Frankenstein's Bloody Nightmare (2006) Reviews

• strange indie-exploitation effort thats worth a peek

  lyhue12006-12-02

  Director John R. Hand's bizarre journey into obsession and murder is definitely worth tracking down. I was given a copy by Hand when it was in its beta form, before its limited theatrical release, and was truly impressed by the film's overall facade. The color and texture of the set-pieces have a definite 70's aura to them. It has the grainy look of a washed-out and forgotten blaxploitation DVD you would find on a rack in some desolate Midwest truck stop. What makes it special is that this grainy look is intentional. I met the director by posting on Hand's long-running exploitation film forum "the pulsing cinema". This film may just become another dead and bloated indie sleeper, but that would be unfortunate indeed. Find this film, somehow, and experience a 'monster-fisting' in all its whacked-out glory.

• Complete Junk

  w00f2007-10-05

  It looks like people involved with this movie are stuffing the ballot box to boost its ratings. The good news that apparently only 18 people have seen it. I suppose that makes me the 19th. I have no involvement with the flick and don't know anyone who did and I'm a long-time IMDb user (check my vote record and reviews over the past seven years), so I promise I'm giving an honest and unbiased opinion. It's coming to you from a 30-year horror fan who has also appeared in a couple of low-budget flicks himself. Aside from a couple of interesting video effects, "Frankensteins Bloody Nightmare" is incoherent, boring, and technically flawed beyond all reason. It was apparently shot on silent stock and the audio then dubbed in; most of it sounds like it was recorded with a tin can and a piece of string, anyhow. More than three quarters of the dialog is inaudible. I watched this from beginning to end and have no idea of what the story was, or even if there was one. It seems like the director is mostly impressing himself with long, panning shots of the corners of table and dead black spaces that do nothing but pad the film out. That would be a problem if one were actually developing a plot and making a film that had some sense of pacing. In this case, though, the rule doesn't apply. It doesn't matter how scenes are shot because they don't add up to a story. Watching this video is an exercise in futility at every level. Whatever people who worked on it are writing and however they're trying to influence the ratings here on IMDb, this is just bad, tedious stuff. That's the honest truth. If you're thinking of spending your money or time on this one, think again. It's easy to find something better because you won't find much worse. And that's the unbiased, unvarnished truth.

• A trippy, often mesmerizing journey into the bizarre...

  angry-man2007-01-07

  "Frankenstein's Bloody Nightmare" takes some of its plot line, story and inspiration from an obvious source, and then quickly surrounds us in an abstract world of sight and sound, held together in loose narrative fashion by the obsessions of the young Victor Karlstein. The aesthetic of the film in nearly every respect is extremely abstract, but this does not really detract from the story. Mostly the style blends effectively with script and characters to create a mesmerizing and immersing atmosphere. To his credit, there is little of the film that doesn't feel like a very deliberate part of the vision of its creator: director/writer John R. Hand. The characters and story (though probably intentionally so) are the weakest. Normally I'd say this is a big drawback, but somehow in this film, the very style and sense of it kind of becomes the real character. It almost feels like you're having a bizarre, trippy dream through someone else's eyes. With a dated and yet somehow timeless feel, the film's greatest strengths and weaknesses derive equally from its uncompromisingly abstract reality. It will likely have a very polarizing effect on viewers, but that is more a plus than a minus in my book. "Frankensteins Bloody Nightmare" is a painstakingly crafted trip into the bizarre. Often defiant of classification, it evokes reflections reminiscent of Cronenberg, Tsukamoto and Godard. A strong, strange and unique debut feature from writer/director John R. Hand. It will be interesting to see what he comes up with next.

• An Art Piece Disguised as a Horror Film

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  Here's what I think the plot is: Victor Karlstein, a scientist who runs a medial institute, is trying to save the life of his girlfriend using questionable medical experiments and organs from questionable sources. He also, apparently, has a hobby of making robotic monsters who like to fetch the organs for him. Will he save his girlfriend's life? Or will the inspectors catch him first? John R. Hand is the writer and director of this very unusual piece. It reminds me greatly of a film I watched back in 1998 called "Red Eyes" and starring one of the guys from the Violent Femmes. (I may be slightly off on that, as I have been unable to find any record of such a film since.) The filming is very grainy, the angles are very strange even for the MySpace era, and I get the feeling this was the kind of thing art houses would show in the 1960s. The music, for what it's worth, is very good. The film has received some very poor reviews and some very low ratings, but I actually feel compelled to defend Hand. While much of this film is bad and for many people unwatchable, I think at least some of this comes from a misunderstanding: what I (and others) thought was going to be a horror film is really an art film disguised as a horror film. Sort of like "Slaughtered Vomit Dolls" without the slaughter and vomit. Which one of these two films is more palatable is hard to say. I also have to give Hand credit for including an audio commentary on this DVD, despite clearly being a very low budget production. I need to hear the audio commentary to really fully grasp this film. Maybe I'll like it more, maybe less once I understand how to view this. I am a horror critic, not an art critic. And while the horror (an unusual monster sex scene and some stringy organs) is just alright, the art levels seem very potentially amazing. The only scene I really enjoyed is when the doctor's girlfriend's sister shows up... but you'll have to wait an hour for that, so be prepared. So, I'm leaving my review in the middle for now -- neither good or bad. Another reviewer says the film "fails so miserably on every level" and reduces it to "schlock". I disagree. Surely, this film would make people walk out of theaters, leave your party or at the very best have your friends fall asleep. This isn't going to win anyone over, so don't try to use it for that purpose (unless you're dating an art snob maybe). But there's something about this film that seems like something grander was going on, I just don't know what it was.

• Tries to be an art installation

  blumdeluxe2017-07-16

  The story of "Frankenstein's bloody nightmare" is somehow hard to grasp. It evolves around a young scientist, concerned with developing methods to lengthen the lives of people, whose body underwent severe damage, while simultaneously trying to save his girlfriend, that is in the cause of dying herself. It may be a hard thing to say, but for me this isn't even a movie. It's just a bunch of random pictures cut together in a desperate attempt to look independent and artsy. But that's not the art of filmmaking. The story itself is not bad, you surely could develop something out of it. And I'm not even against using a vintage camera or anything. But probably over half of this film are just random close ups of things you can't even identify or really creepy stuff, and I don't mean positively creepy. As a viewer, I feel somewhat betrayed actually, because it looks like someone was trying to profile himself more than to produce an actual enjoyable film. All in all, as you see, I didn't like it. Of course that's still only my opinion and maybe I just don't get the brilliance of it, but if you ask me there are plenty better possibilities to waste your time.