Elizabeth (Carrie Fisher) is worried about her fiancé Victor
Frankenstein (Robert Powell), who spends way too much time in his lab and
way too little time with her. So she invites his best friend, Henry
(Michael Cochrane) around to the castle to check up on Victor - but Victor
has no problems making Henry, a brilliant surgeon, an ally in his
experiments, which are - raising the dead of course. They really bring a
dead man with a new brain back to life, but when the laboratory goes up in
a series of explosions, the creature (David Warner) vanishes and is
presumed dead - but of course it isn't, it finds shelter at and a friend
in a blind man (John Gielgud), who teaches him to talk, to read, to quote
the bible and the like, before he is killed by two cutthroats ... which
makes the creature very angry. The creature runs across Frankensteins
little brother (Graham McGrath), and kills him trying to befriend him,
then he meets up with Frankenstein himself, asking him to make him a
companion, just like God made Eve for Adam. Frankenstein outright refuses,
even though the creature has brought him a female corpse to start working
on immediately. So the creature goes after Elizabeth and kills her to make
his master suffer like he suffers. Frankenstein arrives on the scene - his
lab, actually - just when Elizabeth breathes her last, and he blows up the
place, to kill his creature as well as himself and put an end to the whole
horror. This made-for-television movie from 1984 is a rather
faithful adaptation of Mary W.Shelley's famous novel that has up until
then been the victim of rather free interpretations. However, in this case, a
faithful adaptation is not necessarily a good thing, as the book in itself
isn't too
cinematic to begin with, and many of its early 19th century sentiments are
not too easily adaptable with late 20th century views. But that's
not even the main problem of this version of Frankenstein,
the main problem is the film is simply dead boring, there is no tension,
no suspense, no action, no atmosphere, no macabre details, and even the creation scene
and the finale are underwhelming. The whole thing is just a rather stagey
and talky retelling of some of the books main passages, with nothing added
to make them work in the context of a movie. This is also mirrored in the
cast, with everybody giving competent but a bit dull performances, with
nobody ever pushing for greatness. Rather a disappointment, actually.
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