This is one of those peculiar teen movie/horror blends. So on the one hand we get the expected monsters and laboratories, but on the other we have an extended pool party sequence with a live band and some “kids” who appear to range in age from teen-ish to forty-odd.
- Script quality: uneven. Things like Trudy’s putdown of Frank: 7/10. Things like the pool party: 2/10.
- Acting quality: Not horrible. Not great, but serviceable.
- Overall feeling afterwards: I should really start using night cream regularly.
The scene shown in that poster — the monster carrying Trudy — doesn’t actually happen. And that’s a damned shame, given who the monster is, because that would have added a whole other aspect to the film.
There are only a handful of characters you need to know, so here they are with actor names: Johnny Bruder (played by John Ashley); Trudy Morton (Sandra Knight); Suzie Lawler (Sally Todd); Don, Suzie’s boyfriend (Harold Lloyd Jr.); Oliver Frankenstein (Donald Murphy); and Trudy’s elderly, sweet mad-scientist uncle, Prof. Carter Morton (Felix Locher).
There are also a couple of cops, assorted victim/witness/partygoers, and a band.
The movie opens with a make-out session between a sultry blonde and a vaguely skeevy looking guy. The blonde is Suzie, who looks about 35 and between divorces, and the easily-as-old guy is Don. These are supposedly teenagers. He gets pissed off when she calls a halt. Presumably he thought he was getting sex? But they’re parked on a residential neighbourhood outside what is probably her parents’ house, so I’m with her on this one. He’s an idiot. No wonder he didn’t even get a last name.
He drives off, and she’s confronted by a monster in a negligee on the sidewalk. No, really.
This monster.
That’s her back at home in her bathrobe, but you get the idea. Basically the monster is a pretty girl with make-up applied with a trowel, and enormous eyebrows. I’ll admit, though, the first time I saw this I thought she looked scary (shut up, I was still in high school) because her retracted lower lip reminded me of dessicated corpses.
The next day a gorgeous Trudy is awakened by her elderly uncle, Prof. Carter Morton, who reminds her she had plans to meet her friends. She has had bad dreams all night and overslept.
Meanwhile Suzie is telling Don and Johnny about her monster. They don’t believe her. It is ridiculously hard to accept Suzie and Don as teenagers.
Also meanwhile a handsome-ish man is waiting IN THE HOUSE for Trudy’s uncle. This is Oliver Frank, Uncle Carter’s assistant, and I still can’t work out why he’s always in the house. Why does he live there? It’s weird enough that there’s a lab right there in the house; does he really need a round-the-clock lab assistant?
The lab is one of my favourite things about this movie, though, even before it starts expanding (we’ll get to that). This house has *layers*. There’s the perfectly ordinary suburban-Californian part — the rooms with flowered couches and the yard with the pool — and then, on the other side of the locked door, there’s a Mad Scientist’s Lab where Uncle Carter is trying to invent a formula to wipe out disease and prevent cellular aging. The house itself is pulling a Jekyll-and-Hyde routine.
Oliver Frank exposits knowingly that the formula won’t work: it may work on internal cells “but causes violent disfigurement to sensitive exposed skin areas.” Uncle Carter says he can’t possibly know that: they haven’t tested it on anyone yet. Everyone watching immediately figures out the plot.
Trudy shows up at the tennis courts and is disturbed by Suzie’s story because her nightmares were about the same monster. Johnny tries, AMAZINGLY condescendingly, to talk her out of taking Suzie seriously (she’ll say anything to get attention, according to him), but Trudy isn’t comforted by his mansplaining. She reveals that she stayed home drinking fruit punch with Oliver Frank, then went to bed early and had nightmares. Indeed. Johnny is petulant and pouts about this.
“Aww, Johnny, don’t be mad.”
“No, course not, why should I be? I’m going with a grown-up girl who decides to believe in dreams.”
Wow, asshole alert. I’d have set fire to his pompadour.
The scientists do lab stuff in the lab. After working together for months, Uncle Carter still knows nothing about his strange assistant. Also he thinks the gardener is spying on him.
Also he wants to steal some magic ingredient (which I keep hearing as “Degenerate” but according to the web is “Digenerol”) from the lab where he used to work. Oliver doesn’t want him to because it will attract the attention of the police. “I have nothing to conceal! Do you?” says Uncle Carter, apparently not getting that once he starts STEALING STUFF he will, in fact, have things to conceal.
The gardener gives Trudy a rose and tells her that “sometimes things are more beautiful in death.” That seems excessively creepy even by creepy-gardener standards. Uncle Carter drives him out and tells him to use the back stairs. MORE LAYERS OF HOUSE.
The gardener and Oliver have a secret conversation about how there will be a car accident tonight and “You know what we need,” Oliver reminds him. Hmm, what could that be? Car insurance? Tire chains? New hubcaps?
Okay, SPOILER: they need a brain.
Oliver smarms around Trudy for a while and she rejects him.
“Loosen up. After all, I’m only human.”
“You’d have to prove it to me.”
Kiss. SLAP.
“Where are you going?”
“Into the pool for a swim. And I’d suggest you take a cold shower.”
Then he heads into the lab, which is now sporting an obviously-headless corpse under a sheet. HA. He consults a recipe book or something, and the gardener shows up via a secret door, but alas, without a brain. Other than his own, I mean.
He calls Oliver “Frankenstein” and talks about having been proud to serve his father and grandfather. Then he wheels the headless corpse back out through the secret door. So…Trudy and her uncle don’t know this secret passage exists? They just don’t use it often enough to notice the corpse? I don’t get it.
Oliver brings Trudy some “fruit punch,” and she drinks it even though it tastes horrible, because why wouldn’t you accept a foul drink from a creepy older man who hits on you? After all, he said they were drinking to a truce!
She goes all roofied, and he helps her upstairs. She turns into Eyebrow Monster and escapes. I can’t help wondering: if it does that to her eyebrows, what the hell does it do to her pubes? I totally blame Sexcula for my even thinking that.
Oliver gets her home, but not before there’ve been several monster sightings and a police chase (on foot). The next day the newspaper is full of monster news. In the meantime, there’s been a theft of Digenerol from a local lab, and a chemist warns the police it causes external deformities. The lieutenant makes the monster connection at once.
Suzie shows up to talk monsters and then accuses Trudy of trying to hone in on her monster-story with her claims of nightmares of BEING the monster. (“I saw that monster woman first. Don’t get green eyes.” Also, “First you took Johnny away, now this.” Wait, she used to go with Johnny?) She decides to hit on Oliver (whom she describes as an “Ivy-Leaguer”) to get back at Trudy. She arranges to meet him on a corner — not at her house; this is important — that night.
Oliver’s date with Trudy consists of parking on a hill with a view and jumping her. Seriously, he’s on top of her, being very grabby. I know she *looks* 35ish, but she’s supposed to be a teenager, and he’s an adult man with grey hair at his temples.
She fights him off, gets out of the car, and demands to be taken home. He accuses her of being ashamed of him, since she wouldn’t let him come to her door, and she admits to sneaking out to meet him and that no one knows where she is or who she’s with.
Uh-oh.
He runs her down with the car and carries her corpse back to the lab. Voila, brain!
This is my first MAJOR complaint. Oliver and the gardener graft her head onto the body. Uh, why? She’s a fresh corpse! Why not just revive her and throw out the older, staler body?
Although the other body is bigger, so maybe it’s a strength thing.
We get this timeless exchange:
“Your father and grandfather never used a female brain!”
“No. But now we’re aware that the female brain is conditioned to a man’s world. Therefore it takes orders, where the other ones didn’t.”
So…he picked Suzie? Seriously? Suzie, who just turned him down cold? Suzie, who disobeyed her parents to sneak out to see him? You don’t see a problem there?
This would have been a WAY cooler movie if the writer had followed through on the promise implied by Suzie’s disobedient ways and she’d been a rebellious teenage monster.
Alas, instead she goes on predictable monster rampages, killing the gardener and a cop on Oliver’s orders, and a dock worker for no good reason at all.
Uncle Carter gets taken in for questioning about the lab thefts, ends up having an “attack” and being kept under observation in the hospital, and dies there.
Before all that, though, he’d begged Trudy to have a party for her friends, because the pool was meant for people to enjoy. He really is sweet, even if that means he is responsible for the worst pool party in cinematic history.
On the same night he’s being arrested (and dying) Trudy and her friends gather at the pool. There’s a live band.
OH MY GOD MONSTERS no wait it’s the band.
Don sings two songs. The songs are listed as, and I swear this is true, Daddy-Bird and Special Date.
Meanwhile, assorted white teenagers gather around to demonstrate — at painful length — that they can’t dance.
It’s a very mixed crowd, if you overlook how white they all are, which I apparently can’t. They appear to range in age from gauche teenagers to forty year olds who slept rough last night. Some are in bathing suits; some in casual clothes; one poor bastard is in pants, a shirt, and a sweater vest. For a pool party. In California.
Oliver tells Trudy her grandfather’s in hospital. She tells him she’s engaged to Johhny. Johnny Bruder. So she’ll be Trudy Bruder? Seriously? For once I kind of side with Oliver when he asks her to reconsider.
She and Johnny go to the police station; they find out her grandfather has died. They go back to an empty house that was supposed to have a cop in it, and foolishly hang around long enough to get cornered in the lab when the monster comes down the back stairs.
The back stairs, it turns out, connect the secret room behind the lab with the upstairs bedroom. How on EARTH did Trudy and her uncle not know about the secret room? For that matter, HOW DID OLIVER KNOW ABOUT IT? Did he secretly build the house or something?
Anyway: blah blah, monster attack; Johnny throws acid in Oliver’s face, the first useful thing he’s done all movie long apart from making kebabs, and then the monster dies in a horrible Bunsen burner accident. No, really: she (although the monster was PLAYED by a man, so it in no way looks lie Suzie) catches fire and dies. The end.
Except for one awful last scene in which Don shows up brandishing a newspaper and wanting to talk about the monster stuff. Trudy and Johnny tell him they don’t want to hear about it and throw him in the pool, then kiss tenderly….which is a bitch of a way to treat your friend. You know, your friend whose girlfriend was murdered? And decapitated? And turned into a monster? So maybe now he needs to talk about it?
Yeah.
We Watch So You Don't Have To! 