FRANKENSTEIN ISLAND (1981)

Any movie that starts out with a hot-air balloon crash is just asking for trouble.

FRANKENSTEIN ISLAND was supposedly made in 1981, looks like it was made in 1972, and feels like it was made in 1957. It's all kinds of messed up. If it wasn't so stoopidly fun, I'd say it was one of the worst movies I've ever seen. I mean, it's bad. There's nothing really good about it. But none of it is boring, and being boring is the biggest sin a movie can commit. Every five minutes, it's like it's a whole other movie. You never know what's gonna hit you.

Anyway, four idiots and a dog crash into the ocean in their beautiful balloon, and life-raft their way to lovely Frankenstein Island. There's a bunch of annoying old guys (one of them is Robert Clarke, who's been in TONS better movies than this!) and an annoying Peter Brady-looking tool named Dino. Seriously. And a dog named Melvin. Seriously. You know what you're in for when one of the guys leans onto their life raft -- which there's nothing wrong with -- and says that they need to gather wood to build a raft. SERIOUSLY.

So they wander into a cliffside cave for no good reason, there's a split-second shot of the Floating Head of John Carradine, and they wind up on the main part of the island, which is lucky for them. They could have gotten killed in that cave, and nobody would ever have found them.

Then they find Amazons. Yep, there's a tribe of jungle ladies living on Frankenstein Island, and they all use human skulls as bongs, wear leopard-print bikinis, and are suspiciously white. (Really, you know? Every movie I see where there's a tribe of Amazon jungle babes, they're all white girls. I don't know if there's any science backing this up, but something tells me that isn't accurate.) And the four idiots discover that if you try to say the name of any place that ISN'T Frankenstein Island, something that's "like telepathy" makes your arm hurt really bad. SERIOUSLY. Then there's night-time snake dancing and another appearance by the Floating Head of John Carradine who spouts off about "The Power!!!!" I think they shot all of his appearances in a half hour.

So then there's some zombie dressed up kinda like the Hamburglar that nabs one of the jungle girls, and some grizzled old guys from a pirate movie show up and laugh a lot and say that they should all be friends, and then invite the team of idiots up to "where the valleys rise to the sun." They get there and wait around at a camp outside the main house on the island, and there's a bunch more zombie guys, and then Cameron Mitchell is in a jail cell and believes he's in an Edgar Allan Poe movie, and the whole shooting match is being run by Sheila Van Helsing who's the great-granddaughter of Dr. Frankenstein, and the zombie guys wave around plastic Halloween pitchforks and turn an 8x10" glossy headshot of John Carradine into an 8x10" headshot of a SKULL, and there's a zombie fight where we cut to reaction shots FROM THE ZOMBIES (who don't have emotions), and there's a weird electronic thing that gives Sheila Frankenstein the albino white zombie eyes that the zombies have, but only for a second and it's never referred to again, and the Floating Head of John Carradine who is playing the Ghost of Dr. Frankenstein pops up and says "The Power! The Golden Thread!" a lot, and Sheila's husband is a MILLION YEARS OLD and is in bed and doesn't amount to much, and Cameron Mitchell is the dad of one of the jungle girls, and then the Frankenstein Monster shows up and waves his arms around and everyone escapes, and it was all just a dream OR WAS IT?

See? You get ALL THIS for less than the price of most other movies. Nothing in the movie is related to anything else that happens in the movie, and nothing makes any sense, but I COULDN'T STOP WATCHING. Sometimes just knowing that a movie like this exists makes you glad to be alive.