FLESH FOR FRANKENSTEIN (1973)

"But what we really need now is the perfect...nasum!"

Weird 1970's retelling of the Frankenstein story.  This time around, Udo Kier is Dr. Frankenstein.  He's married to his sister and they live in a huge castle.  Also, for some unexplained reason, she doesn't have any eyebrows.  It kinda freaked me out.

They have a loveless marriage (probably due to the eyebrow shortage), so she gets her kicks by banging random men while he gets off on fucking corpses.  He's also obsessed with "creating" the perfect male and the perfect female out of miscellaneous body parts.  He's close to finishing, but he just can't find "the perfect...nasum".  Another worry is that his male zombie will have a low sex drive, so when Frankenstein mistakenly believes that a local young man is a raging cocksmith (due to an incident at the whorehouse), Frankenstein steals his head.  This doesn't sit well with the young man's best friend and current Mrs. Frankenstein plaything, Joe Dallesandro.  Joe and his wildly out of place American accent set off to solve The Mystery of My Best Friend's Missing Head.

FLESH FOR FRANKENSTEIN is way too slow for it's own good.  I don't mind slow movies...if they have an interesting story, but, other than like two or three scenes, FFF is a bore.  I was hoping for some over the top body part chopping/swapping and wild sex...instead, all I got was Udo Kier talking and making sex faces while wiggling his hands inside a corpse.  Yawn.

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JOHNNY MNEMONIC (1995)

I've heard some pretty negative things about this film over the years.  That's probably why it's taken me 20 years finally watch it.  So...were all of those negative comments accurate?  Yeah, pretty much.

Set in the year 2021, Johnny is a data courier who stores data in his 80 gigabit hard drive enhanced brain. On the way to meet a customer in Beijing, he uses a "doubler" to increase his capacity to 160GB. Unfortunately, the package is 320GB so Keanu concentrates really hard and crams that 320GB into the 160GB hard drive.  As a result the data starts "seaping" into his brain and causing him to react violently to bright lights...just like a Mogwai.  Even worse, is right after he downloads the package a group of hitmen bust in and start killing everybody (one of the killers uses a thumb laser lasso!).  Johnny escapes and now the gangsters are after him.  The only person that can save him is a cyborg dolphin in New Jersey. Of course.

I was hoping that JOHNNY MNEMONIC would surprise me and be actually good or maybe silly to the point of being funny.  Sadly though, it's so bland that it's difficult to have much of an opinion about it one way or the other.  The story comes off more confusing than it actually is, the future looks like shit, the CGI is ridiculous, zero nudity, TV show level action scenes, Henry Rollins as a doctor, an "eye phone", Keanu Reeves acting like he just saw the lines for the first time 30 seconds before they yelled "Action".

Good for a few chuckles, but honestly, outside of morbid curiosity or campy train wreck thrills I can't think of much reason to waste your time watching this movie.