Attempting
to cash in on the success of Blacula, writer Frank Seletri quickly
reworked this other classic movie monster tale hoping it would fare as well.
Sadly, this was not to be the case.
In this, Dr Winifred Walker (Ivory Stone) arrives in LA to seek the help of her former teacher Dr Stein (John Hart), who lives in a strange Gothic Mansion, complete with it's own mad scientist's laboratory in the basement below.
Dr Walker's fiancé Eddie (Joe De Sue) is currently lying in hospital, having had his arms and legs blown off whilst fighting in the Vietnam war (though the outlines of his limbs can clearly be seen under his hospital blanket) and hopes Dr Stein, with his advanced medical knowledge, will be able to perform a transplant and make him fully mobile again.
Unfortunately, Stein's assistant Malcolm (Roosevelt Jackson) has taken a fancy to Dr Walker and realising that he'll never win her affections with Eddie still in the picture, sabotages the operation and contaminates Eddie's DNA injections. The result of which being that although having new arms and legs, he's turned into a horrible monster who subsequently decides to walk out Stein's house (yes he just strolls out undetected) and goes on the rampage.
First on the list is the obnoxious orderly at the hospital who used to taunt him, followed by the the usual slew of teenagers, courting couples and innocent bystanders. Being so slow and stupid, quite how Eddie is able to walk around LA's Afro-American community at night undetected, let alone get close enough to his victims, is somewhat silly but then so is being able to slip in and out of Dr Stein's house each night without being noticed, but there you go.
The film has been described by many critics as being the worst adaptation of Frankenstein ever made, though they obviously haven't seen the Jess Franco version. But in any case, the film is certainly not in the same calibre as Blacula. The film suffers terribly from choppy editing, bad acting and generally poor production. It's watchable, but to be honest I found it a disappointment.
