Bride of Frankenstein is the 1935 sequel to the definitive Frankenstein movie released four years
earlier. The story is taken from a subplot of Mary Shelley’s novel though bares
only a passing resemblance to the author’s work. The film picks up in the
moments after the climax of the first movie in which the monster was seemingly
killed in a raging fire. Spoiler alert – he wasn’t. In this movie the monster’s
personality grows, he makes friends and becomes restless. As with any man, he wants
female companionship and with the help of scientist Doctor Pretorius, he
kidnaps his creator’s fiancé, forcing Doctor, now Baron Frankenstein to create
for him a Bride.
I thought that 1931’s Frankenstein was a masterful piece of
cinema and rightly held a place in the minds of horror cinema fans over eighty
years on from its release. Bride of
Frankenstein holds a similar place in cinema history but overall I was
disappointed by it. I felt that the plot was slow and clunky and the dialogue
and acting was much worse than that of the original film. For fifty minutes I
was teetering on the edge of boredom but a final twenty minute flourish,
reminiscent of the first movie, helped to save the day.
