Frankenstein Unbound (1990)

We now arrive at what could quite possibly be the absolute worst Frankenstein movie ever made. And I’m not just being a snob because Roger Corman is the director.

Remember Roger Corman? He’s often placed in the same category as Ed Wood, for his independent, low-budget monster movies in the 1950s and 1960s. He did a bunch of movies putatively based on Edgar Allan Poe stories, but other than the titles the original stories were unrecognizable. But, to be fair, the stuff Corman did wasn’t schlock exactly; it was just wasn’t mainstream, and definitely done on the cheap. He’s been called the Pope of Pop Cinema, but I’d call him the thinking man’s Ed Wood. (Corman still walks the earth today, at age 95.)

Anyway, Corman stopped directing movies in 1970. An then, he briefly emerged in 1990 to direct one final film: Frankenstein Unbound. And that’s the movie we review today.

The Plot: Well. A scientist inventing weapons for the US military in 2031 accidentally cuts a hole in the time/space continuum (or whatever), and finds himself and his cool car transported back to 19th-century Switzerland. This scientist, named Joe Buchanan (played by John Hurt), almost literally bumps into Dr. Victor Frankenstein (Raul Julia), who’s impressed with Buchanan’s high-tech car and watch. A little later he is introduced to Mary Shelley (Bridget Fonda), and tells her he’s very impressed with her book (that she’s just started writing). It seems that Shelley used the real Dr. Frankenstein as her inspiration for her book. Anyway, Frankenstein has of course made a male creature, and now he wants Buchanan’s help to make the creature a female mate. This is done, but Buchanan has managed to secretly power up a laser from his car, and he blasts the laboratory into the future. They’re now in a futuristic city, and Frankenstein inexplicably kills the woman he just created, so the creature he’d created earlier kills him. So it’s up to Buchanan to kill the remaining creature, which he somehow does with more lasers. The end.

My plot synopsis might not be entirely in line with the writers’ intent. (The plot comes from a 1973 science fiction novel, and then Corman wrote the screenplay.) But this is, quite frankly, a confusing movie. Worse, I can’t see a point to this movie; despite the science fiction element, it doesn’t really break any new ground about Frankenstein’s motivations, the creature’s view of the world, or larger existential matters. It just takes the basic characters and surrounds them with 1990-era CGI.

The Monster: It’s a different and frightening look for the Frankenstein monster, so I’ll give them credit for that. The creature is quite articulate, but angry. Kind of like the sociology professors at Cal Berkeley.

As noted above, the creature isn’t developed much in this movie, and spends most of his time breaking things and killing people. But he does have some conversations with Buchanan, which seem to reveal that he’s inquisitive about who makes whom. Is this a form of theological question?

The creature is portrayed by Nick Brimble, a tall chap from Bristol who’s appeared in a number of movies, including Kevin Costner’s disastrous Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves.

The Atmosphere: There are some good settings, particularly in the Swiss countryside. But much of the movie (especially in the second half) is dedicated to long, drawn-out special effects scenes with lasers and electrical discharges and what-have-you. It reminds me of that long sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey that just shows a bunch of weird colors and suchlike for what seems like 15 minutes. In both cases, it’s as though the movie makers got too excited about the new possibilities of CGI, forgetting entirely about the story line.

Oh, and as long as we’re on the topic, this film also uses those noisy, fussy portrayals of “future” technology that were so prevalent in the 1980s and 1990s: Anything involving a computer would have these long and pointless animations play out on the screen, accompanied with that high-pitched trilling noise. Yeah, in the future, we’re going to be devoting all our bandwidth to these “poser” sequences. Kind of like the Droid phone I briefly had in the early 2000s that would announce “Droid!” in a robotic voice every time I turned it on. Yeah, like that’s really necessary or even appreciated.

General Comments: This movie was boring. This movie made no sense. This movie got too distracted with its own graphics. This movie sucks.

Tomorrow, we finally get to see a big-budget Frankenstein movie! At a cost of $45 million (and that’s in 1994 dollars), Kenneth Branagh made the somewhat hubris-tinged Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Does it live up to its claim? Watch it on YouTube to find out!