Widely considered as superior to its predecessor, The Bride of Frankenstein is one of those movies that is probably as great as many will tell you and is not nearly the dreary, serious meditation on the folly of playing God you may have been lead to believe nor is it an old and creaky monster movie that modern audiences will yawn during. In fact, watching this, I was reminded a tad of the Re-animator movies, what with the off-hand treatment of the Monster and the various shenanigans he gets into along the way.

The movie begins just like Halloween II in that it starts before the first movie finished. In this case though, you actually get a much more fleshed-out ending that is ultimately more satisfying than the rather abrupt ending that characterized the first one.

In this version, the ending is played out from all angles, with scenes describing the aftermath of the Monster’s supposed demise and the carting away of the apparently lifeless body of Henry. You even get closure with the family of the girl that the Monster tried to teach to swim in the first film.

What about Henry? Did he survive that brutal windmill ride? Of course he did! He’s hauled back to his castle or wherever mad scientists recuperate between experiments. Now, creating a monster out of dead body parts and having it turn on you like a rabid dog, will take a lot out of a guy, so he spends some time just kicking it in the bed with his wife. This was the 1930s so “kicking it” meant that he was laying in bed, while she was on top of the bed holding his head.

It’s pretty boring being laid off like that, so everyone is glad when this wild-haired freak named Dr. Pretorious enters the scene. Pretorious is the impetus for everything that is to follow and somehow he has heard about Frankenstein and his little Monster. He tells Henry that he’s been very impressed with his work and that he also has been hard at work on a similar project, but he’s encountered one little problem. He’s created little teeny-tiny people about eight inches high!

Henry is amazed and somewhat disgusted by this, saying that what Pretorious is doing is black magic, not science like his big green dummy was. Pretorious pooh-poohs Henry’s concerns and says that he grew them from some type of culture, but he just can’t seem to solve one itty-bitty problem: all these little dudes won’t grow to regular height! And he wants Henry to help super-size them!

There are some remarkably good special effects shots in these sequences and this includes the potentially problematic scene of Pretorious picking up one of them with his tweezers while the he is thrashing about and talking in a really squeaky voice. It looked just as good as any number of computer generated effects I’ve seen in recent movies though.

What about the Monster? The Monster isn’t quite the lumbering retard we’ve suspected as he realizes that a girl flailing about in the water isn’t a good thing and this time (he didn’t throw her in there, she was startled into falling into the water) he goes in after her and pulls her to safety. At about this time, a couple of members of the angry mob happen by, sound the alarm and it is on again!

The angry mob is quickly reformed to mete out justice, Bavarian style. The Monster puts on a pretty pathetic showing (demonstrating the fact that he really isn’t a monster at all, just really confused and scared by everything that’s happening) and they trap him up on a rock. Then they swarm him and beat him down with clubs like he was protesting back in Chicago in ‘68.

The Burgermeister reappears to calm things down and the creature is tied to a rail and incredibly is run into town on it! There the put him in a jail cell and chain him to this real big and sturdy chair that they’ve special ordered in case they ever needed to put a monster in custody. I’m not sure what the Burgermeister’s plan was because the prospect of putting the Monster on trial for his misdeeds (remember he’s a first time offender – not like that Mummy guy!) frankly boggles the mind. Luckily, we don’t have to worry about that for long because the Monster bonds out of jail and by bonding out, I mean he pretty much snaps chains, busts wood, and escapes off into the countryside where we would follow him on his journey of self discovery for awhile.

What follows is an alternately amusing and moving series of events that serves to flesh out and humanize the Monster. He meets up with an old, blind hermit living in the woods. Since he is blind, the hermit doesn’t fear the Monster on sight. The hermit takes him in and figures out that the Monster cannot speak, but is more than capable of understanding what the hermit says. The hermit is literally a saint here, giving our boy food and wine, teaching him goody-goody ideas like “friend” and “cigar,” and holding the Monster as he naps. (Is this really happening? What happened to the dude that punted Henry off the old abandoned windmill?)

There’s really only one problem with their relationship and that of course is the old Monster bugaboo, fire. Fire bad! No, fire good because you can light your stogies with it. Soon the Monster is puffing like one of the monied chaps at a sporting club and he’s talking about what a friend this guy is to him and then two members of the Angry Mob show up and they see the old blind guy, then they get a gander at the nicotine addicted Monster!

Insults are exchanged, threats hurled and somehow the blind guy’s place burns up. Now because of people’s biases against Monsters and their murderous rampages, the Monster is again on the run. He ends up in the graveyard and takes shelter in a tomb. That’s kind of a nice image since he basically was born out of the cemeteries of Europe and that’s where he returns when he’s in trouble. It shows that whatever he may be, he will always be something separate and apart from the living. The Monster actually voices this when he tells Pretorious that “Dead good! Living bad!” Pretorious? How in the heck is the Monster having a philosophical debate with that Puppetmaster wannabe?

Pretorious has happened to come to the same tomb looking for a volunteer in his project to make a woman creature. He sees the Monster, tells him to sit and stay for a spell and the Monster asks if he can bum a smoke!

Pretorious sees that the Monster can be used to “encourage” Henry to go along with his plan to make another monster and they both head off to harass Henry some more. Pretorious has the Monster kidnap Henry’s wife, Elizabeth, and Henry suddenly decides to get back into the monster-making biz. The making of the bride takes place in about the last ten minutes of the film and Dwight Frye (Frankenstein’s Fritz) is once again put in charge of getting vital body parts!

This time though his name is not Fritz, but Karl and he needs to get a female heart, not a brain. He does so by ripping it out of some chick that had the misfortune of being out after curfew. Pretorious is way around the bend (and frankly has been the whole movie) and doesn’t mind when it becomes apparent that this is what happened. Henry is still mostly a regular guy who just happens to make monsters out of body parts, so he is understandably outraged. Henry is quite the moral mad scientist!

The Bride gets made, cranked up on a platform during a big storm and brought to life. She’s better looking than the Monster, but that probably owes as much to the comparative beauty of Karloff and Elsa Lanchester, than to anything else. The doctors try to make a love connection between the Bride and the Monster, but they don’t hit it off. She thinks he’s a big, grody, creep! So how did the date end? Watch it and find out yourself!

If the first movie detailed the Monster’s difficult birth, than this one detailed his tortured adolescence. The Monster is learning, has some bit of self-confidence (he’s bossing Henry around telling him to finish the Bride), and has discovered girls. He’s experimenting with drugs and alcohol, but he’s obviously far from mature, easily rattled by events, and prone to rash actions.

Compared to the original, I don’t know that it’s quite fair to qualify one or the other as a better film, but as merely different. The first was a straight out horror tale with all the attendant themes about man and God, with only hints at the depth the Monster possessed. This one steers completely away from all that, substituting healthy doses of dark comedy and a surreal quality (what was with all those little bitty people in the jars?) that made you wonder if it wasn’t based on the works of the Brothers Grimm, rather than that of Shelley.

If your perception of the Frankenstein monster was that he was a big oaf that lumbered around grunting and scowling, be prepared to be amazed by what you see here. (He smiles! He drinks! He takes part in a kidnapping plot!)

And in the end, the Monster is the smartest one in the movie, finally realizing that this is not his world and he was never meant to exist in it. Studio executives would force him to return many more times, but it wouldn’t be this tormented Monster that knew more than his human creators. That Monster is gone forever after this picture. In the succeeding films, there would only be what the world now knows as the mindless thug. The thing the world mistakenly calls Frankenstein.

© 2008 MonsterHunter