Day 92: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

Based on the relative success of Coppola's Dracula, Kenneth Branagh (of various Shakespeare adaptations) was given the greenlight to do his own literary adaptation of a famous monster story. It is kind of fun to juxtapose this with Hammer's Curse of Frankenstein because, I would argue, Branagh's movie is the most faithful adaptation of the novel ever. All other movies seem to be adaptations of Karloff's film but this is from the genuine source.

That said, it was wildly disappointing to fans of the lumbering behemoth mode of Frankenstein's monster. Shelleys creature talks and runs and thinks on a level even above his creator at times. Deniro plays the monster as an injured, but intelligent animal that wants to see the good doctor suffer. Otherwise, all the characters from Curse of Frankenstein are present (Justine, Krempe, Elizabeth) but they are used in very different narrative ways. We even get a taste of The Bride of Frankenstein here.

If ever there were an artsy fartsy horror movie, this is it. I would argue it still has enough thrills in it to make it worth watching.