Frankenstein 2000 - Ritorno dalla morte

Frankenstein 2000 (1991)

BOMB (out of 4)

Joe D'Amato's last horror film is among the worst films I've seen from him. A woman is raped by two thugs but the police put the blame on her homeless friend. The friend is eventually murdered in jail but the woman, while in a coma, uses her brain power to bring him back to life so he can seek vengeance. This film runs 93-minutes but I could have sworn it went on for nearly four or five hours. Every second of the film is a complete bore with horrible performances, bad dialogue and incredibly bad special effects. For some reason the woman keeps seeing her son get his head chopped off, which leads to countless scenes of his incredibly fake looking head rolling on the ground. There are a few gory scenes but all of them are poorly done. Most Euro films like this are dubbed but this one here features the German actors doing their own English, which leads to a large amount of flubbed lines. Original title: Return From Death: Frankenstein 2000.

You'd think that after directing so many movies, Massacessi would have managed to learn SOMETHING about the art of film-making. However, this is clearly not the case. FRANKENSTEIN 2000 really stands out as being a spectacularly terrible effort from a film-maker whose career has plumbed the depths of ineptitude on more than one occasion. The acting is possibly the worst I've ever seen, as unlike most of the old Euro-horrors, the dialogue seems to have been recorded real-time rather than dubbed afterwards. I can only assume that many of the actors couldn't actually speak English, as their delivery of some of the lines is absolutely HILARIOUS. The special effects are utterly abysmal. During an autopsy scene, you can clearly see a "corpse" breathing; the animal offal draped over its abdomen undulating suspiciously.

Hilarious, and probably worth a look to see just how bad a rushed film can turn out.

Until I checked here, I had no idea that Frankenstein 2000 was the work of Joe D'amato, the prolific director once again hiding behind one of his many pseudonyms; it all makes sense now, the inane script, the poor direction, the lousy acting, Laura Gemser as costume designer—all the evidence points to the King of Italian sleaze.

Sadly, this is far from prime D'amato, lacking the outrageous sex and gore that typifies his most popular flicks. The plot is both derivative and preposterous, a desperate mix of psychic and physical horror that rips off several other movies, most notably Aussie horror Patrick. D'amato's direction is at the lower end of his ability, years of working on hardcore porn having clearly dulled his artistic acuity. The film is also severely hampered by the foreign actors in his cast who fail to display any emotion in their lines and repeatedly stall while delivering them, sounding like Speak and Spell machines as a result.

Those who enjoy really crap Italian horror will undoubtedly glean some enjoyment from the sheer ineptitude of the whole thing and there is some fun to be had with the laughable gore—a few brief decapitations and a hilarious scene in which a guy has his head crushed, the eyes popping from the sockets—but hardcore D'amato fans will be severely disappointed.

Frankenstein 2000 gets a 4.5/10 from me, generously rounded up to 5 for several really dumb moments that beggar belief: a Mick Fleetwood lookalike chasing an irritating blond moppet with an axe; a fancy dress party at an Austrian nightclub adorned with swastikas; and a terrified woman, menaced by the 'monster', climbing onto a sofa for safety rather than legging it.

Georgia (Cinzia Monreale) is a woman with psychic abilities who is always having premonitions of her son being beheaded. One day she is attacked at home by some kids who belong to a local biker gang and is saved by Ric (Donald O'Brien), a former boxer turned handyman. When the corrupt local authorities place the crime on Ric, he hangs himself in his cell. That is okay because Georgia, who is now in a coma, somehow reanimates his dead body and uses him as an instrument for revenge.

By the time the '90s had rolled around, the Italian exploitation industry was petering out. Nowhere was this more apparent than in this Joe D'Amato horror effort that is better suited by its original, more literal title (RITORNO DALLA MORTE meaning RETURN FROM DEATH). Folks hoping for an exciting variation on the Mary Shelley legend will be sadly disappointed in this one as the "monster" doesn't appear until an hour in and this is more of a variation of PATRICK (1978) than a mad scientist. This is strictly by the numbers for D'Amato, who already seemed to have his foot out the door to return to the much more lucrative porn business (he would release one more horror film, THE CRAWLERS (1993), but that was shot before this). I will say the look of O'Brien, who apparently had a stroke before filming this, is pretty good with his skull held on by big clamps and there are some goofy gore effects in the last half hour. The biggest kick I got from it was D'Amato - who famously had Americans watching the Super Bowl in tuxedos in MONSTER HUNTER (1981) - showing he still has no clue about other cultures by having a group of neo-Nazi bad guys having a costume party.

This movie is really boring, the most low budget B-horrormovies are pretty ok because there is something to laugh about, but in this movie nothing happens until after one hour or so!!

And just when you think the gore starts another disappointment kicks in, almost no gore! So why bother to watch? Only for hardcore collectors i think!