FRANKENSTEIN

Directed by Paul Morrissey (A Bryanston Pictures Release)

Paul Morrissey's aesthetic journey from Flesh to Frankenstein is one from inventiveness to pretense and vacuousness. Other directors who have started with as little as Morrissey have made the transition from independent to consolidated director without selling their souls in the process. John Cassavettes is one example. Husbands and Minnie and Moscowitz are the same continuation of his uncompromised studies of people that he made (Shadows bnd Faces) when all he had were friends for actors and weekends to shoot film.

But the vety aiisterity, the spareness, what Marsha Kinder and Beverley Houston call “the new American naturalism” of Trash and Heat and their deglamorized subjects have simply been bloated in to shallow posing, pretentious parody and hollow camp in Frankenstein.