Caseus Archivelox: Poison & Frankenstein

2002-02-06 - 12:02 a.m.
I went off to watch Poison. Really weird gay movie. It was for my Sexualities in Film class, so at least that fits. Weird thing is that it was the first of two movies I watched today that included disfigured characters seeing themselves in reflective surfaces with no disfigured features (the other was Abre Los Ojos). Weird.
So I saw five movies the past two days: "The Seventh Seal", "The Magician", "Poison", "Frankenstein", and "Abre Los Ojos". That's too many movies.

2002-02-07
Why is it that the movies that are based upon the original source texts in the Universal horror genres are usually not as good as the later sequels (with the exception of “The Invisible Man” which had no sequels, and was excellent in its own right)? Probably some of that is due to the limitations of the source materials, but I think that most of it is due to the problem that Hollywood has had with most sequels: they are afraid to do anything special with the first movie, in the hope that it can spawn an equally conservative sequel due to high box office receipts. Both “Dracula” and “Frankenstein” do not challenge the audience at all, with simple characters, poor special effects, and laughable dialogue. Although later sequels would succumb to the Hollywood-ization of the stories by making them only for money, both “Dracula’s Daughter” and “Bride of Frankenstein” take the original stories further than before and add in lesbianism and psychiatry, along with dry wit, to make the stories more attractive than the relatively bland first entries in the series. Another point to make is that they waited for five and four years before making the sequels, which allowed for a good script to be written and imaginative ideas to be included. Most sequels today rarely wait more than a couple years, and do nothing special with the story.

I was upset to notice that it was not Fritz in “Frankenstein” and that it was a later movie that introduced Ygor to the audience. I love “Young Frankenstein” and could have sworn that Ygor was in this one, but it was fun to see so many other scenes that had been spoofed so well in “Young Frankenstein”. And “Bride of Frankenstein” has some scenes as well that are famous and incredible.

James Whale is really the reason why “Frankenstein” has any interest to modern audiences today, besides the obvious historical interest.