With the exception of our friend and former Dissolve contributor, Craig J. Clark, you won’t find anyone a bigger advocate and fan of the flawless 1981 werewolf flick, An American Werewolf in London, than me. Seth Grahame-Smith’s book How to Survive a Horror Movie aptly sums up the film in four words: Funny. Scary. Sexy. Hairy. I bring this up because the film Victor Frankenstein, penned by the son of Werewolf‘s director John Landis, has written a bizzaro script that wants to be all these things that Smith perfectly describes but only manages to get the last word right (and that’s just because Daniel Radcliffe is a real-life hobbit). I do think this is a shame because the other Max Landis film that came out this year, American Ultra, was a great under-the-radar film that was funny and action-packed but also had likable characters.

Unfortunately his second outing this year has left me…perplexed. Many of the other reviews you’ve no doubt seen all question the necessity of this movie’s existence and I myself am left wondering that also. Is this a good Frankenstein adaptation? No. Not at all. But to be fair this isn’t the first movie to pull such a feat. Does this movie do anything new with the Frankenstein mythology? Well…not really since Igor wasn’t in the novel but is a character who was created for the second Universal film, Bride of Frankenstein. Upfront I’ll admit the film’s glaring problem is that the PG-13 leash restrains it from being a balls-out-exploitation film that I think it actually wanted to be. But let’s revisit those four bold words up there for a closer look.

Funny: While I was snickering at James McAvoy’s teething, licking, and gumming on every nook and cranny of the scenery, there was but one legitimate moment in the film that gave me a good laugh and is still doing so right now. It was a line that was very abrupt and very inappropriate to the situation, which is made more hilarious with everyone in the finest British fashions of the nineteenth century. But the script can’t decide if it wants to be that funny or not. Humor in horror films can be tricky because there’s a tendency to be too cheeky which loses the suspense and seriousness of the situation, which means the film either needs to rely on its characterizations to be funny or for the situation itself to be funny (ie; Evil Dead 2; David Naughton’s character in Werewolf goes through a horribly violent transformation, juxtaposed with an upbeat song and a quick shot to a Mickey Mouse doll that is just as shocked as we are). The weight of the humor resides in the interaction of Daniel Radcliffe and James McAvoy, one that is very much appreciated and carries the film, but at times forced me to make the disgusting comparison to Johnny Galecki and Jim Parsons on The Big Bang Theory. They have that same relationship; one is a towering, socially awkward, brilliant mind who drags down his passive but well-meaning partner in crime who still comes back to the abusive and tainted friendship. That relationship is the crux of the movie which somewhat undermines the suspense of the eventual key moment of their story, that being the actual creation of the monster…

Scary: Who has a presence of about 6 minutes in the film’s climax. Again I mentioned that the film isn’t a good Frankenstein adaptation, but the plot of the film is so obviously building up to the most significant moment in the book that it’s a wonder as to why they don’t diverge further with the buildup. This is more grating consider how absolutely pointless the monster’s presence is in the film. The design, I admit looked pretty good, but the movie isn’t a Frankenstein’s monster movie, and the turnaround for why Victor realizes what he has done is wrong is so rushed and ridiculous. It’s as though when Rob Zombie made his Halloween remake, and instead of shoving the entirety of Halloween into the back-half of the film, he saved the whole plot for the last five minutes. Why even bother at that point? There is just no pay-off and I think that’s gonna hurt the film the most; this movie is not for Frankenstein aficionados.

For a film that is called “Victor Frankenstein” though, he certainly takes a backseat as far as motivations and characterization go. He’s not a mad scientist, he has his moments of humanity, specifically how he and Igor come to meet each other, but why not? Keeping Victor within the boundaries of sanity and compassion make him a static character. This character isn’t the one that matches any other adaptation, so they should have really worked to make him his own character. McAvoy is at his utmost hammiest here and the film should have just let him cut loose as a bat-shit genius with a dark streak. Instead of playing homage to Dr. Frank-N-Furter he should have been playing homage to Peter Cushing’s Frankenstein from the Hammer series of the 60s and 70s. That version was an unapologetic bastard who had no morals about killing people just to complete his experiments. Here, the film skirts around it with excuses and easy-solutions (ie; McAvoyStein is a murderer but only to those who deserve it), but it’s so close to just being a Hammer film that it actually comes across as frustrating. The other component to this is the Andrew Scott’s character, a very religious detective who has a personal/religious vendetta against the morally corrupt Frankenstein; one of the film’s more intriguing nuances that again would have been paid off much better had the film gone full Hammer.

Speaking of which, the Hammer films were notorious for their exploitative use of gore, that bright unnatural red for blood, which this film is sorely lacking. Daniel Radcliffe’s other notable foray into the horror genre is the 2012 film The Woman in Black, a flawed film (also made by Hammer) that did at least achieve a sense of dread and despair with it’s dark and dreary atmosphere. There’s no color or atmosphere to be seen here, just a greyish and boring side-adventure in the Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes universe. I’ve yet to mention how this film functions as an action movie, which is more in line with what it is as opposed to what it’s trying to be, in the same vein as movies like the recent The Last Witch Hunter or I, Frankenstein. The problem with action-horror films seems to be a conflict of interest, pairing monsters with explosions and fight sequences will absolutely lose one or the other genres like a double negative; it’s either poor action or poor scares. However, once again, Victor Frankenstein is still really neither of those. There are chases, there are explosions, there are gruesome mangled creations that Frankenstein and Igor create, but nothing really significant happens to the two of them as a result. This might be seen as a defiance of expectations, particularly for anyone familiar with the book or literally any adaptation out there, but nope, the film plays it so safe that it keeps everything dull. Including the sex scene…

Sexy: Well on the one hand that scene was not interesting, on the other it was just another component to the female fan service that seems to be the one and only reason this film was actually made. Seriously though, I joked a while ago when the trailer came up how this film was based on my 14 year-old’s deepest sexual desires, but it seems like that was actually the intention. Who’s this movie for you ask? Fourteen year-old girls who got over the Hunger Games when they were still in elementary school and just want to feel polished with class like a character in a Jane Austen novel but still keep their edge by sitting alone in the back of the class while making sure everyone can see their Edgar Allen Poe collection. Gothic horror speaks to women, it’s a genre written and capitalized by women in the 1800s, and it continues to be a passage for girls of a certain age to awaken their more mature side. Between this and the phenomenal Crimson Peak, the little gothic girl inside of me was very pleased.

So is it odd to say that the only thing the movie has going for it is male eroticism? There’s only one woman character in the entirety of the movie and her sex scene with Daniel Radcliffe has him taking his shirt off, while earlier on there’s a scene where McAvoy shoves Radcliffe against a pillar, ripping his shirt off and taking advantage of his fear and vulnerability. There’s also the detective who has that Frollo thing going on with McAvoy. Basically all the dudes in this movie are one bottle of wine away from fucking each other, and that’s okay. Women deserve to enjoy male eroticism, and while I really don’t think that was Max Landis’s intention when he wrote the script, it’s certainly something that even the actors and director are heartily aware of:

Crimson Peak also totally aimed for that same kind of “this is for the ladies” vibe with Tom Hiddleston and his beautiful ass and beautiful everything else. Like I said, Gothic Horror is a woman’s genre. Victor Frankenstein accidentally accepted this, which brings home for the infinite time; this movie should have been R. More erotic moments, more violence and gore, more of everything to make this movie actually feel alive.

This movie’s pretty dead in the the water.

Hairy: More like Hairy Potter, amirite?

I’ll be in my bunk.