I thought back to this as I was watching the superb Stephen King/George A. Romero’s horror anthology Creepshow. Not because I was sitting next to an idiot piercing the cinema silence as they wolfed down their cheese and chilli tortilla, but because I can’t remember the last time I saw a horror film dabble with a different format to the standard 90-120 minute linear progression.

And in Creepshow it really works. I’ve said elsewhere on Black Lagoon that I think Stephen King adaptations can be pretty hit and miss, but in teaming up with Romero, King was taking no chances in bringing his five short stories (two of which were taken directly from his books) to the big screen. Though intended as a film version of the horror comics of the 1950s, this element of Romero’s direction lapses into almost total non-use beyond the occasional flash of animation here and there. This isn’t fatal though, and what you’re essentially left with is five straight horror tales from two of the genre’s masters.

The variety of the stories, in terms of content, approach and duration, is a critical strength of Creepshow, and one that readily grabs the viewer’s attention. They range from the tragicomedy of The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill (in which King himself does a very creditable turn as the lead character) through to a stylish examination of intolerance in They’re Creeping Up On You!. My personal favourite was Something To Tide You Over, which is almost entirely down to Leslie Nielsen’s superb portrayal of a psychotic husband on the rampage. There’s nothing particularly sophisticated about his performance, but his default method of playing it straight, coupled as ever with the affectionate inability to displace Frank Drebin from the memory when watching him, makes it supremely entertaining.

It’s this fondness which accounts for the enduring popularity of the film, and you can’t help but watch Creepshow and be struck by the love of the genre that King and Romero have. In this affectionate homage to their comic book ancestors, they obviously weren’t aiming to turn out anything approaching the high-brow, genre-defining output that they achieved elsewhere. And what’s wrong with that? All genres, perhaps horror more than most, need the occasional dollop of fun to keep their recipes fresh and alluring. For us, there are few people better placed to do this than King and Romero, as they amply prove in the slick, engaging and thoroughly enjoyable Creepshow.

On paper, you could be forgiven for thinking that you probably had seen it already, as many of the elements that would define the series are present and correct from the start – a man in a rubber monster suit smashing up miniature replicas of Tokyo, the anti-nuclear subtext, hundreds of Japanese people screaming in panic… But whilst subsequent Godzilla films have their moments, they’re a world away from the heart and soul that you’ll find in the very first film. There is absolutely nothing camp about this movie; instead it’s a stately, emotional and at times even harrowing film that treats its subject matter thoughtfully and with gravitas.

Godzilla is of course an ancient monster woken up after millions of years and given terrifying powers by the Japanese H-bomb tests. Obviously, this puts the theme of nuclear weaponry front and centre in the film, but to describe it as simply an anti-nuclear polemic is an over simplification. Godzilla is far more multilayered than many subsequent horror and sci-fi movies that use a simplistic environmental warning as a narrative rationale for monsters and zombies; instead, director Ishiro Honda’s triumph is the way he rejects upfront preaching for a sophisticated threading of ideas throughout the film. Godzilla indeed represents the destructive power of the atomic bomb both on a literal and an allegorical level; however, Serizawa’s dilemma over the deployment of his Oxygen Destroyer (which occupies most of the second half of the film and is written off too easily by many critics as a simple plot device) reflects the wider issues surrounding the ethics of atomic power: should a discovery be suppressed if there are many ‘bad’ applications for it above and beyond its immediate advantages? And once a discovery has been made, can there ever be any turning back? That the Oxygen Destroyer ultimately saves the day, despite being an even more destructive superweapon than those lamented in the film, suggests a thoughtful ambivalence about the nuclear issue, rather than the soapbox grandstanding of lesser directors.

But as well as brains, the film has a very human heart to it as well. Honda deliberately resonates with recent events that would sit very heavily in the Japanese national memory; characters discuss openly the horror of nuclear warfare that hit the country only nine years previously, and the opening scene on the boat is uncomfortably close to the Castle Bravo test earlier in 1954, where the crew of a Japanese fishing boat was poisoned by the fallout from American nuclear testing. These are scars that run deep, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the scenes surrounding Godzilla’s first attack on Tokyo. Subsequent films shied away from showing the human cost of the monster’s rampages but here it is in full force: orphaned children in hospitals sending Geiger counters into overload; a hysterical mother sitting with her two babies on her doorstep shouting that they’ll all be joining their dead father soon; schools of children praying for an end to the onslaught. It’s sobering, harrowing stuff, made all the more emotional by the dispassionate way Honda’s camera simply records the events as they unfold.

Crucially, the effects – although creaky by modern standards – don’t let the side down. This is partly helped by the noir-ish black and white look of the film, where most of the monster action takes place at night, but equally it’s hard not to be impressed by just how well Godzilla’s destruction of Tokyo is realised. Unlike the friendly green dinosaur he would later become, here the monster is a dark, brutish killing machine who towers over the city with ominous force. Helpfully, the actors play it for real as well with no mugging to the camera, and it’s hard not to find at least some pathos in the central love triange of Serizawa, Ogata and Emiko.

Honda and his team made plain their debt to King Kong nearly twenty years earlier, and whilst that film may have been the first to successfully realise the concept of a huge creature running rampage in a major city, to my mind Godzilla remains the finest giant monster movie ever made. The spectacle we expect from such a film is there if that’s what you’re looking for, but almost uniquely for the genre, it is overshadowed by the concepts, ideas and genuine emotion. In subsequent films we root for the monster and cheer when he knocks down another skyscraper, but here Honda successfully conveys the sheer terror of living through such an unstoppable onslaught. Godzilla is never preachy or presumptive in its nuclear subtext, but instead offers a harrowing and heartfelt yelp of pain from a culture that had all too recently suffered the worst destruction that science could then concoct.

The rise in people getting off on filming themselves means that, a decade on from The Blair Witch Project and its flurry of imitators (and indeed, nearly three decades on from Cannibal Holocaust, the big daddy of all “found footage” movies) film-makers are dusting down the tried and trusted technique of the first-person hand-held narrative. Brian De Palma’s Redacted is apparently “Apocalypse Now for the Youtube generation”, George Romero’s poised to release Diary of the Dead (“Night of the Living Dead for the Youtube generation”) and we currently have Cloverfield, which is meant to be “Godzilla for the Youtube generation”. Cloverfield tells the story of a group of friends trying to escape Manhattan during an attack by a giant monster. One of the friends has a camera, which keeps rolling as they run. On paper, it looks like a pretty good concept but in practice the results are wildly variable.

There is a lot to admire in Cloverfield. The monster is fantastic in both concept and design, and in the grand old Romero tradition isn’t over-defined – refreshingly, the apocalypse just happens, without requiring a reason or rationale. There are some genuine shock moments that do get the heart racing, particularly in the helicopter sequence towards the end of the film. Perhaps the most effective scenes are those where director Matt Reeves plays with the audience’s expectations of the handheld style; there’s a brilliant scene in a subway tunnel where one of the characters suggests putting the camera on night-vision so they can see where they’re going. As an audience, we know they’re going to see something horrible when they do, but Reeves has the characters spend what feels like an eternity fiddling around trying to find the right button, ratcheting up the tension in the process.

Unfortunately, there’s far too many scenes which consist of little more than a lot of running around and people shouting things like “We’ve got to get out of here” and “It’s not safe, we’ve gotta go”. And herein lies the main fault with the film: there’s absolutely no reason for it to be filmed first-person hand-held. At a time when the rule of the day in Hollywood is to go big big big, producers JJ Abrams and Bryan Burk are to be commended for having the balls to go small; however, of all the stories that will be told in cinemas this year, surely the tale of a giant monster that levels New York warrants the big screen blockbuster treatment? Much as Reeves does his best, our inability to get a good look at what’s going on is actually irritating rather than tantalising. All the action is reduced to a lot of incoherent banging and crashing. It’s akin to being forced to watch a Broadway spectacular through a keyhole. There’s a really exciting story here, it’s just that it’s all happening off-camera; you become resentful of all the cool stuff that’s going on just outside your line of vision.

I also resented having to see the apocalypse in the company of some of the most vapid, substance-free, zero-note characters I’ve seen in a long time. The whole point of the first-person narrative is that there’s inherently got to be something about the narrator that’s interesting or comment-worthy to justify the sacrifices in objectivity and omniscience that third-person gives you. Unfortunately, despite going through the worst ordeal ever with the characters, it’s hard to feel anything other than total indifference to their fates. The first 20 minutes or so, before the monster shows up, are excruciating. It would be fine if they were there just as monster-fodder, but they’re on screen, in our faces, ALL THE TIME, whereas the monster (which is far more interesting) is only fleetingly in the foreground. The whole plot revolves around Rob’s romantic mission to rescue and win-back his on-off girlfriend Beth; unfortunately Rob is as dull as dishwater, and our understanding of the depth of their relationship is limited to a couple of shots of them giggling together on the subway. Some reviews I’ve read have tried to pass this as a comment on the narcissism of the Youtube generation, but frankly I saw no evidence of this; if we were supposed to dislike the characters I would have been more interested but I have a horrible feeling that Reeves intends for them to be our point of identification in the ensuing madness.

Crucially, despite the shakycam, you never once get the impression that this is real footage or that these are real people. They are clearly actors working from a script, and they’re not doing a particularly good job of it. Now, horror and sci-fi don’t necessarily have a proud history of naturalistic performance, but the Cloverfield’s gimmick relies on us buying into the reality of the situation to sell the rest of the story, which falls apart as soon as any of the characters open their mouths. Most ruinous, however, is the decision to make the cameraman a Hollywood stock “comedy dork” figure. This fulfills the Hollywood rule of only putting beautiful, aspirational people in front of the camera, but his irritating babbling actively saps the tension out of some rather good setups.

Cloverfield is not a bad movie by any stretch, but it’s a frustratingly missed opportunity. It’s been ages since Hollywood made an honest to god, balls to the wall, giant-monster-smashes-stuff-up film. For a while, I thought Cloverfield might be that film, but it wimps out by taking the hand-held route – a technique designed to suggest modernity and immediacy, but that actually feels horribly old hat. It’s jarringly uncinematic; I’ll give the DVD a go when it comes out as I have a feeling that I might enjoy it more on my TV, but on the big screen it feels neutered. As a big-landmarks-get-destroyed film, it can’t hold a candle to Independence Day, which is nearly twelve years old now. As a monster movie, it happily sits in the first division, but comes nowhere near the premiere league of Godzilla, King Kong, Gamera 3 or The Host – for my money, still the best 21st century monster movie yet.

There’s no music in Cloverfield, except over the end credits, where we hear a stirring, militaristic, doomy march in the spirit of the old Toho kaiju films. This pretty much sums up what the film could have been, but wasn’t. Monster movies don’t have to be a treatise on the human condition, but if you’re going to make the characters more important than the monster then it helps if you have something interesting to say about them. Cloverfield should have been an all-out popcorn belter, but in truth it’s just a bit incoherent and unexciting – which is the worst crime of all.

I don’t normally mention DVD extras in these reviews, but Contamination comes packaged a pretty engaging 20 minute interview in which Cozzi, clearly on the defensive, explains how pretty much every aspect of the film is a product of compromise, commercial considerations and interference from the producer. It was the producer who wanted “an ugly woman” to play Colonel Stella Holmes, hence the casting of Louise Marleau, which seems slightly uncharitable. The production company was based in the office next to the company who made Zombie Flesh Eaters, and hearing how much money that film made, they decided to get the same cast – to find that only English thesp Ian McCulloch was available. Budgetary constraints meant that huge chunks of the film were made in a studio in Rome, which explains why it boasts some laboratory sets that even the 60s Batman series would wince at.

Cozzi – or Lewis Coates as he is credited – is keen to give the impression that as an artist, his main motivation was to pay tribute to the science fiction films he loved, particularly Alien. In practice, he achieves this by liberally helping himself to much of Scott’s iconography. The chest bursting scene is present and correct – replayed a dozen times, in fact – as are the green eggs, which vary between being close-ups of olives and something resembling a rubber bath toy. The massive alien Cyclops, meanwhile, harks back to the B-movies of the fifties in both design and direction, whilst the opening ten minutes are pretty much identical to the opening ten minutes of Zombie Flesh Eaters.

So far, so derivative, but is Contamination entertaining? It is to start with. The first forty minutes are pretty good fun as long as you’re prepared to look past the appalling scripting, wooden acting and flaccid direction. I’m not normally of the ‘so bad it’s good’ school – you either like it or you don’t – but it’s hard not to admire the gall of writing lines like “call it intuition – but I think they were going to put those eggs in the sewers!!” as late as 1980. The early scenes try to feel so epic – complete with budget-busting helicopter shots of New York, to desperately try and sell the idea that the whole film was made there – that it’s hard not to get swept along, and your patience is rewarded by an exploding man less than 12 minutes in. The music (by Italian horror stalwarts Goblin) is great too, all farting synths and funky bass guitars.

Unfortunately it all falls apart at the halfway point, where Contamination turns into a terrible James Bond ripoff, complete with sabotage sub-plots and a secret base on a coffee plantation. Cozzi claims that this turnabout was forced upon him, but it’s pretty clear that he must shoulder the blame for some extraordinarily leaden pacing. The film almost grinds to a halt, and although McCulloch – brilliant as ever – does his utmost to lend some much-needed grit to proceedings, Louise Marleau and Marino Mase sleepwalk through their parts, including possibly the least convincing romantic subplot ever seen on screen.

All of which means that when the alien Cyclops does arrive, it’s a blessed relief – partly because it means the end is in sight, partly because it reduces the amount of inert acting we have to sit through. In keeping with everything else in Contamination, the Cyclops is a bit rubbish; apparently designed as a hugely expensive mechanical prop, it failed to operate on the day, meaning Cozzi had to film it in 100 different shots to cover the fact that it was being operated by hand. Suffice it to say that Mase’s death more resembles a terrible accident with a vacuum cleaner than it does consumption by an evil alien.

In light of these real failings, it seems churlish to criticise the script’s brave lack of logic – Marleau’s character in particular seems to alternate between making jaw-dropping leaps of logic to missing clues that are bleeding obvious – because if these were the film’s only problems it would still be a fun, ropey piece of trash cinema. Unfortunately, Contamination’s main crime is that it simply becomes rather boring, which is ultimately Cozzi’s fault. Apparently he now runs a film memorabilia store, which seems a far more apt way of paying tribute to his beloved sci-fi movies than this brave but ultimately unsatisfying effort.

In the decades since its initial release, Freaks has lost none of its power to shock. Regardless of whether or not the film is any good it is a unique experience to behold. Tod Browning spared no effort in tracking down real circus and carnival performers to appear in his movie, with predictably genuine results. The problem is that he seems to have spent rather less time in deciding what he would do when he actually found his misfits.

As a result Freaks is quite a difficult film to read. This has nothing to do with the actual plot, which is fairly linear and holds no surprises. What is more problematic is Browning’s ambiguous representation of the freaks themselves. With great fanfare the film opens extolling the inherent virtue of our plucky underdogs, observing that their community is one of mutual support and inherent virtue. There is no wallowing self-pity and mean-spirited vindictiveness here. Though the freaks are obviously different their ‘code’ helps to ensure that their dignity is maintained and their worth recognised.

On this reading the truly unsavoury character is Cleopatra, who has no regard for the peculiar but particular place the freaks have in the circus hierarchy and so sets about manipulating Hans, to the growing chagrin of both his fellow freaks as well as the other circus performers. The conclusion of her machinations is rendered slightly less brutal on this reading, coming across as righteous vengeance against a wicked, unpitying force.

The problem with this is that there is an implicit fault in Browning’s treatment of the freaks, one which renders them susceptible to the wary disregard embodied in Cleopatra. Essentially, we know nothing of them beyond their physical impairments. The overt attempts to elucidate their everyday lives are focused principally on Hans, but this is too quickly overshadowed by his entanglement with Clepoatra. We are therefore left to reflect on the portentous warning delivered at the beginning of the film-that the freaks are a secretive group who have their own rules and who do not look kindly on people who transgress them. It is difficult not to see in the interactions between the freaks and even those befriend them a certain discomfort at an insurmountable divide. One wonders whether Venus does not pity the freaks just as much as Cleopatra, making her befriending of them just as devious as that of Cleo and Hercules. The final scenes, with the freaks advancing out of the shadows, reinforces this characterisation. Emerging from their shadows to enforce their code seems like the most natural thing in the world to Browning’s freaks.

In places it feels as though Browning’s mask drops and we see Freaks for what it is; a celluloid retelling of the traditional carnival freak-show which forms the very backdrop of his film. That it is powerfully done cannot be denied, but its attempts to portray itself as more leave it open to the charge of being just as exploitative as those whom it attempts to demonise.

How does Silent Hill fit into this spectrum? I was hindered from the off by the fact that I am completely unfamiliar with the original games, though a cursory trawl through Wikipedia tells me that they’re onto their fifth instalment so must be doing something right. In some ways this could have been an advantage as I was able to judge the film squarely on its own merits rather than constantly spotting the differences between it and the games that spawned it.

This worked out fine to begin with, as the film gently builds in to a naturally engaging plot despite the best efforts of its uniformly average dialogue to induce collective insomnia. Rose’s interactions with her daughter quickly become overly sincere to the point of irritation. It’s not that you want Sharon to be gobbled up by the demons but you ask yourself if you’d really care if she was. By the time we get to the ‘burn the witch!’ towards the finale the tedium is irreversibly established.

This is where the poor job of translating the plot from a computer game to the big screen really shines through. Not enough is made of the fact that Silent Hill periodically reverts into Hell on earth until the final 15 minutes, which probably ties in with how the adventure develops on the game. That’s fine where the gamer has hours worth of interaction with which to frame their experience but it doesn’t hold together in a film of this length. What results is an effort that feels like a botched rush job and an overly drawn out melodrama at the same time. The hesitant feel of the tale also has the original game written all over it. There is some attempt to weave a narrative thread through it by having Sean Bean as an external character who puts the pieces into place but this never really takes off and he seems to be completely forgotten for lengthy periods (which is just as well given his awful American accent). This does little to help the fact that absolutely NOTHING happens for most of the film. There is minimal plot development, almost no engagement with any of the characters and a complete lack of momentum which completely undercuts the attempt at a dramatic finale.

It’s a real shame because the storyline is one that should work on film. The reversion scenes are the undoubted highlights of the film, watching as an already sinister town is unexpectedly punctuated by air-raid sirens and suddenly and inexplicably turns into Hell. You come to look forward to the fleeting moments of engagement they bring in punctuating the vapid and seemingly interminable hunt for Sharon. Even they lose some of their magic when the answers are finally revealed, again in an astonishingly inept way which eradicates what little suspense there is remaining. The mixed morality tale is left far too late in the day to develop any roots and ends up looking like a bad adaptation of The Ring.

With a little bit more thought Silent Hill might have finally broken the mould of poor computer game-to-film adaptations but instead it coasts through expecting its core fans to be content with seeing the characters and places they are familiar with being presented in real life action. To the uninitiated it ends up feeling like a stunted horror version of Groundhog Day, only with none of its positive qualities.

]]> http://www.blacklagoon.info/movies/monsters/silent-hill-2006/feed/ 0 http://www.blacklagoon.info/movies/monsters/dr-jekyll-and-mr-hyde-1931/ http://www.blacklagoon.info/movies/monsters/dr-jekyll-and-mr-hyde-1931/#comments Sat, 04 Feb 2006 14:19:50 +0000 Carl http://www.blacklagoon.info/?p=97 The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde slipped easily into the cultural consciousness, to the extent that even people who are unfamiliar with the book will have a sketchy idea of its central theme. Much of this can probably be laid at the door of lazy newsreaders, who are adept at finding a neighbour of the latest serial killer who is willing to say that really they were actually quite nice to chat to over the garden fence and that they can’t believe they tortured cats as a child. Of course, this is precisely the kind of phenomenon that prompted Stevenson to write the book in the first place, and it’s perhaps not surprising that with such a meaty philosophical question to ponder we still haven’t found the answers some 120 years later. It also helps explain why the book lends itself so well to screen adaptations (if you can overlook the cameo in Van Helsing) as Stevenson raises the key question but can never really answer it; just what would happen if you could release your ‘bad’ self?

Rouben Mamoulin has a damned good stab at exploring the theme in this, the first sound version of the book. Like the vast majority of adaptations, the perspective of the work is shifted entirely from the narration of Utterson (who is entirely excluded here) to following Jekyll himself. Though this removes the mystery elements of the original story (where Jekyll and Hyde were presented as separate figures initially) I think it’s to the advantage of the film. Almost nobody now would sit down and watch a Jekyll and Hyde film without knowing that they were the same person, though my apologies if you would have and I’ve ruined it for you. You only have to endure Keanu Reeve’s grinding and distracting narration in “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” to know that an overly literal devotion to the original text is not always advisable for a film treatment. By focusing the story entirely on Jekyll’s downfall we’re not only forced to confront the horror of what is happening to this eminently likable man but must also try and decide who exactly is to blame for it.

I say this because from the start Jekyll himself is a complex character. The initial sugar-lumps of him lovingly tending to his patients in the charity hospital, charming his delectable fiancé, and mesmerising his audience with his scientific knowledge point to a man confident in himself and happy with the world around him. Mamoulin’s great success though is recognising that beneath this veneer things are not all that they seem. The first time we see Jekyll with Muriel Carew for example, we’d be forgiven for thinking that he is utterly devoted to her and wants nothing more than to spend the rest of his life with her (I lost count of the number of ‘I love you darling’s that were bandied around). What Mamoulin does excellently is show that this dependence is not necessarily a good thing and raises the possibility that Jekyll is almost too in love to the extent that it is a force of harm in his life rather than good. The subtlety in Stevenson’s story-brought out beautifully in this film-is that Jekyll experimented with the twin sides of his personality not because he was a virtuous and curious man of science but because he was a flawed man.

All too often adaptations paint the relationship between Jekyll and Hyde as an elemental struggle between the good and evil, with the latter, when released from its shackles, finally overpowering the former. What makes this film work so well is that it recognises that things are a lot more blurred than this. It’s a little underplayed in relation to Hyde, with his malevolence quickly anchored on sexual depravity rather than primeval brutality. He is quickly-too quickly perhaps-confined to scowling at people until towards the end of the film when things really get going. It’s difficult to resent Hyde because, unlike Jekyll, he is at least honest in his actions. It’s fascinating to see the duel between the ‘two’ intensify to the point where Hyde finally reveals the secret and curses the man he ‘hates most in the world’. It’s also instructive to note that this contrasts with Jekyll, who only seeks to stop Hyde once the killing starts and who even then never brings himself to express hatred for him. Once again the question of who is the more moral is not an easy one to answer. You can never quite tell whether Jekyll resents Hyde’s presence or whether he secretly longs to be overpowered by him and revels in seeing his long-supressed desires fulfilled. I suspect that it is the latter. Hyde is not a ‘bad’ Jekyll so much as Jekyll is a cowardly Hyde.

This is to say nothing of the superb job Mamoulin did in presenting the film. Frederic March is irreplaceable as Jekyll/Hyde, and gives a performance which has few rivals from the 1930s. The make-up on Hyde will be familiar to any viewer of Red Dwarf but March is flawless in using it to full effect. The first transformation is utterly mesmerizing and gives the Invisible Man a run for its money in the special effects department. I can’t praise this effort highly enough. Everything about it works, from the effective dissection of a moral minefield through to the way that it’s beautifully packaged. Though Hyde’s repugnance does eventually lead to the viewer losing their initial sympathy with him I am still unsure whether Dr. Jekyll was ever likeable at all. I think that this was the point all along and I’ll wager that I’d still be unsure after another 120 years.

At this point, just as things are getting really interesting, Winston gets lazy and reverts back to the theory that served him well when he worked on Alien – the scarier and more bizarre looking the monster, the better. Unlike Alien though, he does nothing to sustain the tension that comes not with actually seeing the monster but with knowing it is there and not seeing it. This is a real shame, because he’d done everything right in paving the way for the arrival of the demonic Pumpkinhead. The viewer at this stage is intrigued with seeing if Harley’s hatred of his son’s killers is enough to circumvent his kind nature and allow him to go ahead with his compact with evil more than it is with seeing a gang of teenagers get ripped apart.

What we get instead is a sudden and disappointing reversion to a standard monster slasher movie, with the creature in question even looking like a cheap version of Alien. All the empathy that the audience had with Henrisken disappears in a flash, though he does his best to keep things on an even keel and his performance gets stronger as the rest of the movie falls away beneath him. As it resorts to clichés there isn’t enough to keep the audience onside and Harley’s realisation of what he has to do to save both his son’s killers and, ultimately, himself, now seems out of place instead of coming across as the kind of act of redemption that would have fitted in nicely with the first half. Pumpkinhead is more interesting than many of the offerings of this period but Winston really lets the side down with his tired and badly rendered finale. In many ways this paved the ways for the awful Pumpkinhead 2, which again missed the point of the true message of the original and further muddied its worthy points.

Like all of Wood’s movies the production on Bride of the Monster is dire. There is a mismatch between his interior and exterior shots, continuity between night and day is completely overlooked and his sets wobble worryingly during any action scenes. Having said that, it isn’t half as bad as his later Plan 9 From Outer Space and it rarely becomes distracting or too disruptive to the plot. Wood actually comes close to turning out something quite atmospheric if one can look beyond the barely disguised photograph enlarger machine as the ‘Atomic ray’ or the tellingly listless giant squid that lurks in the swamp, and there is a genuine hint of menace surrounding Lugosi’s secluded lair.

Likewise, though the script is as shoddy and clichéd as they come it is far more accessible and less convoluted than some of his offerings, so it is easy to overlook the hackneyed journalists and policemen. Wood also manages to marshal his players effectively, especially in light of the fact that one of the leads (Tony McCoy) wasn’t even an actor but the son of his financial backer. In so far as comparisons with his other works go, Bride of the Monster is a polished piece with none of the unnecessary plot twists or padded characters he allowed to creep into his other offerings. As I said above, the flaws we see here are those that you could pick out in many other B-movies of the era, movies which (unlike Bride) fail to overcome their physical defects with worthy plots or memorable acting performances.

It is Bela Lugosi who really shines, and if ever an example was needed of an actor rising above his material then this is it. The psychotic Dr. Eric Vornoff was Lugosi’s last speaking part, poignantly playing the mad scientist stereotype that became the staple of his later films. He dominates the screen with this role and fills it with his old commanding personality and sincerity. The lovely scene where he unburdens himself (“hooome? I haff no hooome”) is as touching as Tim Burton rendered in Ed Wood to those familiar with Lugosi’s career, and is a fitting swansong to the cinematic giant. For this reason alone it is difficult for me to dislike Bride of the Monster, for despite his limited resources Wood treats Lugosi and the material with the heartfelt respect they deserves and manages to churn out a respectable little movie which proves (though none is needed) that he’s far from the worst director in film history.

In between the two Frankenstein films, Whale directed The Invisible Man, a very successful blend of horror and comedy. This more lighthearted approach is self-evident in Bride from the opening scenes, where a woman’s horrified reaction to the monster’s survival is played more for laughs than scares. But whereas the Invisible Man’s invisible-ness lent itself to a certain amount of slapstick comedy (aided by the character’s vicious but snappy one-liners), here it feels rather out of place. Rather than enhancing each other, the horror and the comedy sit rather uncomfortably, as if you’re actually watching two separate films taped together. Worse, the tone of the humour feels all wrong; there’s a sense of conscious self-parody, which is a shame as there’s nothing intrinsically silly about the first film that lends itself to parody. The self-destructive way Whale tears down the delicate suspense of the earlier movie with camp comedy is both sad and petty; it’s well documented that he was reluctant to direct a Frankenstein sequel, but taking the piss on camera doesn’t strike me as being very professional. It also means Bride has dated significantly faster than its predecessor.

This is a shame, as when the mugging stops there’s some really good stuff here that’s easily on a par with Frankenstein. Basically, the plot takes a bunch of storylines from the novel that weren’t used the last time and spins a sequel out of them. This is a sound move, as the novel itself is an underappreciated masterpiece, and it means we get to see gems like the monster’s friendship with the blind man – easily Karloff’s most moving monster moment. Inevitably, Karloff’s just as fabulous the second time round, and even though the actor was opposed to the monster speaking, he pulls it off with aplomb, without detracting from the character’s bruised, awkward tenderness. His tour de force performance also shows up Elsa Lanchester’s performance as the eponymous Bride as being stilted and overly stylised, although her hair shows a clear influence on Marge Simpson. Luckily, her screen time is limited.

As with most Universal monster movies, the whole thing looks tremendous as well, and the climactic sequences with the creation of the Bride are spectacularly compelling. Whale’s direction is more grandiose, and the sets are jaw-dropping, making this a really slick blockbuster. It’s just a shame about the script; the self-mockery doesn’t sit well and cheapens the memory of the first film. I’m not saying horror and comedy can’t mix – the first film had some sublimely comic moments – but the way Whale waves two fingers at the conventions he established isn’t particularly impressive. Obviously history disagrees with me but although I’d recommend seeing it, I’d advise you don’t believe the hype.