Experience Mary Shelly's horror classic through a Vietnam-shattered, micro-budget, entrail-smothered lens. While Blackenstein has some name recognition, few have actually seen the film, or know its bizarre origin story befitting a Frankenstein movie. In 1973, criminal-lawyer-turned-wannabe-monster-movie-mogul Frank R. Saletri wrote and produced this grindhouse hit about a Black soldier mortally wounded in Vietnam transformed into a rampaging monster by a mad scientist in Los Angeles. Almost a decade later, Saletri himself would be murdered gangland-style in a crime that remains debated — and unsolved — to this day. John Hart (The Lone Ranger), 1940s Hollywood starlet Andrea King (The Beast with Five Fingers) and even former mob moll/stripper Liz Renay (Desperate Living) star in this jaw-dropper, restored for the first time by the American Genre Film Archive.