Career injection
Can Frankenstein find a second lease on life? Or is he destined for the slab?
As many Victor Frankensteins have found, reanimation is a delicate game. Stitch your bits together poorly and you could end up with something like the ghastly baby/sink combo assembled by the plumber in Chris Morris’ pitch-black satire Jam. Or a studio-scaring abomination like 2015’s Victor Frankenstein, or 2014’s I, Frankenstein.
Critics reach for ready-made metaphors when reviewing Franken-stinkers: “A random hotch-potch of clumsily animated parts” tends to be the gist. But neither film deserved more effort from reviewers, especially if box-office hauls are any proof. Victor netted $34m, while I, Frankenstein could only draw $77m – and a lynching of 3% on Rotten Tomatoes.
Mary Shelley’s complex creature deserves more love and understanding than gimmick-y treatments provide. Victor writer Max Landis tried to turn the story into a bromance akin to Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes. Aiming low, much? Yet I, Frankenstein aimed lower, setting myth-heavy vampires/werewolves mash Underworld as its template. More critically still, both failed the monster: Victor left him until its climax, I, Frankenstein gave him a stick but sapped his soul. But neither is the first botched Franken-film. Previous confused rejigs range from Andy Warhol’s porn-y Flesh For Frankenstein to Stephen Sommers’ noisy monster mash Van Helsing, gimmick pics both. Even Universal Studios struggled to crowbar the creature into multi-monster contrivances – Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man (1943) wasn’t bad but House Of Frankenstein (1944) succeeds only on style.
Sure, the comic makeovers in Young Frankenstein, Abbott And Costello Meet Frankenstein and The Monster Squad prove you don’t have to play Shelley’s story straight. But Squad’s canny casting of Manhunter’s electric Tom Noonan as the monster spotlights one vital thing all three films share: an interesting creature.
Breaks from the book’s bromides are fine when you have Boris Karloff maximising poetry and poignancy, or Christopher Lee oozing threat. Kenneth Branagh’s often derided (perhaps unfairly) 1994 Frankenflick is worth revisiting for similar reasons: Branagh went for high opera but he invested total conviction in the plot’s tragedy and gave us a magnetic monster in Robert De Niro. If the monster is to be reborn as part of a rebooted monster-verse, soul and sincerity are honourable sparks of life. KH