Katie Caple

(In French, On Cable TV, March 2021) Public domain monsters are meant to be re-used in ways that their long-dead creators couldn’t possibly have imagined, so let’s not mourn Mary Shelley’s creation being featured a silly horror-themed hospital comedy. From the first few moments (cultivating the black-and-white aesthetics of Frankenstein’s lab, even in a modern colour film), it’s obvious that Frankenstein General Hospital is swinging wildly for every joke that comes to its mind, even if they’re not exactly the wittiest. Oh, there are a few moments here and there — combining the blind man and the little girl that the monster encounters is fun enough, but the nods to the mythos are not meant to be profound nor all pervasive. This modern-day “sequel” sees one of the Doctor’s descendants replicating his ancestor’s experiments in the sub-basement of a hospital by taking body parts from unwillingly deceased patients. It doesn’t take a long time for the overacting, the overly broad humour and the uneven jokes (many of them running gags) to strike. Frankenstein General Hospital is clearly meant to be a dumb comedy, but it loses something by simply trying too hard — the mugging occasionally becomes obnoxious, and the danger of a running gag is that if it doesn’t work the first few times, you’re stuck with it for the rest of the film. Fortunately, the last half is better than the first, once the humour gets less obnoxious and the pieces are all in play — including the monster. The lack of wit occasionally plays in the film’s favour — at least for a segment of the audience: I will always appreciate any sequence of enthusiastic sudden toplessness (this time featuring Katie Caple in an elevator), but naughty slapstick is not necessarily a broad crowd-pleaser. At least it’s a step up from the basement gags that populate the rest of the film. If you try hard enough, you can find a few elements of interest — a dominatrix psychologist (Kathy Shower), a hideously more effective joke past 2013 (“Boston Marathon special”—I thought it was an addition from contemporary dubbing, but no—it’s from the original 1988 script). Frankenstein General Hospital is not good, but it’s almost enjoyable in a low-grade try-hard way, with one bonus point or two if you’d rather see nudity than nihilistic horror.