Painful to Watch - Frankenstein & The Werewolf Reborn

Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to a new "Painful to Watch" review, which is actually more a rant than anything else, with your trusted host Robb P. Lestinci. After wishing to lose our sight in the last one, today we'll see how to ruin not one, but two classic horror characters! At least this time around we won't be seeing any monster's private parts, ugly ghosts or out-of-place kites, but don't worry, we wont be covering anything remotely good anyways.

Everybody loves classics, afterall if it wasn’t like this we wouldn’t universally recognise them as such. Monsters of 1800s books re-told by cinema pioneers and then, with great creative freedom, by Universal are now key pieces of our pop culture, icons destined to remain cornerstones, starting points for everything that will come after them. To be fair even now it is not uncommon to find in cinemas movies with werewolves, vampires and mad scientists, some even similar to their cinematic reincarnations from almost a hundred years ago. Some times, instead, there's the decision to distort them to give them new luster with some admirable examples (“An American Werewolf in London”, “The Lost Boys”, “Bliss”...) and other times, definitely questionable ones (“Dracula Untold”, “I, Frankenstein”...).

The movie we are going to talk about today, even though it is technically two movies clumped together in the hope to sell them better in bundle, it’s part of the second category and it is so clear even from the poster and from the first few minutes, so disgustingly tasting of television movies that it is impossible not to be reminded of movies like 1989’s “Amok Train” and Lamberto Bava’s same year movie “The Mask of Satan” (originally “La maschera del demonio”), remake so distant, in plot and quality, from his father’s masterpiece by the same name. Today’s movie is “Frankenstein & The Werewolf Reborn” (2000), a combination of “Frankenstein Reborn” and “The Werewolf Reborn”, both, originally, from 1998.

There's something wrong with the girls in these posters.

The two movies chopped (yet still inexplicably slow and boring), shuffled and stuck together, have been directed by Jeff Burr and Julian Breen, pseudonym of David DeCoteau, and when a director uses a pseudonym in the 2000s you can be certain it is because the film is so bad that even he can’t deny it anymore, to the point of rejecting every credit due to him. These two’s filmography is, however, rich of experiences in horror, with movies like “Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III”, various “Puppet Master” and “Pumpkinhead 2”,  all sequels renowned to be subdued compared to their first chapter; DeCoteau, instead, directed almost the entirety of the “Puppet Master” series from the third chapter on, then “Creepozoids” and a small 80s b-movie gem that will surely be a future topic: “Sorority Babes in the Slimeball-Bowl-O-Rama”, a movie with an extravagant name that alone should be enough to pay the ticket and watch it.

Great premises, right?

The first episode (movie) shows Anna Frankenstein (Haven Burton, whose career started and ended with this movie, except for a role in the musical Shrek) visiting her uncle Victor (Jason Simmons of “Sharknado”) after the death of her parents, in a grief-less and neutral atmosphere. In the huge castle of the scary uncle, busy with his assistant Ludwig (a static George Calin, in the role that replaced the iconic Igor and that has nothing to do with the doctor’s son in “The Ghost of Frankenstein” apart from sharing the same name) working on some mysterious experiments, the girl meets the handsome illiterate Thomas (Ben Gould, with a career similar to Haven’s one) with whom she will find out that the two men are actually trying to bring back to life a corpse (Ethan Wilde, whose only other role was a Cthulhui in the 2009 “The Last Lovecraft: Relict of Cthulhu”), a corpse that they actually want to kill, after a slow motion chase (without any running though), because they weren’t expecting it to really receive its life back and because they were scared of the screams and panic that this mass of meat emitted as soon as it came back from the dead. A perfectly scientific and reasonable response.

I guess there were some sales at Spirit Halloween.

The second episode (movie) shows the beautiful Herstner (Oana Stefanescu, already seen in “Talisman'' two years prior and then nevermore) visiting her shady uncle Kranek (Robin Atkin Downes, only one with some talent and, at the moment, one of the main voice actors in the DC animated movies, voice of characters like Nergal in Constantine or Harvey Bullock in Batman) while the small town they live in is hunting a werewolf, victim of a ancient curse that, apparently, is only known to the gipsies that live as outcasts in the outskirts. All the characters already know who the monster is and how to stop him and, above all, that he is precisely that, a monster, but still, when the beast will be captured, everybody will pretend to have never seen anything inhumane and to not know what to do, simply to justify a very forced, “teary eyed” last scene (a scene that is simply Stefanescu’s face over a shot of her own figure, inexpressive, at the train station). What a pity.

If the plot summary and the names involved were not enough, the movie appears completely flat, without any interesting parts, obvious and cheesy with no merit, an absolutely laughable editing and a picture without any personality. The sets are extremely fake, the special effects look at least 10 years old and the costumes of the two monsters seem bought in a Halloween store during sale season: after all, all we see of these two beings are just their faces and gloves, because a full costume would have been too pricey for the film production, entrusted to Full Moon Features (known for many horror b-movies between the 80s and the 90s, like the already mentioned “Puppet Master”, “Demonic Toys”, the awful blaxploitation “Killjoy” and “Gingerdead Man” in addition to the comedy “Evil Bong” and Stuart Gordon’s “Castle Freak”) now very distant from the success of the past decade and closer, ironically, to its end, destined to be just a nostalgic memory, surviving only with direct-to-video sequels, having nothing of the inspiration of movies that gave it exposure in the past.

The last shot of the movie. Sad not for its meaning, but for its execution.

Mundane and badly made retellings of two classics that, rather than creating a renaissance of the titleholder creatures, seem to be trying to kill them once and for all, despite everything, in its naivety, in its wanting to make money upon notorious intellectual properties that are now public domain, without paying a cent, to the point of using amateur actors in main roles, just because they would be attractive for the average teenager, all of this has however its charm, its nostalgic aura. Or not even that.

You can read more english articles and the other "Painful to Watch" entries here.

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TRANSLATED BY GIULIA ULIVUCCI