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The camera descends from a spider's web to welcome the Frankenstein children, who rummage through the laboratory and dissect the stuffing out of a doll—their gaze is beguilingly perverse, Paul Morrissey adopts it for the rest of this elegant analysis. The Baron (Udo Kier) envisions a new race out of corpses sewn together, "not since Adam and Eve," his wanton wife is also his sister, poised somewhere between Sylvia Miles and Madeline Kahn and essayed by Monique van Vooren with leonine finesse and no eyebrows. The musclehead peasant (Srdjan Zelenovic) aspires to be a monk, the Doctor likes the cut of his nasum, out of the bordello and into the shears stumbles the subject. A Times Square hustler teleported to 19th-century Europe, his pal (Joe Dallesandro) investigates the beheading and finds a place in the castle's boudoir, having his armpit slurped by the Baroness. "I always look for beauty. As a matter of fact, I insist on it." A most abstruse Reich of madmen and artists for Morrissey, who calibrates his absurdism delicately: A pile of disemboweled juveniles on the tiled lab floor segues into a deadpan dinner tableau, where opulent lateral tracks are capped by a roll of the eyes. Barbie and Ken à la Clovis Trouille, "some interesting medical problems," a certain pre-Raphaelite air around the copious spilling and dangling of entrails. The wicked pièce de résistance has the stitches on the curving abdominal suture of the Perfect Woman (Dalila Di Lazzaro) snipped open so the Baron can discover ecstasy in a new orifice, Kier delivers the punchline ("To know death, you must fuck life... in the gallbladder") with ripe gravity. Scalpel-wielding moppets and pulsating innards figure in the concluding composition, for the benefit of Gordon's Re-Animator. With Arno Juerging, Liu Bosisio, Nicoletta Elmi, and Marco Liofredi.
--- Fernando F. Croce |