Frankenstein vs. The Mummy [Advance Review]

Directed by Damien Leone, Frankenstein vs. The Mummy is a fairly straightforward movie pitting two iconic horror legends against one another for the very first time. The film is set in the present day, which hurts it’s look and atmosphere right out of the gate and makes it very hard to feel like a Frankenstein or Mummy film until the monsters actually start showing up on screen. Even then, a little more convincing was probably needed.

If it has a good script, great direction or simply a few compelling actors, a horror movie can sometimes overcome an embarrassingly low budget. This is sadly not the case with Frankenstein vs. The Mummy. It needed a lot more than it had if it was going to work.

We start off with Victor Frankenstein, a hot young college professor who happens to be interested in an archaeology professor named Naihla Khalil. Khalil is about to aid Frankenstein in uncovering an ancient mummy, while he is stitching corpses together after hours. Both of them screw up and inadvertently create monsters that have no real connection to each other or—somehow—the overall plot.

Like many versus movies, Frankenstein vs. The Mummy suffers from a total inbalance between the two creatures. It is not about Frankenstein and the Mummy in equal doses. If anything it’s a Frankenstein movie that happens to have the Mummy in it. This is an even bigger problem when considering that the feature has a much better handle on the latter than the former. As a Frankenstein adaptation, it’s terrible and has a blatant disregard for the source material. It doesn’t work. Victor appears to be creating a human being out of boredom more than anything else and the characterization of his monster is even worse.

Since there’s no real way to tiptoe around the chief problem with Frankenstein’s creature in this movie, I’ll come right out and say it: he’s a rapist. There are a hundred other issues down to whatever the hell he’s trying to do with his voice, but that’s the most glaring. The entire point of every adaptation, from Edison to Whale to Fisher to Dean Koontz has been that the man is a monster and the monster is a man. There’s a deeply human side to the Frankenstein monster when you see him in anything but this, where he has one rape scene and—in case you thought it was an accident or a misunderstanding—has another one later on. He also jumps into killing right away, then picks up a leather jacket and a smoking habit so we can see that he’s a bad dude from the wrong side of the tracks.

Despite boasting a budget in the range of a MacDonald’s Happy Meal, Frankenstein vs. The Mummy clocks in at the cusp of two hours. It’s not even the type of movie that could sustain that runtime and certainly doesn’t keep your interest for 115 minutes, let alone ten. This will be available for a whopping recommended SRP of $30 on February 10^th. If you absolutely need it to complete either your Frankenstein or Mummy collection, then pick it up but I’d advise you to think twice under any other circumstances.

WICKED RATING: 2/10 

• Writer: Damien Leone
• Stars: Max Rhyser, Ashton Leigh, Constantin Tripes
• Release Date: February 10, 2015
• Length: 114 minutes
• Sub-genre: B-Movie, monster movie, mummy movie