BEFORE: We were out late last night, we went to see "Sweeney Todd" in an off-off-Broadway production at the Barrow Street Theater in Manhattan's West Village - it was the Sondheim musical, but presented in an innovative way, with minimal props and a small 3-piece orchestra, and within a relatively small space made up to look like Mrs. Lovett's pie shop, with serving tables (that the actors frequently walked and danced on) and benches for seats, and the actors walking around in the aisles, occasionally interacting with the audience. Forget theater in the round, this was a completely immersive experience, and for an extra charge, guests could arrive early and eat a genuine meat pie with mashed potatoes and a beverage. (If you've seen the play, you know why it's probably better to eat the meat pie BEFORE and not after. The real meat pie contained chicken, but still.)
While there were many things that this stage play was forced to compromise on - like having most of the killing performed off-stage, and having no mechanical barber's chair or complicated method of delivering bodies from the barber shop to the bake-house - the creepiness factor was amped up by the possibility of having the actors performing only inches away, even making direct eye contact. I had the actor playing Sweeney Todd swinging his razor very close to me, and though I knew the razor was a prop and therefore probably not very sharp, there was still a part of the lizard brain that activated the "fight or flight" danger response. This was a lot like virtual reality, only more real somehow - I guess that would be close to "reality", right?
But it got me thinking about Sweeney Todd (I'll probably try to re-watch the film version with Johnny Depp before Halloween, just for comparative purposes...) and how he stands in contrast with Victor Frankenstein - they're like opposite sides of the same coin, even though they're both Europeans from that Gothic/Victorian era (Frankenstein was set in 1818 and Sweeney Todd in 1846). And both were madmen, but one was a surgeon who saw a bunch of dead bodies in Germany and tried to bring them back to life, while the other was a barber who saw a bunch of living people in London and thought they'd be better off dead. When you put it that way, Dr. Frankenstein doesn't seem so bad, now, does he?
Peter Cushing carries over from "The Curse of Frankenstein", somehow...
THE PLOT: Baron Frankenstein escapes from the guillotine and goes to Germany, where he renames himself Dr. Stein and plans to restart his experiments by using parts of dead bodies.
AFTER: We don't really find out until about halfway through this film EXACTLY how Dr. Frankenstein got out of his execution - and even then, the details are sketchy, we know WHO helped him, but not so much with the HOW. I find this hard to believe, that he could have cheated death this way, but if he didn't, then we wouldn't have a story. Then it's pretty hilarious that he moves to Germany and just changes his name to "Victor Stein", like that's going to do the trick. Why not call himself "Frank N. Stein", if he's going to go hide in plain sight?
And why stick with the body-snatching and body-assembling bit? Isn't it enough to be a doctor to the wealthy, having cheated death once, why press his luck? But no, the compulsion to resurrect dead tissue is powerful indeed - remember, this guy PERFECTED the formula that could bring a dead person back, you'd think that there would be some rich families in Germany willing to pay top dollar to have a beloved family member resurrected. But no, Dr. Stein persists in feeling like he has to build his own person from the ground up. Imagine that someone found the cure for cancer or heart disease, and then decided that he wasn't going to release it until he cracked the genetic code to prevent aging or something. Because what's the point in saving someone's life, or bringing them back from death's door, if they're only going to get old and die again someday? Medicine is like all-or-nothing with this guy, I swear.
There's a hunchbacked assistant in the lab (isn't there always?) named Karl, and the plan here is to build a new body and put Karl's brain inside - somehow that's easier than fixing Karl's original body, which is probably a debatable point. But this hearkens back to "The Ghost of Frankenstein", which I watched last year, where they kept putting different brains inside the Creature's body - first one of the assistant doctors, and then the brain of Ygor, the deformed assistant. I think we know now that once you remove a human brain, like cut the brain stem or whatever, it's really not any good any more. I mean, we can transplant just about any human organ except the brain, right?
The poster's a bit misleading, because the "Creature" here doesn't have green skin, or look like the old Universal version, with bolts coming out of his neck and everything. He's essentially the "perfect" body here, and that sort of leads to questions about Dr. F. and why he's so obsessed with achieving this, and also exactly what his standards are when it comes to "perfect" men's bodies. Like, size obviously matters because Frankenstein's Monster is usually portrayed as a giant - some films in the series have explained that delicate surgery is probably made easier when the body is larger, but now I wonder if that's a bit of a dodge.
But there's really no "perfect" in the world of medicine, right? The new improved Karl soon shows signs of being the old, deformed Karl, and I don't know if that's one of those nature vs. nurture things, or just karma catching up with him for having his brain put into a new body. Either way, things don't go well for Karl, and we're never really sure why. The monkey who got a brain transplant didn't do well either, and theories range from him being frightened too soon after the surgery, or from eating meat. Well, I guess that's good to know - if you find your brain has been put in a new body, you'd better become a vegetarian right away.
But the Creature manages to "out" Dr. Stein for who he really is, and then nearly everyone turns on him, especially the poor people in his hospital, the ones he's been taking body parts from. Come to think of it, we never really find out who Dr. Frankenstein wanted to get his "revenge" on, or whether he achieved that this time around. Maybe we'll get some understanding in the next installment, but I kinda doubt it.
Also starring Francis Matthews, Eunice Gayson (last seen in "From Russia With Love"), Michael Gwynn (last seen in "Cleopatra"), John Welsh (last seen in "Indiscreet"), Lionel Jeffries (last seen in "Lust for Life"), Oscar Quitak, Charles Lloyd Pack (last seen in "Bedazzled"), George Woodbridge, Michael Ripper, Arnold Diamond, John Stuart (last seen in "Number 17"), Marjorie Gresley, Anna Walmsley, Alex Gallier (also carrying over from "The Curse of Frankenstein"), Michael Mulcaster (ditto).
RATING: 4 out of 10 medical council members
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