I have in my office a large poster from the Pop Chart Lab company of 1,500 “must see” movies arranged by genre. There’s a simply device involved. If you’ve seen the movie, you can fill in the circle next to the title with a pencil. The circles are divided into three, and you fill in one for a movie you saw, two for a movie you like, and three for a movie you love. Now, I’ve seen a lot of movies, but when I got the poster and started filling in circles, I was a bit surprised I’d only seen about 600 of them. Since then, I’m looking to fill in a lot more of them, including the ones I’ve honestly never heard of before.
That includes a 2015 version of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein I had no idea existed. But since I’ve been finding more and more interest in horror movies, I opted to give the Shudder streaming service a shot, and lo and behold, there it was.
Set in modern day America, the movie opens with the creature, a rather handsome young man to start, waking up in a lab to see, for lack of a better term, his parents, Victor and Elizabeth Frankenstein. Victor (Danny Huston) is excited to see his experiment worked, happily shouting the iconic “It’s alive!” line. Elizabeth (Carrie-Anne Moss), offers the confused creature (Xavier Samuel) maternal comfort. All seems well at first, but then a deformity of some kind forms on the creation’s neck. Something went wrong, and the Frankensteins, mostly Victor, opt to dispose of him and dissect him to see what went wrong.
Of course, that doesn’t work out quite so well. The monster, eventually revealed to have the name “Adam,” is quite eloquent in his voice-over, but in the movie he starts off with what may best be described as the intelligence of a child. Factor in as well Adam seems to ignore a lot of injuries and doesn’t know his own strength, leading him to respond to various attacks with violence of his own. Individuals who treat him with kindness, like a dog, a little girl, a blind man (Candyman himself Tony Todd) and Elizabeth, he responds to in kind. Individuals who try to stop him when he doesn’t know what’s going on, such as cops, security guards, and various scientists working for the Frankensteins, don’t fare so well.
Told entirely from the monster’s perspective as his body seems to fall apart, the movie is stylish in a clinical and detached sort of way. This is a world that isn’t gong to be kind to the likes of Adam, and it shows. Director Barnard Rose, also from Candyman, put together a movie that shows how harsh the world can be to someone who needs help. Adam isn’t trying to hurt anyone. He really just wants his mother, namely Elizabeth. Most of his murders are either accidents or self-defense. He doesn’t understand the world, and most of the people he meets aren’t interested in teaching him, starting with his “father” Victor.
If anything, my lone complaint is Adam’s voice-over is far more eloquent than what comes out of his mouth. Did he speak those words when he didn’t know what words meant? Did he speak them later? How could he? As it is, this was an interesting take on a classic horror story, and if this is the sort of stuff Shudder has to offer, it’ll be a good service to subscribe to.
Grade: A-
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