Frankenstein

I was midway through a piece on labor economics for today’s column, when a junk food pang propelled me to the store for some soda and empty calories. I spied, strategically placed by the cash register for impulse purchases, a DVD movie for sale. Title: Jessie James Meets Frankenstein’s Daughter.

Jessie James, the legendary cowboy outlaw…meets Frankenstein’s daughter? How can you NOT want to see that? I don’t know what kind of mind-altering substances inspired this concept in the minds of scriptwriters but, well, there it is, produced in 1965, in all its wacky glory.

So forget economics for today. I’m sick of it. Let’s watch this movie instead…

Here’s the deal: Jessie James’ gang got pretty much wiped out in a shootout, so he’s a desperado along with his lone remaining gang member, Hank. Hank is a muscle man who spends more time at the gym than in the saloons, an attribute that will figure prominently in this flick.

Meanwhile, Maria, the granddaughter (not, as the title says, daughter) of the legendary Dr. Frankenstein, is proving that an acorn doesn’t fall far from the tree, and she, too, is a mad scientist. She and her assistant are on the lam from the authorities in their native Austria, so they’ve bought themselves an old Spanish mission (think castle) in the wild, cowboy west, where they perform their ghoulish experiments unencumbered by officialdom. They kidnap and kill an occasional villager in the process, but, hey, at least they bury the bodies promptly and the crime rate has gone down. Interestingly, Maria’s assistant is the only Austrian I’ve ever heard who speaks with a Mexican accent. But at least they both say laboratory the sinister, spooky way: lab-OR-it-ory. Yikes!

Talk about an action- packed movie. We’ve got Wild West shootouts, an Indian attack, a hard-nosed marshal hot on Jessie’s trail, and, over on the sci-fi side of things, the usual Frankenstein stuff going on, notably the fact that a dyspeptic assistant keeps murdering Maria’s patients with poison injections. It’s so hard to find good help these days.

In fact, Maria has become a bit of a desperado herself. She’s down to her very last brain (it’s in a jar on a table) and this sucker has to work or she’s out of business. She needs a big, strong body of a victim that can survive the necessary electrical current for the brain transplant.

Meanwhile, Hank gets shot in the chest during a bushwhacking and he doesn’t even have health insurance. He and Jessie happen across the obligatory Wild West maiden type, Juanita, who is none too hard on the eyes. Juanita points Hank to the Frankenstein place for treatment.

Now this Juanita…everyone has got the hots for her. Jessie James does. Hank the Hunk does. I was hoping that Maria Frankenstein would, too, just to spice things up a bit….but, wait, wrong movie…Anyway, Maria winds up having the hots for Jessie James. Maria is no slouch in the attractiveness department, if you go for the haughty, ice-queen type.

In fact, the only time Maria warms up is to put the moves on Jessie, right by where she buries the bodies, but Jessie brushes her off, despite the aphrodisiac effect of proximate fresh corpses.

While Hank the Hunk is being doctored by Maria for his bullet wound, she notices that the beefcake bod of his is the perfect gig for her ad hoc organ swaps.

So, much like your average HMO patient, Hank checks in for a chest wound, but winds up getting a shoddy cranialectomy from an incompetent foreigner.

The transplant makes him a zombie who is Dr. Maria Frankenstein’s slave. Maria has Hank the Zombie crush various and sundry people to death, since slave-zombies are good for that kind of thing. No word on if he’ll paint the kitchen or if he still leaves the toilet seat up.

Still, Maria is on a roll now, and she can finally bring her fury to bear on Jessie for having scorned her. She traps him in the laboratory, straps him to her operating table, and tranquilizes him in preparation for her unspeakable ends. Oh, I hate it when that happens, especially on a first date.

Yes…this looks like the end for ol’ Jessie.

But just then the marshal and Juanita show up at the castle for the rescue. It’s tough going at first: Hank puts his zombie death grip on the marshal and pops him like a ripe zit, and he’s just about to give Jessie the same treatment, when Juanita scoops up the marshal’s revolver and caps Hank mortally.

The day is saved! Juanita and Jessie smooch for a while…and the future is theirs. She wants him to settle down, make babies, sit around on a cheap couch, watch her get fat, and listen to her bitch about Social Security privatization…but he’d rather face the prospect of a violent death than the certainty of a living one.

So he rides off into the sunset to continue his outlaw ways.

And that, dear friends, is the tale of when Jessie James met Frankenstein’s granddaughter.

(Ed Stephens, Jr. is an economist and columnist for the Saipan Tribune. Ed4Saipan@yahoo.com)