crap cinema. A low budget stretched to its very limits, a plot so thin it must have been cut with a microtome, acting that ranges from wooden to deliciously over the top - and it's only 77 minutes long, and much of that achieved by stock footage.

What's not to like?

First of all, let me get this out of the way - good gravy, that's the ugliest DVD cover I've seen since ... well, ever! Matrix Revolutions, you can now show your face again. The menu makes more clever use of movie clips than is the usual, at least. The quality of the print, though one of the better versions I've seen, has some missing frames here and there, evidenced by audio skips. This is particularly noticible in a well-edited stock footage sequence underscored by the Poets' That's the Way It's Got to Be (which is, come to think of it, fairly appropriate). The digital clarity also tends to punch up the grainy quality of that black-and-white stock footage, but that's always been there .

There is a 12-item Photo Gallery mainly composed of lobby cards from different lands, and a theatrical trailer which is in very good shape, and presented anamorphic, to boot.

This is rather meager, especially compared to Dark Sky Films' Del Tenney Double Feature. Like their equally spare disc of The Flesh Eaters, this is a long-awaited addition to my collection that really could have done with at least a text piece, giving the viewer a bit of background and context.

Dr. Freex, 6/28/2006