People are voting emotionally.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

The movie really just wants to entertain people.

"Professor Carter Morton" (Felix Locher) is an elderly scientist attempting to create a drug that will halt the aging process. Working with him is his assistant "Oliver Frank" (Donald Murphy) who has very little regard for either Professor Morton or the experiment he is working on. Instead, Oliver's real last name is Frankenstein and he is the grandson of none other than Dr. Frankenstein himself. So although he works with Professor Morton during the day he secretly uses the laboratory at night to continue the legacy his grandfather by attempting to create life from death. Since he already has a dead body what he now needs is a brain from a subject freshly deceased. Unfortunately, he has experienced great difficulty in obtaining one until one night he takes matters into his own hands. Now rather than reveal any more of this film and risk ruining it for those who haven't seen it I will just say this movie initially started off rather well. However, things fell apart after the introduction of the so-called "monster" which looked extremely ridiculous for a supposed member of the female gender. Conversely, Sandra Knight (as "Trudy Morton") looked quite nice and her presence was definitely most welcome. Regrettably, it just wasn't enough. Below average.

In time for last Halloween (which I subsequently skipped!), I acquired scores of horror/sci-fi fare from the genre's Grade-Z heyday; this, obviously, was one of them – which I decided to get hold of in spite of Leonard Maltin's unflattering BOMB rating! Anyway, the late 1950s saw favorite Gothic/fantasy themes being brought up to date and mixed with such topical fads as juvenile delinquency (I WAS A TEENAGE WEREWOLF [1957]) or, as here and in BLOOD OF Dracula (1957), rock'n'roll music! Curiously enough, in the space of a year we had a number of films on the same theme (and they were also comparably substandard): I WAS A TEENAGE FRANKENSTEIN (1957), FRANKENSTEIN - 1970 (1958) and, the last to be released, FRANKENSTEIN'S DAUGHTER itself! Incidentally, there are some definite points of interest to the title under review but these do not make it a good picture. First of all, we have not one but two monsters – and they are both female and incredibly ugly (like the afore-mentioned BLOOD OF Dracula and DAUGHTER OF DR. JEKYLL [1957], one of them – played by Sandra Knight, the future Mrs. Jack Nicholson! – is drugged into turning hideous and, frankly, it is simply a case of the makers having their cake and eating it…since these scenes basically serve to pad out the running-time and little more)! The official, titular creature is one of the most memorable of the era for all the wrong reasons: one, the fact that the make-up was devised to be applied on to a man (so what transpires has nothing at all to do with who the character, a luscious girl, had been beforehand!) but also because she is attired in a spaced-out costume (complete with robotic motions) as Michael Jackson would frequently adopt during his performing tours some 30 years later!! The last and, possibly, most entertaining thing is the trio of dabblers in the unknown (one is the heroine's elderly uncle who is not above stealing vital ingredients from the government in his search to stall the aging process, the others a direct descendant of the Frankenstein name and his condescending aide and the latter's forebears' own assistant now passing off as the old man's gardener) who spend so much time at each others' throat one wonders how they ever got anything cooking at all in the lab! Interestingly, Frankenstein has a secret workspace within where he is assembling yet another creature from dead body parts: missing only the head, he mows down the heroine's sluttish friend (who, in the very first scene, comes face to face with the one Knight herself had inadvertently become!) with his car…but no sooner has the monster been revived that it runs out of control and out of the house! Knight suspects the truth about her 'sleep-walking' activities (since she wakes up each morning with a hazy recollection of events but sporting the clothes described in the papers as having been worn by the monster) yet she never fingers the sleazeball Frank as the culprit…while her thick-headed boyfriend merely (and continually) scoffs at her nightmarish accounts! The rock'n'roll element comes into play here during a barbecue given at Knight's house (even if her uncle had just suffered a near-fatal heart attack!) and incorporates a couple of tunes sung by, of all people, Harold Lloyd Jr.(!) who, naturally, also handles the intentional comedy-relief angle throughout the film (but, as I said, the lab antics provide the real giggles here!).Also on hand are a couple of cops who have their hands full trying to cope with the many misdeeds (not to mention, egos and anxieties). The film is noted for not skimping on the gore front: we get to see a couple of severed hands, the mangled legs of the monster's last donor, and even the villain's face being ravaged by acid when the hazardous liquid thrown at the creature by the hero (whom he had somehow been keeping at bay with the lame, repeated shoving of a stretcher!) misses its mark completely…after which the monster expires, too, when clumsily setting itself on fire when coming in contact with an active Bunsen burner!P.S. Now...where to get hold of an English-friendly copy of SANTO VS. FRANKENSTEIN'S DAUGHTER (1972)?

The film starts with a silly looking "monster" running around a suburban neighborhood scaring the locals. The special effects artists involved spared no expense--giving an actress a set of hillbilly teeth and a giant uni-brow (like Bert from Sesame Street). At first, I thought this was Frankenstein's daughter, but instead she was just a diversion--a DIFFERENT experiment by the doctor. No, apart from creating a formula to make people look like they could use a bit of dental work and electrolysis, he also was secretly working on making a monster--just like his father. You see, this sexually frustrated man is trying once again to prove the Frankenstein name and come up with his own freakish experiment. The problem is, the lady he creates looks more like a melted candle than Boris Karloff and she just didn't get around to doing all that much. And in the end, it pretty much wraps up as you'd expect--with no twists or turns to provide any interesting diversions or subplot. In fact, there's very little to like about this movie unless you enjoy seeing bad films and laughing at them (which I occasionally like to do). In this case, then this film is for you! Horrible acting, a horrid script and some of the worst makeup I have ever seen on a monster combine to make a truly horrible horror film.

**1/2 out of ****My earliest memory of seeing FRANKENSTEIN'S DAUGHTER was somewhere back in the early 1970s when I was very young. I was living in Queens, New York and back in those sweet days I used to bounce between TV stations to catch a Saturday night horror film on either Channel 5's "Creature Features" or Channel 11's "Chiller Theatre." Well, "Chiller" won out on that particular evening. It was the heart of summer and my street was having a festive block party. I can still hear the sounds of music and kids laughing and playing, as someone would frequently run inside and ask me why I wasn't outside joining in all the fun. As much fun as I knew the family and neighbors were having outside, I couldn't have cared less; I was riveted to an old-fashioned television set watching FRANKENSTEIN'S DAUGHTER and adding this night to my memory banks. I'm sure they've all since forgotten their block party...It's strange to think that this film was only a dozen or so years old when I first saw it! Since we weren't yet too jaded by gore and splatter, I found some genuinely powerful moments in FRANKENSTEIN'S DAUGHTER: There was blood on some of the the victims, we got a glimpse of a dismembered hand, and we were also treated to mangled and meaty body parts. The icing on the cake was a shot of a character's face virtually melting away after being splashed with acid. Pretty potent stuff compared to what I was already accustomed to.The 1958 feature seemed very relative to me at the time. My Queens block looked very much like the residential streets in the movie, and the basement laboratory could very well have been my own cellar, had I dressed it up with some test tubes and a large table. The added fact that the story was about teenagers (okay, so they looked more like thirty-something's) also gave me a point of identification. A backyard barbecue scene again struck a chord, and was particularly appropriate on this festive evening where a noisy shindig was actually occurring a few feet away, just outside my own screen door.The movie starts with a pre-credits sequence: Sandra Knight is prowling the neighborhood in cheap (but effective) monster make-up, with bushy eyebrows and decaying buck teeth. One of her girlfriends (the sultry Sally Todd) is just getting home from a date with her boyfriend and screams at the very sight of her. The next morning, Knight awakens as a normal-looking girl with no memory of what went on the previous evening, though when she meets Sally for tennis, her friend insists that she saw some sort of monster last night. This strange revelation triggers memories of bad dreams for Knight, and she soon thinks that she could have been the creature in question.Meanwhile, Knight's elderly Uncle (played with hilarious ineptitude by the always-funny Felix Locher) is experimenting with a formula to render man ageless. He has acquired a young assistant named Oliver Frank (short for Frankenstein, of course) who is supposedly aiding him, but who would rather see the old man dead so he can gain full use of the laboratory to concentrate on his own masterful experiment. Donald Murphy plays Oliver, and he's one of the most detestable snakes ever to slither down the Frankenstein Family Tree. He's a joy to watch at work, using the "nutty old man's" formula on his own niece by spiking her nightly glasses of fruit punch, thereby turning her into the grotesque monster from the opening sequence! Later, Oliver connives his way into a date with Sally Todd and tries in vain to make out with her, only to be slapped across the face by the stuck-up vixen... "Hey," Oliver protests from Lover's Lane, "you agreed to park here with me!" Soon he has a better idea: he gets even by mowing her down with his car as she tries to run away! Then, taking her body to the basement lab, Frank decides to use her head on the hulking carcass he's assembling behind the old doc's back. When the automation comes to life, it's actually a male actor (Harry Wilson) who portrays her with a toasty-looking face (reportedly, nobody bothered to tell makeup artist Harry Thomas that the monster was to be female, so he solved the dilemma by smearing some lipstick on its kisser!) Amidst the rampages of Frankenstein's Daughter, we are treated to the aforementioned evening backyard barbecue. Still wondering where their friend Sally Todd vanished to, the other teens ease their pain between hamburgers and frankfurters while enjoying the live music of "Page Cavanaugh and His Trio". The band treats us to two '50s gems: "Daddy Bird" and -- my own guilty favorite -- "Special Date." I have since memorized all the words, and it's a riot! With lovable horror clichés, gooey monsters, and funny dialog, this is a cult classic of its type from director Richard Cunha. It's a lightly-paced thrill ride from start to finish and one of the best teenage monster movies of them all. It's easily Cunha's masterpiece (if such a word applies here). At its worst, FRANKENSTEIN'S DAUGHTER is a harmlessly funny exploitation farce; at its best, it's one of the most underrated monster classics of the 50s. I'd love to give it three or four stars just based on sheer cheesy enjoyment value!