Villain(s)  Reanimated monster, Baron Victor von Frankenstein

Actor(s):  Boris Karloff, Tom Duggan, Jana Lund, Donald Barry

Brief Description  Frankenstein 1970 is a 1958 American science-fiction horror film directed by Howard W. Koch. Notable for starring horror icon Boris Karloff, it represents a unique historical footnote as the only film where Karloff plays the mad scientist, Baron Victor von Frankenstein, rather than the monster. Shot in crisp black-and-white CinemaScope over a mere eight days on a shoestring budget, the film's title was chosen to give it a futuristic, "atomic age" appeal popular in late-1950s cinema.

Plot:
The story follows Baron Victor von Frankenstein (Karloff), the last descendant of the infamous family. Victor is heavily disfigured, a result of being tortured by Nazis during World War II for refusing to cooperate with their experiments. Destitute and needing a massive sum of money to purchase an atomic reactor to finalize his family's life-giving experiments, Victor compromises: he leases his gloomy ancestral castle to an American television crew. The crew—led by director Douglas Rowe (Don "Red" Barry), publicist Mike Shaw (Tom Duggan), and actress Carolyn Hayes (Jana Lund)—arrives to film a meta-horror documentary drama about the original Frankenstein monster. In a clever meta-twist for 1958, the film opens on a girl fleeing a monster, which is quickly revealed to just be the TV crew shooting their show.

Unbeknownst to the television crew, they are exactly what the Baron needs to harvest fresh body parts. While the crew shoots upstairs, Victor works in his secret basement laboratory utilizing a hidden nuclear cyclotron. He restarts his ancestor's work using a nuclear atomic steam generator. As the crew members begin "disappearing" one by one, Victor systematically murders them—along with his faithful butler—to harvest vital organs, eyeballs, and limbs to piece together a new creation. The resulting creature (played by Mike Lane) is wrapped extensively in bandages, closely resembling a traditional mummy. The creature is initially brought to life without eyes, requiring Victor to transplant a fresh set to give it sight. Once fully functional, Victor uses hypnosis to command the monster to carry out his bidding, including capturing the lead actress, Carolyn.

The movie culminates in a tragic, chaotic finale typical of classic gothic horror, updated for the atomic age. The monster eventually breaks free from Victor's hypnotic control and turns on its creator. As they struggle in the underground laboratory, a safety protocol fails, and both Baron Frankenstein and the monster are engulfed and destroyed by a blast of radioactive steam. In a final twist ending, authorities listen to an audio recording left behind by the Baron. As the bandages are cut away from the dead monster's head, it is revealed that Victor designed the creature's face to be a perfect, undistorted replica of his own youthful face before he was disfigured by war. To save money, the castle sets used in the movie were actually leftover from the Warner Bros. biographical drama Too Much Too Soon (1958).