Phantom Movie Guide Part Three

BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN

(1935)

REVIEWED BY SHRAG


For me, satire and humour are really important in horror. I’m not talking about Scream, Scary Movie, or even Abbot and Costello here (although “Valeria Watt” in Carry On Screaming has a special place in my heart). I’m more about the zombies of George A Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978) shuffling around the shopping mall because they don’t know what else to do. Who are the zombies? We are the zombies!

In Frankenstein (1931) British director James Whale and bolt-necked Boris Karloff created one of the ultimate monster icons of the horror genre. In Bride of Frankenstein (1935) they take this ultimate icon and get him shit-faced. In my favourite scene, the monster is on the run in the forest and finds shelter and refuge with a blind man who introduces him to the finer things in life. In the most articulate and succinct appreciation of these things the monster’s first words become: “Wine… good! Smoke… GOOD!!” Why this hasn’t been picked up in a stoner mover yet I don’t know.

Bride of Frankenstein is still a horror film, but one with a sense of it’s own ridiculousness and evidence that the genre was spoofing itself from the very beginning.

Russell Warrior - Shrag

IT'S ALIVE
(1974)

Written and Directed by Larry Cohen (Maniac Cop, The Ambulance, Phone Booth) It’s Alive tells the ole chestnut of Frank and Lenore Davis who are excited about the birth of their second child; cue cheesy scene of husband playing poker in the waiting room whilst the mother calmly screams her way through labour.

But rather than a bouncing bundle of joy, a bulbous headed, fanged and clawed baby-creature pulls itself out of the mother only to massacre the delivery room of nurses and doctors. What follows it a mini trail of carnage and a manhunt lead by the angry father Frank to track down said baby to his cries of “it’s no relation to me!”.

When the baby manages to over power several fit and healthy adults (one even possessing a gun) the father has to decide if he can he really kill his own newborn child - will paternal instincts get in the way? A Seventies classic that’s worth digging out.

- Lee Puddefoot