Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1994)

To place this film in the horror genre is unfair. It seems more like a melodramatic cautionary tale to me. A cautionary tale of what, you might ask. A cautionary tale of the horrors the industrial revolution is going to unleash of course. The only people that could possible find the story of Frankenstein scary would have to be from way before the 1900s, when science was evil and the most practical way of healing a physical ailment was amputation. There are only two things scary about this movie and they are: (1) Helena Bonham Carter and (2) Richard Branagh’s over the top Shakespearian acting.

Another way to make sense of this movie is to look at it as a classic revenge story. The creature, played by Robert De Niro, is pissed off at Dr. Frankenstein, Kenneth Branagh, because the good doctor created him and then immediately tried to kill him. Not only did he try to kill him, he abandoned him in a backwoods eastern European town where he would be repeatedly hit
with sticks and chased with torches.



When the creature is on his own in the countryside he has some pretty neat interactions with the locals. These scenes are the film’s best parts. He spends about a year’s time hiding next to a farmhouse and helping the family out under the cover of darkness. When he finally reveals himself to the family he is again repeatedly hit with a stick. This is his breaking point, and he then is determined to kill the doctor that created him and kill everyone the doctor cares about. He kills the doctor’s wife, played by Helena Bonham Carter, by punching through her chest and ripping her heart out. At least the film has a couple good kills.

I am still not sure how I fell about De Niro’s interpretation of the monster. When he talks there is a tiny bit of Brooklyn and I am not sure that works for a creature that was made in Eastern Europe. I also think that he talks more than I would like the monster to talk. Other Frankensteins mutter one word sentences, but this one can talk at length and sound quite educated at times.

Overall it’s a pretty decent film and is totally worth watching just for the scene in which a naked De Niro is wrestling with a shirtless Kenneth Branagh in gallons of amniotic fluid.

I am going to continue with De Niro and follow him to a movie I have wanted to see for quite a long time, Sergio Leone’s American crime epic Once Upon a Time in America. It will be good to see De Niro back in his mobster element.