Victor Frankenstein

We seem to be inadvertently having a Daniel Radcliffe Film Festival. The last one we saw was the deeply weird Swiss Army Man, where he played a dead body. This time he is an ex-hunchback. Igor, to be precise. The concept is an interesting one. There have been at least fifty movies and such that have stolen Mary Shelley’s idea of a man creating life, but none have told it from Igor’s point of view. But this is not the Igor we are all familiar with (Marty Feldman in Young Frankenstein: “The name’s EYE-gore.”). He is a nameless hunchback held captive in a circus by some real nasty people. Victor F. frees him, and shows him he’s not really a hunchback at all, he just has this huge zit on his back, which Victor drains. Since his posture sucks from walking hunched over for sixteen years, Victor does some painful adjustments to Igor’s spine, thus inventing the discipline of chiropractic! Igor happens to be an autodidact, teaching himself anatomy in between beatings.

It all looks very good in a Jules Verne, Victorian way, but it’s pretty silly. James McAvoy plays the mad scientist, and he really is pretty crazy. I’d call him bipolar, at least. He enlists Igor as his assistant, then his partner. He experiments with animal parts. They use half the carcasses from the London Zoo and craft a hideous creature that is about half chimp, with spare parts from Donald Trump and Sarah Palin. Such an abomination can only live for a few minutes, so they decide to build a human body from scratch. If you thought things would go well from there, you haven’t seen enough Frankenstein movies. I had some fun, but wouldn’t really recommend this.