transfeminine frankenstein’s review published on Letterboxd:
Frankenstein Island is a slow and incompetent mess, but unlike most slow and incompetent messes, it seems to have at least some ambition. While the plot is ludicrous (alien Amazon women?), writer-director-producer Jerry Warren occasionally does very interesting, creative things with it. I loved the special effects, as cheesy and imperfect as they were, and lab design reminded me enough of a set from Batman for me to dislike in any capacity. What confuses me the most is how out of time this film seems to be. It would be perfect chums with mid-60s dreck like House on Bare Mountain, but this came out in the 80s. It's essentially a the same thing as Warren's own 1960 film Teenage Zombies—sincerely, what on earth in 1981 made him think that the market was ripe for recycling it into Frankenstein Island? The slasher genre had just exploded in popularity and here he is trotting out a goddamn nudie-cutie.
Having a female Dr. Frankenstein, in this case Sheila, is what made this watch so relevant for my current thesis research. It's interesting here how she spends the entire film deferring to the expertise of other men—her great-great grandfather, her bicentarian husband, and the marooned doctor—to where she barely has any more agency than the bikini-clad and monosyllabic Amazons. She is also not seeking to create new life, but to prolong the life of one "great man," her husband. As I watch more films with female Frankensteins, I'll be eyeing whether a pattern develops in this regard.