The US space program is in trouble (again). Their new-fangled Mars rockets tend to explode in orbit, without anyone knowing why or seeming all that interested to know why, as long as they can shoot another rocket.
Dr. (who knows of what) Alan Steele (James Karen), though, is a secret humanitarian and has developed an android to pilot the next Mars mission. Disguised as Airforce pilot Frank Saunders (Robert Reilly) for a public that just wouldn't understand sending a machine up when so many men are willing to risk their lives (oh yes, this is the film's explanation), the poor machine isn't much luckier than its predecessors. Which comes as no surprise when you know that the rockets are shot down by an alien spaceship carrying the last remnants of a race of hairless, pointy-eared gnomes and their leaders, The Princess (Marylin Hanold) and Dr. Nadir (Lou Cutell), in desperate search for "breeding stock" for their after a war womenless race. It's only after shooting Frank's rocket down that the aliens finally understand they are destroying manned spacecraft - therefore leaving possible witnesses to their presence. It seems best to just start with phase 2 - breeding stock acquisition - of their plan (number 9?), while searching for Frank.
The android itself is barely functioning, but whiling his time away with the killing of passersby and the molesting of women. How will it all end?
With a lot of stock footage, that much I can promise.
What begins like a candidate for the elusive club of brain-addled masterpieces like Robot Monster, Eegah and Plan 9 From Outer Space soon implodes into a truly astonishing mass of stock footage, footage of people driving around, stock footage of people driving around, stock footage of the US army, stock footage of the US army driving around etc etc etc, without the traditional filler minutes of people talking and talking and then talking some more usually added to make the proceedings a little less boring. Now, I'm used to films like this having their share of filler, but Frankenstein Meets beats almost every other movie in this respect - (and in this respect only). Someone less sunny and more cynical than me could think that the production didn't have enough money to shoot more than half an hour of actual own footage.
If you are very very patient, you'll find some cracktastic pearls here, though, like the absurd overpronounciation of every utterance our aliens practice (I am quite sure Dr. Nadir is speaking in boldface) or the sexualized evil gloating the good Doctor and the Princess practice while watching the "electric purification" of bikini-clad women (who, by the way, are the most willing prisoners one could possibly wish for). Or the US military operating to the soundtrack of (bad) surf music.
But now I'm letting the film sound entertaining, something it absolutely isn't, unless you are an expert viewer of the painfully bad or a masochist, or a masochistic expert viewer of the painfully bad, like me. Normal people will be rather bored, I'm afraid.
Oh, and the "Space Monster" of the title is a seldom seen guy in a ratty gorilla suit wearing a Halloween mask whom the Princess uses to discipline their henchpeople. The film prefers to show us stock footage instead.
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