Review #227: Bride of Frankenstein (1935)

This review was originally written in October 2022.

Gabe's 100 Bucket List Horror Films Review #81: Bride of Frankenstein (1935)

It's no secret that sometimes when a movie gets popular, the sequel gets greenlit long before there's even a script. Looking at the IMDB trivia that absolutely seems to be the case for Bride of Frankenstein, as it was announced over a year before any production began. There's usually something to be said about the quality of a movie when it's created purely because people wanted more and not because there was a story that needed to be told, so I guess keep that in mind if you watch this one.

Bride of Frankenstein picks up about five minutes before the end of Frankenstein (1931), right when Henry Frankenstein falls from the windmill after it's set on fire. But where the first film shows Henry being taken home where his father laughs and jokes about how many grandchildren will be coming his way, this movie retcons his father out entirely (seemingly implying that he died offscreen?) and then establishes that the monster didn't die in the fire, but rather fell into some kind of cave underneath the laboratory instead. We then spend half the movie watching the monster wander around as people point and scream at him for thirty minutes, and the other half of the plot has Henry Frankenstein be approached by some other scientist who shows up out of nowhere and has some bizarre experiments of his own (more on that in a bit). This other doctor I guess serves as the antagonist of this film, forcing Henry to help him create a second monster, to serve as a mate for the first monster. They make the second monster (the "Bride of Frankenstein") and then the movie ends.

I criticized the last movie for seemingly not caring whatsoever about how the townsfolk felt about Frankenstein's experiments (it's not clear that anybody in town even knew what he was up to, and those that did, didn't seem bothered by it at all- they only tried to kill the monster because they thought he was a murderer that killed a little girl). This movie seems to have taken my criticism to heart, because it immediately starts off with everyone talking about how much of an affront to nature this monster is. (Of course, they don't really seem to hassle Frankenstein about it, they just all seem to intuitively know the monster is gross.) Oh, and I guess I forgot that this movie has a bizarre framing device where this is a story being told by Mary Shelley to Percy Shelley and Lord Byron, but the movie seems to have forgotten that too because it never comes up again.

I also praised the first movie for getting right into the action- this one seems to have rested on its laurels though, because the eponymous Bride doesn't get animated until about seventy minutes into this seventy-five-minute picture. I'm not exaggerating when I say at least half of the film is spent watching the monster bum around the countryside and get yelled at. (Oh, and there's a scene where he asks someone for a smoke. Remember how weird these old movies are compared to the public perception of the icons they made famous?)

And one more thing I need to bring up: the other scientist that pops up in this film, Dr. Pretorius, tries to entice Frankenstein into helping him by showing off a scientific marvel of his own, that's supposed to rival Henry's own reanimation of a cobbled-together corpse. What is Dr. Pretorius' experiment, I hear you asking? Why, he's made several tiny humans that live in jars, of course! He has a little king, a little queen, a little pope, a little devil, and a little mermaid. Let me just make it clear: THIS. IS. ABSURD. This is like a Looney Tunes cartoon somehow got merged with a 30s-era horror film. Not even an attempt is made to explain how he was able to genetically engineer a tiny, anatomically-correct and perfectly-proportion human being, let alone do it five or six times. There's barely lip service paid to why they are a king, queen, pope, devil, and mermaid. No effort is put in to making ANY of this make sense, and immediately after they're shown off, they disappear from the film entirely and never get mentioned again. (Pretorius later says that he made the brain that's to be put into the female monster; not only is that not explained either, that's not the same thing as making six-inch-tall royalty.) I found myself completely unable to take the movie seriously after this point because clearly it exists in a universe where nothing needs to make sense.

Overall I found this movie to be an extremely lazy cash-grab to follow after the original. It looked worse than the first one, the plot made no sense, and none of the character developments made me like the characters more than I already did. I thought maybe this would be the one to set the stage for how people would perceive Frankenstein media for decades to come, but apparently not.

Overall Rating: 2/10 Lonely Blind Monks

Uhm Ackshually Moment: Obviously you've probably heard someone be corrected (or been corrected yourself) for calling the monster "Frankenstein". ("Uhm ackshually, Frankenstein is the scientist, you're talking about Frankenstein's monster.") Well, this movie is called Bride of Frankenstein, and it's explicitly about making a bride for the monster. Now technically Frankenstein (the scientist) DOES get married in this film, so he DOES have a bride, but in the final scene, once the female monster has become fully animate, Dr. Pretorius proudly announces, "The Bride of Frankenstein!" while Henry Frankenstein is standing three feet away from him. So the take-away here is, if someone tries to "Uhm ackshually" you, you should just point out that by the SECOND ENTRY IN THE FRANCHISE, the movies themselves had already started referring to the monster as "Frankenstein", at least in their marketing.