Every so often in the malaise of watching terrible movies for the podcast rises a star, a moment of clarity, humour, transcendence. This week it was when my partner in crime Lindsay requested subtitles for Flesh for Frankenstein a 1973 film staring Udo Kier and specifically starring his accent. Whoever had made subtitles for the film had elected to make a number of edits and called their creation ‘speech impediment edition’. Now Udo Kier has not got a speech impediment, he is just German and the dialog is in English, however subtitling each and every time he says ‘the’ with ‘ze’ is hilarious. I don’t know if it accurately reflects his pronunciation, but the experience is excellent, it really makes a drab film watchable, 10/10 fan subs. Frankenstein accidentally puts the brain of a gay twink in his monster, who he was hoping to use for some kinda racial purity breeding scheme. Which naturally goes awry, I mean it always goes awry, that’s sorta the point I guess. The movie is generally filled with these psychosexual themes, while adaptations of Frankenstein inherently deal with the desecration of corpses, this movie frames it as a molestation. When Frankenstein plunges his hands into the abdomen of a womens body, his reaction is of disgusting sexual pleasure, Kier sells it perfectly, it’s perverse and fantastical. The film is generally messy and weird and bad, but I don’t think I’ve seen a Frankenstein I can genuinely recommend yet.

I watched 4 other Frankensteins this week, but I want to keep some in the tank for the podcast and don’t want to keep repeating myself. That said, in Frankenstein Unbound, the one where John Hurt time travels into the middle of the Frankenstein myth, he fucks Mary Shelly and just messes around with the timeline and it’s objectively hilarious. The movie’s monster looks like a Star Trek alien and rips someones heart out. All this makes it sound much better than it is.

Now that we’re done with business, we move to pleasure. I went to the cinema with Lindsay and my girlfriend to see The Pope’s Exorcist, a movie that’s possessed with absolutely insane needle drops and possession movie clichés. It’s inexplicably set in the 1980’s but none of the tracks they play are partially iconic, there’s just always someone taking off or putting on headphones with the least interesting but most unexpected and inappropriate music you can imagine playing though them. Russell Crowe plays the titular Exorcist, Father Gabriel Amorth, who was a real guy (rip); Crowe styles him as a cool rockstar priest and overall elevates the material. I think the script is generally better than the direction, which is a little frustrating. The film is at it’s best when it’s going hard, at one point a possessed kid tells Crowe “I’ll fuck you, you’ll cum and you’ll hate yourself for it,” which is just amazing, no notes. These moments are few and far between and the films punctuation is all camp possession stereotypes, a boatload of cheap contact lenses, multiple characters speaking as one, nothing you’ve not seen before. I just wish the martial had been left to sit on it’s own, the dialog was usually pretty good. The ending is little bit of a giant CGI fight, which was where I started to check out but it’s OK. But then just after this ending, the film keeps going with an extended avengers assemble scene, where Vatican Nick Fury sets up literally 199 sequels. During this extended advert the entire theatre was visibly board, people were getting their coats, the person next to me was playing with their seat controls and others whispering to their friends. Putting aside the messy ending and obsession with franchising, which one must blame on the producer, the movie is fun, watchable and entertaining. It isn’t great but watching it is a great time.