Watching This Film Made Me Want To Hide At The Ends Of The Earth

I don't know what possessed Alex and his housemates to watch I, Frankenstein. Idle curiosity, I think. It was as bad as I expected from all I'd heard of it. Aaron Eckhardt played the monster, and as far as being a hideous monster goes, he looked a lot worse when he played Two-Face.

In some versions of Dr. Doom's origin, he actually is hideously scarred (whether from the explosion in his college days, or because he slapped that mask on while it was still hot), but in others his face is fine except for a tiny, almost unnoticeable scar. Eckhardt (who goes by "Adam" her) has noticeable scars, but they don't exactly make him a disgusting guy. Compared to Robert deNiro's version from the '90s Frankenstein film, or even any number of people I've seen dressed up for Halloween, he looks fine. It makes me wonder if Adam really had a lot of trouble with humanity persecuting him. I don't know that people would look at this version of the monster and run screaming for torches and pitchforks. It seems like Adam could just say, I left my skillet in the oven too long (or he messed up something with his distillery) and it exploded, and he's just glad to be alive. i imagine you would notice him if you saw him walking down the street, but I'm not positive you'd see him and think something was wrong, and you need to destroy him. So I wonder if he hates humanity because of the qualities in us that drove Victor Frankenstein to try bringing him to life in the first place. although that makes it sound like a state of perpetual teenage angst. "I didn't ask to be stitched together and hit with electricity and brought into this world!"

Anyway, Adam doesn't have much use for humanity, but there are demons walking around on Earth, and they want him, because as a reanimated amalgamation of corpses, he has no soul, meaning a demon from Hell could possess him. The demons want to know how to reanimate the dead, so they can have a huge army of bodies for more demons to possess. I'm not sure if it's addressed how these demons got on Earth, since presumably they aren't possessing reanimated corpses. Anyway, they have some corporate headquarters where Attractive Scientist Lady is trying to recreate Victor Frankenstein's work, while beneath her, there's a huge complex just full of dead bodies suspended in metal coffins. It might be on top of an actual doorway to Hell, I'm not sure. When things start to go wrong, a huge pillar of flame and demons starts pouring up from directly below all those corpse cages.

So Adam can't simply hide from everyone in the middle of nowhere, and has to kill a lot of demons, but there are also a bunch of gargoyles, who are sort of angels, that are fighting the demons. They know Adam is of interest to Hell, but don't seem to know why. All the scowly, bestubbled guys are like, "Just kill it", because they don't respect Adam's rights as a mopey person, but a couple of the lady gargoyles think he's not such a bad guy, and one of them offers him a little trust, so he doesn't trust them really, but they aren't actively trying to kill him most of the time. At least until Chief Stubble goes rogue and tries to kill Adam, loses, and then Adam walks right up to their door with the guy's weapon, and lets them chase him (there is a stupid moment where one of the gargoyles reports to their leader, their only connection to Heaven, for what that's worth, "We found him." You found him? He walked right up to your door. It's like saying I found my mail after the mail carrier puts it in my mailbox). Right back to the demon's HQ, and there's a big fight, and when demons die they turn into these fiery spirals. It's all these people flying around killing each other with fire spirals all over the place. Which didn't make a lot of sense, but at least added a little color to fights between a bunch of gray stone things and demons in their nice black suits.

Alex kept claiming he saw people who were also in the Underworld movies, and he was usually right. Which probably sums up the film. It's not as rainy, but it's always cloudy or night, everyone wears dark clothes, lots of slow-mo in fights scenes, two factions fighting over a very special blonde guy. Seemed like more of a mess, though, maybe because they're using Frankenstein's monster, and making a kind of generic action/fantasy movie. I'm not expecting that guy to be leaping around killing demons in some war for Earth.