Blackenstein
Both the film's director William A. Levey and actor John Hart have stated that Joe De Sue was actually a one-time client of the film's producer Frank R. Saletri, a former criminal lawyer trying to break into show business.,Eddie's arms and legs were blown off by a land mine. When he is unloaded from the ambulance at Dr. Stein's home, his legs and feet are clearly visible underneath the sheet covering him from the neck down.,This film's closing credits roll in reverse: downward, instead of the usual upward.,Featured in Frankenstein: A Cinematic Scrapbook (1991),I Can't Find No One to Love Me
(uncredited)
Written and Performed by Cardella Di Milo
plays during opening credits,In 1972, some genius had the idea of a blaxploitation vampire film, Bram Stoker's legendary vampire Dracula becoming Blacula. It's clever because it rhymes.

The following year, writer/producer Frank R. Saletri tried to get in on the action with a blaxploitation version of Frankenstein called Blackenstein, which isn't such a great title. It's also not a very good film.

Blackenstein sees Dr. Winifred Walker (Ivory Stone) paying a visit to her old teacher Dr. Stein (John Hart) in the hope that he will help her fiancé Eddie (Joe De Sue), a Vietnam veteran who has lost all of his limbs in a landmine blast. Using a special DNA serum, Stein transplants new limbs onto Eddie, but his assistant Malcomb (Roosevelt Jackson), who is in love with Winifred, meddles with the treatment, turning Eddie into a violent lumbering monster.

The problem with Blackenstein is that it's not obvious whether director William A. Levey was going for genuine horror or pure camp. If he was aiming for a truly terrifying experience, he fails spectacularly, starting with Stein's hilariously clichéd mad scientist's lab, which is full of flashing lights, bubbling beakers, and crackling electrical equipment that could have come straight out of James Whale's Frankenstein forty years earlier (in fact, the special electronic effects were created by Ken Strickfaden, who also worked on Whale's movie). If he was going for tongue-in-cheek, OTT fun, he doesn't go far enough: much of his film is uneventful and extremely tedious, so much so that the director resorts to throwing in a nightclub act to try and add some pep to proceedings.

With terrible performances, inept gore (limb ripping, spilled guts, a torn out throat), and gratuitous female nudity (four bare breasts, and past-her-prime mobster's girlfriend Liz Renay in a sheer negligee), Blackenstein sounds like fun, but it takes a special kind of horror fan to sit through a film like this without wanting to throw in the towel at some point.,