Frankenbabes From Beyond The Grave! had its world première (both in-person and virtually) in the Short Film Block #4 at Panic Fest, 30 Mar 2025
As TV news in the background reports a tour bus accident that killed an entire burlesque troupe travelling to Leather Dommy Mommy Con, Dr Channard (Jimmi Simpson) and Father Timothy Vanes (Dana Ashbrook) work fast stitching the women’s corpses back together, pumping them with a cocktail of will-sapping brain serum and ‘Jordan River Holy Water’, and galvanising them back to life. This is the two men’s first unauthorised experiment in stripping “wicked, disobedient… whores” of their free agency, and transforming them into helpmates, wives and mothers who live only to serve men. Yet the will of these eight independent women (Penny Barber, Bunni Black, Melissa Drew, Hex Hypoxia, Stephanie Michelle, Little Puck, Savannah Solo, Cheyenne Wise) is strong, and things do not go quite to plan.
Right from the form of its title (including exclamation mark!), you just know that Frankenbabes From Beyond the Grave! is reassembling and resurrecting all the lowest sensibilities of the B-movie, and writer/director Andrew Bowser (Onyx the Fortuitous and the Talisman of Souls, 2023) broadly – and I mean broadly – delivers on this promise with outrageous gore, high-camp performances and day-glo visuals. The key influences here are not so much Mary Shelley’s – or even James Whale’s – foundational horror narrative, but rather the more gonzo pastiches of the Frankenstein myth found in, say, Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein (1974) Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator (1985) and Frank Henenlotter’s Frankenhooker (1990). Meanwhile Channard, who is being used by Vanes, gets his name from the mad, manipulated antagonist of Tony Randel’s utterly mad (indeed, asylum-set) Hellbound: Hellraiser II (1988).
Once resuscitated, the burlesque troupe might show its grotesque stitching, but already Vanes and Channard represent a monstrous merger of religion and science, held flimsily together by common principles of partriarchy and profit, yet still clearly coming apart at the seams. For, despite all its comic silliness and retro stylings, Frankenbabes From Beyond the Grave! is very much about the here and now, poking at the scars of America’s current culture wars, and reconstituting from Vanes and Channard’s lucrative, misogynistic ambitions the severed parts of Project 2025 and the attempted erosion under Trump of women’s rights to anything other than servile ‘trad’ wifedom.
In Bowser’s optimistic fantasy, at least, women are (re)empowered with the freedom to do as they please with their minds and bodies, and to ‘serve men’ only in a very specialised sense. As for the reality, we shall have to see where the United States are headed – but for now, they are being governed with a self-serving venality, entitled hypocrisy, and casual disregard for women’s autonomy that Vanes and Channard, if they had any powers of introspection, might recognise as their own. Though certainly borrowing its familiar tropes from genre, Frankenbabes From Beyond the Grave! is altogether too knowingly daft to (re)constitute horror – but it does dramatise the nightmare of the incumbent Republicans, faced with women who are much smarter than they will ever be, and who are out (and proud) for revenge.
strap: Andrew Bowser’s retro-styled horror comedy short sutures contemporary American politics into its allegory of women’s galvanised resistance and revenge
© Anton Bitel
