Frankenstein 2007

Original Air Date:  24 Oct. 2007 (UK Television)

Directed By:  Jed Mercurio

90 Minutes

I stumbled on this last month while checking out one of my favorite actresses Helen McCrory's IMDb page.  She's probably best known stateside for playing Cherie Blair a couple of the times, most notably in The Queen (2006), though she also had small roles in Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince (2009), and, bless her, Interview With the Vampire (1994), playing the part of "Whore 2."  Here in this house she is enjoyed in Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Silk Stocking (2004) and hissed at for wicked performance of Barbara Villiers, The Countess of Castlemain in The Last King (a British mini-series of 2003).

The script seeks to update the science in Frankenstein, much like it was, badly, in Frankenstein 80 (1972), by having the monster created out of stem cell research gone awry.  Sounded interesting, so I ordered a copy from the UK for Fright Month.

I looked at the full cast and saw that two of them were updated characters from James Whale's classic giggle treat Bride of Frankenstein (1935), a Dr. Ed Gore and a Professor Jane Preterious, I then got the thinking that this might be a fun tongue and cheek affair.  Not so.  It is deadly serious, and hard to watch.

McCrory, in the role of Victoria Frankenstein, is a stem cell researcher, who just happens to have a dying child.  So, of course, she is desperate and things quickly get out of control.  True to the worn out Henry Frankenstein in Bride, she is exhausted after the death of her child.  She wants nothing more to do with the experiment that initiated to save her son.  She wants it terminated.  Her assistant Dr. Ed Gore tends to agree.  A craven, possibly evil, Pretorious, has other ideas.  Soon they have a bi-pedal monstrosity roaming the lab halls.

He looks nothing like the traditional movie icon of The Monster, but why would he? Depictions of Mary Shelley's Monster outside of the world motion pictures have been quite varied.  He does look like he was grown of something, rather than pieced together

From here the script pretty much follows the traditional telling of Frankenstein, with the government, government security and the military standing in for the mob.

In the end a thought is was rather well done, one does have some of the same pathetic sympathy for the creature as is invoked at the end of Whale's classic of 1931.  Thank goodness they didn't choose to go down the path that Kenneth Branagh did in 1994 in trying to combine the two movies.

I'm sure it is not to every one's taste, and I wouldn't say that it is enjoyable, but it is thought provoking certainly well made for a television movie.  Alas, like The Shout it available only in the UK.