Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) was the little film that could, except for the ‘little’ bit. It’s a Coppola film backed by Columbia for gods’ sake and had a fairly standard for the time Hollywood budget. Still, the folks in the biz assumed it’d fail pretty badly at the box office, presumably on account of its heavily stylised nature, only for it to very much succeed, thereby ushering in a new age of ‘serious’ and ‘faithful’ adaptations of classic horror stories. Please ignore that, while Dracula is probably one of the more faithful adaptations of the source material, it still takes massive liberties with it.

Also, this new age stuff is pretty much a lie. The threatened trend died almost as soon as it started when Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein landed with a massive thud.

Two years later, drunk off success, they decided they needed a film that would do for Frankenstein what Coppola’s film had done for Dracula. A noble goal, I’m sure, if you ignore the less noble parts about it. Shelley’s novel is quite a bit better than Stoker’s, which suffers from the standard problems of serialised novels (though evidence would suggest that it wasn't even serialised originally), such as incessant wheel-spinning where basically nothing is allowed to happen until the end of the chapter so as to have an near endless string of cliffhangers, as well as some less standard ones, such as Stoker’s baffling grasp of time and/or geography. Seriously, people get between Exeter, Whitby, London and sometimes Amsterdam in that book at a moment’s notice, it’s like Stoker thought they were neighbouring towns. At least they need a boat to get to Amsterdam, even if I’m left incredulous by the idea of going for a day trip in the 1890s. 

Anyway, you know the basic plot of Frankenstein. I probably don’t really need to go into it, but I seem to have established a formula where I do that. Way back when, an Arctic expedition finds Victor Frankenstein (Kenneth Branagh) traversing the ice. Ol’ Vic and the captain (Aidan Quinn) hit it off, I guess, and so the former reels off what his deal is. Way back even further when, Victor lived the fancy life of an upper class Enlightenment era type, all about this new-fangled ‘science’ doo-hickey and also his hot cousin/adopted sister, Elizabeth (Helena Bonham Carter), but it wasn’t all sunshine and roses, for his mother (Cheri Lunghi) died giving birth to his brother, thus causing him to vow to find a way to use this here science gubbins to conquer death. Being an upper class Enlightenment era type, he’s able to go off to university to study medicine, such as it was in the eighteenth century, but his quest is dismissed as madness by his peers. However he insinuates himself with Waldman, a professor who has studied the creation of life (John Cleese) but who warns him against meddling in such things. Joke’s on him though as he gets murdered, leaving Frankenstein to dick about with his notes and equipment; he promptly ignores the warning and sets about whipping something up with the prof’s brain and the murderer’s (Robert De Niro) body, and animating said creation with electricity. The fickle bastard then decides that, eh, that wasn’t such a great idea after all and decides he might as well kill the feller. The creation gets away however, and Victor goes back home, and surely nothing will come back to bite him in the arse down the road. Definitely no vengeful De Niros who have learned the terrible truth of man (it’s that man sucks, boo hiss).

First off, people familiar with the book will notice that, yes, this keeps the frame story, why not? Albeit without the increasingly ludicrous epistolary thing which wouldn’t translate well anyway. Also this is one where Elizabeth is Victor’s cousin; Shelley seemed to waver on that one in the different revisions. Much like Dracula, this is also one of the more faithful film adaptations, though it does still go off piste quite a bit and does so far more gratuitously than the earlier film. Sure, sure, the creature’s all erudite like, unlike the version most engrained in popular consciousness, that is to say the one played by Boris Karloff in James Whale’s 1931 film (ostensibly based on a stage version)* wherein the creature is all innocent beastie/unfeasibly strong child, all the time, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t come at the story with comparatively broad strokes. The second half of the film, while loosely following the original story, all plays out rather differently, seemingly a bit more inspired by Whale’s The Bride of Frankenstein (1935) version of events than the novel.

Anyway, let’s cut to the chase, shall we? This film is terrible. I kind of love it. Branagh, pulling double duty as director, occasionally seems to be trying to ape the style of Coppola’s film, but not very consistently nor to great or, you know, logical effect. A comparative gimmick of the earlier film was that it was pretty much entirely studio based and used this to revel in a weird unnatural aesthetic, with unrealistic looking sets and costumes and all that jazz, combined with a bunch of old fashioned photography techniques and filters and tinting, etc., that evoked the idea of early cinema. This befitted the period; the fin de siècle being the time where film, as we know it today, started to take shape, so it makes a certain logic for the film to try for that sort of feel. Frankenstein takes place a good century earlier, so its vague attempts instead just seem to be to try and remind people of Dracula. It’s moot anyway, the bulk of the film takes place on entirely ordinary looking film sets rendering when it jarring when it does suddenly jump over to the Frankenstein place and it looks like it fell out of Tales of Hoffmann (1951). It’s one of those things where if you’re going to do it, you have to commit to it.

Commit to that it does not, as you may have gathered. Don’t worry, instead it decides to play everything in such an over-the-top manner that the thing soon collapses into hilarity, the coup de grâce being the scene wherein the creature is (re)animated is truly a sight to behold in its overwrought absurdity. I don’t want to spoil too much of that… I will tell you that it involves a giant pulsating sack full of electric eels. I had to pause the film from laughing. But even that scene aside, melodrama infuses pretty much everything, from the script to the acting to the mise en scene, pitching just about every element at a tone that’s downright silly. Frank Darabont has tried to distance himself from the film, basically disavowing any responsibility and laying all the blame at Branagh’s feet. While often times the lion’s share of the final screenplay isn’t actually the work of the credited screenwriter, but one assumes at least some of the film’s awful dialogue and restructured plot beats were from his manuscript; he certainly seems to suggest that the tone is problem rather than the actual writing.

There's a weird doppleganger [sic] effect when I watch the movie. It's kind of like the movie I wrote, but not at all like the movie I wrote. It has no patience for subtlety. It has no patience for the quiet moments. It has no patience period. It's big and loud and blunt and rephrased by the director at every possible turn.

— Darabont, in Argent & Bauer

Whether or not he means ‘rephrased’ literally, I don’t know. The impression I get is not (though obviously not having seen any draft of the script, I can't really comment with any real authority), but there’s enough ludicrous, leaden dialogue in the film that it feels like trying to do the script as seen (or heard, I guess) in the final film that trying to do it with any degree of subtlety would still result in a bad film, just one that would be more prosaically forgettable.

As it stands, this film is quite catastrophic in a way that tends only to happen by accident. It’s positively ludicrous. It’s chock full of dubious stylistic choices, stupid dialogue, hammy performances and just plain baffling tweaks to the source material that don’t serve the narrative in the slightest and more often hinder it. It’s also incredibly entertaining. The reasons that it is so are almost certainly the wrong ones (I suppose it’s conceivable my reaction was in fact the intended one, but I’m unconvinced), but the film’s failures are so plentiful, so spectacular in their magnitude, that it all works out into a glorious mess.

…After the sequence where the creature is birthed, there’s a really long sequence of the shirtless Frankenstein (Branagh takes any excuse to get his shirt off in this) and the nude creature struggling to stand up on the wet floor. This goes on for like a full minute.

Yeah.

* Whale’s film had so many hands involved in its writing that, while perhaps a scholar could discern which ideas came from where and/or from whom, I frankly don’t think I have the skill nor could I be bothered at this time to try