A Classier Standard of Plagiarism

Inspiration, homage, and the widespread borrowing of ideas is part of how any artistic medium works, cinema included. Culture is a conversation, conversation often requires responding to something someone else said. Kurosawa made Yojimbo as a Samurai-inspired riff on Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest; Sergio Leone then made A Fistful of Dollars as a Western-flavoured riff on Yojimbo. That’s just how the game works.

That said, the Italian film industry has sometimes been, shall we say, unusually flagrant about borrowing from others. It got especially blatant in the 1980s; Bruno Mattei would release a film entitled Terminator 2 (and, even more cheekily, renamed as Aliens 2 in some markets before it eventually settled on the less ripoff-y name Shocking Dark), there’d be an Alien 2 (and Contamination, which borrowed a bunch of ideas from Alien but executed them in a sloppy way), the distributors of The Last Shark got sued because it was just a straight ripoff of Jaws, there’s the La Casa series of films passed off as Evil Dead sequels, and then there’s the absolute legion of zombie films that have been spuriously presented as being sequels to Dawn of the Dead.

However, before the 1980s the Italian film industry seems to have been in a genuinely healthier place. For this article, I’m going to take a look at a couple of Italian horror releases which take clear inspirations from other movies or movie series – but at the same time, also bring something distinctive and new to the table.

Lady Frankenstein

Baron Frankenstein (Joseph Cotten) and his research partner, Dr. Charles Marshall (Paul Muller), are on the verge of the culmination of their life’s work: restoring life to a cobbled-together corpse (Riccardo Pizzuti). How fortunate that this wonderful event should coincide with the return home of the Baron’s daughter, Tania (Rosalba Neri), after her successful qualification as a surgeon! Alas, the creature predictably runs wild and goes on a murder rampage.

Intent on conserving her father’s reputation, Tania refuses to allow Marshall to notify the police. Instead, she comes up with her own plan: make her own creature, strong enough to battle the original prototype! And it had occurred to her that her ideal man would combine the intellectual wit and obvious infatuation for her of Dr. Marshall with the youth and physicality of Thomas (Marino Masé), the castle’s manservant who has fairly significant intellectual disabilities. Alas, busybody lawman Captain Harris (Mickey Hargitay) just won’t leave well enough alone…

Lady Frankenstein, directed by Mel Welles, is a 1971 Frankenstein-themed horror movie which is part of a long tradition of riffing on Frankenstein, but seems specifically to be imitating the Hammer Studios Frankenstein series in its approach. Specifically, it mashes up the overall aesthetic of the Hammer Frankenstein series with the more explicit sensibilities of 1970s Italian B-movies. Really, this largely amounts to saying the quiet part loud; classic Hammer wasn’t afraid to be a bit titillating from time to time, but within fairly careful limits; The Horror of Frankenstein was their attempt to do a “Frankenstein, only the scientist is a hottie who fucks” movie, and it seems positively tame next to Lady Frankenstein. Not for nothing did one of the taglines read “Only the Monster She Made Could Satisfy Her Strange Desires!” – if you saw that and bought a ticket, you’d have gotten more or less what you paid for.