Tales of Frankenstein celebrates the bicentennial of the publication of Frankenstein (wow, 200 years since that came out already? Time flies!) with four short films that all present a new take on the Frankenstein theme. In the first, a relative of Dr. Frankenstein is trying to make his own Frankenstein bride, but when he brings her to life, will she have a surprise for him? The second involves a plague ravaging the village Dr. Frankenstein lives in, and after he dies, a neighbor wants to exhume his body to steal a ruby ring from his dead finger. Can't see anything bad happening there. The third is a pulp detective story with Mel Novak as a mad scientist who puts human brains in gorillas; and the last has a man related to Frankenstein who tries to revive his work in Transylvania.
The runtime gets it again. The thing is, if you lop off the last story you have 90 minutes but I don't know if that would have saved this, as each of the four all went a little longer than they needed to. For 25-minute affairs, they tended to waste a lot of the openings and spin their wheels a bit before getting to the meat of the story, so perhaps the better solution would have been to make them all shorter. 4 20-minute stories plus the bumpers and your hovering around 85-90 minutes. Now you're looking good, and from there the elements of this that I enjoyed, like how it brought me back to some of the low-budget horror my friends and I would rent from the video store in the early 2000s, can really shine through. That 90-minute rule might be the one that holds up the most in almost every situation, and this was no exception.
All four of these had the feeling of a one-off Tales from the Crypt episode, which was a great show and a lot of fun. The thing is though, for an anthology, they're all directed by the same person, Donald F. Glut, best known for his novelization of Empire Strikes Back. I think had they been done by different directors and submitted to an editor, that editor would have trimmed them all down; but because this was all Glut's writing and direction, he didn't see it that way. This is one similarity with the other two films Joe has submitted to us, as those two were directed and written by one person too. I used to be a big fan of that, especially considering how two of my favorite movies were made that way, Citizen Kane and Bad Taste, but I think I'm seeing more how giving a script to a director and letting the director and actors give it a once over can be important. When the writer is the director, they may be more protective or less likely to see how the dialog is going a bit too long, or how an opening scene isn't moving as it should. If I read a novel based on these four stories it would've felt well-paced, but in a movie those extra minutes can feel like an eternity.
This is our ninth Mel Novak film on the site. To give you an idea of where that puts him, he's passing Casper Van Dien's 8, and 9 also ties him with people like Kim Coates and Klaus Kinski. In this film he plays Dr. Mortality, the evil doctor who, in the name of Dr. Frankenstein, wants to put a human brain inside a gorilla's head. It has more of a pulpy feel to it, which I liked, but it didn't finish it off, if you know what I mean. I think I would have liked to have seen a better outcome for our gumshoe in the spirit of those old pulp novel/film noir stories. Anyway, Mel Novak doesn't look like he's slowing down at all, so expect to see him back here soon.
One thing this film reminded me about was the fact that horror tends to be one of the main bastions of the indie/low-budget film world. Unlike action, which requires a lot of money to blow things up, shoot people, and choreograph nice fight scenes, with horror it can be done for less, so the wealth of indie horror is much greater. As such, I think I've been doing that market a disservice by not covering it more. One of the films I did when I came back was Clownado, a Todd Sheets indie horror flick, and the people involved, including Sheets, were very appreciative of me giving it the spotlight, and as a result, their spreading the word about my review got it even more views, making it one of the most viewed posts I've made since I came back. It's like the Beatles said: "The love you take is equal to the love you make."
Finally, I wanted to wrap up with one of my favorite takes on the Frankenstein story. In the Highlander TV series, there was an episode where we learn that Lord Byron was an immortal, and in the early 19th century, he kills another immortal out on a lawn after hanging out with Mary Shelley. When he beheads the other immortal and the quickening happens, she watches it, the image of Lord Byron engulfed in electric bolts inspiring her to write Frankenstein. That's one area where this movie disappointed me: outside of the Novak story that had more of an old detective pulpy feel, the other three were pretty standard for what you'd expect out of a Frankenstein theme. What if someone had done something like what the Highlander writers did, maybe show where Shelley got her inspiration. Another different take on the story was Data's character on Star Trek: The Next Generation. There were more places this could have gone that it didn't, which I think was a missed opportunity.
With that, it's time to wrap this up. Once again, the 90-minute rule rears it's ugly head, and again it's undefeated. I think a half-hour shorter we would have had a fun collection of horror stories in the tradition of Tales from the Crypt. For me though, close to two hours is too long, and ultimately that hurts the film. Thanks again to Joe for another opportunity to look at a screener like this, I always enjoy the chance to do this!
For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7365740
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