Word: karloff
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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ECONOMISTS AND CORPORATE EXECUTIVES ARE NOT USUALLY thought of as disciples of Dr. Victor Frankenstein. But they too have created a monster, and it has suddenly found a voice--not Boris Karloff's this time, but Pat Buchanan's. In his strident demands for trade protection can be heard the long-mute anger of workers who feel both injured and insulted by free traders in the academy, business and politics: injured by the loss of jobs and income to foreign competition; insulted because too many free traders have airily dismissed their pain as either illusory or inconsequential...
Branaugh's latest vision--De Niro slathed in what appears to be Freddy Kruger's discarded latex--demands comparison to Boris Karloff"s popular 1931 interpretation of the monster. The Brattle Theatre's current series, "The Monster Within," provides an opportunity to re-examine Karloff's nifty neck bolts, and several films inspired by Mary Shelley's myth. Each presents a version of Shelley which contributes in various ways to our understanding of her classic work...
...novel (see review below). Adopting a different approach altogether, the dark and mesmerizing "The Spirit of the Beehive" explores the effect of the 1931 "Frankenstein" on a young girl in Franco's Spain during World War II. As the girl becomes deeply involved in a fantasy of the Karloff film, the world surrounding her begins eerily to echo the film. It often resembles a dark version of "Cinema Paradiso," stressing the importance of the child's imagination in creating her personal world. The 1977 new wave classic Eraserhead subjects a version of Shelley's myth to the vision...
...original inspiration for all these celluloid Frankensteins is James Whale's 1931 film which in fact takes only minimal plot elements from Mary Shelley's novel. Karloff's monster stands out in a production which is in many ways simply a Hollywood fluff treatment of the story. This time around, the handsome Dr. Frankenstein animates a monster who terrorizes the countryside, and Frankenstein's lovely fiancee, until he is hunted down and dies in a bizarre finale sequence at a windmill...
...science in its time, thus ruling out Shelley's tragic father-son relationship. The 'science' of phrenology, the study of the physical characteristics of the skull as an indicator of personality and behavior, is used as a horror technique, obscuring true possibilities of horror. The brain transplanted into Boris Karloff's monster is that of a psychopathic criminal, presumed to be preprogrammed for murder and mayhem. The revealing of this fact to 'Dr. Frankenstein extracts a reaction of dread at the inevitable terrors such a brain, reanimated, will produce. Yet Karloff is at his most terrifying when he appears...