The dream of cinema gives birth to us. It's the '70s again, and psychedelic crumb. The silvery and suffering monster of Frankenstein, the daughter of a professor, entering into a battle with chthonic evil “in the name of science and the victory of justice in the world”, the blind devil with green hands and her master – Count Cagliostro performed by Howard Vernon.
Jesus Franco has made many strange films, many of which I do not want to remember. For all we know about it, "The Curse of Frankenstein" is a movie in many ways about how interesting it is.
The film's hypnotism is exceptional. As a mystical and psychedelic project, The Curse leaves far behind all of Hodrowski’s early work, along with his claim to such a project disclosure. The film is not much different in its structure from a cinematic dream - one of those dreams in which extremely clear systems of images are organically updated in their incoherence, linking the most illogical details into a figurative configuration.
Characters are cyclical. So the film has several modes - action (specific), Cagliostro's speech about his deeds, the speech of his maid about his magnetism, the speech of Baron Frankenstein's daughter about the good and science, the speech of the heroine Lina Romey, about how she flattens. Give or take. The elements can be combined as you like.
An important detail that few people understand or understand is silent about it: the story of the creation of the monster by Baron Frankenstein not only in many ways becomes the apogee of the project of romanticism, but also in some way encapsulates this project, encapsulates it in absolute images that this project can guide itself in multiplication. Thus, the story of Frankenstein’s creation, full of tragedy and romantic pathos, turns out to be capable of complete processing within its own framework, and the result of such processing will be capable of the same. That is why, throughout the twentieth century, new films about Frankenstein appear, less and less related to Shelley’s book, but all the same dramatic. The film contains a whole world built on this principle of a romantic project. It is a world in which Good and Evil (Vera Frankenstein and Cagliostro) are the fundamental in the general dialectic that defines an intermediate being between them as a limb, in which all things are contained, painfully trying by the very act of its existence to clarify its own position.
In the end, it is not so much horror or fiction as visionary fantasy.
Vernon in the role of a dark spirit makes at the same time more and less understandable the “cult of Howard Vernon”, which arises of itself among viewers of such cinema. Even the young and mysterious Lina Romay all screen time is somewhere on the periphery of the plot, as if it performs its replicas and appearances the function of “choir” in the tragedy. In terms of surreal weight, the tape resembles "The Virgin among the Living Dead". Or early Rollen tapes.
Yes, again, surprised by some of the inattention to this film from the mass modern audience.
10 out of 10