Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster

This is one of those rare, seemingly inescapable (back in the day) Saturday morning Creature Features, with a razor-thin script and tons of stock footage to pad the 60 minutes-plus running time. Space aliens (including a trollish science officer who is the spitting image and voice of Jon Lovitz) land on Earth to abduct nubiles for breeding purposes. On their way down, they knock a NASA missile out of the sky. The missile contains a prototype robot astronaut who hits the dirt all disoriented and sociopathic. By the name of Frank, and with half his face reduced to smoking circuits, he wanders about Puerto Rico killing anyone who doesn’t like his looks. Meanwhile, his creators cruise around San Juan pitching woo on a Vespa in between trying to track him down. There’s also a sorta cool space monster onboard the spaceship for the climactic smackdown. Not expecting to ever see this on DVD (it was filmed in 1965), it seems almost churlish to complain that there are several abrupt dialogue dropouts throughout, but we’re not talking Mamet here. Director Robert Gaffney does what he can with the budget/material and shows some skill at creating an effective sequence or two, and uses the stock footage to better effect than one would expect.