Mary Shelley's Frankenstein
From AwardAnnals
| Film: | Mary Shelley's Frankenstein |
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| Director: | Kenneth Branagh |
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| Distributor: | Uca Catalogue |
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Reviews
Amazon.com
Let’s be honest: this should be titled Wretched Excess’ Frankenstein. Swooping, wild, bloody, and energetic, this is bad moviemaking from the best, which makes it all the more loveable. Kenneth Branagh plays Victor Frankenstein, a man so obsessed with conquering death that he decides to create life. What he gets, after a protoplasmic mud wrestle, is a Mean Streets monster (Robert De Niro) that isn’t particularly happy to be back from the dead or thrilled about all the stitches. Helena Bonham Carter may, at several points in this film, actually be channelling Ramtha. The supporting cast couldn’t be peopled with better performers (Tom Hulce, John Cleese, Ian Holm) but they all look like they’re ringside at some Ultimate Fighting competition. A must for any midnight movie collector for the shock factor alone. A hoot. —Keith Simanton
Related works
Frankenstein: Or "The Modern Prometheus"
Frankenstein is a masterpiece of nineteenth-century Gothicism and the prototype of the twentieth-century science-fiction novel.It was conceived in the Swiss Alps in mid-June 1816 after a conversation about bringing corpses to life provoked a nightmare, and was written over the next eleven months in largely morbid circumstances. Death and the terrors of childbirth—as much as Romanticism, a burgeoning awareness of unconscious drives, and contemporary ideas of atheism, the collapse of the social contract, and the corrupting influence of society on human nature—inform this story of a man (or monster) built by Dr. Victor Frankenstein and brought to life by electricity.
The monster’s culpability for various horrific acts, his powerlessness in the face of his complete ostracism from society, and Dr. Frankenstein’s lies, abdication of responsibility, and the pain he inflicts on his creation raised chilling questions that made the novel an immediate bestseller.
