O God. Do NOT get me started on James Whale's adaptation. It is tied with the animated The Return of the King (1980) for not only the worst book-to-movie adaptation I've ever seen, but the worst movie of all-time.
James Whale's 1931 movie was atrocious at best and pure torture at worst. The movie couldn't even get the title character's name right! The character is Victor Frankenstein, not Henry Frankenstein.
And it all goes downhill from there.
Frankenstein created the unnamed monster on his own. There was no hunchbacked assistant named Fritz or Igor or however you want to call him. He did not utter "It's alive!" when his monster was brought to life. In fact, Victor felt no joy, excitement, or euphoria whatsoever. He felt some sadness and some fear. As I mentioned earlier, his wife is killed. In the movie, he gets married and lives happily ever after.
Now for the worst thing, the thing that made me want to go back in time and murder James Whale: the monster himself.
There is a night-and-day difference between the book and the movie. In the book, because Frankenstein works on his own, he actually gives his creation a good brain. The creation is extremely intelligent and philosophical; in fact, I'd say he has a better brain than his creator. He lives on his own in the wild and does what he can to avoid people, not terrorize them.
In the movie, it's a whole other story. Fritz unintentionally gets a bad brain for the creation. Therefore the creation walks like a zombie, and his vocabulary consists of two or three grunts. He terrorizes people rather than avoiding them.
That really angers me more than anything else. When I read the book I found myself caring more for the creation than for his cowardly creator. The creation is truly pitiful because no one wants him. Everyone, including Frankenstein himself, judges the creation because of his size, and they flee before they can realize that he is a capable, kindhearted individual. But that isn't the case at all in the movie. The creation is just your typical cookie-cutter horror creature, and that is the most unforgivable offense.
Frankenstein is my favorite book to be made into a bad movie. James Whale's 1931 adaptation was no adaptation in my book. If you can't even get the main character's name right, something is terribly wrong here. So read the book. Don't see this atrocity of a movie.
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