In the race to ride the coattails of Blacula’s modest success, 1973’s Blackenstein emerged like a shambling, stitched-together afterthought — the cinematic equivalent of a failed 8th-grade science fair project reanimated by static cling and bad intentions. It’s a film that boldly asks, “What if Frankenstein’s monster were Black?” — and then forgets to ask any other questions… like “Should this movie exist?”
Let us be clear: this isn’t just a bad movie. It’s a tragically inert monster, stitched from clunky dialogue, plot holes large enough to swallow a scream queen whole, and acting so wooden you half expect termites to burst through the screen. If Blacula had style, soul, and something resembling a heartbeat, Blackenstein is its brainless cousin who wandered in late, got confused, and left carnage — and audiences — in a sleepy, sluggish daze.
A Mad Lab Without a Pulse
The “plot” (generously speaking) involves Eddie Turner, a Vietnam vet who loses all four limbs to a landmine. Fortunately, his fiancée is Dr. Winifred Walker — a Nobel Prize–adjacent geneticist who takes him to her old mentor, the inexplicably Caucasian and castle-dwelling Dr. Stein. Dr. Stein, whose science seems to involve ping pong balls and dry ice, promises to regrow Eddie’s arms and legs using something called “DNA solution,” a term screamed at the screen like it means something.
But wait — Dr. Stein’s assistant Malcomb (who gives off the vibe of a sleazy lounge lizard in a lab coat) is also in love with Winifred, and in an act of romantic sabotage, he swaps the clean DNA with “bad RNA,” turning poor Eddie into a glowering monster with Neanderthal brows, hair that defies physics, and the agility of a dying Roomba.
What follows is… well, nothing much. Eddie, now Blackenstein, lumbers through dimly lit neighborhoods disemboweling victims and returning to his cot each morning, unbothered by the giant chunks of flesh stuck in his teeth. No one seems to notice the murders despite the fact that the body count is rapidly climbing and all of them happen within a four-block radius of Dr. Stein’s front door.
Frankenstein’s Monster… by Way of Daytime TV
Let’s talk about the monster: Joe De Sue, an amateur actor in the truest, flattest sense of the word, plays Eddie with all the emotional range of a parking meter. Once he transforms into Blackenstein, the performance somehow gets worse. He lurches from scene to scene like he’s rehearsing for a haunted hayride — slow, methodical, and totally devoid of tension.
His look is less Boris Karloff and more “1970s taxidermy experiment.” Sporting a jet-black, squared-off Afro and a puffy turtleneck, Blackenstein doesn’t so much terrify as confuse. He resembles an action figure left too close to a heater. It’s as though someone described Frankenstein’s monster to a barber who had never seen a horror movie but had seen Shaft once.
Science! (Sort of?)
The science in Blackenstein would make Mary Shelley weep and then sue. DNA is thrown around like seasoning in a low-rent cooking show. “Just inject more DNA!” someone barks, as if DNA were Gatorade and not a complex molecular structure. The lab looks like it was designed by someone whose entire understanding of genetics came from a cereal box.
Meanwhile, Malcomb’s motivations are murky at best. He’s jealous. Or evil. Or just wants to inject things with weird glop. His downfall comes after a hilariously half-hearted attempted assault on Winifred, followed by him shooting the monster six times in the chest with no effect. The monster strangles him — one of the film’s rare moments of karmic justice.
Direction, Pacing, and Other Missing Elements
William Levey, the director, seems unsure whether he’s making horror, science fiction, blaxploitation, or a cautionary tale about what happens when you let interns write screenplays. Pacing is glacial, dialogue is filler, and action scenes unfold like tranquilizer-fueled interpretive dance. Entire sequences seem to occur simply to fill time, like the final scene in which Blackenstein slowly chases a screaming woman through an empty warehouse for what feels like 47 real-time minutes.
The musical score, a jazzy, inappropriate mess, plays like the soundtrack to a detective series that was canceled mid-pilot. Scenes meant to inspire dread are instead accompanied by saxophones that would be more at home in a smoky jazz club. It’s a tonal disaster, as though the editor had no access to mood-setting music and just picked tracks labeled “generic funk.”
The Real Horror Is Behind the Camera
The most tragic thing about Blackenstein isn’t the story, or the acting, or the laughably bad monster makeup. It’s the wasted potential. The film squanders a chance to actually explore the trauma of returning Black veterans, racial identity, or scientific ethics. Instead, it chucks those possibilities into the same trash bin where it keeps spare limbs and script rewrites.
This was meant to be a counterpart to Blacula, a film that, despite its camp, managed to weave race, identity, and horror into something both entertaining and culturally relevant. Blackenstein, on the other hand, reads like a mad-lib horror film assembled in one afternoon by people who hadn’t spoken to each other.
Final Diagnosis: Dead on Arrival
Watching Blackenstein is like undergoing slow, experimental surgery with no anesthesia — clunky, painful, and ultimately pointless. It’s a film that wants to be both socially aware and terrifying but ends up being neither. With cardboard performances, laughably inept science, and a monster who looks like he wandered in from a wig store fire sale, it’s a film best remembered as a cautionary tale… or not remembered at all.
Rating: 0.5 out of 5 DNA solutions
Because sometimes lightning doesn’t strike twice — and sometimes it doesn’t even bother to show up.
