Tartan Video 2006: Not a huge body of extras for Flesh For Frankenstein, released for the first time in its full uncut version (sadly, sans 3D). The screen-test is nothing to write home about and as Paul Morrissey notes, the audio part has been lost. At just four minutes long, it's for completists only. All the same, "I'm glad it's on the DVD and I hope someone finds them necessary" he laughs. (More satisfying is the screen-test from the Blood For Dracula DVD, also featuring Zelenovic as Dracula, before Udo Kier clinched the part.) Next, some production stills with another Morrissey commentary. "I'm glad they're not sitting in a box on a shelf," he says, but rarely refers directly to them, choosing instead to discuss aspects of the movie. Boy, can he talk. Mostly, he's at pains to reiterate that "the story is absurd - all my films are comedies," a fact which often completely slips the mind of our resident film historian Maurice Yacowar.
Appropriately, the main commentary consists of three lengthy interviews separately recorded then welded together. In practice, it resembles some freakish verbal relay race between the folksy, self-deprecating Morrissey, the florid and over-exacting Yacowar and the slightly sinister, heavily-accented Kier.
If Yacowar's second out of the gate, by God he's going to make up the miles. "As we watchers see other suspect watchers we become part of the film subject" he burbles. "Critics today call this 'Questioning Spectatorship.'" Yacowar's by far the most entertaining contributor to the DVD, as he appears to have stumbled in from another commentary entirely - which only adds to the high camp. For Maurice, a dogging movie shot in the car park of your local Tesco would probably herald a lengthy treatise on the aesthetics of the automobile; you begin to wonder if his inclusion is a deliberate ploy to underline the ludicrousness of it all.
Udo thinks the film is "poetic, beautiful and timeless" - actually, he says exactly the same thing on the Blood For Dracula commentary, and many of his musings could be interchanged without anyone noticing. No danger of that with Yacowar: "Morrissey is being satiric and funny when he has those small bandages on the corpse's private parts." Thanks, Maurice. What on Earth would we do without you? "He's mocking our pretence to decorum, especially when we're such slavering voyeurists that we pay big bucks to see a 3D film about Frankenstein. We crave gore and sex." Later, he observes, "The prolonged snipping open of her wound is both grisly and erotic. The wound looks like a vagina, but of course it's an impractical alternative." The wound absolutely does not look like a vagina, Maurice and frankly, we're worried about you.
Udo recalls that he learned Latin for the role of Baron Frankenstein (quite unnecessarily as it happened) and explains why it's best to play comedies straight. "If you make a joke and you laugh before everybody else laughs, nobody laughs." While Morrissey reveals where the movie's most memorable quote came from. "I saw Last Tango In Paris, which was the greatest work of art of all time if you listened to certain critics," snorts Morrissey. "I came away thinking it was a soap opera, and kind of corny. But one line in the film struck me as so silly, so when I was doing this section with Udo, I gave him that line." Udo cocked it up, and the rest is trash cinema history.
Appropriately, the main commentary consists of three lengthy interviews separately recorded then welded together. In practice, it resembles some freakish verbal relay race between the folksy, self-deprecating Morrissey, the florid and over-exacting Yacowar and the slightly sinister, heavily-accented Kier.
If Yacowar's second out of the gate, by God he's going to make up the miles. "As we watchers see other suspect watchers we become part of the film subject" he burbles. "Critics today call this 'Questioning Spectatorship.'" Yacowar's by far the most entertaining contributor to the DVD, as he appears to have stumbled in from another commentary entirely - which only adds to the high camp. For Maurice, a dogging movie shot in the car park of your local Tesco would probably herald a lengthy treatise on the aesthetics of the automobile; you begin to wonder if his inclusion is a deliberate ploy to underline the ludicrousness of it all.
Udo thinks the film is "poetic, beautiful and timeless" - actually, he says exactly the same thing on the Blood For Dracula commentary, and many of his musings could be interchanged without anyone noticing. No danger of that with Yacowar: "Morrissey is being satiric and funny when he has those small bandages on the corpse's private parts." Thanks, Maurice. What on Earth would we do without you? "He's mocking our pretence to decorum, especially when we're such slavering voyeurists that we pay big bucks to see a 3D film about Frankenstein. We crave gore and sex." Later, he observes, "The prolonged snipping open of her wound is both grisly and erotic. The wound looks like a vagina, but of course it's an impractical alternative." The wound absolutely does not look like a vagina, Maurice and frankly, we're worried about you.
Udo recalls that he learned Latin for the role of Baron Frankenstein (quite unnecessarily as it happened) and explains why it's best to play comedies straight. "If you make a joke and you laugh before everybody else laughs, nobody laughs." While Morrissey reveals where the movie's most memorable quote came from. "I saw Last Tango In Paris, which was the greatest work of art of all time if you listened to certain critics," snorts Morrissey. "I came away thinking it was a soap opera, and kind of corny. But one line in the film struck me as so silly, so when I was doing this section with Udo, I gave him that line." Udo cocked it up, and the rest is trash cinema history.