S1E04 - Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter
About The Movie
Dr. Frankenstein's Daughter Maria has moved to the Wild West in order to continue her father's work. Meanwhile, Jesse James is NOT actually dead (as was believed) and is still out there gunslinging it up with his pal Hank, who is a walking slab of Prime Grade A Man Beef.
After being betrayed by his own brother, Jesse loses all the remaining gang members he had except Hank, who is wounded badly. Jesse winds up taking Hank to Maria Frankenstein to be patched up, but she's decided that what he needs isn't a repair, it's an upgrade.
With Hank now being called Igor and controlled/powered by an "artificial brain" that's totally not just a colander with some wires sticking out of it, Jesse finds himself quickly running out of allies, but that's ok because love will triumph over all - provided that love has remembered to bring a loaded pistol.
About the Riffs
There's a lot of westerns out there, especially ones that are in the public domain and logistically easy to riff. But like the dusty plains and sun-blasted mesas of the wild west, most of them are too dry to really have a good time riffing. Oh, and the casual constant racism. All that is to say, that's why we tend to avoid them unless they've also got a goofy hook - for instance, Frankenstein's previously unmentioned attractive-ish daughter is doing the whole Frankenstein thing again.
Funnily enough, the reason that this movie has wound up in the public domain is almost identical to the story of Night of the Living Dead - with that, the distributor forgot to include the copyright notice, whereas with this movie it was originally the second movie in a double feature bill, along with similarly themed and named "Billy The Kid Meets Dracula". The single copyright at the start of the double feature covered them while they were playing together, but once they got separated for later distribution, this half of the pairing got no notice, and so slipped into infamy - and our clutches.