Those expecting Guillermo Del Toro’s Frankenstein to be similar to the book, or to any other adaptation, are in for something else. A longtime enjoyer of the creature’s story, Del Toro instead draws from many places: the novel, James Whale’s culturally defining 1931 film, the Kenneth Branagh version, there are even hints from Terence Fisher’s Curse of Frankenstein, and if the set design and costuming are to be believed, there are trace elements of the National Theatre production too.

The formulation to breathe life into this amalgam is a sort of storm cloud of cultural memory and personal desire for Del Toro. This is about crafting his Frankenstein: the one he wanted to see since he was young, the vision he wanted to stitch together. What results is an experience that is more colorful and kinetic and well-loved by its creator than any Frankenstein we’ve had yet, but what it leaves behind is much of its gothic heart. Quiet darkness, looming dread, poetry, and romance are set aside as what has been sold as “the definitive retelling” goes off to the races. It’s a fast-paced ride through a world of mad science, and you’re on it.

Victor Frankenstein’s Ambition and Tragedy

A tale as old as time, with some changes: the morbid talents and untamed hubris of Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac) guide him to challenge death itself. Spurred by a wealthy investor named Henrich Harlander, and a desire for Harlander’s niece Elizabeth (Mia Goth), Victor uses dead flesh and voltaic vigor to bring a creature to life. His attempts to rear it, however, go horribly wrong, setting the two on a bloody collision course as the definitions of man and monster become blurred.

Guillermo Del Toro’s Frankenstein is more Hellboy in its presentation than it is Crimson Peak; it’s honestly more similar to Coppola’s Dracula than either of them. The film is barely done with its opening when it starts with a loud sequence of the monster attacking Walton’s ship on the ice. Flinging crew members about and walking against volleys of gunfire, he is a monstrosity by no other name. The Creature (Jacob Elordi) cries out in guttural screams, part animal and part man, as it calls for its creator to be returned to him. While visually impressive (and it remains visually impressive throughout, believe me), this appropriately bombastic hook foreshadows a problem with tone and tempo.

A Monster That Moves Too Fast

The pace overall is far too fast for its first half, even with its heavy two-and-a-half-hour runtime. It’s also a far cry from the brooding nature the story usually takes. A scene where Victor demonstrates rudimentary reanimation to his peers and a council of judges is rapid, where it should be agonizingly slow. There’s horror and an instability in Victor to be emphasized in that moment, but the grotesque sight is an oddly triumphant one instead. Most do not revile his experiments; in fact he’s taken quite seriously.

Many scenes like this create a tonal problem that makes Victor’s tale lean more toward melodrama than toward philosophical or emotional aspects; he is blatantly wild and free, in a way that is respected rather than pitied. There are opportunities to stop, breathe in the Victorian roses and the smell of death, to get really dour, but it’s neglected until the film’s second half.

Isaac’s and Goth’s performances are overwrought at points, feeling more like pantomimes of Byronic characters. I’m not entirely convinced it has more to do with them than with the script they’re given. Like Victor working with the parts of inmates and dead soldiers, even the best of actors with the best of on-screen chemistry are forced to make do. The dialogue has incredibly high highs (especially in its final moments), but when it has lows, how low they are; a character outright stating that “Victor is the real monster” adage to his face was an ocean floor piece of writing if there ever was one.

Isaac, Goth, and Elordi Bring Life to the Dead

Jacob Elordi’s work here, however, is blameless. Though Elordi’s physical performance as the creature will surely win praise, his time speaking is the true highlight. It’s almost certainly a definitive portrayal of the character; his voice for Victor’s creation is haunted with scorn and solitude, the same way his flesh is haunted by the marks of his creator’s handiwork. It agonizes me to see so little of the books’ most iconic lines used wholesale here, because they would be absolutely perfect coming from Elordi. Still, he has incredible chemistry with both Isaac and Goth, and for as brief as their time together is, he radiates pure force.

Frankenstein Is a Masterclass in Mise-En-Scène

Despite its pacing and tone issues, one can’t help but appreciate the truly masterful craftsmanship Del Toro has managed to pack into the screen. Every millimeter of the sets is carved to specification, filled with personality through to the shadows. Every piece of brick, hint of frost, stain of blood, and curve of the vine is painstakingly and surgically placed to create one of the most wonderful and spellbinding sets you’ve seen—and then it keeps presenting you with new environments like that, over, and over.

At the very least, Del Toro’s Frankenstein is a masterpiece of mise-en-scène down to the minutest of details, and that makes it endlessly rewatchable for aesthetic purposes. This isn’t even getting into the effervescent lighting, or how returning collaborator Kate Hawley has outdone herself again with the costuming. Guillermo Del Toro tackling the king of gothic horror stories, a story written by the mother of all science fiction, inevitably set a high bar for him to clear. And while it’s not a pitch perfect rendering of Mary Shelley’s slow moving and Shakespearean epistolary, it is still one of the best-looking movies you will see all year.

Perhaps for us, it’s at the cost of adapting the straightforward, dark story we know into something more operatic. It sings the tale like a soprano rather than reciting it like humble prose, and it doesn’t always sing well. But for Del Toro, the epic scale and voice of this adaptation is the wage expected for making the movie he’s always dreamed of. Even with its problems, it’s well worth it to see a visionary director at work on a story they love.

Look, I’ve always been more of a Munsters guy. That’s my meager defense for the only Addams Family project I have directly engaged with being the pinball machine. But I have now rectified this with a first-time watch of the 1991 gateway horror classic, directed by Barry Sonnenfeld.

For those who need a refresher, or are in the same boat as I was, here’s a quick plot synopsis. The Addams family exists. They’re weird. They delight in the macabre, to the dismay of the square society that surrounds them. Are they monsters? No, except maybe the Frankensteinian butler Lurch (Carel Struycken). Are they supernatural? No. Except maybe the disembodied hand, Thing (Christopher Hart). Are they witches? …Not really? Mother Morticia (Anjelica Huston) studied hexes in college, and matriarch Grandmama (Judith Malina) mixes bizarre ingredients in a cauldron. But it’s not like they’re casting spells or anything. The whole family is just kind of… doing their thing. Including encouraging their children, Wednesday (Christina Ricci) and Pugsley (Jimmy Workman), to experiment with sharp objects and casual manslaughter.

Amid their antics, there’s a plot quietly sputtering around. Lawyer Tully Alford (Dan Hedaya) is trying to steal the Addams’ fortune to repay loan shark Abigail Craven (Elizabeth Wilson). They collude on a scheme to disguise Abigail’s son Gordon (Christopher Lloyd) as Gomez Addams’ (Raul Julia) long-lost brother Fester. Gordon begins to love the Addams’ lifestyle and doubts his mission, delaying his betrayal as long as possible.

Is The Movie A Good Introduction to The Addams Family?

Even as a novice to the franchise, cultural osmosis has taught me who the Addams family is. Going in, I knew everyone’s names except for Grandmama (a character I had heretofore not even known existed). And I knew the overall vibes of Wednesday, Morticia, Lurch, Thing, and Cousin Itt (John Franklin). I imagine many people (who haven’t already watched Netflix’s über-popular Wednesday) would be in the same boat as me. However, notice that I haven’t listed any of the male characters with speaking roles.

There’s a reason for this. The men simply aren’t as interesting. Take Pugsley, for example. What is his deal? He’s kind of just a regular-looking, regular-acting kid whose macabre sensibility is a pale shadow of his inimitable sister’s. It doesn’t help that Workman is giving the only dud performance of the movie. (Not to blame Workman. Getting a good performance from a child actor requires strong chemistry between the actor and the director. This is something that Sonnenfeld and Ricci clearly had in spades, but you can’t win ‘em all.)

And Gomez Addams is a character who has always been somewhat vague to me. The Addams Family movie didn’t exactly clear things up. I imagine he’s supposed to be a bit of a “Latin lover” archetype? He’s Don Juan meets Don Quixote, and Raul Julia brings that to life with cartoonish aplomb. And to be fair, cartoonish is the name of the game here. The franchise started as a comic strip, after all, and the movie brings that to life very well. Every character is smashing their “thing” with a sledgehammer and brilliantly exaggerating their faces and movements. It’s just that Gomez doesn’t really click with the goth vibe of his family. Morticia and Wednesday are chilly and cadaverous. The hot-blooded energy of Julia’s Gomez stands out in sharp relief against them, rendering him more irritating than fun.

Regardless of the fact that Gomez’s character leans on questionable stereotypes and doesn’t quite land, you get him. And, give or take a Pugsley, the movie properly introduced me, the newbie, to the rest of Gomez’s immediate family.

However, as a first-time viewer, I didn’t get Uncle Fester at all. I imagine it requires a more thorough understanding of Fester as a character to fully grasp the whole imposter storyline. The movie plays it like there are huge differences between Gordon (as he understands himself) and Fester. However, not having met Fester, I was baffled by what these differences were supposed to be in the first place. Gordon is already an incredibly weird, cartoonish character before the Fester element even comes into play. Thus, the fact that the entire plot hangs on this balance is a huge mistake. Christopher Lloyd plays both characters admirably, at least. He harnesses the cartoon energy he had already displayed in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, to great effect.

Does The Addams Family Hold Up?

I did find that my biggest gripes with the movie were with how the Addams family functioned as characters. I assume this is endemic to the franchise, though I of course cannot be certain. Regardless of these quibbles, the movie is quite a lot of fun when taken on its own terms.

For one thing, the production design is exquisite. The Addams family lives in a gothic funhouse that is stuffed with detail yet not too fussily over-designed. This is another way that the movie successfully elicits the feeling of a comic strip come to life. Its imagery is clean and clear, but packed with wonder. From the rotating bookcase doorway to the dizzying labyrinth of the family cemetery, it’s any imaginative child’s dream haunted house. The stylized costumes and lighting also go a long way toward draping the whole movie in the perfect Halloween-y atmosphere.

The score by Marc Shaiman also perfectly evokes this vibe. It’s a bit “Danny Elfman with the edges sanded off,” but it does the job nicely. And it certainly does so much better than the needle drops on the soundtrack. These are without doubt the worst moments of the movie. The MC Hammer theme song that closes the movie, “Addams Groove,” is flop-sweaty and corny, for one thing. Those aspects lend to it being nostalgically remembered, so I ultimately don’t think I’d cut it. But the Kipper Kids song “Playmates,” which explodes onto the soundtrack during the slide scene, is maximally intrusive. It’s poorly mixed with the sound of the scene, rendering the goings-on much too chaotic. The biggest sin of “Addams Groove” is that it grounds the otherwise timeless movie a little too much in the 1990s. “Playmates,” on the other hand, is grotesquely juvenile.

That song feels intrusive because The Addams Family otherwise resolutely rides the line between fun kiddy fare and edgy dark comedy. Although the movie is rated PG-13, the dialogue between the amorous Morticia and Gomez alludes to downright NC-17 behavior. It lends a deliciously salacious edge to a movie that deftly balances tones like almost no horror-comedy before or after. Violence is blended with vaudevillian comedy in a way that somehow makes the former convivial and the latter downright naughty.

A lot of this tonal balancing comes down to the acting. While Lloyd and Julia are providing a solid cartoonish bedrock, the women of the cast are doing the heavy lifting. Frankly, Elizabeth Wilson is the single element that holds the Fester storyline together. Her hilariously broad performance makes the moments where the movie is reluctantly compelled to have a plot still feel enjoyable. Additionally, Abigail’s power over Gordon is what fuels the engine of the story. Without the simmering maternal menace that lurks behind Wilson’s words, that storyline would have flat-out failed.

Whenever the movie relaxes and simply focuses on the Addamses freaking out normies, Wednesday and Morticia are the effervescent lynchpins. Christina Ricci’s deadpan eeriness is superb and probably lands her among the Top 5 child performances of the 1990s. (Off the top of my head, I’d slot her just behind #1, Haley Joel Osment in The Sixth Sense.) But the majority of this film’s success lands squarely on Anjelica Huston’s shoulders. Her Morticia is imperious and unknowable. She has the eternal upper hand. She’s the cat with her paw on the mouse’s tail, daring it to run. She’s sinuous, sensual, maternal, and makes every minute movement of her hands or face feel like a whip cracking. She lingers lovingly over every morbid punchline, tossing them off casually in ways that make them feel ten times stronger.

I really can’t say enough about Huston. But I’ve already far exceeded my word count, so I’ll leave everybody with this. Whether it’s for the first time or a long overdue revisit, 1991’s The Addams Family is well worth a watch. This is true, even though I am led to understand that its 1993 sequel, Addams Family Values is superior. Keep an eye out for my review of that soon. Despite its narrative weaknesses, it’s well worth spending 99 minutes basking in The Addams Family‘s atmosphere and comic sensibilities.