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As far as I can tell, this is what happens in Jess Franco’s Rites of Frankenstein: Dr. F (Dennis Price, looking pickled) and his assistant Morpho (Jess) are just finishing up a brain transplant on his silver-bodied, flat-topped monster (Ferdinando Baldo) when a carriage rolls up to his castle and out pops Melissa (Anne Libert), a blind, nearly naked bird-woman (complete with squawks), who bursts into the lab, bites the doctor and kills him, and makes off with the monster (Jess gets his on the end of a knife wielded by her sidekick, fist-faced henchman Lucas Balboo). Melissa schleps the monster back to the seaside castle of the magician Caligostro (Howard Vernon, who appears to be wearing Morey Amsterdam’s chin scruff from Beach Party), who plans to create a race of super beings by mating the Frankenstein monster with a lady creature of his doing constructed from the bodies of local girls. Caligostro and Melissa also hold regular meetings in the castle dungeon for the Sect of Panthos, a cult devoted to pain and blood and pleasure whose members are culled from the ranks of the undead (played by a bunch of Spanish extras in skull masks, flour makeup, and in one case, a ratty pair of Spock ears).

Meanwhile, back at Casa de Frankenstein, the doctor’s daughter Vera (Vera? Yes, Vera Frankenstein, played by Beatriz Savon) comes home to find her father dead and the monster MIA. So she hooks her dad’s corpse up to a machine and reanimates him (which Price portrays with a great show of twitching and mile-long stares) to find out who killed him. Once she susses that it’s Caligostro, she and her nurse find the monster, who’s been abducting girls for his bride, and convince him to take Vera instead of the busty artist’s model he’s toting. However, Vera’s plot for revenge apparently didn’t extend beyond “Get inside Caligostro’s castle,” because once she’s discovered, the magician puts her under his spell, and forces her to build the monster’s bride. Said bride is completed, and offered up to the monster at a full-on Sect of Panthos rally – but unbeknownst to Caligostro and company, Frankenstein family friend Dr. Seward (Alberto Dalbes) and a police inspector (Daniel J. White, Franco’s longtime soundtrack composer) are storming the castle in the hopes of bringing this whole insane mess to some kind of sensible conclusion. That doesn’t happen.

Here’s the thing: Rites of Frankenstein was one of three pictures Jess made in Spain and Portugal in 1972 with essentially the same cast and locations (Dracula vs. Frankenstein and La Fille du Dracula). None of them make a lick of sense, but if you know anything about Jess Franco, it’s that for every one of his movies that has some semblance of a plot or style or eroticism (like, say, Venus in Furs or Succubus), there are about ten others that were made for rent money and resemble nothing more than the filmed results of a long weekend with costumes at Jess’s house. You can’t really get upset about it, or bemoan that this unsung talent wasted his time making silly monster flicks like this one when he could have made “great art”; Jess liked to work (still does), and he went where the money was. In this case, it was to make a Frankenstein movie with not a stitch of script, a touch of kink (the Monster whips Vera and henchman Balbo in a room filled with poisoned needles) and as quickly as possible. Despite these circumstances, Jess’s knack for interesting visuals does get a few shining moments – Caligostro’s castle looms impressively from its gloomy beachfront location, and there are a handful of shots of the Sect of Panthos stumbling through a foggy forest that manage to distract you from the myriad of confusing and stupid moments in the film (most notably a subplot involving Jess’s then-new girlfriend Lina Romay, who made her movie debut here, and wears far too much clothing as a gypsy girl with some kind of connection to Caligostro). And Anne Libert, as the bird woman Melissa, really throws herself into the part; her freaky character has an animal sexuality that gives the film a much-needed shot in the arm every time she appears on screen. So even if you’re the snobbiest of Franco fans, there’s something to chew on in Rites of Frankenstein. But you know, Jess always takes care of his fans.