Dr Frankenstein on Campus (1970)

Dr Frankenstein on Campus (1970) is one of those cases where you can't help but feel that somewhere, lurking inside a cheaply produced exploitation film, is the germ of a good idea that, with a better script and direction, could have made an intriguing film.  As it stands, the film is a somewhat frustrating watch, continually promising more than it ever delivers and never properly developing interesting seeming plot developments.  Worst of all, it throws away what should have been the film's central idea as a last minute plot twist.  A low budget Canadian production, Dr Frankenstein on Campus (also known as Flick) gets off to an interesting start, opening with a POV shot as medical student Victor Frankenstein engages in a fencing duel with a rival, in a sequence deliberately staged to give the impression that this is going to be another period-set Frankenstein film.  But it quickly transpires that we are in (the then) present day and Frankenstein promptly finds himself kicked out of Ingolstadt University, (which might be in Germany - East or West is unclear - or Transylvania, all seem to be used interchangeably in the film), travelling to Canada to resume his studies there.  Victor, it seems, is a pretty straight and buttoned up character, it seems, who finds himself standing out like a sore thumb in the university's student counter culture.  He does, however, form a bond with a professor doing brain research - most specifically mind control via implants - and starts a relationship with a girl involved with the student newspaper.  Victor, it appears, has advanced his research into mind control further than his mentor and, after finding himself caught in the middle of student protests against computerisation (!), ends up once more being kicked out, this time after being photographed by the student newspaper holding a joint, (which he was simply holding for a friend).

At this point, (more than half way through the movie), the scenario finally begins to move more firmly into horror territory, as Victor uses his mind-controlling implant to turn a martial arts expert friend into a murderous human robot.  A killing spree ensues, with various people who have crossed Victor - student activists, student newspaper journalists and the Dean - being killed.  (Victor had previously demonstrated his device on his girl friend's pets, forcing them to fight to the death - the cat eventually killing the dog.  Despite witnessing this, at no point does said girlfriend ever seem to suspect Victor's involvement either in the killings, or their Karate chopping friend's odd behaviour and frequent memory lapses).  Finally deciding to get rid of his girlfriend as well, Victor sets their friend to killing her in an art gallery, but fate intervenes and first Victors mind-control remote device is destroyed, breaking his control over the friend, then, accidentally, he takes an apparently fatal fall down a stair well.  But as a crowd gathers around his prone form, his body, quite literally, begins to fall apart at the seams, revealing that he was actually an artificial creation, his friends left pondering who had created him.  It is then revealed that, (surprise, surprise), it was the professor, who had been controlling Victor all along with his own mind control device which, with a shrug, he tosses in a bin as he strides away from the gallery, pondering the idea of rebuilding Victor again in order to continue his experiments.  

While Victor's true nature had been hinted at throughout the film - his refusal to take his clothes off, even when making love to his frequently naked girlfried, his protestations that 'Frankenstein; was a work of fiction and his name merely coincidental and that Frankenstein wasn't the monster, but rather its creator, not to mention the business of his crushing a mechanical Frankenstein monster toy the other students use to mock him (a prefiguring of his own demise) - it never becomes the plot's main thrust.  Which is a pity, because it is the film's best idea.  But it instead chooses to avoid properly confronting the issue of who is the 'real' Dr Frankenstein on the college campus, in favour of endless footage of student parties and protests - all of which go on far too long, slowing the film's pace down to a crawl.  It doesn't help that, overall, the film is very scrappily made, its low budget all too apparent, with several key exterior scenes staged on pretty obvious interior sets, very variable acting performances, undistinguished camerawork, poor plot development and pacing, with too many long talky scenes dominating the film, despite not actually moving the plot along much.  The most interesting parts of the plot - Victor's revenge and the final revelations - feel rushed and barely developed.  Now, to be entirely fair, the version I saw was seemingly taken from a truly terrible VHS transfer, possibly an off air recording, with multiple tracking problems, which doubtless made the film look, quality wise, far worse than it actually was.  Nevertheless, it is probably significant that Dr Frankenstein on Campus proved to be the first and last feature for its director, Gilbert W Taylor, whose direction, while not actually bad, is pretty dull and uninspired.

While the campus setting was a popular one for youth-orientated films on the late sixties and early seventies (and Dr Frankenstein on Campus was aimed at the drive-in audience, going out on a double bill with Night of the Witches), this film's depiction of the milieu misses the mark completely.  Quite apart from the fact that most of the university's students seem to be in their thirties, it's characterisation of student protests and student activism are laughable.  While, in the real world sixties and seventies student protests invariably focused on contemporary issues like the Vietnam war, race equality, women's liberation and so on, in the film's university, the best thing that the students can seem to find to get angry about is the issue of the increased use of computers!  While, obviously, that served the purposes of the plot, with the professor's sinister secret experiments proving they were right to be worried, it nevertheless renders the depiction of the protestors ridiculous and divorces the film's action from the real world.  (It seems clear that the film's makers were aiming at some kind of 'social relevance' but undermine their efforts with the way in which they depict their fictional student protagonists).  Yet, despite all of these criticisms, Dr Frankenstein on Campus still isn't a complete loss.  Not only does it have that intriguing, never properly developed, underlying concept, but it also boasts an interesting performance from Robin Ward as Victor, making the character suitably creepy, his emotional responses to situations always seeming somewhat off-kilter, as if they are programmed responses rather than genuine emotional displays.  It also has a fair amount of nudity, principally from Victor's girlfriend, (her attraction to him remaining a mystery throughout the film).  Sadly, none of these things are enough to lift the film overall above the average and it isn't hard to see why it has fallen into obscurity rather than becoming a cult classic, (despite having all the ingredients for the latter).