While the story of Frankenstein has spawned hundreds of feature films, only one is so dreadful to inspire a retroactive hatred of Mary Shelley: Science Crazed. Shot on 16mm in Toronto, it appears to be the only credit that has surfaced for its director, writer, producer and editor, Ron Switzer.
Pray that sentence never requires updating.
Despite promising to rock the world of biological science, Dr. Frank gets booted from the board of the Shelley Institute — a supposedly prestigious organization, yet its exterior screams “Section 8 apartment complex.” Undeterred and still wearing his Jack Nicholson sunglasses, the doctor continues his research — namely, the brunette he has tied to a lawn chair. Prepping a syringe of green fluid, he tells her, “In exactly three hours, you will be pregnant,” followed in 21 hours by birth to a baby boy. Sure as shit, she is and does. She also dies during delivery, and while Frank hardly is the type to adhere to the Hippocratic oath, you’d think he would’ve led with that.
After being zapped with (one presumes) electricity, the newborn grows at a phenomenally accelerated rate into what the credits refer to as “the Fiend” (Tony Della Ventura), a young man with pointy ears, a gimp left foot, a head wrapped in gauze, a torso in a bloody undershirt that exposes one nip, zero speech skills and, as if to mitigate all of the above, quite the set of biceps. Perhaps not believing the muscles to be mitigating enough, the Fiend kills his creator.
Dr. Frank’s assistants (Cameron Klein and Robin Hartsell) call the police … well, kind of. They ring up the local video store and ask for Inspector McCoy (Michael Sommers), a trenchcoat-and-fedora crimefighter who’s chewing Twizzlers as he stares at the VHS box for Rambo: First Blood Part II. Why he takes phone calls there is unexplained, yet makes more sense than much of what follows.
I would say that the remainder of Science Crazed finds the Fiend killing innocent victims; however, it’s more true to say the movie finds us waiting for the Fiend to find innocent victims to kill. Roaring like the MGM lion breathing directly into a tape recorder’s built-in mic, the Fiend slowly shuffles his way down the same hallway over and over and — yep! — over. Meanwhile, in a method of anti-editing, Switzer cuts to lengthy scenes of various unawares going about their business; most notoriously, two ladies exercise and exercise and — yep! — exercise, for more than 10 minutes. To call it “excruciating” is too kind by half.
One such sequence elicits accidental howls, as a woman (scientist? politician? evil incarnate?) writes on notebook paper while we hear her thoughts: “I suggest nerve gas tests be conducted in the following countries: France … Canada … United States … Italy … Japan … South Korea … Taiwan … Germany … Spain … England … Mexico … Australia … Colombia … Holland … Norway …” Now, while those words number a mere 28, Switzer’s balls of low-grade steel elongate the ellipses between them so that it takes the actress three minutes to complete her line, before half-assedly raising her hands as if to shield her face when she notices the Fiend filling up her office door frame.
Without meaning to, Switzer embodies a rule all burgeoning filmmakers should heed: Just because you shoot a ton of coverage doesn’t mean you have to use all of it. Comparing waste to want, Science Crazed runs at a 9-1 ratio — quite a pitiful showing for all of Canada … United States … Italy … —Rod Lott