Frankenstein: Legacy presents an intriguing “what if” scenario in which the journal detailing just how Frankenstein brought his creature to life survives, opening the way, potentially, to an unlimited number of Frankenstein scenarios.
After a prologue recounting the very beginning of Frankenstein – the Captain Walton part that you’ll only recognise if you’ve read the book or seen the pretty awful Kenneth Branagh film – we jump forward a century to the late Victorian era. This is a smart move; the late-Victorian monster canon includes Dracula, Jekyll & Hyde, The Invisible Man, The Phantom of the Opera, The Hunchback of Notre Dame and is sometimes extended to such tangentially Gothic items as The Hound of the Baskervilles, The Picture of Dorian Gray and Bram Stoker’s Mummy novel The Jewel of the Seven Stars. By virtue of his origins in the Romantic era, Frankenstein’s Monster is, as ever, the outcast of the bunch…until now, anyway.
As I was saying, Frankenstein’s journal survives down the years and eventually winds up in the hands of lady scientist Millicent Browning. When her old man – “old man” both as in “husband” and “looks about 190 years old” – dies by a combination of crowbar incident and morphine mishap, Millicent, armed with the secrets of Frankenstein’s journal, decides to resurrect him. Which of course means that in no time we’re into scenes of grave robbing, spooky Victorian ambiance, an unsanitary sanitarium, and a dramatic showdown by moonlight.
Which is a good thing! Frankenstein: Legacy knows precisely what it’s doing and, for the most part, succeeds. As far as recent Frankensteins, it may lack the humanism of Bernard Rose’s Frankenstein or the style of Larry Fassenden’s Deranged, but the picture is handsomely (if cheaply) staged, the Victorian dialogue is reasonably convincing when the sound mix lets you make it out, and the implied romance between our hero William Browning and asylum nurse Liza (Alexandra Afryea) is rather sweet and doesn’t lack for chemistry. But basically the best thing is that everything proceeds in the Hammer tradition. Specifically, it’s reminiscent of Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell, the last(?) and best of Hammer’s Frankenstein pictures, with its asylum setting and theme of the stagnation, the decay – literal and metaphorical – of the whole Frankenstein, er, legacy.