The Bride (1985)

Best movie of this year hands down!

Sadly Over-hyped

It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

Baron Charles Frankenstein (Sting) and his assistants create Eva (Jennifer Beals) for his monster (Clancy Brown). Eva rejects the monster and he destroys the lab. Frankenstein escapes with Eva. Unbeknowst to him, the monster also escapes and befriends midget Rinaldo. Rinaldo teaches him humanity and gives him the name Viktor. They travel to Budapest and join the circus. Meanwhile, Frankenstein intends to civilize Eva and mold her into his love. He tells everyone that he found her in the woods with memory lost. Captain Josef Schoden (Cary Elwes) is taken with her. She encounters Viktor and the spark is reignited.The movie has little tension. When the story splits in two, the tension fades. Sting is stiff in this and not his best role. Jennifer Beals doesn't deserve her Razzie nomination. Her role requires some odd work from her. This is a bad attempt at reworking the Frankenstein story.

Reworking of Bride of Frankenstein lacks the wonderful dark humor and...well, pretty much everything good about that classic film. There are some good things here, though. The blind hermit from the original Bride is replaced by a midget, excellently played by David Rappaport. His scenes with Clancy Brown are the best in the movie. Far better than the stuff with Sting and Jennifer Beals. Once Rappaport is gone, the movie becomes far less interesting. Aside from Rappaport, Clancy Brown also does a decent job in a role that's easy to overplay. Sting is competent. Jennifer Beals is terrible in most respects. She seems out of her element throughout the film. The scene with her and the cat was enough to earn her that Razzie Award nomination she received for this movie. Aside from Rappaport and Brown, the movie's other strength is that it is well-photographed. Unfortunately its few qualities aren't enough to make it a truly good movie. It's worth a peek if you're a fan of anything Frankenstein.

Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" was the first true horror novel, a brilliant mixture of 18th century hautiness slammed headlong into the unwise act of playing God. The style mingled with the horror were the key and without them you have . . . well, you have The Bride.The Bride is a labored, snooze-inducing effort to turn The Bride of Frankenstein into a sympathetic Merchant/Ivory-esqe production and style it up to sell to the MTV crowd. The problem is that it isn't any more interesting then what you had for dinner last night.The movie takes place sometime after Dr. Frankenstein (Sting) has forgotten that his creature (played here by Clancy Brown) threw a child into the lake and thus has pulled his electrodes out of mothballs. Why? Because his creature is starting to feel the itch for some female companionship.Then the creature gets upset that the process is taking too long and destroys the lab just as his bride is beginning to wiggle. Not realizing that Dr. Love Connection has just completed building Jennifer Beals, the creature runs away and hangs around with a circus midget (David Rappaport).Completely forgetting that his creature might come back at any given moment to reclaim his bride, the Absent Minded Professor decides to claim this little philly for himself and names her Eve. He's made lots of vast improvements over Version 1.0 including removing all of her stitches without a single scar. He tries to teach her the ways of 19th century etiquette, fashion, fine dining and social graces in scenes that will likely bore you into a coma.The scenes between the creature and Rinaldo the midget are kind of touching (in a petting a bullfrog sort of way) as the two make off with the circus and become bosom buddies. Rinaldo even gives the creature a name - Viktor. How ironic.Then Viktor suddenly remembers that he was about to get a bride. This comes as a shock when we discover - now get this - they are linked, psychically. Ooooooooooookay!! This leads to the inevitable as Viktor returns to claim his bride and one thing leads to another and I can't remember the end of the film because I kept falling asleep.What it boils down to is MTV does Gothic horror. It is made in the style of a music video stretched on for 120 minutes and it's agony getting through them. The movie is like dinner with your least interesting relatives.Don't stop by this castle, there's no life here.

"The Bride" is one of the earlier attempts to sex up classic horror stories with period piece production value glitz and hot young actors, predating "Bram Stoker's Dracula" and "Mary Shelley's Frankenstein" if not Frank Langella's "Dracula." The movie has a great opening hook: What if the Monster's Mate survived the explosion at the end of "Bride of Frankenstein?" From there, the movie builds itself as something of a feminist fable. Dr. Frankenstein, given the first name Charles for some reason, decides he can build the "perfect woman," a woman who thinks like a man, is, as he puts it, "equal to a man." The script nods silently at his sexist intentions. The film has quite a bit of potential with that set-up.It doesn't quite live up to it but, still, the movie that follows is definitely worth watching. The story is split in two. One follows the Frankenstein Monster, quickly named Viktor, as he befriends a traveling dwarf and tries to make a career in the circus. The other half of the film revolves around Baron Frankenstein training and teaching the Bride, dubbed Eva, in the ways of polite society, basically a horror version of "My Fair Lady." Oddly, of the two story lines, the Monster's quest is actually the more interesting. Paired with Renaldo, the late David Rappaport, the two become immediate friends. Stories of outsiders struggling to make it can be prone to smultz, but then again there has never been a more definitive outsider then the Frankenstein Monster. It's the entire appeal of his character. There are no surprises in the circus drama that follows but the performances of Rappaport and Clancy Brown make up for the potentially trite material. Rappaport makes dialogue as hokey as "Follow your heart and you'll be fine" actually effecting. Renaldo's death scene is likely to bring a tear to your eye. Brown's take on the monster, a mumbling simpleton who slowly learns his own self-worth, never rings hollow even if it's far from the actor's best work.By comparison, the Bride's journey comes off as more route. The broad comedy of her learning to eat or shrieking, much like Elsa Lanchester, at cats quickly gives way to the girl as a fully self-aware young woman, dancing at balls and gaining the attention of a young count. (Played by young, handsome Cary Elwes. Remember when Cary Elwes was young and handsome?) The most potentially interesting material, the stuff in-between, is glossed over.The relationship with the doctor isn't delved deeply into. Sting, who has always been fairly adapt at playing villains, gives a decent enough performance but his growing feelings for the girl and his sudden turn to teeth-gnashing villainy at the end are more script problems then actor problems. The inherent sexism in his desire to "build the perfect woman" boils down to him being fine with teaching her but, as soon as she shows any romantic desire for another man, he gets all possessive and rape-y. That a male ends up rescuing her at the end rather undermines the point of the story.The potentially complex material is simplified a bit. It's no fault of Jennifer Beals, who gives a rather understated, thoughtful performance as the titular woman. The psychic connection between the two creations is never explained and comes off as a plot contrivance.Even if the movie never lives up to its potential, it does have some striking moments. The nude Bride slinking out of the darkness, clinging to the Baron's side like a frightened animal. Or, later on, her standing in the rain in an open tomb, questioning her own origins. The opening sequence, with its disembodied body parts twitching in shattered tubes of liquid, suggests a more conventional, just as effective horror film could have been made from this material. The movie wasn't successful upon release, which is probably why it's underseen and somewhat underrated today. Frankenstein fans should seek it out, if just to wonder about the excellent film that it could have been, instead of the merely satisfying one it is.