MONSTER'S DEVELOPMENT MAKES SEQUEL BETTER

"Bride of Frankenstein" (1935) -- 8/10

If you want to see perhaps the best movie scene of all time, you should watch "Bride of Frankenstein."

The scene I am referring to is a demonstration of why "Bride of Frankenstein" is a better movie than "Frankenstein." In the scene, The Monster walks into the tiny home of a blind, lonely and elderly man. Unaware of The Monster's looks, the old man reaches out to make the stranger his friend. As the friendship grows, the old man teaches his new friend how to talk.

The 7- to 8-minute scene is simple and sentimental yet profound and instructive. It also shows what could have been achieved in the second half of "Frankenstein" if the plot hadn't inexplicably pivoted from a great science fiction movie centered on the development of The Monster into a weak horror story centered on the town's outrage.

Boris Karloff reportedly objected to The Monster speaking in "Bride." He was wrong. The Monster's character development makes the sequel the superior movie. I found it enjoyable that The Monster learned, developed emotional feelings, yearned for friends and women, and enjoyed life. Grunting doesn't make a monster scarier. Intellectual growth does.

But there are true horror scenes in this movie – at least intellectually. The scene with the little people created from seeds by Dr. Pretorius is humorous and scary to think about. "Bride" also benefits from the addition of a truly evil character although Dr. Pretorius is sometimes cartoonishly evil and the significantly less time that was spent on Dr. Frankenstein's boring love life.

The creation scene in "Frankenstein" was one of that movie's highlights, but the creation scene of the bride in this movie is actually better. Less innovative perhaps, but more complex and interesting.

Unfortunately, the ending of the movie was just plain awful. I wanted to see the character of the "bride" develop or at least begin to develop the way The Monster developed. I'm not sure whether I wanted to see a relationship between Dr. Frankenstein's two creations, but I certainly did not want to see the movie end minutes after they met.

The movie should have been significantly longer. The ending was too rushed, too absurd, too contrived, and too preachy as suddenly The Monster became a moral arbiter of who is good and who is bad.

The ending was so bad that I was tempted to cut my rating from 9 or 10 to 7, but I gave "Frankenstein" a 7 and "Bride" was definitely better. I gave it an 8.