Not so much a remake of The Bride of Frankenstein as a continuation of it, starting out in the scientist's laboratory in the midst of a thunderstorm, and asking the question: what if they hadn't all perished that night? (And what if the scientist's latest creation had looked like Jennifer Beals instead of Elsa Lanchester with her finger in an electrical socket?) The storyline splits up into parallel acculturation cases à la The Wild Child and Kaspar Hauser. Baron Frankenstein has it in mind to mold his new "ward" into the modern woman: "independent, free, as bold and as proud as a man." The traditional "monster," meanwhile, has hooked up with a midget who is on his way to Budapest to join the circus. The latter pair tend to dominate center-stage, which in a way is understandable. Clancy Brown as the disfigured, fat-lipped, doltish, but gentle giant and David Rappaport as the spirited midget are an engaging and touching couple, while pop singer Sting and Jennifer Beals are insipid and inept. Unhappily, the monster-midget relationship comes to an end well before the Pygmalion-Galatea. We never see anything of the Baron's instructional methods, so we are ill-prepared for his reversion to male chauvinism. And it would seem more appropriate, or at least more traditional, if the "bride" were the one to get to destroy the Baron, perhaps in some meaningfully feministic way, something a bit more Strindbergian, that is, than her merely irritating him by telling him he means Shelley when he says Keats. It does not seem appropriate to reduce her to Pearl White and to promote the "monster" to the U.S. Marines. Directed by Franc Roddam. (1985) — Duncan Shepherd