Yo, Frankenstein! I did it!

I saw I, Frankenstein over the weekend, in a nearly empty auditorium, save for the creature that lumbered in just before the feature presentation began, It had to lift up the armrest that separates two seats in order to sit comfortably, spreading its bulk evenly across two chairs designed to hold people of, let's say "generous proportions" as it is. I am not a thin man, but I have never had any trouble fitting my fat ass into a single chair under any circumstance. I guess I could understand it if the guy just needed a little extra space, but he fit snugly into a space designed to contain two full-grown human beings, and I could hear the seats groan as they accommodated his weight.

And his breathing... how do I describe it? Have you ever heard a pug breathe? Their elongated palates coupled with their short snouts do these small dogs no favors. They basically sound like they're suffering from advanced emphysema at all times. Now imagine that labored breathing in a pug the size of a smart car, down to its last lung, and you begin to understand the strangled noises that emanated from this behemoth in the auditorium. After thirty minutes or so, these horrifying sounds began to blend into the film's soundtrack, creating the bizarre effect of seeming like every actor in I, Frankenstein was suffering from some serious upper-respiratory infection at the same time.

This constant, intrusive noise didn't ruin my screening of the film, however, because the film did a fine job of ruining itself without any assistance from the swelling monster that was slowly devouring all the available seating in the lonely auditorium. You may remember an earlier post where I tried to figure out what exactly I, Frankenstein was and why it existed, and after seeing the film I still have no answers.

A long time ago, Victor Frankenstein sewed a bunch of corpses together and then dunked his little fleshy jigsaw puzzle into an aquarium filled with electric eels, and Aaron Eckhart was born! Then some other stuff happened, and he was kidnapped by gargoyles because the gargoyles were worried about his safety due to his sudden popularity among the demon hordes that have plagued the world since the dawn of time. Aaron finds himself in the middle of an ages-old struggle between Satan's army of monsters (that all look suspiciously like the trolls goblins in Troll 2), and God's chosen protectors of humanity, being the gargoyles, who all hang out in a really big cathedral that sits in the center of some random city and can only be killed by creatures without souls.

The demons want Aaron because he has no soul, and if they can unlock the mysteries of his re-birth, then they can create an army of soulless, undead monsters possessed by demons that can destroy the Holy Order Of Gargoyles and transform the world into Hell 2.0. And instead of destroying Aaron and his creator's journal, which details the mad doctor's methods of re-animation, the Gargoyle Queen lets Aaron go (?!) and deposits the journal in her private art gallery or some shit, because she's an idiot. A few centuries pass, and the Demon Prince Tiberius Naberius has tasked human scientist Yvonne Strahovski, best known for her role as "THAT ASS in Mass Effect 2", with re-animating a fake rubber dead rat in his state of the art laboratory, because he's still keen on that "soulless army" plan.

I'm not sure why he didn't just divert all of resources to finding Aaron at some point in the past two hundred years, because that just seems like the smarter plan. He couldn't have been that difficult to find, and if you threw enough minions at the guy you'd surely overwhelm him, no matter how good he is at punching people. But I'm no Demon Prince, so what do I know?

Some more stuff happened after this, but I stopped paying attention around this point, because the movie was just too stupid to take seriously. My eyes glazed over as I sat in that darkened room, and the entire second act of I, Frankenstein just drifted from my memory like a bad dream in the morning light. I guess the demons got their hands on Dr. Frankenstein's journal during my blackout, and our pal Aaron found Prince Naboo's huge collection of corpses just waiting to ride the lightning, then the gargoyles try to kill him instead of asking where this stronghold of evil is, even though destroying him would no longer serve any purpose due to their enemy's newfound arcane knowledge.

And it's not like the gargoyles don't know that the horned ones have the journal, because after their Queen was kidnapped (!?) by the demons, her douchebag head gargoyle soldier (played by that asshole who played Bruce Willis, Jr. in the last Die Hard movie) traded the journal for her freedom, and instead of just killing the gargoyle Queen after they got their claws on the journal, they let her go. Because demons are honorable?

So obviously the wise and powerful gargoyle Queen sends her insubordinate douchebag henchman, who just broke their most sacred laws by taking the journal from her private library and trading it for her freedom, knowing what the secrets of that journal mean for the future of all life on the planet, to go kill Aaron Eckhart instead of trying to find the demonic stronghold and thwart their plans to wipe out the gargoyles and annihilate the human race with an army of unstoppable killers because that's clearly the smartest course of action at this juncture.

After a brief fight, Gargoyle McLane falls on his own axe and dies, and the rest of the gargoyles come after Aaron for retribution. Being a decent guy, Aaron leads the gargoyles to Prince Nazgul's lair instead of engaging in more pointless fighting, and the gargoyles finally realize that fighting the demons is what they should have been doing all along, so everybody teams up to fuck shit up in demon town. Perusing the journal, Yvonne Strahovski realizes that the secret to re-animating the dead is electricity in the proper voltage, so as not to overcook the corpse and cause its eyes to pop out of its skull. I don't understand why she needed Dr. Frankenstein's journal to tell her this.

Hell, the demons could have figured this out on their own given enough time and experimentation. They had what appeared to be hundreds of thousands of corpses in cold storage, so they could have used them to experiment with the proper application of electricity without the fucking journal, and eventually they would have stumbled across the right combination without any help whatsoever. They could have been doing that over the past two hundred years, and it would have been a better application of their time, money and energy than the dumb shit they were occupying their time with.

And why did they need the assistance of an unwitting human scientist in the first place? Just send your immortal demons to college and they could have learned everything this woman learned, and they could have kept all their plans in-house, which would have kept their plans secret from the clearly stupid and technology-illiterate gargoyles, who do nothing aside from hanging out in a massive church when they're not murdering demons who reveal themselves in public for no good reason.

There was no need to outsource this job. All they did was hire somebody with a conscience who was guaranteed to give Aaron Eckhart a hard-on the moment he saw her because have you seen that ass?

My god...

Any heterosexual male would gladly fight an army of demons to save an ass like that. In hiring Yvonne Strahovski, all the demons did was ensure their own destruction.

Men go to war over an ass like that.

Having cracked the code of proper amperage, the demons activate their re-animation program, and these little screens attached to the chests of all the corpses light up, conveniently displaying a "re-animation percentage", slowly filling the "re-animation meter" to 100%. And what does the gargoyle Queen do when she sees this massive underground chamber, filled with slowly re-animating corpses, as well as a legion of disembodied demons rising from the depths, circling the corpses, ready to possess them all as soon as they awaken? She just stands around, all bug-eyed for several minutes before finally giving her soldiers orders to destroy all the bodies before they can re-awaken and pose a threat to the world. Good job?

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention what happens when demons and gargoyles are killed in this movie. Whenever a demon is destroyed, its soul turns into a fireball and crashes into the dirt, banished to Hell. Whenever a gargoyle is destroyed, its soul turns into an orb of light that ascends to Heaven. This shit happens all the time, and it's really weird. Prince Nebulous beats the tar out of Aaron Eckhart, painting a pentagram on his forehead with blood and summoning one of his demon allies from The Abyss to possess his soulless body. After thrashing about in the air for a few minutes while a seemingly never-ending cloud of evil smoke pours into his eyes, mouth and nostrils, he shocks Prince Nebbish by revealing that he's not really possessed, because I guess God just gave him a soul while he was being possessed by the demon, I think, which means there was no room at the Inn, with the Inn being Aaron Eckhart's body? It doesn't make any sense, is what I'm saying.

Then Aaron carves the holy gargoyle symbol for "Deus Ex Machina" into the Demon Prince's chest, and he transforms into a fireball the size of a mountain that crashes through the evil office building, taking all of his nefarious minions with him back to Hell. That's it, really. Aaron Eckhart saves the day, then the movie ends. The stupid, stupid movie finally ends.

Who was the intended audience for I, Frankenstein? I don't think there is an intended audience, considering how hard this film crashed and burned at the box office. What kind of movie is this? It has a paradoxically complex-yet-underdeveloped mythology at its core, its plot is so poorly conceived and executed that it becomes difficult to follow not because of its complexity, but because it's too inane to remain in your brain lest you lose your mind. I can't imagine how stupid these actors must have felt every time they had to say shit like "gargoyle queen" with a straight face.

I, Frankenstein is so terrible and so bizarre that it should be kept in a museum as an example of man's folly, dissected and studied for generations to come in order to prevent something so awful from ever happening again. It should become a boogeyman for film students all around the world, that eternal nightmare that lurks in their closets and under their beds, haunting their every professional decision.

"I recommend a page-one rewrite. After all, you don't want your film to end up like I, Frankenstein, do you?"

Maybe that's why this film exists, as a cautionary tale, or perhaps as the cinematic equivalent of the biblical rainbow after the flood, serving as a promise that this kind of apocalyptic event would never again be inflicted upon the human race.

Who am I kidding? They remade Robocop. There is no God.

On that note, I have a special surprise for you! I can't tell you how many times (none) people have contacted me, telling me how much they would love to go back and listen to my old podcast, The Podcast Of Lies, but they're simply too intimidated to listen to eighteen entire episodes in order to catch up. I've solved that problem for you, person who doesn't exist, by taking those eighteen episodes and chopping them to pieces, discarding most of those pieces and sewing the best bits back together, creating my very own Frankenstein's monster of a podcast I like to call The Collection Of Lies!

In this "greatest hits" (I use the term very loosely) compilation, I have taken several hours of annoying conversation and whittled it down to less than twenty minutes of annoying conversation! It's a fucking bargain, as far as I'm concerned! So do yourself a favor and listen to the following podcast. It won't cost you anything, except maybe a few moments of your precious time, and who gives a shit about your precious time?

The Collection Of Lies



That's it for now, boys and girls. The sun is slowly setting, and I have to go punch something. Until next we meet...

TIME MARCHES ON!