Frankenstein Unbound

The idea here is that the story of Frankenstein is both a real story and a novel. That story is based on the novel of the same name by Brian Aldiss with the screenplay by F.X. Feeney and director Roger Corman. John Hurt plays Dr. Joe Buchanan, a scientist in the year 2031 who is working on a new secret weapon for the government that dispatches the enemy by sending them into another time. Buchanan ends up being randomly dispatched by his machine and going back 200 years to find himself in the part of Shelley's novel where the younger brother of Dr. Victor Frankenstein (Raul Julia) has been killed by the creature (Nick Brimble); I know he is called the monster, but since I always consider the doctor to be the true monster so on principle I always call the creature "the creature." However, an innocent girl, Justine Moritz (Catherine Corman), is being blamed for the murder and the locals are going to execute her as a witch. Buchanan also runs into Mary Wollstoncraft Godwin (Bridget Fonda), the future Mrs. Shelley, and gets her to help in a futile effort to save the girl. Lord Byron (Jason Patric) and Percy Shelley (Michael Hutchence) show up as well, but there is little time to discuss 19th-century English poetry since the creature is out there ready to kill again. Then it dawns on Buchanan that the technology that sent him back to 1831 might be of some use in writing the wrongs (at which point every Frankenstein movie ever made will cease to exist).

The greatest sin of this 1990 film is that it almost works. The ideas are provocative enough and the cast is too good for "Frankenstein Unbound" to descend to the level of camp. Certainly Corman is trying to make something more pretentious than his nominal fare. But at the end of all this that a lot more is being unbound than Frankenstein pretty much blows your mind. We understand that Doctors Buchanan and Frankenstein are mirrors of each other, and that sooner or later the former will recognize himself in the latter. But the intentional use of anachronisms is glaring rather than creative, the creature's make up suggests Frankenstein needs to work on his sewing technique, and there are enough Cormanisms throughout this film to belie the fact that for the first time in his career he had a decent budget. This is not a Frankenstein film that anyone would want to randomly pick up. At the very least you need to have read the original novel to at least be able to appreciate what Corman (and Aldiss) were trying to accomplish here.