FRANKENSTEIN’S GREAT AUNT TILLIE (1984) ½ *

Donald Pleasence (stuck wearing a lousy wig) stars in this excruciating horror-comedy as Dr. Frankenstein’s distant relative, Victor.  Destitute, with nowhere to turn, he and his family members travel to his ancestral castle to look for the good doctor’s hidden treasure.  Meanwhile, the Burgomaster (Aldo Ray) and the town elders want to evict the lot of them, foreclose on the castle, and seize the property (and the gold) for themselves.  It’s only a matter of time before Victor and company resurrect the Frankenstein monster to help them recover the loot.

Normally in a motion picture, scenes flow together sequentially to advance the plot.  Here, the scenes seemingly go around in circles.  To make matters worse, this alleged comedy isn’t funny at all.  (Pleasence and his family live in the village of “Mucklefugger”, which tells you the level of inanity we’re talking about.)  It doesn’t help that the sound is poor, and the accents are thick, so when there is a punchline, it’s hard to tell what was even said. 

Frankenstein’s Great Aunt Tillie was made in ’84, but it’s so crude looking that it feels like a lost movie from the ‘60s.  It’s also borderline incomprehensible as it never stays on one particular plot point for very long.  It’s almost as if someone took an entire season of a television show and whittled it down to a hundred-minute movie.  Because of that, just when you think it’s about to wrap things up, it starts right back up again in an endless loop of nearly unwatchable nonsense. 

For example, when the movie is over, there’s a ten-minute epilogue of unrelated scenes (one including Pleasence selling snake oil) that go on way too long.  The title card that accompanies the epilogue even admits these scenes are nothing more than “Odds and Ends”.  Additionally, the film opens with a title card that reads, “A hundred years later…” but we never get to see what happened a hundred years before!

I guess it wouldn’t matter if the movie was actually funny, but it’s simply a mind-numbing affair any way you slice it.  The only part that had potential was the parody of the scene from Frankenstein where the monster drowns a little girl.  However, it winds up devolving into an unfunny Benny Hill-style chase scene involving her sexed-up older sisters.  (One of whom is named “Horny”.)  I won’t even mention the scene where Donald appears in drag.

Just when you think it can’t get any weirder, Zsa Zsa Gabor shows up in a cameo.  It’s only a brief scene; a montage in which she has no dialogue.  I’m sure she was glad about that.  Aldo, Donald, and Zsa Zsa have made some bad movies before, but this might be all three stars’ career low point, which is really saying something. 

I guess I should mention that Miguel Angel Fuentes plays the monster.  He and Pleasence were also in the awful The Puma Man together.  Here’s the kicker, folks:  The Puma Man looks downright Shakespearean compared to this!