I WAS A TEENAGE FRANKENSTEIN, despite bearing one of the cheese-tastiest lines in a morsel-stuffed ilkdom, hangs its pasted-together face in the mute frankensorrow that its arrogant scientist and a smorgasbord of victims would just be so many spare parts were it not for the angry young alpha path stalked by I Was A Teenage Werewolf.  It’s 1957, and the success whelped from that howler’s too-touchy punk and a ‘doctor’ helping the boy ‘regress’ was such that just a few months later the clarion call of ‘teenage’ (buzzword for cash) was an excuse to dig up yet another relative of the Frankenstein family, that Euro-tribe who crank out monomaniacal medicine men like certain rich dynasties spew fresh spores of shameless hucksters. Back from ‘treating’ Michael Landon’s surly wereteen is the redoubtable Whit Bissell, who lays out his healer philosophy with statements like “If you breed morons, you beget morons.”  

Not as successful as I Was A Teenage Werewolf, this did make $900,000, easily covering what looks like $90 spent to make it. As with the earlier epic, the writing was the work of Aben Kandel and Herman Cohen. Pedestrian is the kindest word for the direction from Herbert L. Strock, though composer Paul Dunlap tries to add some suspense with his scoring. Visiting the States from England (managing to leave his accent somewhere over the Atlantic), ‘Professor Frankenstein’ (Bissell, out & out nasty) decides he can stay around the colonies for a while, using his fiancee (Phyllis Coates) as a secretary while he and his blackmailed assistant (Robert Burton) collect ‘material’ for experiments that he insists will shake the world and make him look like a savior. One of those types. Among those he harvests is ‘Bob’, played by Gary Conway and one of the sillier monster masks ever. There’s a lotta talk in the 74 minutes, most famously the hard to top  “Speak! You have a civil tongue in your head! I know you have, because I sewed it back myself!”

Apart from rewatching this for the first time since childhood (when it was pretty boring then, too) due diligence research for our admittedly ‘meh’ two bits worth did uncover a line from another reviewer that got me laughing out loud, enough to request borrowing it. With grateful thanks to Sam Panico and the entry from his site “B&S About Movies” reminding us that FrankenBissel is in the United States “to assemble his monster from the bodies of teenagers who didn’t make it through Dead Man’s Curve.”

Smelling blood (and teenage allowances), American International Pictures had writer Cohen, director Strock and actor Conway come back the following year with How To Make A Monster, a mashup of the two earlier flicks, put out on a double bill with Teenage Caveman, which dragooned newcomer Robert Vaughan, 26, called “the worst film ever made.”