Frankenstein 1970 (1958)

As usual, Karloff gives it his all. Sadly this film lets him down. As the last of the Frankenstein's, he needs money to continue his experiments to continue his notorious ancestors experiments. While this isn't that good, it's still better than nearly anything on the SyFy channel.

This movie is all around bad. Karloff as Dr. Frankenstein is weird but you won't even notice because the story is so stupid and boring. I almost stopped watching when he hypnotized a guy but I had to see how bad it would get. And of course the title doesn't make any sense. 1 star is the lowest rating you can give, I would give -1.

I thought it might have been my imagination, but another reviewer on this board confirms what I thought I saw - as the story moves along, the scar on Boris Karloff's face gets progressively worse from scene to scene. Even after I had it figured out, his face still kept changing!Well there's really only one reason to catch this flick and that's for the presence of the master, Boris Karloff himself. The story itself gets kind of schlocky and the supporting players, who don't come with a background in horror films per se, don't add a lot of tension or menace to the proceedings. There is however a smidgeon of that great pseudo-scientific babble of the Thirties and Forties offered up as part of Baron Victor von Frankenstein's operating procedure, utilizing an atomic reactor!!! to produce rebirth, along with the idea of fusing real and synthetic skin together. That's worth something to horror film fans like myself, always on the lookout for clever and unique ideas to enhance those lab experiments.If you're going to complain about how hokey the feature creature in this picture looks, do keep one thing in mind. This was an opportunity for Karloff to parlay his reputation as the icon of Universal horror by bringing two of his creations to the screen, The Frankenstein Monster and the Mummy. I don't know if that was on the filmmakers' minds when they put this thing together, but that's what I got out of it. For Karloff fans, that has to be a good thing.

***SPOILERS*** Desperate for money with the Frankenstein Family fortune almost completely depleted in his attempt to to finish what his decedents from his great great grandfather Henry Frankenstein on up tried to create, life out of dead matter, Baron Victor Von Frankenstein Boris Karloff, goes along with allowing the Frankenstein Mansion to be uses for a TV special called "The Frankenstein Variety Hour" on cable-remember this is in the future not 1958 when the movie was released-TV.The Baron who was brutalized by the Nazis for refusing to help them create a super Aryn master race that would win them the war is now on track to create man in his own image but he needs money in him obtaining an atomic reactor to do it. It's the TV network who'll provide the Baron with the much needed cash but he's so hung up in creating his masterpiece that he ends up murdering a number of the crew as well as his both good friend from Nazi Germany days Wihelm Gottfried, Rudolph Anders, and his simple minded butler Sluter, Nobert Schiller, to do it!It's non other that the TV director of the Frankenstein TV special Douglas Row, Don "Red" Barry, who gets whiff of what the Baron is up to and attempts to stop him before he ends up murdering the entire TV crew together with Row in order to get spare human parts to create his new and improved Frankenstein Monster.**SPOILERS**** As things turn out the monster that the Baron created despite having the feeble minded Sluter's brain implanted into his skull had a mind of his own and didn't go along with the Baron's insane and murderous plans and took matters into his own hands! As the movie ends we as well as Row and the police who arrived at the scene find out that the Baron did indeed finish what he started to do! The only drawback in his crazed and insane master-plan was that the Baron didn't live long enough to see it!