Month: March 2026

The Bride and why I love all the Frankenstein’s monsters

Frankenstein’s Monster is dead, but he’ll also really never die. 

I love it when a character hits the cultural level of a Sherlock Holmes or a Batman, and can be endlessly reinvented for new eras. 

Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride is the latest reimagining of the bones of Mary Shelley’s tale, a wild, anarchic creation myth and love story. It’s as loose and freaky as major Hollywood productions ever get these days, and while it’s sure to be divisive, I kind of loved it. 

Very loosely retelling the events of Bride of Frankenstein in the 1930s, Oscar nominee Jessie Buckley gives a delightfully unhinged performance as a new “Bride” to Christian Bale’s wounded and lonesome Frankenstein’s monster. The Bride at times feels as rough and patched together as the monster himself, but that’s what charmed me – it tells something new by stitching together ghostly possession, a screwball musical, a blood-spattered romance and a Bonnie and Clyde-style violent lovers on the run arc. 

The monster and his bride tear through polite society, and while the plot is sprawling and doesn’t always add up, terrific turns by Bale, Buckley and Annette Bening as this movie’s “mad doctor” work well. A truly insane homage dance number to Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein is the most audaciously strange scene I’ve seen so far this year. This one’s for the sickos, and I’m proud to be among them. 

I’m here for all the Frankensteins, to be honest, right on down to campy ‘60s kaiju romp Frankenstein Conquers The World and the ultra-sleazy Frankenhooker. 

There remains endless potential in the story of man creating life, and how it (usually) all goes horribly wrong. 

We’re only a few months from the last great Frankenstein movie, Guillermo Del Toro’s Gothic Oscar-nominated epic of an adaptation of Shelley’s novel with a committed and curiously sexy performance by Jacob Elordi as the monster. That one is as overwrought and passionate as The Bride, but in a completely different way. Those great lonesome Arctic chase sequences – always my favourite part of the original novel – sparkle on the big screen. 

A rough Google estimate tells me there’s been close to 500 spins on the Frankenstein story. Boris Karloff set the standard, of course, and his performance, closing in on a century ago now, remains the template for investing the monster with both humanity and menace. Christopher Lee played the creature as a hurt, abused animal, with melting-egg makeup that seemed startlingly grotesque in 1957’s Hammer production The Curse of Frankenstein – then followed by a half-dozen more Hammer movies that totally reimagined the creature’s story each time, even as a woman and once as a New Zealand wrestler with the world’s worst makeup job. 

Every era has its Frankenstein – splattery gore from Andy Warhol in the ‘70s, kid-friendly spoofs like The Monster Squad in the 1980s, bombastic excess like Kenneth Branagh’s 1990s take. I like the weirder angles, like Roger Corman’s Frankenstein Bound from 1990 that throws time travel and metafiction into the mix. 

I’m even fascinated by the schlocky look of 1910’s Frankenstein by Edison Studios, the first adaptation of the creature’s story done in a mere 16-minute silent film, with Charles Stanton Ogle as a shaggy, deformed monster that’s memorably bizarre. A mere 116 years old now, it’s more of a curio than a successful film, but it sets the template for many a Frankenstein story in the century-plus since. 

And that doesn’t even get into the non-film realms, like DC Comics turning Frankenstein’s monster into a kind of immortal holy warrior, queer fiction imaginings like Jeanette Winterson’s Frankissstein and the novel and movie of Gods And Monsters, or modern-day parables like Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad. 

The Bride builds on all these flocks of Frankensteins, and Gyllenhaal’s weird delight of a film embraces the shimmering fluid identities of the monsters – her romantic duo are alternately enraged and peaceful, needy and fiercely independent. I expect The Bride is the kind of movie a lot of people will hate, and it’s certainly not flawless, but it’s brave in its own weird way.

For a book that came out 208 years ago, Shelley’s Frankenstein is still remarkably futile ground for birthing all kinds of stories about mankind’s hopes and dreams, and nightmares. 

That time the Ramones became unlikely teen movie sex symbols

You know, I love the Ramones a little more every day, and their molten-punk purity of just bashing out pop tunes as fast they could. They weren’t fancy – they were anything but – but they hit on some elemental force that they turned into a 20-plus year career. 

Back in 1979, legendary producer Roger Corman and director Allan Arkush somehow thought the Ramones would be the perfect band to anchor a classic teenage rebellion musical with a warped underground edge. Rock ’n’ Roll High School is a campy screwball delight even now, a time capsule of leotards and neon fashion in that cusp of an era where disco, punk and new wave all scrambled for cultural relevance. 

PJ Soles is Riff Randell, a perky punk fan with a heart of gold who’s the Ramones’ biggest fan, while her best friend Kate is a nerdy good girl with a crush on football player Tom. When the no-nonsense new Principal Togar (the wonderful Mary Woronov, veteran of Andy Warhol movies and much more) comes into town, it all sets up your classic clash between teens and authority. 

It’s a wonderfully sincere little punk rock movie, with Soles’ chipper enthusiasm jostling with Woronov’s sexy dominatrix vibe. It lacks the meanness of a lot of teen movies (for comparison, I watched 1984’s Revenge of the Nerds for the first time in decades the other day, and hoo boy that hasn’t aged well). Even the handsome football jock in this movie is kind of a decent guy, despite being an utter horndog. The kids in this movie mostly look like real kids rather than 30-year-old cosplayers, and it’s filled with great character actors like Clint Howard and Paul Bartel’s stiff music teacher who, of course, loosens up and gets down with the punkers. 

And when the Ramones rock into town, they’re like a blast of sleazy adult energy that still manages to feel cartoony. 

One of the beauties of Rock ’N’ Roll High School is just how weird the Ramones are on screen. They don’t appear until around halfway into the movie, riding down the street in a groovy Ramones-mobile and looking like they just fell out of a comic book, a leather-clad blast of menacing charm. 

The Ramones seem rather uncomfortable shoehorned into this teen comedy, and yet, it all works – they’re an intrusion from another world, and you can’t take your eyes off them. Joey, in particular, was all awkward angles and bulbous features covered by a mane of hair and those ever-present dark glasses, and he looked a bit like a scribbled rough draft of a rock star come to life.

The movie’s best scene is a barely-disguised masturbatory fantasy by PJ Soles of the Ramones playing in her bedroom, capped with Dee Dee revealed to be playing in her shower! I love the darned Ramones, but picturing them as Elvis-type sex symbols feels like a stretch. Did they ever even take off those leather jackets, anyway?

The Ramones couldn’t really act worth a lick – most of them barely have lines in the movie, and when they do they sound like the raw amateurs they were at doing anything other than punk rock. A highlight of the film is simply watching them in concert blasting through numbers like “Blitzkreig Bop,” “Teenage Lobotomy” and “Pinhead” and the title song. 

In real life, they were troubled, of course – only one of the band made it past his early 50s, and Joey, Johnny, Dee Dee and Tommy are all long gone now. The Ramones blazed through the culture like one of their songs, and I’ll always regret that I never saw them live. 

By the time the Ramones show up at the high school and tear it all up in a furnace of punk petulance and a literal explosion, it’s cathartic as hell, even if you didn’t mind high school all that much. Take that, Principal Togar and all the jerky fascist authority figures in this world who think they know what’s better for everybody else. (Um, I might just be projecting about life in the year 2026, a little…)

Amusingly, the behind-the-scenes on the blu-ray talks about how the movie almost came to star other bands – such as Van Halen or Devo (can you imagine?). 

Yet it’s the Ramones, who got so much out of a handful of chords and lyrics about freaks and fumbling love and sniffing glue, who were the perfect fit for this subversive take on teen musicals. Their presence captures the alchemic power a great rock song can have in your life, the way it feels like it blows down the doors of your boring reality and hurls open the doors of infinite potential. Yeah, even if they’re just singing about how Sheena is a punk rocker. 

As both a time capsule and a kind of warped Bizarro version of so many other far worse rock ’n’ roll teen movies, Rock ’N’ Roll High School has strangely endured, closing in on 50 years now. It’s a blast of pure weird joy that makes the world feel a little bit better every time I watch it. Gabba gabba hey!