Frankie gets a lady friend: The Bride of Frankenstein

                                             

4 years later (real world time, not in the movies), good ol' Frankie gets a girlfriend.... kinda, AND the ability to speak. Many fans cite The Bride of Frankenstein as their favorite installment of the series, and it's easy to see why.
The movie starts off in a rather tongue in cheek manner, showing Mary Shelly, her husband and their buddy, who's name escapes me at the moment, sitting around in their parlor (it was the old days, that's what they called it back then) on a dark and stormy night, discussing Mary's marvelously spun monster tale, with Mary proclaiming that the story is far from over, calling for her mate and buddy to gather round for the Frankie show vol. 2. (I was paraphrasing, sheesh.) Now, that may have been a cheap tactic just to include the new movie in the official cannon, but an effective one, none the less.  And then....the rest of the movie......
The start of the story is the usual Hollywood schtick, finding some way of making it seem as if the star of the movie DIDN'T die at the end of the previous installment, because god forbid you have to invent another character and place him/her in one of the 5 stories used in major Hollywood fare since the birth of moving pictures. This time it was the old 'the burning windmill was built on top of a small lake' trick, allowing the monster to narrowly escape being.....made dead
again. That, however, is my only gripe with the film, and it is a very minimalistic gripe, because if the monster had died, there would be no sequel, and that is just not a world I want to live in. The rest of the movie has everything most of us look for in a film, a good manhunt (monster hunt, whatever), suspense, a (closeted gay) hermit, a chick with crazy streaks going up the side of her beehive extraordinaire, and even miniature people in jars. In jars!

The mini people were, to me, the highlight of the film. They were all named after some form of royalty (the king, the queen, and so forth) and dressed in the appropriate fashion of their name sake. The king however wasn't very kingly, as his entire drive in life seemed to be a never ending mission to escape the bondage of his jar and make whoopie with the uninterested queen. I didn't say it wasn't a noble purpose, however when you picture a king you hardly picture some horn dog slobbering all over himself in lust, unless you're watching a Mel Brooks movie that is. Apart from their much appreciated comedic antics, the way they were presented in the movie were some of the best special effects shots in the history of cinema, proving once and for all there ain't no school like the old school.  The technique used had something to do with making 2 separate shots, lining the second up with the first and combining the results, leaving us with a seamless, utterly realistic looking shot of miniature folks sitting in jars on a table in front of a normal sized dude, why doesn't Hollywood go back to the OG style of special effects? Everybody knows they make for a much better finished product, and why they're stuck on this CGI garbage when it's not to the point it needs to be I'll never know.

People seem to not remember the fact that the "Bride" was in fact terrified of the monster, instead focusing on the movie title and reinventing the story in their minds, thinking of it as a story of love existing even between monsters. While it's a nice sentiment, it's not so.

"You want me and him to do WHAT?"

There were also a few homosexual undertones throughout the movie, but I'll let you check that out over on wikipedia, it's an interesting little read. Check it out here.

There's a reason The Bride Of Frankenstein is listed as one of the all time great classic horror movies, Universal really knew what they were doing back in the day. If you haven't given this movie a watch since you were a young child, like a lot of people, check it out, I'm sure it's on one of them video on demand services, or at your local video rental shops (hah! I made a funny), give it another watch, it's well worth your time.                                                                                                                  

Frankie says "uuuuuuuuuggggghhhhhh" : Frankenstein, The 1931 Classic

                    

"It's Alive!" We all know the line, and have made use of it in our everyday lives, whether smacking our DVD player back into working order, or getting the car running on the side of the highway. It's one of those iconic lines that has, and will continue to endure the test of time. Every bit as iconic, if not more so, is the Image of Karloff as the monster, making his way onto every form of merchandise available to the masses, from, lunch boxes to T-shirts, toys to graffiti on the wall in Everytown, U.S.A., and in fact across the world, hell Frankensteins monster is one of the most bought Halloween costumes every year, it has become a staple of pop culture world wide and rightfully so.

The Universal film adaptation of Mary Shelly's Frankenstein came out 82 years ago, and is still every bit as amazing as first time it hit the silver screen to eager crowds, ready and waiting to get their pants scared off. We all know the story by now, mad scientist builds body out of dead people, the brain, mistakenly, being from a violent criminal of some sort, and brings said built body to life with electricity, re-animated sewn together corpse eventually breaks free and kills fools, towns people get all kinds of mad and rally together to kill the "monster". The last part of that half assed explanation really makes me long for days past, days long before I was birthed unto this plane of existence, people used to have each others backs, and in the face of adversity would gang up on anyone or anything that would do them dirty. It's now a dead sentiment, with very few exceptions (gangs, and....uhhhhhhh) and that to me is truly a shame, but I've gotten off track haven't I?
When I first saw this movie as a very little kid (sometime before kindergarten) I thought this movie was like a documentary, and that somewhere there were sewn together dead people walking around throwing kids into lakes, and killing anyone who made anything even construed as a wrong move towards them.And that thought scared the shit out of me.I mean really, when you're little nobody tells you horror movies are fake, especially your parents, who use movie monsters as a way to keep you in line, akin to the boogey man and shit. Jerks. But enough about that....
When watching the movie nowadays I automatically notice some of the scientific inaccuracies, all of which I will gladly tell you now:

• The use of random dead bodies being sewn together, with no mention of the parts needing to have the same blood type, otherwise the body would reject the part, I think thats right anyways.
• The brain, before being stuck into the monster's head, was pickled in formaldehyde, which should have rendered the brain un-useable.  
• The doctor was building the body for weeks, in which time all the body parts would have decayed too much to have been used

• No mention of connecting nerves, which may have just been skipping over scientific jargon to make the movie flow
• The shock of the lightning bolt would have lit the body on fire, I don't care what kind of machines they had rerouting the electricity, a lightning strike that close to anyone would have fried the monster. Yeah yeah yeah, people get hit by electricity and survive, but most don't.    

Frankie say :Float.

Another thing I hadn't noticed as a child, was the ultimately child like nature of the monster, and how the "evil" nature it was accused of was really just the mistakes of an innocent mind. Really, the monster killed 3 people, the doctor's hunchback assistant , who tortured him relentlessly, another doctor who was intending to dismantle him, and a little girl, who had just taught him that if you throw things in the water they float, so he chucked the girl in the water and she drowned. "A little knowledge is a dangerous thing." Really I don't blame the monster for any of the so called atrocities that he committed, the first two cases were self preservation, plain and simple, and the little girl, while it is horrible that a young life was taken, had taught the monster something that wasn't necessarily so, and the monster was just trying to put this new knowledge to use, immediately realizing the wrong he had done.It is possible the nature of the monster having no memory from the brain put into his head may have been the formaldehyde, the idea being the chemical wiped the brain clean of memories, so, in theory maturity wise and so forth, the monster was only a few weeks old at the time of his death, which also brings an extra sad note to the film.

Happy viewing.

Now, yes I am aware how hacky it is to write about such a classic movie that has been written about hundreds, nay, thousands of times a year for  80+ years, but having gained a new perspective on the film after not having seen it since the days of my childhood, I needed to get it out, I mean how many times does Frankenstein come up in conversation among the elitist hipster bastards that crowd the streets of contemporary America? Rarely. So having this platform to spout my jibber jabber works out quite nice. Anyways, go watch Frankie be brought to life and whipped, leading him to  liberate himself, only to be burned to death,  Or not quite to death, as the next flick, "The Bride of Frankestein" ,would have you believe.