On the surface it's a fun horror film for teen viewers. But the film also gives a terrifying portrait of the worst form of diabolical father for whom everyone exists only to serve his own needs. The son is created to obey him unconditionally and he's quickly taught to say "Sir." The wife is treated equally as bad, or even worse. The film also gives a powerful portrait of the parasitic wife who has no life apart from her husband's. Like the other films in this cycle, it challenges the idealized image of the male authority figure common in the sitcoms of the 1950s and in the sociological jargon familiar in the book and film version of Rebel without a Cause, and before that in the Brando flick, "The Wild One." Such authority was also idealized and mocked in Stephen Sondheim's great lyric, "Gee, Officer Krupke," from West Side Story. As in the other films in this "teenage" monster cycle, there's a barely developed homosexual subtext between the mad father figure and his weak-kneed assistant, especially obvious in this film and in the later "How to Make a Monster" where the two actually seem to live together, based on a suggestion in the final color sequence of that film. Obviously as cinema none of these films rank that high. But as social commentary they are far more important than their tongue-in-cheek titles would suggest.
Review of I Was a Teenage Frankenstein
