At the moment of their triumph, Doctor Frankenstein (Dennis Price) and his assistant Morpho (Jess Franco himself, shaggy as always), are attacked and killed by Melissa (Anne Libert). This cloaked and mostly naked woman was - as we will later learn - born from the unholy combination of bird's egg and human sperm, a fact that explains the feathers placed on strategic places of her body and her claws as well as the cries of bird imitation coming from the film's soundtrack whenever she gets excited. I don't know about the cat sounds, her blindness or her sexualized appetite for cannibalism, though. Is it still cannibalism if the perpetrator is a bird woman?
The bird woman and an unnamed assistant have come to steal the Doctor's freshly perfected monster (Fernando Bilbao, sporting a look, but unfortunately not an acting ability, relatively close to Universal's Karloff incarnation - painted silver) for their master, the reincarnated magnetist Cagliostro (Howard Vernon). Cagliostro plans to use the monster to abduct women whom he'll then use to get the raw parts for the creation of the perfect woman he needs to breed a master race that will destroy mankind. The monster is also the chosen father of the new race, by the way.
Fortunately, Frankenstein wasn't quite dead when Melissa left him, so he has ample time to ramble on and on about his monster, evil and so on, begging his friend Doctor Seward (Alberto Dalbes) to put things right again, without going into any details before finally really dying and leaving Seward rather puzzled.
The dead Frankenstein's tendency to ramble on and on is something his daughter Vera (Beatriz Savon) - also a remarkable expert in mad science - will learn to hate. Although she's able to revive her old man for short times with an electro-magnetic gadget, it takes more than one try to get more information about his enemy out of him than long-winded rambling about said enemy's evilness and madness (and that from a guy who invented a silver monster).
She should have spared herself the stress, because the monster abducts her soon enough.
A session of Melissa ranting semi-religious sounding explanations of "the master's" will and Cagliostro staring bug-eyed later, Vera is under his mesmeric control. Now the only thing that stands between mankind and a cult of undead created by Cagliostro (reaching from the Halloween-masked to the plastic skeleton to a guy with pointy ears) is Doctor Seward. Oh dear.
Too many people still dislike Jess Franco's films, find them boring and illogical and call him a hack. One could get angry about it, if not for the fact that those Franco distractors are too be pitied for the things they are missing.
The fun with Erotic Rites of Frankenstein already starts when you are trying to find out which cut of it you have in front of you. Is it the normal European version with quite a bit of nakedness? Or the Spanish version, having clothes inserted where none belongs, and gifted with the first foray of Lina Romay into Franco's world in form of some rather pointless interludes that don't seem to have anything to do with the main plot (whatever this means in this case)? Or the naughty version for the naughty French with the naughty pornographic bits? In my case, it's the main European version, which is also supposed to be the best one.
And an excellent one it most certainly is. It's beautiful to look at if you come to with an open mind and it's also full of the dream-logic that is at the core of Franco's best work and made as hypnotic as Vernon is supposed to be by Franco's singular and strange brand of eroticism. It often seems to me here as if even Franco's well-known method (or tic, if you are unkind) of suddenly letting his camera rest for a stretch of time on some inanimate object has little to do with him getting distracted, as is often said, but more with him sexualizing objects in the same way he is sexualizing people.
This mood is par for the course in Franco's body of work, as is the pointlessness of the plot or the strange, anti-naturalistic way the man lets his actors do their work (just watch Anne Libert's fantastic/completely unhinged performance!). What's not so typical for a Franco film is the surprising amount of silliness here - there's always something happening (even if what is happening does not necessarily make any sense) and it is never quite clear how much of it you are meant to take at face value. The script seems to stem from the same kind of pulp sensibility that can be found in Paul Naschy's work, just realized here in a much more creative (and let's be honest: not boring) way.
If it weren't as obscure as it is, I'd recommend Erotic Rites of Frankenstein as a fine introduction to Franco's work. It's a treat in any case.
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