Lady Frankenstein Blu-ray

The visibly talented film-maker Mel Welles was a highly regarded actor, and versatile, frequently utilised voice dubber, but one of his greatest creative achievements was the perkily permissive, progressively feminist iteration of the frequently pillaged 'Frankenstein' mythos, much like Hammer Film's equally gender-bending, forward-thrusting, bra-bustingly grand B-Movie bonanza 'Dr. Jekyll & Sister Hyde', the grisly Gothic delirium abounding so thrillingly in 'Lady Frankenstein'is not only a lushly fashioned period horror film, but is generously endowed with a truly celestial cast of luminously gifted actors, heroically headed by the serially body-snatching Baron (Joseph Cotten), and his exquisitely beautiful, hot-bodied, terrifically twisted daughter-in-doom Tania (Rosalba Neri), while low budget, the lively performances, wonderfully vivid production design, vastly eerie, cobweb-festooned castle location, and strikingly macabre set-pieces lend Mel Welles's inspired, insanely inventive Gothic shocker the darkly lustrous veneer of quality so frequently absent in many equally penurious Euro-Horrors of the era. Once long unavailable, excluding a rare German DVD, the recently restored Nucleus Films Blu-ray is the little-seen, uncensored director's cut, 99 majestically macabre minutes of sinful, shadow-slinking siren Rosalba Neri sizzling sultrily around the blood-thirsty Baron's luxuriously lurid, limb-strewn laboratory, Tania's stunning, eye-meltingly exquisite beauty readily distracting one from the vile depravities of her catastrophically corrupted mind! 'Lady Frankenstein' is an electrifying necromance that is far greater than the scum of its gruesomely stitched-together parts!!!