Victor Frankenstein
A more modern retelling of the modern Prometheus tale (the Hollywood version, not the book, you think Max Landis reads?), where the doctor is kinda the hero.
There are many more characters here. Igor is a brilliant circus hunchback stuck in his PT Barnum predicament, more like the geek in Nightmare Alley. He gawks at beautiful Lorelei soaring through the air high above, but she doesn’t even know he exists.
Until the fateful day where the Doctor visits the circus to buy dead animal body parts. The tech dudes fuck up and beautiful Lorelei falls from grace. Our hunchback saves her life and gets taken away to an hospital courtesy of our Doctor friend. Victor comes back for him and rescues him from his cage, and they fly the coop.
Our hero’s massive hunchback is just an untreated abscess, which the good doctor quickly drains with his mouth (yuck!). Our hero takes the place of disappeared Igor, the doctor’s former roommate. Apparently, the doctor is not a real doctor yet, just a medical student, son of some big cheese, so money and connections are never in short supply.
Together, the new friends enter a partnership where the hunchback is the low level tech guy, and Victor integrates everything on a secret experiment in the basement. When it’s all done, they celebrate in some society party where Igor meets her object of affection. Lorelei is now a cabaret dancer, enthralled to some closeted gay guy that needs a beard. They start meeting regularly.
Nobody knows what the basement hides: a Frankenstein monster with chimpanzee parts. On the next day they show it in public at the college, but it breaks off and they have to kill it. Barely the only guy in the audience is some even richer dude, who is very interested and wants to bankroll a bigger version, as a human.
That dude is a Elon Musk type, clearly evil. All this hoopla brings the attention of some hyper-religious detective inspector (played by Andrew Scott, ironically). He believes the Doctor is in league with Satan and wants to stop them, but it’s too late, he’s too well connected now, there won’t be any legal way. He doesn’t let that stop him and illegally breaks into the basement, finding the previous Igor dude encased in ice. There is a struggle, but the cop loses an hand and gets fired.
The experiments move to some castle in Scotland, with a bunch of workers harvesting thunder, so everyone is present on the big showdown.
The monster LIIIIVES, kills Elon Musk and the cop, but as soon as it lives, Victor notices that is no life, he is not a replacement for his late brother and he and Igor kill him. The girl had travelled with Igor so they even get together at the end, while Victor roams the Scottish countryside.
Everything works out in the end, if you don’t really analyse this further. This has a big cast of great actors, and Daniel Radcliffe too, and while it was written by Max Landis, any crimes against women are by omission of having the only female character by a Jiminy Cricket, the moral compass for the main character.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.