Ruptured Reasoning: Son of Frankenstein

Movie Coda has teamed up with Hashtag World for a new segment called Ruptured Reasoning. Every day we will watch a horror film and blog about our experience. The rules are: the film must be available on either Netflix Instant or Hulu Plus, the genre listed must be horror, and neither one of us can have seen the film previously. It’s going to be a battle of passion vs. grammar, enthusiasm vs. boredom, a lifetime of movie watching vs. a lifetime of internet commentator reading. Yes, at long last, it’s Justin (Movie Coda) vs. Chris (Hashtag World).

I picked tonight’s movie because of the actors involved. It’s Sherlock Holmes vs. The Monster vs. Dracula. That’s more than enough to warrant a viewing.

Netflix Instant summary: Wolf von Frankenstein, son of the infamous madman, returns to the estate to claim his inheritance and is persuaded to revive his father’s creation.

Directed by: Rowland V. Lee

Cast: Basil Rathbone, Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff, Lionel Atwill

Justin: Son of Frankenstein begins with Wolf Von Frankenstein traveling by train to the town of Frankenstein to recover his inheritance from his father, Victor Von Frankenstein. Frankenstein Frankenstein. There’s a nice meta moment early in the train where Wolf says that 90% of people refer to his father’s monster as Frankenstein.

When he arrives in Frankenstein the whole town is there to meet him and give him his father’s notes, and also to tell him personally how much they hated his father and how much they’re going to hate and mistrust him. The town constable even makes an appearance to reassure him that he will get protection from the villagers. It’s awkward.

Quick side note here. The town in the original Frankenstein and the sequel Bride of Frankenstein is called Goldstadt. In the two sequels after Son of Frankenstein the town is referred to as Vasaria. So apparently the town leaders named their town after their most hated resident and then changed it to a completely different name after meeting his son. For tourism I would imagine.

Anyway, Wolf, his wife, and his son move onto the estate and Wolf finds his father’s laboratory. The notes his father left him describe how to resurrect a dead body. Also he runs into Ygor, spelled with a Y for some reason, who still haunts the grounds. You can probably see where this is going.

I love the Universal horror film look. It’s German expressionism at its absolute best. Many all-time classics owe their visual style to these early horror films. Classics as diverse as The Night of the Hunter, and Orson Welles’ Macbeth. Son of Frankenstein holds up to that legacy. The film is beautifully shot. The filmmakers were obviously trying to capture true black and white cinematography. Every line is harsh and angular, keeping the characters trapped in a nightmare fantasy world. Ditto for the sets. I love how removed from reality they are. All of the houses don’t seem able to support their own weight, the doors and rooms are ridiculously large, and even the trees are leafless and gnarled to an unnatural degree. It’s an exquisite type of filmmaking from the studio system. Aesthetically this is the most impressive movie we’ve seen so far for Ruptured Reasoning.

Bela Lugosi absolutely steals the show. His performance as Ygor is the highlight of the film. For an actor remembered for one role and for having a dismal career because it was the only role he could play, it’s nice to see that there was more talent there than Hollywood thought. He hides his famous accent behind another nondescript foreign accent. He’s the most interesting and dynamic character in the whole movie.

The other great performance is Basil Rathbone. Another actor associated with a single character. The manic, obsessive edge he used so well as Sherlock Holmes is used to great effect. It’s completely believable he would become so focused on clearing his father’s name that he would completely dismiss the danger to his family. When the walls start closing in Rathbone gives a great scene-chewing maniacal performance. The performance as a whole is a little inconsistent, but it’s always watchable and entertaining.

Boris Karloff has moments, but the character is very poorly done. He’s basically like Bane in Batman and Robin. Just a big guy that someone else uses to their own ends. He has some very nice moments when he’s first introduced. A scene where the monster becomes enraged because he doesn’t look like a normal person has the resonance and sympathy that the character requires. After that the only other time that this level of depth is even attempted is after the Monster’s only friend is murdered. The scream of rage and agony Karloff bellows out is fantastic. Obviously Karloff was more than able to give this role the attention it needed. The filmmaker’s just weren’t there to support him.

You would think with cast and this premise the film would be a gem. Sadly the pacing really kills this one. I read on IMDB that the film was written as it went along. It’s very evident. What could have taken a single scene is spread out to three. Information gets repeated over and over again. It makes the film drag in the middle section.

I can understand the lack of a tight script when it’s written on the set, but what I don’t understand is the editing choices. Obviously most of these filler scenes should have been cut down and combined. Another major issue is the lack of cross cutting action. There’s supposed to be a rising level of dread from a combination of the town’s paranoia, the detective’s suspicions, and Ygor’s murderous intentions. Instead of all of those things building they just happen one at a time. When something interesting does happen it happens all at once and then it’s over.

This movie could have been a classic on par with its predecessors. Sadly it was horribly injured by a rushed production.

Chris: In this case, I feel that the pros were very much outweighed by the cons, but it was for a reason that I can’t quite put my finger on. The film is by no means terrible—there are some moments that are even quite good—but it’s just a movie that never quite captivated me.

A few posts back, I somewhat controversially claimed that horror movies from the 60s and 70s are never scary. You could make a case that that claim was incorrect, but one would be hard pressed to argue that there are ever any genuine scares in the old studio horror films.

A horror movie doesn’t have to be frightening to be good, of course, as much as I love the visceral thrill of a particularly terrifying moment. Eyes Without a Face was a very good film without any serious scares, granted it did have a very creepy vibe about. But Son of Frankenstein was mostly lacking in artistry as well.

I’ll admit that there was a certain visual flair to it, but despite its star-studded cast, I was left feeling cold. Nothing about the movie really grabbed me. My favorite part was trying to figure out all the stuff that Mel Brooks lifted for Young Frankenstein, for which this film was clearly the main inspiration.

I thought that even Ygor was a somewhat silly character. Maybe not to the same extent that Marty Feldman was, but it was hard to take him seriously. He was hardly recognizable as Bela Lugosi, but now that I think about it, I don’t really know what Bela Lugosi looked like when he wasn’t being Dracula.

The story was fairly conventional by Frankenstein movie standards. I guess the original was so successful that they wanted to come up with another way to get the iconic monster back in the game, and having his heretofore unknown son take over his old castle and lab was a convenient way to go about it. In most ways, it was the exact same story, just a different Dr. Frankenstein.

At the same time, I imagine audiences at the time got exactly what they wanted. The difference between Frankenstein and Son of Frankenstein is probably greater than the difference between The Hangover and The Hangover 2, for example. And especially since I haven’t seen the original, I can hardly complain about their similarity.

In the end, I just didn’t have all that much to say about it, good or bad. It just existed in a dimension separate from time and space. It lay firmly… in the Mediocre Zone.

Lugosi lives at Hashtag World.