{"id":320224,"date":"2026-03-03T21:16:07","date_gmt":"2026-03-03T21:16:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/320224\/"},"modified":"2026-03-03T21:16:07","modified_gmt":"2026-03-03T21:16:07","slug":"before-maggie-gyllenhaal-the-bride-was-somehow-all-about-sting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/320224\/","title":{"rendered":"Before Maggie Gyllenhaal, The Bride was somehow all about Sting"},"content":{"rendered":"

There\u2019s one Universal Monster movie that remains strangely forgotten even by that niche\u2019s doting community of cinephiles, despite the fact that\u2014unlike many of the zero-budget, public domain Dracula films of the 1970s onward\u2014it boasts both a legitimate budget and a wide theatrical release. 1985\u2019s The Bride bowled its way into theaters four decades before Maggie Gyllenhaal added an exclamation point<\/a> to her feminist reclamation of Bride Of Frankenstein. That earlier film not only featured impressive production design, but a cast including Clancy Brown as Frankenstein\u2019s monster, Flashdance\u2018s Jennifer Beals<\/a> as an undead ing\u00e9nue, and Sting trying on his best Peter Cushing as the Doctor. On the long and winding road of Universal Horror, The Bride is an utterly odd tourist trap.<\/p>\n

Perhaps it is the film\u2019s overall disinterest in the hoary horror bona fides that has led to it becoming a forgotten curio of its era, although you wouldn\u2019t know this watching The Bride\u2018s lush opening sequence. It begins exactly where a traditional Bride Of Frankenstein take would end, with the birth of a female creature, as the impatient first monster looks on, presumably having forced his maker to play god for a second time in his quest for companionship. The purplelicious lab set has all the Frankensteinian tropes in full force\u2014the Jacob\u2019s ladders arcing electrical discharge, the deformed assistant (Timothy Spall) running to and fro, and of course the requisite lightning storm. The creation seems to go wrong as the storm gets out of control, resulting in a brief, inspired moment where errant electricity momentarily reanimates a series of disembodied heads in jars. The whole thing is beautifully Gothic, but it\u2019s all more or less a lie\u2014an implication of the classically macabre that the rest of The Bride never attempts to match. It teases, and then switches to the film\u2019s true identity: a strange fusion of Gothic romance, buddy movie, and costume drama.<\/p>\n

The bar that Franc Roddam\u2019s film offers is one that Gyllenhaal\u2019s version will hopefully have no trouble clearing\u2014and the obvious place to start would be by making its title character genuinely central to the proceedings, which is something The Bride never does. Perhaps the female creature, Eva, is underwritten because producers doubted Beals\u2019 acting ability only two years removed from Flashdance, and negative contemporary reviews certainly play up this perception, as does a nomination that Beals received at the 1985 Razzie Awards. In truth, though, The Bride just fails to take any genuine interest in Eva at all, and whatever lapses are present in Beals\u2019 performance are largely outclassed by the even more embarrassing attempt at gravitas put forth by Sting as Baron Charles Frankenstein. If someone was going to leave this mess feeling ashamed, it should be the Police frontman, who ends up sounding childish each time he strains for melodrama with his old-timey thespian delivery.<\/p>\n

What 1985\u2019s The Bride actually functions like is something akin to a poor man\u2019s Poor Things: a twisted telling of My Fair Lady, acquainting an innocent and childlike Eva with both the delights of the flesh and the cruelty of the human condition. She doesn\u2019t know who she is, and the dashing Dr. Frankenstein tells her that she\u2019s an amnesiac who was found wandering the woods, and that he will nurse her back to health and mental alacrity. She proves a fast study, to the point that her development becomes accidentally comical\u2014within roughly three scenes, Eva goes from nonverbal, to monosyllabic, to fully cogent and erudite. None of it is from her own perspective, making Eva more pawn than a protagonist, robbing her of pathos. The entire Pygmalion process somehow occurs just off screen, between scenes.<\/p>\n

But it\u2019s not just the doctor who takes up all of The Bride\u2018s oxygen\u2014it\u2019s also the original monster. Of all potential characters, one protagonist of The Bride is Clancy Brown\u2019s creature, who survives a presumed death in the destruction of the laboratory during the opening scene and proceeds to become something like a wandering knight errant for the rest of the runtime. He quickly gains the companionship of the dwarf Rinaldo (David Rappaport), and a buddy dynamic between two men rejected by polite society is born. Rinaldo is the one person who sees the best in the scarred creature, making Brown\u2019s soulful monster dare to dream about a version of himself who is virtuous and humane. They dub the monster Viktor, which is certainly an auspicious and confusing choice of name for the Frankenstein mythos. If anything, it stands out as one of the most gregarious, nonthreatening depictions of Frankenstein\u2019s monster.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, it\u2019s also a choice that cleaves the film neatly in half, creating two separate movies connected by the faintest of surviving neural pathways. On one end, you have the patronizing doctor, bringing Eva to high society functions to show off his newly cultured creation, despite the fact that she occasionally slips into monsterhood by doing things like screaming at a cat<\/a> for no apparent reason. But far more of The Bride\u2018s time and interest is devoted to the adventures of Viktor and Rinaldo, who get caught up in a corrupt traveling circus, rise through the ranks of the sideshow, and are ultimately framed for murder. Both Brown and Rappaport turn in the film\u2019s best performances as they seek either understanding (Viktor) from or retribution (Rinaldo) upon society. The longer this side of the film plays out, in fact, the more you wonder why the movie was called The Bride.<\/p>\n

Frankly, it is impressive how thoroughly the two sides of this story are held apart from each other\u2014with 10 minutes left in the runtime, the original monster and Eva have had only one brief, chance encounter, their identities never revealed. This makes one of the subplots, involving an implied psychic connection between the two, all the more odd\u2014the thread is constantly dropped, and it amounts to absolutely nothing, as none of the brief moments in which they seem to sense the feelings of the other have any effect on anything. It feels like a remnant from some earlier version of the script that was partially but not fully discarded.<\/p>\n

To the credit of screenwriter Lloyd Fonvielle\u2014who, oddly enough, would go on to have another hand in the reinvention of a classic Universal Monsters figure when he got story credit on 1999\u2019s Brendan Fraser-starring The Mummy\u2014he does seems to be angling for a feminist reinvention of the Bride. He does so, however, in the most dull and rote way possible, not by making Eva exceptional or intriguing, but by making Sting\u2019s Dr. Frankenstein so pompous and slimy that the audience has no choice but to pity the ing\u00e9nue sentenced to life as his creation. The dramatic irony of her creation is the most engaging aspect of the story between them, because Eva doesn\u2019t understand the root of the baron\u2019s possessiveness\u2014she has no idea she\u2019s an assembled creature made from the dead, and so in her mind owes him nothing, certainly not life itself. This could perhaps have been explored via a more subtle deception or seduction between the two, but instead Frankenstein merely outs himself as not only a base misogynist, but also a violent, sexually aggressive brute.<\/p>\n

\u201cI might make the new woman,\u201d he declares to a friend, describing his intention to fashion Eva\u2019s personality in his image. \u201cIndependent, free, as bold and proud as a man. A woman equal to ourselves.\u201d His friend naturally scoffs at the very idea.<\/p>\n

That chauvinist rhetoric, dressed up as philosophy, is sadly Frankenstein at his best. He doesn\u2019t actually want Eva to be free, independent, or equal to himself, merely a pretty and agreeable bauble. When he finally reveals the truth of her creation, he says that although \u201cit is true that I made you to mate with that abortion,\u201d he decided that she was instead \u201cfit for finer things.\u201d And in this case, \u201cfiner things\u201d works out to being Sting\u2019s side piece, the finest thing that any woman could possibly want. He says he\u2019ll \u201cteach her to love,\u201d which involves looming over her and threatening her. Frankenstein belittles his creation, attempts to force himself on her, and is then angry and genuinely surprised when she proves unreceptive to the world\u2019s grossest mode of wooing.\u00a0<\/p>\n

What\u2019s left but for Viktor (the original creature) to arrive at the eleventh hour to save the day and slay the evil doctor? It\u2019s a good thing he gets back from that other movie in time for the final five minutes. The Bride provides a puddle-shallow rendition of the old \u201cWho\u2019s the real monster?\u201d routine, failing to develop any moral complexity in Sting\u2019s Baron\/Doctor, while being totally disinterested in its own protagonist. Lacking the necessary spark of the divine in its characterization, and without the red-meat horror necessary to anoint it as a lost classic of an era that genre geeks love to mine for discarded treasures, this demure and discarded\u00a0Bride exists today only as a footnote for its public domain characters, less remembered even than the likes of Roger Corman\u2019s 1990 pass at the same material, Frankenstein Unbound<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There\u2019s one Universal Monster movie that remains strangely forgotten even by that niche\u2019s doting community of cinephiles, despite…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":320225,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[146,85,46,397],"class_list":["post-320224","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/320224","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=320224"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/320224\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/320225"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=320224"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=320224"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=320224"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}