Study Abroad: Chapter Five, Cover
And now finally it’s time for Iris’s story. And if you think the cover Lon came up with for this chapter is hallucinatory, wait until you see what comes underneath it.
(Click on the image for larger size. 
Study Abroad: Chapter Five, Cover written and commissioned by Dr. Faustus of EroticMadScience.com and drawn by Lon Ryden is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.)
Steampunk Chimera Genesis
Back when I first commissioned the Chimera Genesis image for this site’s first anniversary post, 3D artist Niceman thoughtfully suggested that he could do a steampunk variant on the same theme. I put that in the mental folder of “interesting idea, must think more about it.” Chimera Genesis proceeded to storm to triumph, being featured not just here but also in a post by überblogger Violet Blue. Around that time, Niceman’s proposal swiftly departed the limboland of “interesting idea” for the blessed region of “I’d be a fool not to do this.” I told Niceman, in effect “I won’t even ask exactly what you’ve got in mind, I’ll commission the steampunk version.”
And I would have been a fool not to have, to, seeing the stunning image Niceman came up with.
(The in-post version really can’t do it justice, so click on the image for full-size version.)
Steampunk Chimera Genesis by by Niceman, commissioned by Dr. Faustus of EroticMadScience.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
The story here is the same, but the historical setting is different. Mad science is being used to turn two women into one with the memories and skills of both. There’s a lot to love about this image: the fact that a lady mad scientist seems to running the show here, and the shocked “I didn’t sign up for this” look on the faces of one of the experiment’s subjects. Even the nineteenth-century underwear has a nice fetishy appeal, somehow.
You know, given how much fun steampunk and dieselpunk and all that are, I really ought to do more with the history of Gnosis College. I mean, as you can see from the college seal (recently worked up for me by Lon Ryden, thanks Lon!) the college was supposedly founded in 1844 (the year that Nietzsche was born and Marx wrote his Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts), and those Victorians could get pretty darn kinky when you looked closely at them.
Must write more…ever more…
Asian Dyna and the New Prometheus
A little while back I enjoyed a pleasant exchange with blogger and FHM Philippines model Asian Dyna when she left a comment here at Erotic Mad Science. As so much of my correspondence does, it left off with my petition “…and if you ever do something mad science, do let me know.”
Well, whaddya know. Just today:
Hot damn! What’s especially appealing here (above and beyond Dyna herself, of course) is that not only has she successfully played into the Frankenstein legend, but she’s used the placement of the metal hoops to achieve an appealing implied nudity effect more usually associated with the tube girl meme.
I’m touched…so let me encourage you all to surf over to Dyna’s site and show her some blog love. Which, given her fetching original content, shouldn’t be hard.
Even more interesting electric girl
This one is good: where to start? Mad lab? Check. Created woman? Check. Electric girl? Check. Interesting electrical effect with nipples that we’ve seen before? Check.
Found at artist Benjamin Hall’s site. Hall’s current project sounds very cool indeed, a follow-on comic to Roger Corman’s Humanoids from the Deep. Dude, I am so there — this one will go to the top of my acquisitions list when it appears.
Rites of Frankenstein
It’s inevitable that I would be viewing a movie that’s sometimes marketed as The Erotic Rites of Frankenstein (more properly La maldición de Frankenstein, 1972). True, it was written and directed by Jesús Franco, a filmmaker with a reputation for being a real schlockmeister, but that’s hardly a disqualification here!
An oddity of this movie is that it seems to exist in two versions, a “clean” version without nudity and a “dirty” one, in which whole scenes in the clean version appear to have been re-shot with naked actors. The “dirty” version, at least the one I was able to find as bonus material on my DVD version, has very low print quality — fuzzy images and poor lighting. The “dirty” version also appears to have some complete sequences that were cut from the “clean” one entirely.
In some ways the “clean” version might actually make for more interesting Erotic Mad Science cinema, because it gets us to focus on concepts. The movie’s unusual plot involves Dr. Frankenstein busily tuning up his massively muscled, silver -skinned monster (which actually appears to be loyal to him), and being stone-cold murdered by some sort of demonic individual called Cagliostro and his hideous (well, in a squick or squee sort of way) bird-woman companion Melisa. They then kidnap (!) Frankenstein’s monster and wrest him from his loyalty to his late master using Cagliostro’s “magnetic” powers.
The monster is then dispatched on the errand of raping and abducting pretty women, who are to be brought back to Cagliostro’s castle where they are to be…well, used for parts. One of them, played by Britt Nichols, puts on a great “woman in peril” face in her final moment.
Which somehow is even starker as a (supposedly) decapitated head.
But don’t worry. As we shall see, she’ll live again. Sort of. These relatively crisp images are from the “clean” version. In the “dirty” version, the camera gives us a close-up panning full-frontal shot whose poor lighting presents too many technical challenges to reproduce here.
Fortunately for the forces of good, or at least the forces of less evil, Dr. Frankenstein has an avenger in the form of his own daughter, Dr. Vera Frankenstein (played by Beatriz Savón), who just by the merest chance, happens to be a hot scientist in her own right. She responds to her family tragedy like any devoted child would: she digs up her father’s corpse and hauls it into the laboratory for a session with the Fixation Ray. The Fixation Ray was what the elder Frankenstein used to animate his monster. As Vera demonstrates, the Fixation Ray can also be used to provide prompt, temporary relief from the symptoms of death. Long enough to ask Dad who was killed by, anyway.
Finding out that it’s Cagliostro who’s to blame (and isn’t it always), Vera pulls a move worthy of a Gnosis College heroine. She substitutes herself in the place of one of Cagliostro’s victims, getting herself abducted by the monster for the purpose of infiltrating his castle. This works…right up to the point where she’s unmasked.
Things are pretty tough for Vera from there. She is tied back-to-back with a minion of Cagliostro who in typical evil-minion fashion has failed his master at a critical moment. The pair is then placed inside a field of giant, poisoned spikes and flogged by the monster. The first to fall, dies. Even in the “clean” version the resulting spectacle is pretty damn kinky.
Naturally there’s also a “dirty” version.
After Vera survives (and also possibly after a “send her to my chamber” episode that only exists as a fragment on my DVD’s extras) she’s subjected to Cagliostro’s mind-control powers and put to work, using the parts Cagliostro has been accumulating to construct and animate a “perfect woman,” whom he intends to mate with Frankenstein’s male monster for the purpose of creating a new master race. (Oh, how very original.) At least Cagliostro picked the parts well.
Hot scientist at the ready.
And in the “clean” version we see this:
And the dirty version this:
But things don’t quite work out for Cagliostro, because the monster’s residual loyalties to Frankenstein kick in just as he’s about to made with electro-woman and he runs around smashing stuff up. Cagliostro drives off laughing maniacally, apparently to his death, except that it’s not really his death because somehow he’s managed to impregnate Lina Romay, who’s otherwise spent the entire movie wandering around in a meaningless detached subplot and will be reincarnated in the body of the child she’ll give birth to. Or something. Way to wrap things up there, Jesús.
But still that’s Erotic Mad Science for you. Though for my money it’s Vera Frankenstein that makes the DVD worth the price. Not so much for what she looks like with her clothes off, though I’m certainly not complaining about that, mind you. It’s for what she does and represents, and for her uncompromising commitments to mad science and throwing herself into danger. You’re a true thaumatophile when you understand why all that matters…
Flesh for Frankenstein II — The eros of mad science
Paul Morrissey grasped the concept of mad science as erotic long ago. Here is a close-up on the face of his Baron Frankenstein (played by Udo Kier) in the middle of work on one of his reanimation-bound corpses. His facial expression pretty much tells you what you need to know about what he’s experiencing.
Like master, like student. Frankenstein’s assistant Otto (played by Arno Juerging) will want in on the act eventually.
Squick inded, although perhaps not without it’s squee element. Which is an irony. Morrissey is a self-identified cultural conservative, and the standard critical view is that Flesh for Frankenstein is a critique of hedonism and a technophile approach to life. As Maurice Yacowar comments in his short essay on the movie for the Criterion Collection:
Paul Morrissey’s Flesh for Frankenstein is one of the goriest film comedies ever made. Yet despite its schlocky sensationalism, it’s still a Paul Morrissey film. That means it has some passionately felt things to say about how we live—and mainly waste—our lives today. Specifically, it blames sexual liberty and individualistic freedom for destroying our personal and social fibre by turning people into commodities.
Yeah, yeah. As an exposition of auctorial intention that’s probably close to right. But the funny thing is that for people with the right (or wrong) outlook, movies like this inevitably escape auctorial intention. I must confess that the harder that Morrissey tried to make Baron Frankenstein a villain — a depraved incestuous homicidal madman — the more I found myself rooting for him.
It’s the risk you run, being (or trying to be) an artist. Your villains turn into the Draco in Leather Pants. Probably someday, somewhere, someone will read the Gnosis scripts not as a celebration of mad science-driven erotic adventure but as a critique thereof…
Flesh for Frankenstein I — cool lab
Coming up now, a trio of posts on Paul Morrissey‘s Flesh for Frankenstein (1973), sometimes known as Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein. This a a seriously weird version of what is already a strange story. Even if we never were to get in the lab, we have a setting of adultery, murder, and incest (Baron Frankenstein is is married to his sister) in a crumbling castle set (presumably) somewhere in the Balkans.
Of course, since we’re into the mad science here, our first stop should be Frankenstein’s laboratory.
Baron Frankenstein’s objective here is not just to re-animate the dead, but to create a mated pair of creatures (notwithstanding the two children he’s had with the Baroness). This pair are to become the progenitors of a master Serbian race. Why Serbian? Some things only the screenwriter was meant to know. In any event, this means making a female half of the pair, which gives director Morrissey an opportunity to provide an early live-action variant on the tube girl meme, as our female half (played by Dalila Di Lazzaro, if you must know) is preserved in a vat of something.
Once she’s lifted out we see a laboratory setup which is one of the coolest we’ve seen since James Whale was directing Frankenstein movies.
Of course it wouldn’t be a Frankenstein movie without electricity providing the spark of life.
It gets squickier tomorrow, I promise.
Tartarus XIII
Script for today:
Page 37
Page 38
Page 39
It scarcely needs to be mentioned what a popular subject Pandora was for artists. One example:
Dante Gabriel Rosettti (1828-1882), Pandora (1878). Original in the Lady Lever Art Gallery. You can find an amazing collection of Pandora imagery here, although unfortunately without much in the way of provenance for individual images.
Splice
I finally got around to watching Splice over the weekend, which is something that I qua thaumatophile am practically obliged to do.
I must confess I was rather less impressed by this than I had hoped to be. Hotshot bioengineers and lovers Clive (Adrien Brody) and Elsa (Sarah Polley) create a creature out of genetic material from a variety of different animals — including humans. Well, one specific human, actually. There’s an appealing Frankenstein-like element here — take things from many things to make one thing — as well as an appealing element of rebellion, since the creature is made in secret and in defiance of corporate bosses (Simona Maicanescu plays the corporate chieftain with an icy self-possession that makes me positively squee).
I have to admit that the creature they produce, whom they name “Dren” does, as a child, make one of the cutest l’il monsters you’ll ever see.
And I guess there’s a sense in which there’s mad science going on in this movie. There’s a willingness to flout moral conventions, lobs of laboratory equipment, and the “science” itself is appropriately crack-brained. And Dren grows up fast, which leads to something either squee or squick, depending on your tastes in such matters.
But somehow this movie didn’t really grab me. There are hints at mad science motivations: Elsa had some sort of miserable childhood and there are hints that her motivation for making Dren might have something to do with compensating for this (in part), although this stab at the mad scientist as Wounded isn’t really played out satisfactorily. And there are the obligatory Promethean recitations (think of all the good our discoveries could do for mankind!) although these often have the feel of rationalizations, and half-hearted ones at that. When things spin out of control (as they inevitably do), the supposedly brilliant and strong-willed characters act disoriented and helpless. What the movie really feels like is Our Dysfunctional Relationship played out in a mad science setting. I don’t have any objection to entertainment about Our Dysfunctional Relationship, but really, isn’t there enough of that already? A proper mad scientist needs to be more decisive, willing to cross the line from normality to Beyond-Good-and-Evil Land with verve and commitment.
I’ll confess, though, that the way the movie ended did redeem it for me, because Elsa does finally grow a pair, uh, grow the beard, uh…jump in with both feet. I won’t give away how the movie ends, except to hint that it owes more to Humanoids from the Deep than the people who made this movie would probably like to admit. So you might as well go watch it.
Enhanced Sally
I don’t doubt that many, perhaps most, readers of Erotic Mad Science have at some point seen Tim Burton‘s The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993). And those of you who have seen it would be surely not forget Sally, an animated ragdoll created by Halloweentown’s resident mad scientist (though perhaps in context he isn’t so mad) Dr. Finklestein. She served as a love interest for the main protagonist and, I must say, I can think of no other cinematic character who makes stalking like quite so adorable.
Now in the context of the actual movie, Sally seems to serve Dr. Finklestein as a sort of combination ersatz daughter/houseservant. But I recently discovered a concept art sketch of Sally…
…and that suggests that perhaps creators had some rather other ideas about the reason why Finklestein might have created Sally. Guess that old erotic mad science really is everywhere.
An additional thought: when Sally doesn’t work out as planned for Dr. Finklestein, he creates a new woman, whom he animates by removing half his brain and donating it to her. “Think of the brilliant conversations we’ll have!” Hmm. This act rather reminds me of something. I wonder if Derek Parfit was serving as a consultant to Tim Burton…
