Review #197: Young Frankenstein (1974)

This review was originally written in 2022.

Gabe's 100 Bucket List Horror Films Review #52: Young Frankenstein (1974)

I've seen this film before, but it was about twenty years ago. I remember thinking it was hilarious, I've heard other people talking about how funny it is (even very recently, since it was Gene Wilder's birthday a couple weeks ago), and I was fully prepared to gloss over the fact that this is yet another non-horror film on this bucket list of horror films, because hey, this one isn't really trying to be a horror film, it's obviously a comedy, just one styled after a classic horror film.

But the problem is... I really didn't find this movie funny. Like, at all. Every single joke I saw coming from a mile away, and half of the time they commented on the joke right afterward or did a victory lap to make sure the audience knew there was a joke there. In my opinion it would have been so much funnier if Igor's hump changed sides once in a while, for example, but instead they had to comment on it. (Then again, the exact same thing happens in Robin Hood: Men in Tights with the prince's mole- so maybe it's a Mel Brooks thing.) I get that this movie is relatively old, so maybe comedy in film hadn't quite figured out the whole "subtlety" thing yet? I don't know, but looking back at this nowadays I found myself saying, "Oh, I get it. Yeah, that sure was a joke" every couple minutes, when I would have expected to be laughing instead. I cracked a smile three times in this whole movie, and that's not an exaggeration.

And of course I can't even really look at this as a horror movie instead of a comedy, either. While it certainly looks exactly like the genre and setting it's trying to imitate (it looks great, really), and there's even a few scenes that could have been spooky, it always has the horror and tension step aside in favor of a joke. And ignoring the comedy really does no favors for the narrative- the world of this movie makes no sense outside of the comedy genre. The town is upset because a descendant of Victor von Frankenstein moves back into town, they suspect him of creating a monster, and then when he DOES create a monster, a packed auditorium full of people pay money to watch the monster perform "Puttin' on the Ritz" on stage and nobody is upset until a camera flash makes the monster lose his composure, at which point they grab their pitchforks and torches. Would it have been so hard to change the earlier scene of the town meeting so that the two attitudes towards the Frankenstein legacy at least feel a little bit consistent? I feel like consistency was an afterthought (if a thought at all), because it's much better to just put some jokes into an already-existing script and do nothing else.

Also: this is yet another movie where a woman gets raped, but it's okay because his dick was just so good that she enjoyed herself. That trope wasn't okay in 1974, it wasn't okay in 1984, it wasn't okay in 1994 or 2004 or any year since.

Overall Rating: 3/10 Monocles Over Eyepatches

Fun Behind-the-Scenes Anecdote: Gene Wilder and Mel Brooks got into only one fight during the movie's production, but it was a big one with Mel throwing a huge temper tantrum, yelling and raging and eventually storming out of Gene's apartment (where the men had been working on the script). Roughly ten minutes later, Gene's phone rang. The caller was Mel, who said, "WHO WAS THAT MADMAN YOU HAD IN YOUR HOUSE? I COULD HEAR THE YELLING ALL THE WAY OVER HERE. YOU SHOULD NEVER LET CRAZY PEOPLE INTO YOUR HOUSE, DON'T YOU KNOW THAT? THEY COULD BE DANGEROUS." That, as Gene later put it, was "Mel's way of apologizing."