Return from Death a.k.a Frankenstein 2000 (1991) Joe D'Amato Brings Horror to Life

Despite the fact that the phrase an "average Joe" remains in the lexicon of colloquialisms, in the last thirty years the name Joe has taken a drastic drop in popularity. It seems that the average on "Joe" just isn't what it used to be. Speaking of Joes that'd defy the average, there's one that I like who frequently has highs and lows above a median line, and that is Joe D'Amato. Born Aristide Massaccesi, the Italian exploitation master, who hid out under a number of Nom de plumes apart from his adopted moniker,  made an incredible string of almost 200 films before he died in 1999 at the age of sixty-two. While most of them ranged from soft-core to hard-core to oh, my, is it okay to film that?, D'Amato is best known for his horror movies, specifically Antropohagus, Buio Omega, and Absurd, but there was one that has somehow flown under my radar. So join me as Joe takes us on a futuristic ride, which looks like the 80s despite being filmed in the 90s, this is Return from Death (Ritorno Dallas morte) a.k.a Frankenstein 2000. 

Frankenstein 1970 (1958) Karloff of Future Past.

While there's little better in life than movies from the past that take a shot of what life will be like in the future, there's really nothing better than when they get brazen enough to tack the futuristic year at the end of their title. This traps the movie or TV show into a path where it can't escape feeling dated, and, quite often, this leads future viewers to see the work as nothing more than a campy projection, like how incredibly behind the times Disney's "Futureworld" looks next to the ’80s era exhibits at Epcot center. Today's film definitely falls into that trap, unless there's been a catalog with home nuclear reactors available for purchase in the past forty three years. However, it does hit on some things that were surely 70s, interest in the occult, rampant narcissism, the dominance of TV, and the fact that no matter what era it is Boris Karloff is the man. Some twenty seven years after Karloff portrayed the monster in James Whale's 1931 Frankenstein, he returned to the laboratory, but not with a bolted neck. Instead, he portrayed a descendant of the creature's creator in the 1958 film that imagines mad science at work twenty two years into the future. This is Frankenstein 1970.