Quick Takes: Frankenstein, Weapons, Bring Her Back

And the not-so-curious awards bias for "elevated" horror

Netflix

NOTE: during awards season I get lots of screenings and DVDs, with relatively little sense of when a given movie might be available to the general public. To the best of my ability, I will include release dates; for my own organization, I will review them as I see them, embargo-permitting. Some will also be releases from much earlier in the year that I’m just now getting to. Thank you for your understanding, if you have it.

FRANKENSTEIN (now on Netflix)

Guillermo Del Toro’s dream project, made on what looks like an unlimited budget, is a handsomely mounted version of the classic tale – perhaps the most handsomely mounted. (On a TV screen, those CG wolves y’all were whining about look just fine, so maybe not seeing it in Imax went okay for me.) He uses the Bernie Wrightson design for the creature, essentially, which is arguably the second most famous look besides Universal’s square head. And the gore effects are crazy good, though if you love wolves, maybe cover your eyes or sit this one out. The creature here is as much an innocent victim as he ever has been in these tales, only killing when he doesn’t quite know his own strength and is being attacked first.

The question is: does it add anything to a story we’re probably mostly familiar with by now?

Well, this one screams “Literary adaptation” as loudly as it can, with both the bad doctor (Oscar Isaac) and the creature (Jacob Elordi) telling their stories in florid prose – when they finally reunite at the end, they basically try to monologue each other to death. Both really come across as different types of incels, pining for Mia Goth’s Elizabeth, whom neither may have. Frankenstein is the bitter, angry, misanthropic one who’ll blame everyone but himself for his ostracism, while the creature is a sensitive type who’s just so misunderstood that he gets angry about it sometimes and lashes out.

This take on the story goes out of its way to make the creature mostly blameless – like the Amphibian Man, he’s a classic tragic monster and probably an avatar of younger Guillermo (once you’re successful enough to marry Kim Morgan, you’re hardly a depressed incel any more!).

Indeed, if I may engage in finale spoilers:

Netflix

[SPOILER]

The creature ends up near the North Pole, newly understanding that because he is immortal, he should do his best to enjoy life. As he has previously been identified as a forest spirit, who leaves gifts at a family’s doorstep, it struck me that this could very easily double as a Santa Claus origin story. And as I described this to my wife, she even blurted it out before I could.

FrankenClaus – next year on Netflix?

[END SPOILER]

Netflix

I may go long on this another time, but I think the TV edit of the original King Kong really did a number on a lot of guys at a young age (self included). We’re told “Kong falls in love and dies for it,” not “Kong sexually assaults a woman, kills and eats other people and wild animals so he can continue to do so, and though she survives the rescue, she will likely have PTSD the rest of her life.” It raised generations of us to sympathize and identify with the monsters, even as they’re clearly coded dangerous, and evil sometimes, so the more modern takes go more emo and sensitive, and actually make them close to blameless.

Can we see a feminist Kong where Ann is the one to (actively) kill him? Just asking. Kong Minus One, we could call it.

It’s okay to have a take that goes the uber-sympathetic way, but the creature here is so sufficiently noble that his creator’s hatred of him feels excessively irrational, and his late-in-life change of heart merely pragmatic.

If this movie doesn’t win multiple awards for production design, it will be a shame. If it wins any for writing, it will merely be a sympathy vote.

Warner Bros.

WEAPONS (now on HBO Max) and BRING HER BACK (?)

If you’ve seen both movies, you know why I’m lumping them together. I’d say there’s a mild spoiler warning here, except that everything I’m going to say is either wholly predictable, or not concealed by the film at all.

I watched Weapons late, after the initial hype died down and the new hype began for getting Amy Madigan an Oscar nomination in her role as Aunt Gladys. I feared that might be a spoiler, as Aunt Gladys was nowhere in the initial publicity, which positioned the movie as a kind of Pied Piper mystery. However, the movie really doesn’t keep it much of a mystery for long. We learn very quickly which house the bad thing is likely in, and there are images of Aunt Gladys in people’s dreams long before she physically shows up. By the time she does, it’s no mystery that she’s suspicious. And especially no mystery given director Zach Cregger’s own apparent phobias.

Backing up a bit...as Cregger does...

The night of the 2024 election, I simply typed out one word: “Misogynoir.” I trust we know what that intersectional portmanteau means. In this case, it meant that after we dodged a bullet by voting out a terrible president who eliminated the pandemic response plan right before getting us into a pandemic and telling his supporters not to mask simply because he didn’t want to mess up his spray tan by setting an example...we put him right back in four years later, when he was blatantly more senile, more racist, and more fascist. Why? Because somehow even a bigot fascist lunatic is preferable to “moderates” than a relatively middle-of-the-road, sane Black woman who laughed funny. The fact that Trump as candidate might have forever been a joke had he not been running against women twice speaks very poorly of us – the only time he lost, it was to a noticeably deteriorating white man.

Is there an existing portmanteau like “mis-age-gynist”? Because if there is, I think Cregger has it. Which elderly relative hurt him?

Warner Bros.

Aunt Gladys is not a complicated role. Amy Madigan plays her straightforwardly –she’s evil, and that’s pretty much it. But before we even know she’s evil, she’s coded as awful and terrifying. How so? Well, like many old women, she has lost the ability to do her makeup well, possibly with fading eyesight involved, so it’s garish. She wears clothes so loud they’re anti-fashionable because old women aren’t hip. And when a young boy sees her without her makeup, it’s presented as the most terrifying thing imaginable, because I guess wrinkles and baldness are bad.

You know, I grew up around some old ladies who were like this, and they grossed me out too. But I was a kid. This is mockery of seniors for weaknesses we all may get at some point. And it’s a pattern for Cregger – the surprise monster in Barbarians was a giant scary aging mother figure.

The Golden Girls was a radical show in its day for the idea that older women could have dating lives. An American show depicting senior women without dementia merely existing would be radical now. We never get any real reason why Gladys is supernaturally evil – she just is. Maybe in the proposed spinoff, it can turn out that a movie director was horrible to her once, and set her on the path of witchcraft.

Stage 6

The movie itself is fun to watch as the full scope of the plan unfolds. But Gladys herself is an unkind caricature, and movies can do better. In fact, I know they can, because in Bring Her Back, Sally Hawkins plays a similar character whose motivations are absolutely fleshed-out and fully portrayed. As Laura, she’s playing a foster mother whose actual daughter drowned, but thanks to a dubious Russian video she may have found online, or at a swap meet – it doesn’t matter – she thinks she can imitate a ritual she’s seen and bring the girl back from the dead. There’s a nice theme here that’s mean to old people but in a pointed way: if you let them “do their own research” unsupervised, they’ll start believing flat-out evil shit and become dangerous. I offer, again, the 2024 election.

Once Bring Her Back gets moving, it takes you to brutal places and pulls no punches. That said, the audience is way ahead of the plot for most of the movie, and this gets frustrating. We watch as Laura plays the long game with her two newest foster kids, and nobody (save everyone watching) catches on until the last minute. Hakwins’ performance is everything it should be; it’s not her fault that the script’s primary direction appears to have been to drag things out to feature length. It would have been an incredible short.

Stage 6

One of the things that actually annoys me most about Oscar talk for Madigan is that it illuminates the double-standard we tend to have for so-called “elevated horror” (which at this point means, basically, any horror movie released by Neon or A24). Take a look, if you have access to it, at the Blu-ray extra on Saw X, which offers the alternate, single-take master shot of Tobin Bell’s Jigsaw laying out his whole plan to his assembled victims. It’s an acting masterclass...one that will never be recognized as such by awards bodies. Here’s a snippet:

Next, watch a Marx brothers movie and follow it with Terrifier 2 – specifically, the scenes in the costume shop where Art the Clown is trying to pass as normal, It’s completely nonverbal (for him) and channels some of the great Harpo Marx’s shtick. Nobody will give David Howard Thornton awards credit for that, either, because the presumption is that audiences for these movies are just there to watch and enjoy torture, while those going to see Weapons or Bring Her Back are presumably there for the acting and story, and nothing else.

In neither case is the assumption true.

Look, I love Amy Madigan as much as anyone who has grown up watching her be consistently great. Maintaining her dignity in a role that strikes me as blatantly hateful to women her age may have been an effort. But it’s a nothing character – a cheap payoff to an otherwise fascinatingly creepy buildup, just like Barbarian.

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