I am only giving this movie a 1 for the great cast, though I can't imagine what any of them were thinking. This movie was horrible

It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

Wow, despite Jesus Franco having a bit of a cult following for his horror films, this Frankenstein monster is among the crappiest ever seen in a movie--almost as bad as the monster in "Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster" (though technically this guy isn't THE Frankenstein) and Al Adamson's god-awful "Dracula Vs. Frankenstein"! Yes, it's THAT bad! Here, the monster is painted silver and looks a bit more like the Tin Man from "The Wizard of Oz"! Heck, the cheesy 1910 version of the monster looks better than this guy! As for the movie, it really bears little semblance to the original story and is a Frankenstein movie in name only. S&M, rooms full of articulated skeletons, a few ALMOST steamy scenes and an incomprehensible story make for a really, really terrible film. I don't see much of the Franco magic here in this tired bastardization of the classic tale. Now considering that he was also responsible for "Night of the Blood Monster" and the terrible Fu Manchu films of the late 60s, I shouldn't have been surprised that I disliked the movie as much as I did. Quality-wise, it didn't even approach the worst Hammer film in quality and is best left unwatched unless you are either a glutton for punishment or are curious to see a bad monster film. Of course, if you ARE looking for a bad monster film, try watching the ones I mentioned above--especially "Dracula Vs. Frankenstein" which makes me shudder to think about its wretchedness!!

More hot hacienda action the ol' Franco way, featuring many of the sets, actors and characters from "Dracula: Prisoner of Frankenstein". "Curse" does in fact exist in two versions, as the "proper" version is called "The Erotic Rites of Frankenstein" and is roughly the same as "Curse" aside from that fact that in several scenes the characters have miraculously lost all of their clothes. Curse is the censored and "clothed" one, which also unfortunately includes an additional number of scenes not present in "Erotic Rites" which depict a gypsy girl called Esmeralda wandering around a wood and talking to an under-acting old woman who doesn't even appear to realise that she's being filmed. Needless to say these scenes have absolutely sod all to do with anything else and, in an act of pure sadism, Tartan Video decided to release this longer version onto DVD. Being fair to it, "Curse" is a lot better than "Dracula: Prisoner" and with some alterations could even have made a tolerable 70s horror film in its own right. Its core plot isn't too far removed from the Hammer films being churned out at the time and there's some vaguely interesting stuff going on in it. However, that doesn't mean to say it's any good. Mercifully, Franco has vastly cut down on the number of crash zooms though still seems to have problems in focussing the camera a third of the time, and most exterior footage seems to suggest that every building in Spain is situated on an ungodly ground subsidence. The musical score is also questionable, giving us some nicely eerie tunes here and there and then assaulting us with jazzy percussion tempos during key action scenes, such as when Frankenstein's monster breaks into a poor young lady's bedroom and leaps on her on the bed. Ah yes, there's some naughty hijinks going on in this film – including a truly nasty whipping scene that goes on for too long (and is even worse in the "Erotic" version, simply because one of the people being whipped is a nude 50 year old man – urgh…) – but certainly nothing to get heated about. Then again, Franco's idea of erotica seemed to be to just point a camera at a naked woman and stay there for 30 seconds a throw. Ho hum.Dr Frankenstein (Price) is reanimating a somewhat shinier version of his monster, with help from his assistant, Morpho (what is Franco's fetish with the name 'Morpho'???). Despite playing the title character, Price is killed approximately two minutes into the film. Now, poor old Price's characters often have a run of bad luck. I've seen him getting throttled, impaled, drowned, drained of blood, tipped into acid and "excited to death", but I think I wouldn't be wrong in saying that Curse gives us the most novel method of Price dispatchment: bitten and bled by a blind and cannibalistic bird woman. Mmm. There's something to write home about. The bird woman and a gurning helper steal Frankenstein's monster and take him to the true villain of the piece, Cagliostro: a ranting nutter who doesn't blink (yes, it's Howard Vernon again, far better playing some bloke we've never heard of than the legendary Count Dracula). Cagliostro initially seems to want the monster to steal lots of virgins for him but then decides that he wants to create the ultimate woman as a bride of sorts for the monster. Quite why I don't know but I'm sure if he had the chance he'd list his reasons. Frankenstein's daughter, Vera, comes to pay her respects at her dad's funeral, following which she steals the body and reanimates it back at the "castle" to learn who did the poor bugger in. Eventually she reasons that the best way to get her revenge on Cagliostro is to let herself get captured by his monster and… um, get hypnotised into being his completely willing slave. Yes. Erm, not quite sure what she was getting at, there. In any case, that's the status quo and it's not even including the activities of the good Dr Seward, wandering around the plot and chatting to people (probably looking for Bram Stoker for an explanation as to what on Earth he's doing there).I said it wasn't as bad as "Dracula: Prisoner" and that's true. For a start, it can only tarnish the memory of one horror staple rather than three, but aside from that it at least seems to know where it's going half the time. Most of this is thanks to the dialogue, in stark contrast with its prequel; yes, this time characters actually talk to each other, a revolutionary concept if ever I've heard one. Dr Seward actually gets stuff to do here and even comes across as a decent enough hero character (even if he does try to chat up Vena at her dad's own funeral – yes, really), having a hand in the baddie's downfall as opposed to his spare part status in "Dracula: Prisoner". Dennis Price appears several times throughout the narrative despite the seemingly overwhelming drawback of having been killed but spends most of the time lying on a bed, twitching spasmodically and rambling about his monster and Cagliostro. From what I can make out, Price seems to be giving an… interesting performance (in other words, going over the top to exceptional degrees) but as it's dubbed in Spanish with English subtitles I can't really tell. Eventually Frankenstein dies after one ramble too many, only to come back from the dead as a (somewhat mincing) zombie who staggers into the next room to have a go at strangling Dr Seward. Price's demise is finally made certain when a police inspector chucks a container of acid over him, which seems to disintegrate Price's head in 0.5 seconds. Golly.And then, 20 minutes later, it sort of... stops. I ought to be grateful that it ended at all.

Most people watch Franco it seems specifically because it is junk, or so they think. The cheapness and (for the era) exotic nudity must give some sort of trailer park thrill.But these films seem important to me. The reason is that today's most exiting cinema comes from the Spanish tradition of layered realisms. While the main source is Latin literature, I fancy that it can be traced back to Franco and buddies as well.About half of these that I encounter make me yell "This! This must be the ultimate Franco!" I had that experience when gliding through this.Yes, of course it is cheap, with bad acting and so on. But nearly _every_ movie is for me. Its just a matter of degree and earnestness. Overlook that, dear viewer.The story alone should be enough to attract you. I won't recount it here, but it is complex and ambiguous, borrowing from several genres and reinventing them capriciously. One character is the evil genius's erotic soothsayer. She is blind but sees, a vampire but humanly erotic, our surrogate on screen.That evil genius wraps us up in capturing Frankenstein's monster to mate for a purpose I didn't understand. This eventually involves Frankenstein's beautiful scientist daughter who temporarily reanimates her now carrion dad and ends up getting nudely whipped... well it hardly matters.The real thing is in how he creates a gauzy, abstract world that floats above the normal world of movies. It is a movie like other movies, but not. It engages us in a conspiracy to weave a new world. Who cares about what that world contains, it is how it is woven that matters.Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.

MORD 39 RATING: 0 (of ****)I have no objections to low-budgeted horror films of the foreign nature...but when they're boring beyond endurance, it's mind-numbing.Jess Franco is one of the worst directors in the horror genre (I'll give him respect by not saying "of all time"), but this piece of garbage makes his COUNT DRACULA (1970) look like a masterpiece. I can't critique this film very well, as I literally had no idea what I was looking at. The monster is painted silver, someone gets whipped, and that's all I am sure of. Dull, dull, dull.A sort of companion piece to this dreck was DRACULA, PRISONER OF FRANKENSTEIN. While it too was poor, it was far less plodding than this one. As of this writing, EROTIC RITES OF FRANKENSTEIN is not easy to find...and that's the best thing to be said about it.