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Date Posted: 17:17:29 06/27/01 Wed
Author: Griff
Subject: Hey Rich, I got your parcel today, nice one!! Definite highlights were your sketches - I haven't laughed so hard in ages! My stomach actually hurt after watching the Movie Focus one, it was so bloody funny! Top stuff. I've watched half of Shaft but I fell asleep through it, and when I woke up I did this Curse of Frankenstein review, so it's shite cos I'm still half asleep. I did another review this morning, so to say thanks for the top goodies, here's a Frankenstein double!


THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN


Watching The Curse of Frankenstein is like being told the plot of the book by someone who read it years ago and can’t quite remember what happens. It sticks faithfully to Mary Shelley’s story for one word of the title, kicks off with a few scenes that run parallel to the book but have completely different settings, rambles on for more than half the film before the monster puts in an appearance and then derails itself completely by changing everything. It’s all just a little off, and it’s oddly distracting.

For instance, whereas Victor in the book (here played by Peter Cushing) is inspired to bring life to dead flesh by his teacher, his tutor in the movie, Paul, is an equal partner in his experiments before deciding it’s morally wrong. Where Victor spills his story to a ship’s captain in the book, here it’s to a priest in a prison cell. The creature’s resurrection happens accidentally here while Victor’s trying to convince Paul (Robert Urquhart) to help him. The creature escapes the house and encounters the blind man, but is soon shot and killed, and later brought back to life a second time.

All these little changes distance the movie from the book scene by scene, before it goes off in its own direction and misses the point entirely. The tragedy of the creature destroying Victor’s family has been completely chopped out, replaced with... nothing, so the heart of the story is gone. The movie takes another wrong step by having Victor kill a professor in order to use his brain, then have the creature kill a blackmailing maid – by making Victor a murderer, any sympathy for the consequences of his experiment disappears. In fact, he deserves everything he gets; he’s conniving, devious and mean. The monster looks – well, there’s no other word for it – shite, but sure is horrific; just look at that pudding bowl haircut! He’s even more two-dimensional than in James Whale’s film and never engenders sympathy, hatred or fear because he hardly does anything.

With the smaller changes giving way to these bigger changes, Shelley’s cautionary tale becomes a rather melodramatic load of old nothing that fails to make the story mean something. By using the bare bones of Shelley’s book – obsessed scientist creates a man that eventually destroys him – without taking its moral centre, the movie just becomes a shallow ramble through the Frankenstein cliches. Even taken on its own merits it’s seriously average; this is a blandly written, rambling film that’s interesting really only for being the first ever horror movie from Hammer. Directed by Terence Fisher, starring Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, its place in horror history is secure but that doesn’t make it any good.




I WAS A TEENAGE FRANKENSTEIN


I Was a Teenage Frankenstein is one of those annoying movies that doesn’t seem to realise the potential in its own material. A kind of sister movie to the dull I Was a Teenage Werewolf, made the same year, this is rubbishy fun with Whit Bissell, master of the badly-written scientific proclamation, as a distant relative of the original Frankenstein who decides to resurrect his ancestor’s experiments – so the movie should really be called I Was a Teenage Frankenstein’s Monster.

Setting up a lab in his basement, Bissell’s Frankenstein sets about collecting various teenage body parts in an attempt to make a creature that will blend into a crowd rather than stomp about the village throwing little girls into lakes. The pacing is pretty slow-going in places, the acting isn’t going to cause any jaws to drop and it’s a pretty obvious retread of the famous story that doesn’t really offer up any monumental surprises – unless you really are taken aback when the creature turns on his creator and breaks out of the house – but the silly dialogue is where this really hits the spot.

How can you not like a film that includes such gems as: “After I’ve grafted on your new face, life for you will really begin!” and “Hands and legs are back on his body, I’ve kept my promise,” and “Only a few parts - normal preparation for an experiment that will determine the fate of the world!”? The tongue-in-cheek, hokey delivery is where the movie scores best and it’s full of stuff like that. How about the scene where Frankenstein is explaining his project to his colleague and right outside, at that exact moment, a car full of teenagers crashes, giving him the body he needs? Or the one where he explains that burning or burying the body parts risks exposing his plans and reveals his method of disposal – a crocodile in the basement!

What’s frustrating is that the two most successful elements of the film – the humour and the rather downplayed horror of Frankenstein keeping his creature locked in the basement, making him sleep in a morgue drawer – aren’t put to the use they might be. The screenplay doesn’t crank either of them up to the level where the movie really breaks out and so instead it becomes a flatly directed B-movie cash-in flick with an uncertain tone. It’s fun but not enough fun, daft but not daft enough, promising but not satisfying. It’s better than Werewolf though.



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