It's not nice to fool with Mother Nature…it can be horrifying!Billed as a 70s re-envisioning of Tod Browning's controversial Freaks (1932), Jack Cardiff's The Freakmaker (aka Mutations) is a over-the-top zipper fest if I've ever seen one. Mixing authentic human oddities such as Félix Duarte (Frogboy) and Willie Ingram (Popeye) with rubber suited stuntmen, The Freakmaker is a mad scientist menagerie of social misanthropy.
Starring Donald Pleasence as Professor Nolter, the film focuses on Nolter's crackpot scheme to fuse humans and plants into some form of superior being. With volunteers for such experiments being far and few inbetween, Nolter turns to his students as unwilling guinea pigs for his unethical work. Assisting him in his work is a local carnival owner Lynch (Tom Baker), a horridly misshapen man himself (both inside and out) who desperately yearns for Dr. Nolter to make him normal.
Taken for what it is The Freakmaker pays homage to Browning's work, there's even a scene that mimics the infamous "one of us" chant from Freaks, but just falls too far out of reality with its cornball creeps to be taken for anything more than than what it is (even in spite of some decent acting by Pleasence and the cast). As a definite rental, the good news is that the film is available in its entirety online over at YouTube. Highly recommended for those with an interest in monsters as metaphors or fans of Donald Pleasence.
Whoa. I gotta check this one out.