frankenstein

Frankenstein (2025)

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In the Iliad, Patroclus gives a speech about the two jars that sit before Zeus, and from them he dispenses upon humans either gifts or detriments. I like to imagine Guillermo del Toro sitting in one of the enviable throne-like pieces of film memorabilia that fill his home (which he calls “The Bleak House”) and sitting with two jars before him from which he makes his films. One is labelled “Cool,” and it is from this vessel that he dispenses all of his clever ideas, slick visuals, and fascinating character work. From the other, which is labelled “Corny,” he pours in many of the things that his deriders cite as his weaknesses, which is unfair; the resultant cocktail between the two is what matters, and sometimes the stuff that makes it corny is the stuff that makes it great. Not this time, though. 

When I texted Brandon (who has a more positive take that you can read here) after leaving the theater with a message that was, essentially, “Oh no, I didn’t like it,” that thread continued into the next day as we discussed that eternal del Toro combination of Corny vs. Cool. Brandon likened it to native English-speaking critics have taken note of actors’ tendencies to go broader in Pedro Almodóvar’s films “of late,” whereas Spanish-speaking critics have stated that this is a matter of perception and that all of his films are like that, it’s just not clear when it’s not in English. And he’s not wrong; we had a similar discussion about Bong Joon Ho’s Mickey 17 being a more “obvious” and less subtle picture than Parasite and how we may simply be viewing them through different lenses unintentionally. For me, however, nothing in any of the performances here is a problem, as they’re all appropriately grave. Of special note are Charles Dance and David Bradley, the former essentially playing Tywin Lannister again (and it’s pitch perfect as always) and the latter playing very strongly against type as a kindly old man, rather successfully. For me, it’s the other choices that make this one feel too tonally inconsistent to be as immersive as it ought to be. 

The film is structured as the novel is, with a wraparound story in the glacial north in which a ship captain finds Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac) on the ice and takes him aboard, where the dying man tells his story. Raised by a mostly absent surgeon father (Dance) who was domineering and abusive when he was present, young Victor doted on and was doted upon by his mother (Mia Goth), whose dark hair and eyes she shared with her son and which Victor knew his father despised. When Mrs. Frankenstein dies giving birth to a boy, William, Victor quickly gets relegated to second favorite child, and there’s an abyss between silver and gold, which is exacerbated by Victor’s belief that his father allowed his mother to die; the boys are split up as children following the death of their father and don’t see one another again until adulthood. Victor takes his name literally and seeks to find victory over death, and when we see him as an adult, he is before a hearing at medical school regarding his ghoulish and grisly reanimation attempts. In attendance is Henrich Harlander (Christoph Waltz), whose niece Elizabeth (Goth again) is engaged to William (Felix Kammerer), and who uses this as an excuse to see Victor and offer the virtually limitless resources his war profiteering has given him to fund Victor’s experiments. In all of this, Victor meets Elizabeth and is utterly taken with her, and he begins to engineer reasons to keep her and William apart, and although she is interested in his friendship, she rejects him utterly when he confesses. Amidst this, Victor has been preparing his lab and his patchwork specimen. 

Once the monster (Jacob Elordi) is brought to life, Victor at first seems interested in teaching his creation life, but when the being only manages to learn the word “Victor,” Frankenstein becomes impatient and starts to abuse him. After a chance meeting between the creation and Elizabeth and William, Victor floods his laboratory tower with kerosene and destroys it, his last minute regret and attempt to save his “son” leaving him mangled and in need of prosthetic limbs. Interspersed throughout this narrative, we’re also checking in with the ship that Victor is aboard and where he is recounting this story; although the captain believes that they are safe due to the monster having disappeared beneath the ice following a prolonged attack sequence, he reappears and eventually makes his way aboard, where he begins to tell the story from his perspective, and how he sought his vengeance. 

There was a little too much of this film that feels like it was shot on The Volume, and I was disappointed by that. This makes sense for the opening sequence, wherein a mass of sailors are attempting to break the ice which has frozen their ship to the surface, only to be set upon by an apparently unkillable monster who goes down hard (and not permanently). It makes less sense when we’re talking about the courtyard outside of Frankenstein’s tower, which sees enough use that it would be a great practical location. Get some styrofoam, carve out some clefts, age it to look like stone, and get a little atmosphere up in this place. Worse still is the tower’s entryway/foyer, which would have looked so good if it had been done practically, but instead kind of looks like someone tried to recreate the Valkenheiser mansion from Nothing But Trouble using the software that rendered the barrel sequence from The Hobbit: Whichever One That Was. The reason for this, of course, is that we need to be able to fill that space with dozens, if not hundreds, of kerosene canisters so we can have our big explosion; that is to say, it has to be disposable, and it looks like it. 

It wouldn’t be so out of place if the attention to detail in other places, like Victor’s laboratory filled with previous experiments, which looks like a del Toro dream workshop. The dungeon in which the creation is held is also strikingly imagined, and I like that quite a bit, and we spend enough time in the captain’s quarters that we get to get a real sense of it, and it feels real. Beyond set design (when they bothered), the costume designer went to town on crafting a series of elegant gowns for Mia Goth to wear. They’re all hoop skirts and several have relatively simple sewing designs, but they’re all composed of shimmering fabrics in beautiful patterns like peacock feathers, all in a green hue. Each one is utterly sumptuous, and if there is to be awards buzz about Frankenstein, I hope it’s for this if nothing else. 

Thematically, the film’s structure holds up. The biggest throughline within the film is fatherhood, as one would expect. Victor’s father is a cruel man who thinks himself fair; he married his wife for her dowry and estate and never really thought through what he would do once this was accomplished, other than to attempt to mold his son in his own image through a childhood that is all stick and no carrot. He’s successful, as Victor himself never seems to have given a moment’s thought to what to do with his creation once he bestows it with life, and when his “son” learns slowly, he beats the poor thing just as he was beaten, except with a rage in place of his own father’s placid disappointment. Both sons demonstrate their defiance in exactly the same way, by taking the instrument of “discipline,” Victor taking up the riding crop his father uses while challenging his father to admit to either being fallible or killing his wife, and the creation taking the bar that Victor holds and bending it with his superhuman strength. That’s all well and good, and it works. But what doesn’t are some of the more spectacle-oriented elements. When Victor destroys the tower, there’s a legitimately tense scene of his terrified big baby boy trying to escape, but once he’s out of his chains, it’s all CGI fire and Avatar bodies flying down a 480p chute. It made me think of the “sleigh ride of friendship” that the human lead and the Predator have at the end of Alien vs. Predator (derogatory). Why does it look like this? 

That mixture of corny versus slick is hard to get right. Sometimes, you can get it right in the wrong amounts and make something like Pacific Rim, which gets a mixed response from the general public but becomes an utterly pivotal Defining Work for a subset of diehard fans. Sometimes, you get it right in the right amounts and you get something that’s cheesy but beloved by most, like The Shape of Water. Sometimes you just get it absolutely perfectly right, and Pan’s Labyrinth emerges. Look, I made a (highly subjective and admittedly corny) chart:

This one just didn’t work for me. That doesn’t mean it won’t work for you, though, or that there’s anything wrong with it, objectively. At its length, it might actually function perfectly as a two-part miniseries, split down the middle between Victor and the creature’s stories; it might give you a chance to savor it a little and feel less browbeat by it. It certainly isn’t going to stop me from seeing whichever concoction del Toro mixes next. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Kill-O-Rama 2025

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Without question, the local MVP this Halloween season has been the original uptown location of The Prytania, which has provided the bulk of local repertory horror programming in the lead-up to today’s spooky holiday. Not only was the single-screen theater’s regular Classic Movie Sunday slot repurposed to feature Halloween fare this month (Dial M for Murder, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, The Haunting, 13 Ghosts, The Bride of Frankenstein, and Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein — all Swampflix favorites), but The Prytania also doubled down on its Spooky Season Content by staging a week-long film festival of classic horror titles. In collaboration with local MVP horror fest The Overlook, The Prytania launched a “Kill-O-Rama” lineup midway through the month, making up for the relatively anemic output of exciting new horror releases currently making the rounds. This year’s Kill-O-Rama lineup included perennial Spooky Season classics The Exorcist & Halloween, a 30th anniversary screening of George Romero’s Day of the Dead, multiple alternate-ending variants of the murder-mystery crowdpleaser Clue, and a victory-lap rerun of their 70mm print of Sinners (which they’ve been heroically exhibiting all year). It was the exact kind of Halloween-season programming I’m on the hunt for every October, conveniently gathered in one neighborhood theater. Although I was unable to give this year’s Kill-O-Rama the full mind-melting marathon treatment I tend to give other festivals, I was able to catch a few screenings from the program, reviewed below. Here’s hoping that this festival format returns to The Prytania next Halloween season, when I can plan ahead to live in the theater for a week solid — ignoring all non-scary-movie obligations in my schedule until All Hallows’ Eve has passed.

Interview with the Vampire (1994)

Sometimes, procrastination pays off. It’s likely shameful that I hadn’t seen the 1994 adaptation of Anne Rice’s vampire saga Interview with the Vampire until this year, especially since I lived here through the 90s era when the French Quarter was overrun with gothy vampire cosplay inspired by Rice’s local cachet. It was especially fun to watch with a New Orleans audience, though, so I’m glad I didn’t spoil the experience by diluting it with ad breaks on cable. There’s a moment late in the runtime when Brad Pitt’s woe-is-me vampire Louis announces that he is traveling to reunite with his jilted master (Tom Cruise, as the dastardly Lestat) on Prytania Street, and the crowd erupted into titters. It’s the most firmly I’ve felt rooted in The Prytania’s geographical location since catching an early screening of Happy Death Day there (which was filmed on a college campus a few blocks away, with students filling out most of the audience). Interview with the Vampire is not entirely anchored to New Orleans, but instead globetrots between three international cities: New Orleans, Paris, and San Francisco — great company to be in. Still, its locality is undeniable in that New Orleans is the chosen home of its most infamous vampire, Lestat, who attempts to break away from the restrictions of his European coven to establish a new afterlife on American soil, starting his new family by turning the sad-eyed Louis into one of his own. There’s only trouble once that family becomes nuclear, when Louis gives into vampiric temptation by feeding on a small child, damning her to an eternal adolescence as her new two dads’ doll-like daughter. After about thirty years of faux-domestic stasis, she rebels in spectacularly violent fashion, burning their shared home to the ground in a righteous rage.

For all of the A-lister hunks in the cast (Cruise, Pitt, Christian Slater, Antonio Banderas), I was most impressed with Interview with the Vampire as The First Great Kirsten Dunst Movie. Dunst has been a wonderfully talented screen actor for as long as I can remember watching the screen, but it’s still incredible to watch her out-perform her more famous, better-paid adult co-stars in a role filmed when she was only 10 years old. Dunst’s embodiment of Claudia, the eternally dollish vampire, conveys a world-weariness and vengeful fury far beyond the age of the actor behind it. Part of the reason she stands out so much is that all of the male leads are such sad sack yearners, all fitting neatly into the somber tone typical of director Neil Jordan’s work. Jordan’s interpretation of Rice’s text is more melancholy than it is sensual, finding its hunky, mutually obsessed vampire men jaded beyond repair long after they’ve lost their lust for sex & blood. As the latest addition to that damned clan, Claudia is the only character who’s going through a major emotional upheaval, so that the story’s most violent, extravagant turns rest on her little shoulders. Given the specificity of locale and the name-brand talent elsewhere in the cast, it’s likely the movie would remain undead in annual Halloween-season circulation with or without Dunst’s involvement, but it’s her performance that actually earns that cultural longevity. She’s eternally great.

Corpse Bride (2005)

I was drawn to Kill-O-Rama’s 20th-anniversary screenings of Tim Burton’s stop-motion musical Corpse Bride for a few reasons, not least of all because it felt like a rarer anomaly in the schedule than more frequent go-tos like The Exorcist & Bride of Frankenstein. That’s assumedly because it’s a lesser loved title among the rest of the heavy hitters on the schedule, despite it being a perfectly charming seasonal novelty. When it was first released, Corpse Bride was treated like the microwaved leftovers from earlier Tim Burton/Henry Selick productions like The Nightmare Before Christmas & James and the Giant Peach, but 20 years later it now plays like a precursor for later Laika productions like ParaNorman & Coraline, which have since become the go-to primers for lifelong horror nerd obsession among youngsters. Time has mostly been kind to it, give or take the biggest star in its voice cast (the wine-tasting spit bucket Johnny Depp), but I’ve personally always had a soft spot for it. It’s hard not to adore a movie that fantasy-casts Peter Lorre as a talking brain maggot with kissable lips and takes breaks from advancing its plot to animate a band of stop-motion skeletons playing saxobones against Mario Bava crosslighting. I missed the film during its initial theatrical run, though, so I had only ever seen it on a 2nd-hand DVD copy, which made this repertory screening a must-attend event.

In short, Corpse Bride looks great. All of the visual artistry that distinguishes The Nightmare Before Christmas as a holiday classic is echoed here without any lost integrity. The worst you could say about it is that Burton borrows a little too freely from former collaborator Henry Selick in the production design, to the point where the underworld afterlife setting appears to be pulled from the live-action sets of Selick’s Monkeybone, entirely separate from the film’s production overlap with Nightmare. If I were Selick, I might be complaining, but as an audience member, I’m more than happy to spend time with the cartoon gals & ghouls in that underground otherworld where every day is Halloween. Much like in earlier auteurist works like Batman Returns, Edward Scissorhands, and Ed Wood, Burton conveys a yearning desire to party with the undead freaks of the underworld instead of being stuck with the drab drips of the living flesh. Johnny Depp & Emily Watson voice a soon-to-be-married couple of awkward strangers who’ve had all the joy of life strangled out of them by their uptight, aristocratic parents. They seem to be instantly, genuinely fond of one another despite the grim-grey world they sulk in together, but tragedy strikes when the groom accidentally marries an animated corpse instead while practicing his vows in the spooky woods outside town. The titular undead bride (Helena Bonham Carter, duh) drags the poor, nervous lad down to her Halloweentown underworld where he’s forced to party with the lively dead instead of moping among the dead-eyed living. Song & dance and comedic antics ensue, ultimately resulting in a tender-hearted reunion for the rightful bride & groom and a cosmic comeuppance for the dastardly cad who sent the Corpse Bride underground in the first place. It’s wonderful kids-horror fare, especially if your particular kid has already re-run Coraline & ParaNorman so many times that you’ve become numb to their Laika-proper charms.

Frankenstein (2025)

The concluding event on the Kill-O-Rama schedule was a double feature presentation of James Whale’s iconic 1931 adaptation of Frankenstein and the latest interpretation of that text, directed by Guillermo del Toro. Besides the double-feature format of that programming, the most exciting aspect of the new Frankenstein film’s presentation during Kill-O-Rama is that The Prytania continued to run it weeks after the fest concluded on a 35mm print, the only venue in town to see the film on celluloid before it is shuffled off into the digital void of Netflix. After similar runs for titles like Sinners, Tenet, and One Battle After Another, The Prytania is making a reputation for themselves as the premiere film venue in town by default, since they’re the only place that can actually project film. Given the massive crowds that have been swarming The Prytania every night in the past week to catch Frankenstein in that format, it’s clear that the public yearns for tangible, physical cinema and are willing to pay extra for it. My screening even started with an audience member loudly booing the Netflix logo in the opening credits, to the rest of the crowd’s delight. Netflix’s omnipresence in urban & suburban homes indicates that most of these crowds could’ve waited a couple weeks to see Frankenstein at home for “free,” but they instead chose to attend a big-screen presentation with richer, deeper colors in projection and visible scratches on the print. It was a classic theatrical experience befitting such a classic literary adaptation.

As for the movie itself, it’s exactly what you’d expect from a Guillermo del Toro adaptation of the Mary Shelley source text. It’s pretty, it’s moody, and it’s got a surprisingly sensitive heart for a movie in which a mad scientist stitches together leftover corpse parts to create a monster and then proceeds to abuse that monster. The biggest surprises in Frankenstein lurk in the intensity of the performances, given that the actors could have easily gone through the motions and let the exquisite sets & costumes do all of the work. Mia Goth conveys a defiant ferocity as Dr. Frankenstein’s uninterested love interest, matching his creative intensity but swatting down his god-scale ego in what feels like an onscreen avatar for Mary Shelley’s literary jam sessions with Percy Shelley & Lord Byron. Jacob Elordi plays Dr. Frankenstein’s monstrous creation as a big scary baby who’s convincingly dangerous when provoked but angelic when properly nurtured. Oscar Isaac is feverishly manic as Dr. Frankenstein himself, so fixated on his mission to bring dead flesh back to life that he doesn’t consider what kind of father he’ll be once he succeeds (having only Charles Dance’s physically abusive patriarch as a default example to follow once the creature is in his care). It’s in that cautionary tale of what happens when you single-mindedly dedicate yourself to a passion project at the expense of your own humanity that del Toro’s Frankenstein starts to feel personal to the director beyond its surface aesthetics. This is a project he’s been fighting to complete for decades and, thus, it has partially mutated into a story about the madness of its director’s own grand-scale, solitary ambition. The result is not one of del Toro’s best works, but it’s at least a more heartfelt, refined, accomplished version of what Kenneth Branagh failed to fully give life when he adapted Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in 1994. After three or so decades of book-faithful Frankenstein adaptations, I’m excited that we’re approaching the point when Jack Pierce’s creature design will enter the public domain (in 2027) so that every new repetition of this story isn’t so fussy & literary, but del Toro’s version still feels like an exceptional specimen of its ilk. I appreciated seeing it big & loud with a full horror nerd crowd, instead of alone on my couch the way Netflix intended.

-Brandon Ledet

Dead Lover (2025)

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Grace Glowicki’s directorial career debuted in the genderfucked stoner-comedy freak show Tito, which might very well have been the world’s first Crispin Glover drag king act. The fuckery continues in her sophomore film Dead Lover, which locally premiered at this year’s Overlook Film Festival (and, to my eye, was the best of the fest). Dead Lover perfectly exemplifies the Overlook brand of horror-themed genre films that skew more artsy than scary, delivering a flippantly surreal Hammer Horror throwback that filters the Frankenstein myth through the Tim & Eric meme machine. Glowicki has focused her eye in the years since Tito, crafting some of cinema’s most gorgeous, perverted images in recent memory. Her sense of humor has remained decidedly prankish & juvenile, though, punctuating punchlines with ADR’d fart noises and ejaculations of vomit. It’s a masterclass lesson in the refinement of bad taste.

Glowicki stars as a 19th Century gravedigger who has become lonely in her continuation of the family business, as she stinks too badly of rotting corpses for any other locals to socialize with her. Her pursuit of sexual partners despite that putrid stench does eventually prove fruitful, drawing the eye (and nose) of a nearby wealthy pervert who’s grieving the loss of his sister but still makes time to fetishize the gravedigger’s offense to the senses. They fall in love and bone like mad, but tragedy soon strikes when, as the title promises, her long-awaited lover dies by sea. She refuses to give up on her one shot at genuine romance, though, so she attempts to reconstitute her dead lover using the one remaining body part that was recovered from the shipwreck (his severed finger) . . . with a little help from the stockpile of corpses that happen to be buried around the cemetery where she works & lives.

The tension between Dead Lover‘s high-art visual style and low-trash sense of humor is also echoed in its bifurcated tone, which alternates between the extremities of camp & sincerity in erratic mood swings. Much of the gravedigger’s dialogue is addressed to a gigantic arts-and-crafts rendering of the moon, recalling the operatic poetry of Kenneth Anger’s experimental short “Rabbit’s Moon.” She confesses all of her most vulnerable yearnings to Mr. Moon, but those thoughts are frequently interrupted by hissing, selfish jags of animalistic horniness & greed. Combined with her insultingly inaccurate Cockney accent, this internal romantic/vicious struggle estimates what it might be like if Lily Sullivan’s unhinged impersonation of Bridgette Jones on Comedy Bang Bang suffered the same fate as Gollum from Lord of the Rings. My apologies if that CBB reference means nothing to you, but it really is the only accurate point of comparison.

There’s a sound-stage artificiality to Dead Lover that recalls both the perverted visual poetry of Stephen Sayadian’s Dr. Caligari and the low-budget carelessness of the graveyard set in Ed Wood’s Plan 9 from Outer Space. It’s a picture overflowing with bad wigs and even worse accents, as its four main players alternate through multiple sets of characters with the ramshackle energy of a sketch comedy revue. Still, there’s a lot of heart to its romantic yearning in which characters love one another for their quirks & stench rather than in spite of it. It also has surprisingly provocative ideas about the physical embodiment of gender, as the gravedigger rebuilds her male lover with indiscriminate concern for whether the corpses she sources spare parts from are male or female (or, even more strangely, whether they are related to her lover by blood). All she cares about is still being able to orgasm by the thrust of his finger; how romantic.

I was greatly amused by the strangeness of Glowicki’s debut, but this follow-up exceeded my expectations even so. In my mind, she’s now joined an elite class of high-style, low-budget filmmakers who are pushing the outer limits of how sex, gender, and desire can be represented on screen while also just goofing off with their friends: namely Cole Escola, Amanda Kramer, and Betrand Mandico. At times, it really does feel like some of the most exciting, immediate art being made right now, even though it’s an outdated genre throwback featuring a severed finger that stretches to the length of a broomstick and a potential suitor professing his love by declaring he wants to eat one of the gravedigger’s turds longways, “like a banana.”

-Brandon Ledet

Poor Things (2023)

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“We are a fucked species; know it.”
“We are all cruel beasts – born that way, die that way.”
“Polite society is fucking boring.”
“Polite society will destroy you.”
“All sexuality is basically immoral.”

Poor Things is the kind of movie about the total scope of life as a human being that allows characters to voice those kinds of abstract philosophical statements, often with immediate dismissive pushback from the poor souls hearing them.  In that way, it’s the culmination of everything provoc-auteur Yorgos Lanthimos has been working towards since early antisocial provocations like Dogtooth & Alps.  He’s always had a coldly detached fascination with basic human behavior & relationships, but he has yet to dissect & catalog them all in a single text the way he does here.  Every new Lanthimos movie feels like it’s poking at some assumed social norm as if it were a corpse he found in the woods.  Poor Things finds that naive interrogation at its most scientifically thorough & perversely fun, to the point where he articulates the entire human experience through repurposed dead flesh.  In doing so, he’s clearly made The Movie of the Year, and so far the movie of his career.

Emma Stone stars as the repurposed corpse in question: a suicide victim who has been reborn as a Frankenstein-style brain transplant experiment in a mad scientist’s Turn-of-the-Century laboratory.  Her monstrous “Daddy God” creator—played with pitiable Elephant Man anguish by Willem Dafoe—initially keeps his experiment on a short leash, confining her entire life to his grotesque but lavish home.  She eventually breaks free, though, as all Frankenstein monsters do, and ventures into the world as an adult-bodied woman with the mind of a rapidly developing child.  Her resulting interrogation of the world outside her home is intensely violent, as anyone who can picture an adult-sized toddler throwing a temper tantrum would expect.  It’s also intensely sexual, as she can find no joy more immediately self-fulfilling than orgasmic bliss but lacks basic understanding of that joy’s socially appropriate boundaries: assumed monogamy, acceptable dinner conversation, the stigma of sex work, when & where it’s permissible to masturbate, etc.  If she is meant to represent humanity at its most basic & untouched by learned social restrictions, she represents us as insatiably horny, violent beasts who have to consciously strive to learn empathy for each other because it is not innate in our souls.  It’s a hilarious, uncomfortably accurate assessment of the species.

If there’s any one particular social norm that Lanthimos naively interrogates here, it’s a gendered one.  Much of the reanimated monster’s exploration of Life is limited by the men who wish to control her.  First, her Daddy God confines her as a domestic prisoner, the same way all fathers of young women fear their freedom as autonomous adults.  Once she’s loose, a small succession of selfish bachelors aim to trap her again in the domestic prison of marriage: Ramy Youssef as an ineffectual Nice Guy, Mark Ruffalo as a dastardly fuckboy fop, and Christopher Abbott as a sociopathic abuser.  All the men in the monster’s life seek to control her in ways that stifle her self-development.  It’s a movie about male possessiveness just as much as it’s about the absurdities of Life & societal decorum in that way, and the heroic triumph at the center is mostly in watching the creature fuck & read her way out of her patriarchal bonds to become her own person.  At times, that sentiment is expressed through philosophical assessment of what it means to live as an ethical person in modern society.  More often, it’s a crass celebration of women being annoying & gross in public despite the men around them demanding they calm it down.  It’s oddly uplifting in either case.

Yorgos Lanthimos’s films have become more recognizably comedic since he broke through to a wider audience with The Lobster, and they’re all the better for it.  There’s a sense of playful collaboration here where the director allows each contributor freedom to run wild: Stone & Ruffalo in their sketch comedy acting choices, cinematographer Robbie Ryan in his fish-eye lens fantasia, screenwriter Tony McNamara in his violent perversions of vintage humorist quips.  It’s telling that the only work that’s directly alluded to onscreen (besides, arguably, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and its James Whale mutations) is Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, another prankishly prurient comedy of manners.  Lanthimos has always morbidly poked at social norms & decorum with this same curious outsider’s perspective, but never before while taking so much obvious glee in the act, nor on this wide of a scope.  I rarely have this much fun thinking about how we’re “a fucked species” of “cruel beasts,” and how our rules of appropriate social interaction are so, so very “fucking boring.”

-Brandon Ledet

Podcast #198: Universal’s Frankenstein (1931 – 1948)

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Welcome to Episode #198 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon is joined by Aaron Armstrong of the We Love to Watch podcast to discuss the eight classic Universal horrors that feature Frankenstein’s monster.

00:00 Welcome

08:00 Spooktober on the We Love to Watch podcast

12:12 Ghostwatch (1992)
14:16 Invaders from Mars (1953)
17:23 Beyond Dream’s Door (1989)

21:07 James Whale’s Frankenstein movies
58:42 Universal’s other Frankenstein movies

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

-The Podcast Crew

Lagniappe Podcast: Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) vs. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss two literary horror adaptations produced by American Zoetrope in the 1990s: Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) and Kenneth Branagh’s Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994).

00:00 Welcome

01:35 Eyes Without a Face (1960)
04:30 Prom Night (1980)
07:45 Multiple Maniacs (1970)
09:55 Exorcist III (1990)
11:55 The Infernal Cauldron (1903)
13:53 Sorry, Charlie (2023)
15:40 Mission: Impossible, Dead Reckoning Part 1 (2023)
25:40 Lake Mungo (2008)
28:00 Life After Beth (2014)
33:20 The Brood (1979)
40:40 Dracula’s Daughter (1936)
45:22 Opera (1987)
50:11 The Creeping Flesh (1973)
55:02 Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (1989)
59:48 A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987)
1:04:28 Dicks: The Musical (2023)
1:07:48 The Cassandra Cat (1963)

1:13:00 Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) vs. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

-The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

Jesse James Meets Frankenstein’s Daughter (1966)

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It’s always at least a little frustrating when all a movie does is affirm things you already know. For instance, I already knew from the first film in William Beaudine’s career-concluding Weird West double bill, Billy the Kid Versus Dracula, that I wasn’t likely to enjoy its marquee mate Jesse James Meets Frankenstein’s Daughter. Indeed, my second trip to that well was even less rewarding than the first and I had to question exactly why I even do these things to myself, especially since I already knew going in that its title was bound to be its best attribute. That wasn’t my most depressing reaffirmation watching Frankenstein’s Daughter, however. What really got to me was once again facing a truth about myself as an audience that never goes away: I will greedily gobble up any scraps of horror genre schlock put in front of me, but most Westerns put me to sleep, regardless of quality.

Of Billy the Kid Versus Dracula, I wrote that the Western end of the film’s horror-Western divide felt like a Halloween-themed episode of Gunsmoke or Bonanza. Jesse James Meets Frankenstein’s Daughter similarly mirrors the lifeless, going-through-the-motions tedium of televised Western serials whenever its titular horror villain is offscreen. It also makes the problem worse by stretching out these gun-slinging adventures to much longer extremes than Beaudine’s other Weird West picture. At the opening of the film I was foolishly excited that it may be an improvement from Billy the Kid Versus Dracula because it begins in Lady Frankenstein’s lab as she experiments on a dead body using her grandfather’s ancient recipe. That excitement soon faded as I realized this is more so a picture about Jesse James’s travels as a pistol-shootin’ romantic.

Two scientists from Vienna, including the titular Lady Frankenstein, set up shop in a small Mexican village to take advantage of two of their most precious resources: electrical storms & disposable laborers (you know, human children). Lady Frankenstein’s experiments in the old abandoned mission she converts to a lab packed with sciency bleep bloop machines have no concern for conquering death, but rather create a strong, mind-controlled slave out of the local undead. Unfortunately, the cruelty in her preposterous form of sci-fi colonialism is abandoned for most of the film’s (very short) runtime to follow the American man who eventually does her in: Jesse James. James’s story is split between planning a bank robbery and getting stuck between the romantic intentions of a local Mexican woman & Lady Frankenstein herself. Neither end of that divide is half as interesting as Lady Frankenstein’s experiments, cheap thrills that have been better pulled off in countless films that are far more entertaining than this one.

If there’s any delight to be found in Jesse James Meets Frankenstein’s Daughter, it’s in the film’s disinterest in maintaining its own sense of world-building. Just like how the vampire in Billy the Kid Versus Dracula is never once referred to as Dracula, Frankenstein’s “daughter” in the film is actually the mad scientist’s granddaughter. Also, when Lady Frankenstein finally creates a successful undead mind-slave out of Jesse James’s hunky buddy, she names the monster Igor for some unknown reason. I guess the production design or the line delivery or a classic “Why? Why?! WHY?!!!!!” reaction made stray moments of the movie humorous, but it never lived up to the potential of its real life outlaw meets supernatural threat premise. I suppose my familiarity with its sister film should’ve meant I already knew that it wouldn’t. I got tricked, once again, into thinking the delights of its schlocky horror elements or its ridiculous title could outweigh the tedium of watching a tedious mid-60s Western. I sorta already knew better, but I watched it anyway and learned nothing in the process.

-Brandon Ledet

The Colossus of New York (1958)

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fourstar

Written by hoaxter parapsychologist Thelma Moss & released on a double bill with something called The Space Children, you’d be forgiven for assuming that The Colossus of New York was an unworthy throwaway sci-fi picture only notable because it somehow wasn’t featured on an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000. You’d be wrong, though. Although the film is only a breezy 70min long, pads itself out with a little airport stock footage and is undeniably goofy in some of its special effects details, The Colossus of New York deserves way more respect than you might expect from its drive-in schlock pedigree. Unexpectedly serving as a bridge between Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein & Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop, I found the film far more inventive & thematically well-considered than I would have initially assumed. It looks from the outside to be just one of many cheap 1950s Frankenstein bastardizations, but the film pushes way past a simple brain transplant horror story into something that feels anachronistically forward-thinking. A lot of The Colossus of New York‘s initial appeal rests in its drive-in era charm & unique creature design, but it somehow amounts to far more than the sum of its parts.

The film starts with two sibling scientists watching footage of automated assembly line technology that the far more successful of the pair is pioneering. His jealous brother, tired of competing for their father’s praise, jokes that the invention will “put the human race out of business.” After hearing his father brag to the press that his son is one of the all-time great human minds, comparable to the likes of Einstein & Darwin, we watch the scientist die in a horrific car accident while retrieving his child’s toy airplane. The father is driven mad by this “foolish, wasteful” death and starts raving about the shame of the human body’s inferiority to the power of the mind and some slippery slope philosophy about the brain vs the soul. Long story short, the father resurrects his favorite son by implanting his brain in a more durable cyborg body, while the lesser, more alive brother starts making moves on the scientist’s widow. The experiment works at first, with the scientist’s new cyborg body finally matching the immense power of his mind. He’s essentially a gigantic, metal version of Frankenstein’s monster, with the added bonus of light-up eyes that shoot deadly lasers. Of course, the father’s meddling with the laws of God & Nature means that the creation’s temporary success doesn’t last forever. Eventually, the titular cyborg colossus uses his newfound strength to exact his brutal revenge, first on his wife-stealing brother and then on the world at large.

What’s most striking about The Colossus of New York is what happens when it ventures into the uncanny. Most drive-in schlock would’ve stopped at the Metal Frankenstein aspect of the premise, but this film pushes itself into much stranger, more adventurous territory. When the colossus is first switched on, we see the world through his POV, a television static-inspired technique that recalls the similarly shot birth of RoboCop. When he first sees himself in the mirror as a cyborg he squeals in horror, pleading to his father, “You want to help me? Then destroy me,” in a pathetic mechanical voice. He curses his “flesh that cannot feel,” pines to reconnect with his wife (who the father initially reports to be dead), and repeatedly visits the grave for his old human body. Things get even stranger from there as the scientist’s mind begins to push beyond normal human capacity. He’s tortured by “meaningless images,” visions that are later revealed to be premonitions of future events. He also becomes more erratic in his thoughts by the day, even discovering a new talent for hypnotism, which he immediately employs for evil. This escalates to the once great, humanitarian mind declaring the poor & hungry to be “human trash” and deciding to wage a one-cyborg war on world peace, starting with a massacre at a UN conference. What was once a standard black & white horror cheapie starts to feel much stranger, much more special, and by the end The Colossus of New York starts to feel like a long buried gem.

Even if my praise of the film’s adventurous sci-fi themes sounds a little hyperbolic, I believe it’s a work that could easily be enjoyed for the simple pleasures of its sights & sounds. Lack of facial expressiveness is usually not a plus in a monster movie mask, but the cyborg colossus uses that awkward stoicism quite well as an essential part of his self-tortured inhumanity. The movie also pulls a lot of great visual play out of terrified victims being lit solely by the monster’s light-up brain & eyes in the moment before he zaps them to death. Besides boasting a cool-looking monster who eats up a lot of screentime in a refreshing change from the genre’s status quo, the film also employs a minimalist piano score from frequent Twilight Zone musician Van Cleave that affords it a classic silent horror vibe in its simplicity. If you’re ever in the mood for a Universal Monster-type classic, but you’re feeling exhausted with endless rewatches of Frankenstein or The Black Cat, I highly recommend giving The Colossus of New York a shot. It just might surprise you.

-Brandon Ledet

How to Make a Monster (1958)

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fourstar

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I had previously complained in a recent review that the film I Was a Teenage Frankenstein had moved away so far from the original formula of its predecessor I Was a Teenage Werewolf that the two films had almost no reason to share a title at all (except, of course, for the former to make a quick dollar off the latter’s notoriety). I Was a Teenage Werewolf was a huge financial & cultural success largely due to its first-ever depiction of a teenager transforming into a murderous monster, a basic concept it’s near-impossible to imagine modern horror without. I Was a Teenage Frankenstein was then rushed out within five months of that film’s release and, although it boasted an impressively cruel villain & killer monster design, the film featured no actual teenagers to speak of, completely missing the point of its predecessor’s success. The bridge that actually connects these two disparate works wasn’t to come until a year later.

1958’s How to Make a Monster combines the monsters from I Was a Teenage Werewolf & I Was a Teenage Frankenstein into a single picture, but not in the way that you’d expect. Much like how the second film in the series moved away from the Teenage Werewolf original’s formula for success & originality, How to Make a Monster ventured even further out to sea and somehow found its own legs to stand on as a unique work of meta horror. Instead of staging a logical physical altercation of the Teenage Werewolf & Teenage Frankenstein from the previous pictures, How to Make a Monster instead depicts a movie production of that altercation. Set on the American International Pictures movie lot, the film centers on the make-up artist who created the look of the Teenage Werewolf & Teenage Frankenstein and his mental unraveling during the production of a film where the two monsters meet onscreen. It’s the exact kind of meta horror weirdness I was a huge sucker for in Wes Craven films like New Nightmare (except maybe a little cheaper & a little goofier) and it works like gangbusters.

Much like with the first two films, the only narrative through-line How to Make a Monster holds with its loosely-connected franchise is the idea of a mad scientist exploiting innocent teenagers in their experimental medicine.  Instead of trying to save the world through treacherous experimentation like in the first two pictures, however, this mad scientist is a make-up artist trying to save the monster movie as a genre. Once he discovers that he’s been laid off by the studio due to the decline in monster movie popularity, our dastardly mastermind applies hypnosis through homemade experimental make-up to turn his two latest creations, Teenage Frankenstein & Teenage Werewolf, into literal monsters that “scare” studio heads into changing their minds . . . by murdering them. There’s a lot of industry talk in How to Make a Monster about the artistry of monster movie make-up, the cycles of genre films’ popularity, typecasting among horror actors, and the “therapeutic” qualities of horror films for audiences that all make the movie feel like a love letter to the industry. A lot of the movie works like a pretty standard monster movie genre piece, but the rest holds such a high reverence for cheap horror as a finely-crafted artistry that its reliance on the genre’s basic tropes actually serve the film well.

If you’re going to watch just one film in this franchise I highly recommend sticking with I Was a Teenage Werewolf. It’s a rare example of a cheap drive-in monster flick that actually finds high art in its genre trappings & taps into the subconscious fears that spring from puberty in an oddly authentic way. However, How to Make a Monster does a great job of molding that past success in horror filmmaking into an entirely new format. It’s a standard monster movie in terms of its monstrous thrills, but it repurposes those tropes into a meta, self-reflective work that genuinely surprised me in its genre innovation. The film functions nicely as a connector between the Teenage Werewolf & Teenage Frankenstein flicks that came before it, but it also stands firmly on its own as a unique work in the 50s drive-in horror genre, especially in the way it reflects on what that genre is & what it means to the American movie-going public.

-Brandon Ledet

I Was a Teenage Frankenstein (1957)

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three star

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If there’s any doubt of my contention that the 50s drive-in creature feature I Was a Teenage Werewolf was a zeitgeist shift in its first-ever depiction of a teenager-turned-monster as its central threat, just look to the fact that the film’s wild cultural success lead to an immediate onslaught of imitators. There are countless movies that have followed in the cult classic’s wake that all turned the horrors of puberty into literal monstrous transformations, far too many to list here. There are even enough teen werewolf movies that followed that the plot device can be considered its own genre: Teen Wolf, Ginger Snaps, Cursed, Twilight, and, from the very same year as the original, Teenage Monster all fit snugly under its umbrella.

More often than not, though, Hollywood producers will learn the exact wrong lessons from a film’s success. So, when Sam Arkoff & AIP decided to strike while the iron was hot with a follow-up to their surprise hit I Was a Teenage Werewolf, they ended making a film that was nothing like the wild idiosyncrasy of the original. I Was a Teenage Frankenstein completely missed the point of why I Was a Teenage Werewolf struck it big with drive-in audiences. In the werewolf picture teens watched their peers talk hip slang (or at least what adult screenwriters assumed was hip slang), rough house, make-out, and transform into hideous beasts at the cruel hands of puberty. I Was a Teenage Frankenstein, by contrast, shows almost no teens at all during its entire runtime. Even the titular teenage Frankenstein monster appears to be a man well into his 20s (not that you ever get a good enough look at the actor to really make a judgement call on that).

The one thing I Was a Teenage Frankenstein did keep from I Was a Teenage Werewolf‘s formula was the idea of a mad scientist experimenting on teen subjects. In the original a rogue scientist plots to “save” the world by bringing man back to a primitive state through hypnosis-aided de-evolution. In the Frankenstein version of this story, an equally ambitious man of science (and direct descendant of the more infamous Dr. Frankenstein, of course) wants to save the world by creating some kind of superbeing out of disposed body parts. His exact goals are a lot fuzzier than his werewolf-creating predecessor’s, but they have something to do with experimental eugenics & bodily reconstruction due to a belief that the world is in danger because morons keep breeding morons. He believes he can do a better job of constructing the human body than God & Nature. Gathering the pieces-parts of his teenage specimens from a head-on car crash, the doctor creates a modern Frankenstein monster in total secrecy, even keeping his lab assistant & nosy fiancee in the dark. Inevitably the experiment gets out of his control & the monster ends up killing a few unsuspecting victims, both by accident & through coercion, despite having a genuinely kind teenage heart resting in his undead body.

You pretty much can guess how this film winds up, which is largely what holds I Was a Teenage Frankenstein back from achieving the glorious heights of its predecessor. Rushed to theaters less than five months after the release of I Was a Teenage Werewolf, the film feels like it was made without any real knowledge of what even happened in its source material, let alone what made it popular. The only teens I can recall seeing in the picture arrive in the final third during a brief trip to a Lovers’ Lane parking lot in the monster’s search for a new face, which separates the film so far from its lycanthrope counterpart that it’s a wonder they even share a title the way they do. Still, as a standard drive-in era monster movie the film is a surprisingly decent watch. The teen Frankenstein’s monster make-up is downright grotesque in its hamburger meat visage, the doctor’s fiancee has a sincerely great gravitas to her performance, and the doctor’s disposal method for unused body parts is to feed them to a stock footage alligator, which is something of my schlock-loving dreams. I also really appreciated the doctor’s relentless cruelty, which was surprising in its viciousness even for a villain in a monster movie. For instance, when he first brings his creation to life, the teen freak immediately weeps at the crushing weight of its own existence & the doctor exclaims, “It appears even its tear ducts function!” That’s pretty cold. I Was a Teenage Frankenstein may have missed the point of its more teen-oriented predecessor’s success, but it stands well enough on its own as a straight-forward genre exercise with a heartless villain & a truly horrific monster design.

-Brandon Ledet