Tag: Frankenstein

The Bride! (2026) Review

On By troubledproductionsIn ReviewLeave a comment

Quick Synopsis: Frankenstein is fed up with being lonely, so he asks a doctor to give him a bride. A corpse that just so happens to be possessed by Mary Shelley is chosen.

I’m writing this review less than a week removed from Jessie Buckley winning best actress at the Academy Awards for her performance in Hamnet. Personally, I didn’t love that film as much as everybody else seemed to, but I’m glad to see she won because she’s one of my favourite performers at the moment. Her performance as the titular character in this is one of the highlights. Her manic energy is exhilarating and makes you want to see her let loose in films a bit more, rather than being restrained to emotional and high-art pieces; give her the villain role in a slasher movie, and she’ll kill it. Without her in this movie, it would be a lot worse, and that’s saying something.

I should have liked The Bride. I want to look at it and see something lovingly crafted, feminist as fuck, and batshit insane. It is all of those things, but it’s also messy. Not in a “blood and guts everywhere” way, In a “this needs to be better” way. It’s telling that the film it most reminds me of is Joker: Folie A Deux. But whilst that felt like a musical that didn’t want to be a musical, this feels like a film that wants to be a musical but isn’t. It’s horrifically anachronistic, and it feels deliberately so. A film set in 1930’s Chicago that features references to astronauts, and a club that plays modern techno music support the theory that it’s deliberate, but it’s also incredibly annoying as a viewer to have the story break like that in completely inconsequential ways. It would be like if the Starbucks cup in Game Of Thrones was a deliberate choice.

Let’s be honest, though, a lot of the film is inconsequential. The Bride inspires a feminist uprising, where women across the country mimic her style in a show of defiance. Guess how that plays into the plot? The women torture a mobster during the closing credits, or to put it another way, it doesn’t tie into the plot in an important way. It should have. How can you have a Frankenstein movie that involves an angry mob and NOT have a “villagers storming the castle by torchlight” scene? It should have been a big part. Frank and The Bride should have had an argument which led to her leading the group to his home. Maybe not that, but something. The Bride leading a group of women would be an incredibly powerful scene to witness, but we don’t get it.

The Bride! has so many good ideas contained within: the allusions to Old Hollywood, the isolation that the monster feels, a wronged woman seeking revenge against an uncaring society. All of them are perfect ideas for a story like this, yet it tries to do all three and has no idea how to connect the differing threads. So it doesn’t bother to try; instead, it just has the two characters lurch (lol, Addams Family reference) from one scene to the next like two characters in a video game.

The characters don’t even feel consistent. We’re never given a reason for The Bride to like Frank. At one point, she even decries the name Bride of Frankenstein, saying she just wants to be known as The Bride. She is her own person, she is independent, and she doesn’t need to be tied to a man for happiness and fulfilment. Then, a few minutes later, they’re portrayed as soulmates who will spend eternity together. No matter how cool the moments are on their own, there’s no cohesion between them.

Before seeing this, I had one of my friends tell me she thought it was “the worst film of the 2020’s”. Personally, I feel that that’s War Of The Worlds erasure. It’s not quite the worst film of the decade, it’s not even the worst of the year, but it’s probably the biggest gap between potential and result that I’ve seen in a long time. Like I said, it has some great moments, and the story being told is interesting, but it doesn’t make for a good final product. Ultimately, it’s like a really drunk person retelling Paddington 2 who keeps getting distracted by the football results: you can tell there’s a good story underneath the bullshit, but you don’t have a shovel big enough, and all you want to do is tell them to focus the fuck up.

Candyman (2021)

On By troubledproductionsIn ReviewLeave a comment

Quick Synopsis: An artist delves into the Candyman mythos and it starts to slowly take over his life.

I will freely admit, I haven’t seen any of the original Candyman films, so I am going into this mostly blind. Pretty much all I know is the basic plot, and that Tony Todd is in it (or to give him his full name: Tony Freaking Todd). That might have made it harder for me to enjoy this film as there are quite a few returning characters who I just didn’t get. On the other hand, if I did know, then it might have ruined one of the “twists” as it would have been obvious what had really happened, so it would have been only an internal reveal, the audience already aware.

I’m not really sure who this was aimed at, the lengths they go to to include all those references to the original make me think it’s aimed at seasoned fans of the franchise. But the fact it was advertised based on creating something new, that it didn’t talk about a “return” made it seem new, even the name made it seem like a new start and a reboot. Compare this to Halloween. Which firmly established itself as a sequel that ignored all but the first film. I also hadn’t seen any Halloween films before I saw that one, but that did a much better job of establishing who the character is, and what he does. This doesn’t really do a good job of establishing what it is the character can actually do. It focuses a lot on “say his name and he’ll appear”, but it doesn’t establish whether he feels physical pain, whether he can be reasoned with, or even deal that much with the mirrors. The character mostly exists in mirrors, unable to be seen in the real world. This means that the film is missing that core aspect of a horror film: the fightback. At no point does any character even begin to look like they can fight back, there’s no “will they survive” to any of the deaths as you know they won’t. So there’s no tension, every death is the equivalent of a train approaching somebody tied to a railway track, you know they’re going to die so the slow nature of it just draws out the inevitable.

It’s not as though the film itself is slow and drawn out, there are moments where it’s painfully rushed. 90 minutes is not long enough to tell a story like this. The film has to do A LOT. It has to introduce the main character in his normal life, then introduce the lore, have the character be uncertain then be presented with evidence, then research it more etc. You need to do a lot for a film like this, and that requires time, and this film just doesn’t have it.

The third act in particular really suffers from the rushed nature. The third act reveal could really work, and the concept itself is exciting and could lead to a great sequel. But the way it’s handled in this is shockingly bad, with REALLY important details rushed over in a sentence or two, so the true implications of the reveal don’t have time to breathe. I’m not asking for a five hour horror film, just another 15 minutes or so would have really helped this.

Now onto the good, it looks amazing. Nia DaCosta is lined up to do The Marvels film, and I’m really excited about what she could bring visually to it. There’s some very cool concepts in this, the idea of the shadow puppets being used to tell some of the stories is interesting, bringing to mind the works of Lotte Reiniger. Her use of angles too are interesting, making even standard scenes have a sense of dread. It’s also suitably gory, and the score is pretty damn intense too. Would I recommend this? It’s hard to say, I feel if you go see a few films a year, maybe skip it. If you want to just sit and be scared, go see it. Also, if you’re interested in film-making I’d go to see it purely so you can study the techniques they use. I’d say it’s more important than it is good.

It did give me one of the stupidest comments I’ve seen on film twitter though:

Yeah, stupid woke Hollywood, taking a story about a former slaves son who was lynched and tortured for falling in love with a white woman, and somehow making it about race. What’s next? Making a film where we actually are supposed to sympathise with the creature in Frankenstein? Or a Nightmare On Elm Street film where it turns out Freddy Krueger is actually the villain just because he kills people? Snowflakes!