While every possible intellectual property gets mined to death by voracious studios, eager to turn even the teensiest sliver of notoriety into a billion-dollar success, some of the best and most popular characters in pop culture history have been floundering. The classic horror monsters all seem to be struggling to find a place in the new Hollywood system, and the awkward attempts to turn both Dracula and The Wolf Man into superhero analogues – with the dreadful Dracula Untold (2014) and the wan Wolfman (2010) – have been egregious misfires for Universal Studios.
So what, pray tell, can 20th Century Fox do to make their upcoming Victor Frankenstein stand out from the pack? Maybe, as we can surmise from this first trailer, their plan was not to take it very seriously. The new film looks like a classical gothic thriller, and stars legitimate franchise headliners James McAvoy (X-Men: Day of Future Past) and Daniel Radcliffe (Harry Potter), but perhaps most notably it comes from the pen of screenwriter Max Landis (Chronicle), whose bemused fingerprints are all over this preview.
In a short time, Landis (the son of An American Werewolf in London director John Landis) has made a name for himself with witty genre riffs, beginning with the spry Masters of Horror episode Deer Woman and moving on up to this weekend’s American Ultra, which puts a stoner spin on familiar spy motifs. And it appears, if Fox’s first trailer is any indication, that Victor Frankenstein takes a similar, tricky approach: to take the material seriously AND have fun with it.
And it looks like it’s working. This Victor Frankenstein trailer has a self-aware streak (they even reference the classic Mel Brooks comedy Young Frankenstein) but it also seems to be engaging in its own right, as an Igor-centric spin on the classic tale, and we sure as heck had fun watching it.
And being Max Landis, who is not only currently writing a Superman comic but who also wrote and directed the short film/comic book criticism The Death and Return of Superman, there also appears to have be a major a DC Comics reference, with Sherlock co-star Andrew Scott playing “Detective Turpin,” a name fans will all recognize from Superman stories of yore.
Victor Frankenstein opens on November 25, 2015.
William Bibbiani (everyone calls him ‘Bibbs’) is Crave’s film content editor and critic. You can hear him every week on The B-Movies Podcast and watch him on the weekly YouTube series Most Craved and What the Flick. Follow his rantings on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.
