Movie Review: Frankenstein's Castle of Freaks (1974)

Rowdy villagers attacking a giant neanderthal, a grave robbery and a kidnapped young woman, and there is a castle in the vicinity occupied by a Doctor Frankenstein. Do you suppose there is a connection? Well that is about as clear of a connection and plot as you will likely find in this inane film.

Starring horror movie regular Rossano Brazzi and veteran actor Edmund Purdom, no stranger to horror movies himself, plus one of the more successful dwarf actors of the time, Michael Dunn whom you may remember as James West's nemesis  Dr. Loveless in The Wild Wild West TV series. Dunn is the outstanding performance in this as despite being a tepid and near plotless film he does give it his all with Brazzi handling his role with relative ease while Purdom appears to wish he were in another film. This was also one of Dunn's last films released the year after his untimely death at only the age of 38.

Compared to a Hammer outing this is a threadbare effort of set decoration with, I kid you not, a door as the setting for most of the town scenes and Frankenstein's lab looking more like a collection of fish bowls. The direction and camerawork are choppy trying to work around their limitations and not succeeding very well at that.

As an exploitation movie it is very limited in what it offers with a few scenes of naked women with little showing, not out of creative direction but more out of skittish direction. The pace of the film is static while if anything of interest did actually happen it must have been off camera. I can certainly understand why the director didn't even put his own name on this yawn fest.

I cannot recommend this (just in case you didn't get that from my review).

You can get this in an Elvira hosted version on Amazon or download or stream a non-hosted version for free from Archive.org.