One Paragraph Movie Review: Frankenstein

One hundred and sixty-first film: Frankenstein. It’s very, very difficult to watch this as it might have been watched in 1931, before almost every scene in it became a crusted-on cliché. From the early “it’s alive… IT’S ALIIIIIVE” to the mob-with-flaming-torches finale, everything’s creepily familiar due to eighty percent of horror cinema learning from or borrowing from it since it was made. That’s not to say it isn’t super-creepy, including the opening scene where the good doctor chances on a body hanging from a gallows on his way back from a grave-robbing, rare two-for-one value in the corpse-collection racket. The movie moves much faster than the book it barely bases itself on, and as a begrudging bonus it gives irritating ‘actually’ pedants the opportunity to correct people who refer to the monster as Frankenstein instead of the doctor, which gives everyone else at the party the opportunity to roll their eyes and change the subject. Worth a look, if only to properly understand where all the tropes come from and fantasise about safely resting a beer on the monster’s head. Three and a half floating daisies out of five.