Bride of Frankenstein

Time and again, I've heard movie buffs and horror fans talk about Bride Of Frankenstein. How it is not only excellent and a worthy follow-up to Frankenstein, but possibly even better. It is heralded as a classic, worthy of being slotted alongside the other Universal classic monster movies. I cannot put on my +1 Hat Of Objectivity here. I really do not understand what people see in this movie, how it is held in such high regard. Did we see the same thing? Because here's what I saw. I saw a movie that is incapable of maintaining tone. It is violently horrific in the opening, then more gothic, then it tries to inject comedy for some reason, then it gets sentimental, it pivots back to the gothic atmosphere, does a cliff-notes version of the original, and then ends. Bride never tries to weave these together. It doesn't even try to make these tones live within the same ZIP code. The movie abruptly slams on the brakes and says "we're going this way now!". A great example is the characterization of The Monster; in the opening, he kills an old woman just because she's there. A few scenes later, he stumbles upon a young lady by a river and he's perfectly friendly to her. Neither represent a threat, and he's had zero character growth between the two scenes, but here we are, with a radically different character, because the movie has shifted gears. Comedy is awkwardly crowbarred into scenes, like Pretorius' introduction, where he and the housemaid go back and forth about how to pronounce his name. It's jumbled and whiplash-inducing. I saw a movie that jams half a dozen ideas into one 77 minute movie and follows up on maybe half of them. Frankenstein (who somehow survived a fall off a windmill and crashing into the structure itself) wants nothing to do with his old life, until he sees his mentor's work ... until he arbitrarily decides nope, changed my mind again. Frankenstein's wife, who represented morality and decency in the first movie, is the human embodiment of an appendix here. Frankenstein's mentor, Pretorius is shown to have created, in a lab in whatever time period this is in -- judging by the technology, late 19th or early 20th century -- miniature humans. He grew them. Literally, at a molecular level, grew fully functional, six-inch tall human beings. He has mastered a form of cellular growth and manipulation that scientists today, in 2024, could only dream of ... and for some reason, he needs Frankenstein's help to make Girl Monster because ... it's a Saturday night? It's couple's night at the bar? Pretorius even grows the Bride's brain in a lab. No mention of how the most complex organ in all life is grown like a petunia; the movie only bothers enough to say it's blank and dormant (which doesn't explain how The Bride knows fear and horror later on, but whatever). I saw a movie waste its own premise and fill a whopping 85% of the movie with filler. There could've been a fascinating tale told of nature vs. nurture here; have Pretorius and Frankenstein create The Bride with her blank canvas brain and develop her, versus The Monster being out in the wild, being influenced by the world around it. Would the scientists fight for control of The Bride, undermining each other and confusing her, leading to a failure of the experiment? How would The Monster react in a world that sees him as an abomination? Could he learn to grow and evolve in such negative conditions? Nope, movie doesn't care about that. Let's spend most of the movie in a manhunt, sprinkle in some rudimentary "learning from a wise blind man" cliche, and then The Monster becomes complicit in a kidnapping to force Frankenstein to make him a friend ... which happens with less than 10 minutes to go. The titular character, the purpose for this movie, doesn't show her face until there's less than 8 minutes left, and then has to rush through the finale like the movie's run out of time. WHY EVEN BOTHER. I will give it that it is shot beautifully, and Pretorius is a great, slimy villain. Boris Karloff gets a lot more to work with here than the original. It is not boring, that's for sure, as it goes all over the place. But in doing so, it is so tonally confused, so devoid of purpose other than taking the long way around to executing its titular premise, that I can't see how this movie gets the accolades it does. I genuinely can't.