Flesh for Frankenstein (1973)

"Flesh for Frankenstein" is Andy Warhol's (or more accurately, Warhol compatriot Paul Morrissey's) vision of the iconic monster film.

But please don't take this to mean that just because it's a similar take that it's similar either in tone or in quality. This take is bizarre, gory, and campy as hell, and if you'll excuse me for saying, has to be the product of a gleefully sick mind.

Udo Kier stars as Baron Frankenstein, a mad scientist (as all the more interesting ones are) who is obsessed with the idea of reanimating the dead. He robs graves and kills to get the body parts he needs to assemble full male and female bodies. His intention? I'm not really sure, and I don't think it's ever explicitly says, but one could suppose he means to create a race of zombies from his strange Adam and Eve.

Of course, no mad scientist can work without a crazy sidekick. The Baron has Otto, a sexually repressed, bug-eyed maniac who is as obsessed with human innards as his employer is.

The Baron's obsession, then, leaves his attractive middle-aged wife (Monique Van Vooren) to tend to their two children (the creepy Nicolleta Elmi and Marco Liofredi) and find other outlets for her other needs.

In other words, she hires a new beefcake stableboy named Nicholas (Joe Dallessandro), though he spends more time in Baroness Frankenstein's bed than tending horses.

Nicholas has his own issues, after a night of drinking with his pal Sacha (Srdjan Zelenovic), they are attacked, and Sacha is beheaded. We know The Baron and Otto are to blame; Nicholas does not.

The picture is full of gratuitous gore shots, with the Baron either digging into his corpses, or people are gruesomely killed. On a couple of occasions we see a set of disembodied lungs aspirating on their own.

The beheading scene is particularly well done, with the Baron using what look like a set of hedge clippers to lop off his victim's head, while blood spurts from the head and the body and the body twitches and quivers (while Otto continues to beat it with his club).

At what at the time I thought the height of the film's ridiculousness, the Baron tears into, then mounts his nude but not-yet-reanimated female specimen and has sex with it. When he finished, he matter-of-factly says to Otto, "To know death, Otto, you have to fuck life...in the gall bladder."

The film was originally presented in 3D, and features the telltale gimmick shots of such a picture, with various shots of organs, weapons and other objects awkwardly stuck in the foreground of shots. It's not as distracting as it is in, say, "Friday the 13th, Part 3," but it's still obvious.

The acting is over-the-top, with Kier especially brandishing a terrible-sounding accent, which he delivers as if his character is in a perpetual state of grunting impatience. "Why must you always pick on Mazzha?" he asks his wife at one point.

And then his wife...who is apparently also his sister, unless there was some error in the script the writers forgot to edit out.

Sexual perversion and repression is a theme throughout, between the Baroness and her dalliances, the Baron's perversions, Otto's repression, which later erupts to the surface, and even some homoerotic undertones sprinkled in for good measure.

There are literally dozens of other wholly unexplainable events of unintentionally intentional comedy that I have neither the time nor space to recount. From its screenplay, which is a veritable factory of memorably bad dialog, to the poor acting, over the top splatter sequences, and the overall sadism and sordidness of the picture, "Flesh for Frankenstein" is a legitimate classic of schlock cinema.