I, Frankenstein (2014)

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Hey everyone, welcome to another episode of Movie Mastery, the podcast where we watch the movies that you have commanded us to. It is our noble charge. We are nothing if not your humble servants in this, the podcast realm. We ask only that you gird our loins and give us your hair in a locket before each quest. Can you give us a fair trinket so that we may remember you upon our journeys? I ask a simple handkerchief. I'm John, that is Jeff. We are the ones who watch the movies, and this time around we watched I, Frankenstein? B.I. Frankenstein?

Yes. B.I. Frankenstein. I'm hungry for love. And at feeding time. This sucked. It was not good. I just wanted to end that pause somehow. I had to find the solution. Coming back into it, I was just like...

God, fucking iFrankenstein was bad. So this came out in 2014. That is so fucking weird, right? It's so late for something like this. This feels like a 2003 to 2009 movie. Yeah, I mean, the general idea of iFrankenstein is somebody watched Underworld and went, I could probably do that. There are two other monsters I could pick. Or just like Legion or something. It's basically a superhero movie, but it's from that era where all the superhero movies were about semi-religious people. They were all like religious shit, and they were always like trench coat guys.

It was just like, oh, you know, a good guy in a trench coat must fight the armies of hell or whatever. Because they hadn't quite, they were still in the era where superheroes weren't allowed to be in a movie unless they saw their original comic book costume and were like, hell no. So, but this is from Book of 2014. Guardians of the Galaxy came out this year. Yeah, it's, it was a weird choice. And now this did get.

pushed back. Like they had filmed this in 2012. It was supposed to come out early, like February 2013. And then it got pushed back to late 2013. And then it got pushed back to 2014. And it's probably because they knew that they had made I Frankenstein. Hey, I thank him for it. This movie was terrible, but there are certain line reads that I'm just glad that exist in the world. Not that they're good line reads. I'm just happy that they're out there floating around being real. Oh yeah. I mean, whenever you're like, oh, I'm going to listen to fucking Aaron Eckhart talk about the queen of the gargoyles. I'm like, God bless this movie. The best one is definitely Bill Nighy saying you've returned.

Frankenstein. God, you got to assume that they had to cut like within a half second because he just started laughing. I mean, here's the thing. He was in Underworld and they were like, hey, you want to do that again, but slightly shittier even than that. And he was like, my friend, you have no idea how much I want to do that. My sink having a problem in the kitchen wants me to do that. So, yes, this is a movie about.

Frankenstein fighting demons and also fighting gargoyles occasionally. Yeah, yeah, he mixes it up. He fights demons, he fights gargoyles. You know, he just fights and fights and fights. Yeah, I gotta say, as the non-spoiler review, just, God, just go watch Underworld. Like, I don't even like Underworld. I think Underworld is bad. And I'm like, I would rather go watch Underworld than this.

Yeah, I already kind of put my statement down for the era of movie that this is, which is the, you know, oh, we're superheroes, but we're only wearing black trench coats. And instead of supervillains, our enemy is God. It's just that era of filmmaking. But this one feels like it was sitting on a shelf since like 2008. It's the weirdest thing to exist. One of the wildest things to me is that initially, obviously, I assume before they watched this movie and then put it out, there were sequels planned that were going to be in the Underworld universe. And like Frankenstein meets Selene at some point. They were going to connect to them. I could have sworn this was just another one of those attempts to build a dark universe. Yeah, no, apparently.

There was like, oh yeah, we're going to try and have this be hypothetically in the Underworld series. We're going to get Kate Beckinsale. We're going to do the whole thing. And none of it was used because this is I Frankenstein. Kate Beckinsale and Aaron Eckhart. That would be too hot for the movies. That's the hottest two people. I would love them both to reminisce about like, oh yeah, I had to kill this super dangerous old guy. I want them to not believe each other. I mean, I know what you're getting at. You're getting at the Bill Nighy. That they were both Bill Nighy. Yes, I get it. But I want them to just not believe each other. He has to be like, wait, you say you're...

You were trapped and embroiled in the never-ending conflict between vampires and werewolves. That sounds made up. That's a myth made up to scare children. Now, gargoyles are ordained by God. Now, the gargoyles sent by St. Michael to take out the 666 demons that roam the earth. Now, that's just fact. Yeah, that's just the secret war all around us. That's truth. Yeah, I would have sworn if you'd asked me that this was like an attempt similar to Dracula Untold or whatever it was called to boot up a MonsterVerse franchise. We're like, I, Frankenstein, and the next one was going to be about a wolfman. Oh yeah, they were just like, ooh, it's Dracula, but now he has to fight like Pixies versus... Exactly. It would just be a universe of smash-ups.

where every one of them would be like, well, okay, what's going on with the Wolfman? Well, unfortunately, he's become, against his own will, embroiled in the conflict between Creatures of the Black Lagoon and 50-style Pots and Pans boop robots. They hate each other. These robots and Black Lagoon guys cannot stand each other. We are the Creatures of the Black Lagoon. We were ordained by the Archangel Gabriel. Patron saint of fish monsters. You don't know. They're the patron saints of so many goddamn things. Prove they're not.

So yeah, Bill Nike in both series. Kevin Grevio also. He's the big bodyguard in both of them. Yeah, he's recognizable. He's that guy where you're like, wait, is that Tommy Tiny Lister? No, hold on. Is that Michael Clark Duncan? No, it's Kevin Grevio. Yeah, all right. You know what? We're going to play a little music. We are going to come back. We are going to do a full in-depth spoilery review of exactly how and why Frankenstein got embroiled in a war between demons and gargoyles when we return for I, Frankenstein.

We're back. It's time to talk about I, Frankenstein. I will give this movie some credit. Let's start off. Let's make this a compliment sandwich. Let's start off with one compliment, an hour of making fun of it, and we'll end with a compliment. That maker song in the credits is fine.

No, it's awful. No, I'm just kidding. I thought it was a Remy Zero song. But no, what I was going to say is this movie hits the ground fucking running. It's got a dumb convoluted concept for a movie, but it just gets that whole shit out in the first like three minutes. Oh, yeah. I mean, the movie just starts with like, hey, everyone, my name's Frankenstein. I was made in 1750. And then I'm that guy. I killed my maker's bride. And then he followed me into the north. And that's where the story normally would end. But then he died in the cold. And that's our cold open. And I brought him back to wherever we're from. Don't worry about it. To bury him.

And then I got attacked by demons, and then the demons get attacked by gargoyles, and then I got attacked by gargoyles. And then it turned out I was kind of on the gargoyle side, and then for 200 years that was fine. And now I'm hunting demons, and the gargoyles don't want me to. Okay, let's do this. All right, thanks for listening, everyone. That's been the whole spoiler review. I mean, that's where the movie starts, but I really appreciate them being like, no, fuck it. We got a lot of ground to cover, folks, so strap in. We are not wasting time. I also appreciate that it was not a slow-scrolling text crawl going up. You know, in 1750, Victor Frankenstein created a monster. Oh, I am that monster. And then you have James Earl Jones sounding like Kevin Grevio reading it.

It's, I mean, we start with, like I said, we've got the whole recounting of what happened in fucking Frankenstein. And then he takes Victor back to city town that Victor is from. Yeah, he's from East France Angeles, New York. The whole thing takes place in the city that has a giant crazy version of like Notre Dame in it. Oh yeah. But it's not France. No, he's definitely from the city of lights, London. You're like, wait, what? What's going on here? The movie is filmed in Melbourne. I know. The whole thing is just like, we are in nondescript.

probably European city. Don't ask questions. It's kind of like when you watch horror movies from around this era and they always film them in fucking Prague because it's cheap. And then they pretend that they're in like sunny Los Angeles, a college town. And it's all these like imposing 16th century golf buildings. You're like, there's nothing like that there. But yeah, this, this movie's location is super nebulous. It is a straight up. Don't worry about it. Oh yeah. They should have worked it into that rapid fire intro. Really? Don't ask where this is taking place. It doesn't matter. But instead they're just like, it doesn't matter so much that we don't even comment on the fact that no one knows where this is. Also that Frankenstein apparently just stayed there for 200 years. Cause we end up, we leave him in this.

He wanders the earth, but then he gets right back there. We have an entire giant scene here. He has to fight demons. He is going to bury Victor and then grabs his journal. Yes. Because Victor, of course, has all of his how I did it, if I did it journal. Yeah. He's got Victor Frankenstein's journal by Mary Shelley. Yeah. I do like at least later in this when they talk about Frankenstein. I know, I know. That it's not like, ah, yes, Frankenstein. You know the book by Mary Shelley. They're like, oh no, Frankenstein is literally just...

Someone might have heard of this weird doctor. No, he's like a matter of historical record now, but they do this. There's a scene where like Bill Nighy is talking to two like human scientists and he's like, what do you know of Frankenstein? And they're like, oh, he's made up a myth to scare children. You're like, oh my God, we're doing, they did the jump. They're like, he's a historical character, but no one believes in him. Well, I mean, everyone's like, oh, there's the story that he reanimated dead, but that's just horseshit because no one's ever proven it. I just love that it's a myth to scare children because imagine trying to scare a child with that myth in 2014. Okay, so in 1750, a guy reanimated a body and the body didn't like it. And then the guy died.

And also, he was definitely the bad guy of the story, but he's been dead for 270 years. Who is the monster and who is the man? Anyway, so when he is burying Frankenstein, because for some reason he travels into the frozen north, Frankenstein chases him, Victor Frankenstein chases him, dies of the cold, and then he carries Victor's body all the way from wherever the fuck they were to wherever Victor's family home was, which means this dude has been carrying a corpse around for weeks at this point. From north, don't worry about it, to central, don't worry about it. And goes to bury him, takes the journal, but then some demons show up and are like, for some reason we know...

What you are, and we want you for our dude, Niberius. The evil Prince Niberius has need of you. Prince Niberius wants you. Vampires are bullshit. Prince Niberius. However...

Prince Niberius. He got to pick his own name and thought it would sound cool. So he gets attacked by demons and they're indestructible unless you happen to have a specific shape carved into your weapon or your weapon is that shape, in which case you can blow them back to hell. And he grabs like a random Graves marker does Frankenstein and manages to stab one of the demons with it. And lo and behold, it's the right shape. Yeah, because it's a cross. It's a triple cross, which I was expecting to be part of the story that the cross has two extra arm bars on it. And I kept hoping for someone to point out that that makes it a triple cross and then you can't trust anybody. But no, he grabs this triple cross, stabs a vampire. This wakes up a gargoyle in that area. Well, every time.

A demon dies, and Angel gets its wings. A demon is, in the parlance of this movie, Descended. Oh, that's great, by the way. Yeah. Every time we get some Descendants, then we get a musical number about how they're bad to the bone. They're rotten to the core. Core. Rotten to the core. I thought you were going to do a real Descendants song. Well, rotten to the core is. That's the first one. From the film Descendants.

So they, when they die, erupt into flame. A fire snake comes out of them and goes to hell. Like, it's basically a fireball spins around, goes up, and then it goes an indeterminate amount of ways up into the air and then slam dunks itself into the ground. Yes, and if you're a more important demon, you get more fire snakes. Yeah, the more powerful you are, the more ridiculous your descended display is. But also, in a weird thing...

When you get descended as a demon, when your fireball hits the ground, it kind of has an impact. Instead of you just like, oh, I go through the ground and I'm going to hell, it slam jams into it. And again, the more powerful the demon, the harder it slam jams into whatever is beneath it, which will be important later on. Yeah. So it turns out that, I guess a gargoyle notices one of these fire trails. Oh yeah, because a giant fucking eruption happens, which when they're like, there's a secret war between gargoyles and demons. And I'm like, bullshit there is. Every time one of you dies, there is a...

fucking Pink Floyd light show. Fuck you, there is. So a couple gargoyles fly over to investigate what on earth could have possibly killed a demon beyond another gargoyle. And they find several demons, because he only managed to get the one, still harassing Frankenstein. So they help. They rescue him from Frankenstein. But just as they finish, the demons have knocked Frankenstein unconscious. So they just pick him up and drag him back to their gargoyle super church. Yeah, there is just an absolute mega cathedral in the middle of city town Europe. It's buttresses have buttresses that also have buttresses. The thing is like 90% flying buttresses. It looks ridiculous.

This chapel thick. It is all buttress. You know what I'm saying? You could bounce a quarter off that buttress. But no, it looks like it's 90% made of constructs. It's so many spires. It is the type of thing where someone's like, hey, I want you to make me a gothic cathedral. And they just went ham with the generator. They're like, oh, I can do that. I know what that looks like. And they're like, so I'm pretty sure a gothic cathedral is 97% spikes. And here we go. There shouldn't be any rooms. It should only be a series of interlocking spires and buttresses that support those spires and support the other buttresses. And then for the main building.

All stained glass, the whole thing. Yes, 100% stained glass surrounded by buttresses. Also, no one's ever in there. It's the biggest building in town, whatever town this is, and the only people who are ever in there are secret gargoyle angels. Yeah, it's the headquarters of the gargoyles, and everyone thinks them to be mere statuary, but by night they fight Xanatos. Dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, da, da, da, da. Nope, sadly. None of the gargoyles have cool names. None of them named after the borders of New York or whatever. Yeah, there's no gargoyle here named Boston.

I don't even think the actual gargoyles are named after Boros. They're named, like, Lexington and stuff. Yeah, they're named, like, Lexington, Kentucky. They're just named after, like, neighborhoods of New York, right? Yeah, well, you got- Or Hudson is a river, so. Yeah, Bronx, Hudson, Lexington. Yeah, so, and that's just the ones who did that. You know, the neighborhood of Goliath. As opposed to Goliath and Demona or whatever, who were like, nah, screw it, we have our own cool names. I wish they'd stuck to that. I wish they'd been like, oh, you know, I've had a name since I was, you know, born way, way back several hundred years ago, but for now, I'll be Times Square. I want to see some gargoyle named, like, you know, Hell's Kitchen or Stuyvesant, all these other neighborhoods of New York you never hear anyone mention.

I'm Staten Island. Get out. I'm Jefferson Island. You know that one that you can get off the bridge on and it's just like a couple weird houses? What's it doing there? That's what it's there for. You get an achievement if you can get there as Spider-Man in any of the games. So yes, they take the monster Frankenstein and there is now a split for our gargoyles who are like, all right.

Some of us want to destroy it because Niberius wants him, so if the Demon Prince wants him, we should just destroy him so that he doesn't get his hands on him. Just play, whatever that. Good job, Gideon. Hi, Courtney. For the future Captain Boomerang hanging around in this. Hell yeah. Gideon, the main super badass gargoyle, is like, let's just murder this dude. Yeah, he's the captain of the gargoyle defense guard. He's the number one line of defense for the queen of the gargoyles, Leonor, as played by Miranda Otto. Indeed. It's a cavalcade of stars. And the opposite side of that, we've got the two people who captured him.

Kiria and Ophir, who are just lowly regular gargoyles. But they're the ones who are like, we're kind of friendly and we're cool and we don't want to just murder this guy. This does not do a very good job of establishing relationships because it's a shitty movie. Yes. But this is the closest we get to like, oh, he kind of has some people in the order that like it. He's at least aware. They're at least aware of him and he can like tolerate them. But yeah, he's like tied to a chair. And so Gideon's like, we should destroy him. Or it. We should destroy it. And Leonor gives him a good looking up and down and she's like, him, not it. I really wanted him to correct her at that point. Be like, you know, I really should have a say about my pronouns. I'm more of a they them. Thanks. Thanks. Yeah. I'm using neo pronouns because I'm not human.

Yeah, it's fine. I'm just going to do whatever I want because I'm actually fully unique to me. But yeah, his pronouns are a big matter of contention in this movie. It comes up a lot. Yeah. There are a lot of people that are like, oh, we just want to refer to him as the creature or the monster. It's an it. Yeah. And the one thing we get is Leonore looks into his eyes and is like, no, it's a he. And I'm going to call him Adam. That's your name now. I've given you your pronouns and your name. How do you like that? Huh?

And he's fine with it. He goes by Adam. Later on in the film, he will violently defend the fact that his name is Adam, even though he doesn't appear to like where it came from. Yeah, considering no one called him that except for one time, once a gargoyle was like, hey, you look like an Adam to me. And he was like, sure, whatever. Okay, that's great. Are you calling me that because I'm the first of my kind and you're a Bible thing? Are you very clever? Do you feel very clever right now? Are you going to give yourself a cookie for that one? Feels a little hacky, honestly. Why don't you call me Neo, huh?

Yeah, why don't you just call me like first or something? Let's just do that. But no, so she calls him Adam. And then she says that by looking in his eyes, I guess her and Nibiria share a unique power among that rank of demons and angel gargoyles, which is that they can look in your eyes and determine if you have a soul or not. So one of the biggest points of this movie is that Frankenstein being a created being, as opposed to an ordained by God being, has no soul. Indeed. Because he is just reanimated dead flesh.

when we find out at some point in the movie that the only bodies that don't have souls are dead bodies. As soon as you die, your soul leaves. So because this is just a reanimated dead body, no soul re-entered it. But Leonora looks into his eyes and is like, oh, you have the potential for a soul. That will come up later. Yes. Although I'm still like, okay, how do you define a soul in context? This guy can walk around and he has wants and needs and a morality to him. Like, which part of the soul is, I guess, just the God part? Yeah, just the Christianity bit. The bit that glows. Yeah. The 21 grams part. Yeah. So, um...

So they take him, again, Gideon just wants to kill him, but the other angels are like, no, we're not. And Leonore's like, take him to the armory and give him the gear to defend himself so that he may go in the world and find himself. And then we get a bit where he walks into the armory and the angels are like, oh, all of our weapons are stamped with this symbol of our order, the triple cross. Well, yeah, because the only way to kill a demon is to kill him with a holy symbol. So like you can kill him with a cross or you can kill him with the symbol of our order, which is just someone tried to count to five and missed one. Because it's just three marks with a slash through it. Yes, but it really looks like a cross with two shorter arms underneath.

Oh, I always looked at it as, oh, this is someone fucked up counting to five. Oh, you did the cross too early. You're supposed to go one, two, three, four cross. I get where you're coming from. I just see that slash that crosses them all out as more of a diagonal when I do them, where this one bisects perpendicular. But anyway.

So they're making fun of him because they're like, you can take any weapons you want from our armory. No, not those ones, stupid. Because he picks like two big sticks and they're like, those are too heavy and slow and stupid and unwieldy. And the whole time I wanted to be like, why did you make them? Yeah. Why are they here if you all hate them and you think they suck? These are dumb weapons for idiots and we just have them here as a test. Whenever someone comes in to pick a weapon, if they pick this, we know they're a stupid asshole. Yeah. Yeah, that's right. We're the good guys. But then he does his swinging both sticks around really fast move. So, you know, get used to that. And they're like, wow, he's so strong. He can swing those two sticks around. I guess that's the right weapon for you, buddy.

Beyond this scene where he gets made fun of for picking them, this is his signature weapon and it feels silly because there's no connection between him and them beyond that someone told him they were dumb. Yeah. It's especially goofy to me to be like, all right, his now signature weapons are two metal sticks. I'm like, that's the least impressive thing you could give someone. Like, visually, I'm not going to go like, ooh, yeah, you know what I want is the cool weapon that this guy has. I really associate him with the stick. Two lead pipes.

How cool. Especially given that the end of this movie is him not using those anymore. Yeah, he loses them. You know, I get where they're coming from. Like Frankenstein or Adam or the creature or whatever is not a character that has a signature weapon. You never think of him that way. No, but with this, when they were like, ooh, these are big, heavy, dumb metal things. You should maybe pick a better weapon. He's like, no, these are crude blood instruments just like I am a crude blood instrument. And I'm like, okay, I get what you're going for.

He's also named Adam. Everyone should be very proud of themselves. But the big thing for me is he takes these two giant fucking metal sticks and puts them on one side of his trench coat. And I'm like, boy, you are doing a disservice to yourself. You're going to be all lopsided now walking around. And all clanky. That coat is going to be hanging off to the side. It's going to suck. You're going to hear those things bonking into each other. Put one on either side of your trench coat, man. Also, they just disappear when he doesn't have them out. Oh, for sure. Given that they're like three and a half foot long magician wands made of steel. They got to be all heavy and clanky. But instead, he'll just like...

run around and you'll see his fucking like trench coat flap. You're like, that ain't flapping. There's two giant fuck off metal sticks in there. Yeah. So then he just, they're like, oh, you should stay with us and help us fight against it. He just walks out on them. Oh yeah. We do get the, the one thing is the setup for this that should have been more leaned into in my opinion, which is, uh, the gargoyles were appointed by, uh, the archangel Michael. Yes. To fight demons because when Lucifer fell, 666 demons were let loose on earth. Yes. And.

No more have ever come in. So the fight between the gargoyles and the demons is there were the 666 that came from the initial fall, and then there are however many the fucking Michael made. Yeah, and amusingly, there's just like no... There's no reinforcements for either side. Which is weird, because you think Michael should still be a going concern, right? I've been Bible in a while. He didn't die halfway through or anything. No, Lucifer, you're like, oh, you're stuck in hell. And the whole point of this is like, oh, we're trying to find ways to get creatures to sneak out of hell. We want to get them back out.

But with this, I'm like, okay, so an archangel just made a bunch of gargoyles. And you'd think he was like, oh, there's 666 demons. I don't know. Maybe I'll make like 10,000 gargoyles then. But instead, we do not know how many he initially made. We just know that he made them. And so he never makes more. And there is a line halfway through the movie when Leonor gets kidnapped. And Gideon's like, we need her back. Without her, there's no hope of reinforcements ever. And we'll just become a dwindling order. And I'm like, yeah, she's the only one who has a line to Michael. Which she never uses. I mean, she does. She's praying to him when she gets got.

Yeah, it didn't help, did it? No. I mean, and the thing is, in that scene, she is doing a traditional Catholic prayer to St. Michael. Very nice. Is St. Michael the same thing as the Archangel Michael? Yes. Okay. St. Angel Michael. I didn't know that angels could be saints. I thought the whole point of saints is that they had to die, and angels don't, so I thought that they might be disqualified. I mean, the point isn't that they have to die. You can get, you know, brought up, transubstantiated. Well, I guess I'm thinking more of the modern version of canonization. The rules for canonization. Yeah, like St. Teresa is a saint now because they had to wait for her to die, and then have people come forward and say, she did the following miracles. Yeah.

So there's rules for how you get in now, but I think it was all loosey-goosey back in the ancient days. Oh, before you just go like, hey, I think this person is probably the saint because I saw him give butter and it had honey. Yeah. And I didn't see any bees. That's a miracle! This lady had a headache for like a year and a half. She might be a saint, I think. I'm pretty sure she's all fucked up on saint juice. A lot of saints back then were just like, I was upside down in a barrel of shit or something. Can I be a saint? And they're like, yeah, that sounds awful, dude. Dude, that sucks. Welcome to Saint Hunt. You're not the patient saint of shit. You're like, oh, goddammit, that sucks. Why would I be that? Because you were upside down in shit.

Yeah, that means I should graduate from it. I want to be the patron saint of not shit because I made it out. It's a story about how I escaped my... Nope, that's it. Now you're the patron saint of being upside down and shit.

Little kids who love about half of you. The shit part. So Frankenstein wanders the earth for 200 years to observe mankind but live outside of it because it's important, and for the purposes of this story, it's important that he does not believe he is human. Yes. Well, the other important thing here is we told you how to descend a demon. Yes. Which is you have to use a holy symbol essentially to murder them or anything that has that symbol carved into it. So if you were just like, could I carve it into a gun and would the bullets kill them or would I have to carve it into the bullets themselves? Who knows? That never comes up because everyone uses melee weapons, but...

the only way to kill a gargoyle is they can only be killed by something without a soul. Yes. Demons have no soul. And of course, so does Adam. Yeah. So he's, he's killing them right up to the end. So he must get his soul real late in the game here. Yeah. He gets his soul in a real, you know, like last minute. Blinking and miss it. The winter soldier shows up and he's like, Hey, I brought you your soul. Okay. I'll see you with the sequel.

But yeah, he fucks off because they want him to fight for them. They're like, oh, dude, you're rad. You can murder demons even when you didn't know how to murder demons. You're super cool. We'd like to keep an eye on you as well because Niberius wants you. And because he wants you, he may want you to order this journal. We're going to keep the journal and put it in our big trove. They don't even let him know it exists or they have it. Ophir pulled it off Victor's corpse while Adam was unconscious. Yeah. So he doesn't even know the journal. He thought it was buried and long gone. So he fucks off for 200 some odd years and is just like, ah, I will go into the frozen north like I had originally planned to. And I thought maybe...

I could find peace, but it turns out I'm immortal, and also demons kept looking for me. Yeah, so we get a shot of him being hunted by demons in the woods, and he attacks them, and then we watch those fire snakes pop up out of the woods all huge. And then he's like, you know what, fuck this. I'm going to solve the problem by taking out this Niberius guy myself. And so the first time we see him in the modern day, we get a montage of him walking with his grimy long hair, cutting to grimy short hair. So you know he's modern. He's gotten a grimy haircut. He got a 2014 haircut.

Then he's attacking demons and being bothered by cops and killing demons, which is pissing off the gargoyles in their mega cathedral, which is like six blocks away. So he apparently just came home. Yeah. Well, I mean, I think this is the only city that exists because it's the only one we ever see. I mean, Niberius is here, so maybe he managed to track him down before this and that's why he's in town. It's weird, though, that Niberius would be like, oh, there's one cathedral where, like, the last couple dozen gargoyles that exist live. Maybe I shouldn't have my home base of operations be, like, three blocks away. It's all very convenient, because Niberius even mentions midway through the proceedings that, like, you think this is my only facility? I have hundreds of identical facilities all around the world doing the exact same shit. I have spent...

millennia putting my plans in motion. I'm not so dumb as to keep my entire operation right here. You know, next door to the Gargoyles, where I am right now. Like, why did you have this one at all? Yeah. Like, if you're going to build so many of these, maybe. Go live in one of those. Maybe fuck off and go to, you know, I don't know, any place else. But instead he is in Citiesville, Europe. This is big.

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And when he returns, does Frankenstein, he, you know, kills a couple demons and one of the demons kills a cop who shows up when this fight is happening between some of them. And this will be one of three regular humans in this movie. Yeah, there really are only three beyond just like some extras on subways. But in terms of people who get lines, there are three humans. Yeah, we get...

One shot right before this happens where he walks into like a nightclub looking for demons. Yeah. And we get some humans in there, probably, I assume. I guess technically Victor Frankenstein has a couple of lines in a flashback and he's a human. I guess. So that's one. So there's a few humans. I'm going to say in Citiesville Europe, there are only three humans. In Citiesville Europe, there are only three things to do.

These three humans. Digital styles. But he kills some demons and just gets immediately waylaid by gargoyles again, because gargoyles are slow, lumbering, terrible fighters who seem to suck, unless they're off screen, at which point their feet will just randomly appear from the top like a boom mic and just snatch you and carry you wherever they want. I mean, the thing is, they're amazing fighters, and it is amazing to me that there are still any amount of demons left, given the fact that when we get the scene where, like, demons en masse attack the cathedral, they are just... straight murdering dozens of them. I'm like, are there any left of you? Well, yeah, I don't know what's going on exactly with the power disparity, but there must be a lot less gargoyles than demons. Yeah. But yeah, this time they pick him up and this is Gideon that gets him and Gideon flings him into the tower of their big church order. He's like, Gideon, what are you doing? Come on, man, knock this off because he still remembers all of them. We don't know, but I'm guessing he probably had a couple of run-ins with the gargoyles over the previous two centuries. I assume not. But yeah, this time Gideon's like, we're just going to fix what we should have done years ago. This is a secret shadow war, you dumb asshole. You can't kill demons in town.

Because then people see the fire snakes, which they will immediately forget about and not give a fuck about. I mean, the big thing is you caused a human to die. You didn't kill him, but you need to be careful because a demon killed a human. And they're very pissed off about that for some reason. Yeah, I guess because that's their charge is to stop the demons. You think they wouldn't give a shit. Like their whole goal isn't like protect the humans. It's get rid of these fucking demons. Exactly. And for some reason, the fact that a cop died and it was not his fault. It was like, oh, I was trying to fight demons and a demon killed a cop that showed up. And he's like, that's on you. I'm like, how?

How is that on him? But yeah, for a second, like you can see Frankenstein get like sad about it for a second. He's like, all right, fine. Yeah, that's on me. That's that's probably on me. But who gives a shit? There is a whole nest of demons in town. They have to be killing humans at a pretty advanced rate over there. Oh, I mean, the other problem is we don't really know what outside of Niberius's plan, which, you know, I guess spoilers his plan is to.

figure out what Frankenstein did, Victor Frankenstein, and make a bunch of reanimated corpses so he can shove demon souls into there. Because demons can only possess bodies without souls, which normally doesn't matter because they would possess a corpse and the corpse would just sit there. Yes. Yeah. So he's got this long-term goal that he knows that Frankenstein existed or exists. And he's like, well, Frankenstein should be a perfect vessel for a soul. I can probably have a nice soul possess him. But also the method by which he was made, I could probably mass produce it and just fill a whole army of demons and finally win the war and take over the world and do whatever it is I'm planning to do. So that's him. But in the absence of...

either the journal or Frankenstein himself. He's got a couple of human scientists who think he's a human, an industrial billionaire named Charles Wessex. Aw, what's sex with your mom last night? So he, he's, I'm surprised you didn't pick a more demon-y leaning name. You know, you really want, when you've got that kind of thing. Ah, yes, I'm Mr. Alexander Crowley. You may call me Professor Cain Beelzebub. I'm Dr. Lord of Flies.

Please. Old Scratch was my father. You may call me Young Scratch. That's my SoundCloud. Yo, what up? Young Scratch here and I'm here to say. So he's got them attempting to reanimate rats because, you know, we're still trying to figure out the whole like reanimation process. Get a dead body up. It doesn't matter about the soul. And they have invented a hilarious lightning tunnel in which to put their rats. Yeah. They got a big, weird, dumb ring light that you would normally have for shooting movies. And they put a rat in between it and are like, ooh, let's.

shove some electricity into this rat and it works. It does keep the pace of the movie, which I appreciate because Dr. Wade, who's our female lead in the movie, Yvonne Staroyski, he's like, all right, Dr. Wade, I hope you have something good for me. And she's like, since the beginning of time, man has wished for it. He's like, no, don't waste my time. I don't need you to do the speech every time. Just turn the fucking machine on. But yeah, it works a little bit. They're able to, it looks like it's going to fail, but they do in fact manage to give a rat a heartbeat, a dead rat a heartbeat. Yep. And he's like, well, now when can we begin human trials? And this is where, my favorite thing in this movie, which is the, this is one of those movies.

one of those movies where I'm perfectly willing to be like yeah sure the Archangel Michael empowered a bunch of gargoyles to be sexy humans unless they're flying in which case they're ugly stone monsters and they have to fight demons and no angels help and it's just this and also Frankenstein's here I'm fine with all that all of that fine but the moment he's like when will we begin human trials and she's like you have to understand we're the most complicated beings that have ever existed in the universe the animation for a human is way more complicated than for a rat he's like I don't know that you necessarily are correct that humans are the most complex animal there is. I assume they are quite complex, but I feel like complexity isn't derived by intelligence necessarily. So that begins the science babble in this movie instantly pissing me off every time either one of these two human scientists talk. Yeah. If they had just left it at, ah, yes, Victor Frankenstein used ancient alchemy to resurrect a body, you'd be like, okay.

One more thing to put on the pile of dumb bullshit, fine. But instead, they specify what he did, and baby, it's dumb as fuck. They try to do real science. Like, there's a point where they actually manage to get their hands on Frankenstein's journal, and they're like, he used electric eels, which is a fun reference to some of the other Frankenstein films that have existed over time. Yes. As opposed to the lightning table. We're using electric eels here. But then the guy's, like, doing simple math about electric eels. Electric eels, those can deliver routine shocks of 500 volts. And he used three of them. That's 1,500 volts. And I'm like...

Okay, number one, unless you've got them in a particular stack arrangement, that won't work. Electricity is weird. It's not just math. You can't just have three of them going and then be like, ah, this is additive electricity. And then they need to shock for 10 seconds. And I'm like, that's not how eels work. The one thing he got right was when he immediately was like, you know, they're not actually eels. They're kind of fish. And I was like, all right, well, that's correct. They're nice fish. It's weird to me that it very much felt like someone Googled electric eel, found one fact. That was it. They got two. They got two. Because at the time in 2014, 500 to 600 volts was thought to be the biggest wattage or voltage that an electric eel could put out. So they had that right as well. There you go.

We now know they can get up to 860, depending on the subspecies. But then he's just like, he's like, that's 500, that's 1500 volts delivered directly to a, and he's translating it into amperage as well, where he's like, joules, joules. Yeah, 15,000 volts. That's 15,000 joules. And I'm like, yeah, only if it's at the rate of one kuolum, or kuolum. I've never known to pronounce that word, but it's not. Eels don't work like that. I don't know if you know this. Eels, they're kind of animals. They're alive. They do a whole bunch of other different stuff. It's just so, it took me out of the movie so bad. When I was just sitting there like, can't this just be about Frankensteins and gargoyles?

But the big thing to me is that that was the big reveal is like, oh, we used eels and a lot of electricity. And that was it. That's all we were missing. We just need to crank the voltage because they get the rat alive with like 200 joules of energy or something. And they're like, wait.

Wait, he just used a lot more? That's all it was? He just used a shitload of energy? Just a shitload more energy? Well, that's a breakthrough. Yeah, I'm like, oh man, you have this entire thick-ass journal where he goes through how he got all these bodies and stitched them together in the way he did it, and all that matters is, oh, we should have turned the knob. That's it. Although, I gotta say, that scene, because that happens later, all the eel shit, but in this scene where he's like, when can we move to human trials? And they're like, well, we can't. It's really complicated to move to a human. And he's like, what if I brought you the corpse of Frankenstein? And they're like, that is... Well, Victor Frankenstein wouldn't matter. I don't care if I would view his corpse. I could bring you his spawn, the creature he created. That's a... What? It's so weird. It's like...

It's like if you were working with people whose job is like electroplating things with gold. You're like, what if I brought you a real leprechaun or rumple skin? Well, only if insofar as there was a historic probability that a leprechaun existed. Well, they're a myth made up to scare children. But their reaction to him being like, what if I brought you the creature that Victor Frankenstein created? And they're like, obviously that would be very helpful. Yeah, that'd be great. Except I do at least like that our Dr. Wade, our main lady love interest scientist is like, yeah, but that was like 200 something years ago. I'm sure whatever that creature is, is just bones. And he's like, maybe not. And then her scientist friend, Marcus or whatever his name is, is just like, well, think of this. If it took 15,000 volts to awaken him. Oh, if that was his birth. What would it take to kill him? I don't know, a bucket of water? He sounds kind of electric-y.

For some reason, the gargoyles in this are just the dumbest motherfuckers possible, because every time they deal with fucking Adam... They just are like, oh, I fucking hate you. I'm like, dude, either murder him or don't. But all you're doing is being an asshole to a guy that you know can kill you. Yeah. So they've got him chained down to a chair and Leonore comes in and she's like, I thought I saw this as a potential for a soul in you. Now I see only a creature. And then she like stomps off. Meanwhile, we get Bill Nye's Niberius consulting with what I think is Miranda Otto's real life brother. This dude playing the Archangel Zuriel. Archdemon, I guess. Lieutenant in the Demon Army. Demon General. Zuriel, who's played by a guy named Socrates Otto.

I think you mean Socrates. I'm pretty sure it's just Socrates. Socrates? It doesn't end with an E. It's an I-S at the end. No, it's still Socrates. So, but yeah, Socrates Otto, who's like, I have a plan for how we can do this. Well, what's the plan? We're just gonna send fucking 50 million demons over there. Give me all the demons you can. Yeah. And their whole deal is he's like, oh, give me these. And Niberius is like, you know, they'll defend the creature like he's one of their own. I'm like, no, they don't give a fuck about him. They'll leave him chained to a chair. But he's like, yes, I'm planning on that because the entire plan is sacrifice.

From what I could tell most, like at least 100 demons. And, you know, they kill off like 16, they actually say. 16 gargoyles. 16 gargoyles. And I'm like, all right, God, this fight really does make me go, how? How have you been losing this? There's only 666 of them. And when they attack you with like hundreds of them, you lost 16. Yeah. Jesus. But it's just hilarious that we have a scene where Niberius is talking to Zuriel and he's like, you are my most trusted lieutenant. You are my number one guy. I would not give anyone else all of my demon army to just throw randomly at a problem were it not you. Ugh.

Because my plan is I'm going to attack their base, but they're all there. They'll kill you. Yes, but I'm counting on that. You see, I'm going to send waves and waves of guys. Gargoyles have a preset murder limit. War were declared. No, his whole plan is, all right, I'm going to go in and they're going to think we're going after Adam because obviously that's what we've been trying to go after. So instead, we're going to make it seem like we're doing that and then we'll retreat. And when they go to fight us as we are running away, we'll have a sleeper agent or two jump in and go get Leonor, who for some reason I will know won't join the battle or be protected. Yeah, or...

defend herself in any way, even though she is also a badass gargoyle warrior, probably. Yeah, I mean, we see her in gargoyle form at the end of the movie and you're like, alright, you definitely are a gargoyle, you can do shit. Yeah, but when they capture her, she doesn't even try. The closest we get in the early run before she goes full gargoyle towards the end is there's a part where she's yelling at Adam and she briefly reverts her face to gargoyle face. Yeah, she does, you know, the standard monster movie thing where yelling makes your face get ugly. Yes, which, you know, it's funny you're looking at these guys because instead of getting big mouth and fangs and all that like they usually do in monster movies.

they turn into ugly stone statues, and she's no exception. The only difference with her is that she's whiter than the rest of them. The only difference is she got titty. Yeah, she also has some vampire titties with sculpted stone nips. God bless. Yeah. Hey, Michael, you're a pervert.

Anyone listening to this name, Michael, you're a pervert. It's just amusing because they didn't do that with Kyria or whatever it was, the other... Yeah, the one who was hanging out with Ophir, Keziah. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, the other female, Dargwell, who dies during this scene, by the way, during the massive attack of demons. Yeah, because Ophir and Keziah, the two that are actually friendly, hang back to protect Adam, and, you know, he very rightly is like, you should let me out and help, like, give me a weapon so I can fight for my life, at least. Even if you don't want that, at least you should have the moral, like, thoughts to let me defend myself from this. Oh, yeah. And I do at least, I'm going to give the movie a little bit here. The motivation for Adam...

and him being super pissed off when he's like, okay, I'm going around, I'm taking care of stuff, I don't really care. And the only time we see him get actually supremely pissed is when they actually chain him to the chair, because he's like, the only thing I have is my freedom. Like, literally the only thing I care about is the ability to live my own life, and you will not take that from me. Yeah, so they cut him loose, and then it's just this big fight. A bunch of gargoyles fighting a bunch of demons, and we finally see what it looks like when gargoyles die, which is that while demons turn into fire snakes, they turn into heaven portals that go up. Yeah, they just turn into sky beams. Yeah, they turn into blue energy beams, and then superheroes have to stop them. Yeah. So the fight is just, the gargoyle...

rigging in this. There's a reason where every time a gargoyle lands, they immediately turn into a human in a leather breastplate. They immediately turn into a Game of Thrones character because the gargoyles look like trash. Just so bad. Honestly, every CGI thing in this is like, aw, man. Aw, guys. It's pretty great when Bill Nighy straight up turns into Ivan Ooze at the end of this.

But at least that's a practical, like, when the demons turn into demons, they're like, oh, the only thing that changes is our face and our hands, so we can just put on some prosthetics. They turn into buffy demons, is what they start, they literally turn into guys you'd find as the bad guys on Angel. Oh yeah, they're like, look, we don't have enough to have a ton of special effects for this, we do have some prosthetics we can put on your hands and face though. That's why every demon wears a full three-piece suit, so we do not have to see the rest of your body. Whereas, unfortunately, the gargoyles are like, oh, we turn into, you know, big stone gargoyles, not wearing any clothes. Our clothes manifest when we turn human form. So it's all CG, baby, and it is no bueno. It's not great. So this is the big CG scene of the movie, is the war between the demons and the gargoyles that is 90% fire snakes and heaven beams. And at this point, I'm like...

All right, well, now everyone knows. There's no longer a secret war. Everyone, because there are buildings literally right next to this cathedral that are like residential buildings. Someone has opened a window and gone, well, would you look at that? Gargoyles fighting demons, and they explode into fire snakes and light beams. Huh? Also, it's 2014 in the years of the movie, so all of this is now video. It's on cell phones, yeah. It's pretty funny. But they succeed in kidnapping Leonore, but Frankenstein gets away. So Adam gets away. Now...

While Adam's kind of hiding and watching from the shadows and so on, Zuriel goes to a third location and holds Leonor there until Gideon shows up against Leonor's wishes and is like, look, I don't have Frankenstein to give you. Because a demon was like, oh, we'll trade you Leonor for Frankenstein. Yes. But because they don't have him, he's like, I'll give you the book. Yeah, so he's like, here, I have the book. It's Baker Frankenstein's journal. I hope it's good enough. Please give me back our queen. And she's like, no, I am not worth this. I am just another gargoyle. I am commanding you to take the book and get out of here. And he's like, nope, I am too hidebound by my position and the order. I am a failure. Here is the book. I want my queen back. She's going to spend the rest of the movie mad at me. Yeah.

Poor Jai Courtney. And it's, it's one thing when they don't realize what the demons want to do, which is very weird to me, given that they're like, oh, even when he's explaining it, when Adam finds out like, oh, I've got a giant fucking like underground facility full of hundreds of corpses that they want to reanimate. And he tells them like, oh, they're going to make a whole bunch of me so they can put souls into them. Yeah. And they don't put it together when he's like, yeah, they're going to try and.

uh, bolster their ranks by putting souls into dead bodies. And they're like, but a dead body, you're the only thing without a soul. It wouldn't matter. Like you're looking at an animated dead body. There's a reason that this movie is about Frankenstein. Like it would be one thing if two unrelated people were like, huh, why do they have all these dead bodies here? That's weird. But you have been talking to Frankenstein's monster for this entire movie. You're like,

Yeah. No, no. There's two or three defining characteristics of the gargoyles in this movie. They look bad and they're fucking stupid. There's also the scene where Leonor and her two bodyguards managed to make it into that underground facility that's just like a giant storehouse full of corpses. They're all sitting with big signs on their chest that are a percentage and the word reanimation and then an up-counting percentage until they become demons. And there are four scenes in this movie that are just her standing around and they're confused. Just looking around. Just looking around. Just like, I wonder what this is about. Huh.

And then when they finally start shaking wildly because demons are going into them, she's like, oh, oh, kill these, kill these. And especially bad that she doesn't go, oh, destroy that one thing that's generating the electricity that is animating them. Kill the big generator in the middle of the room. Instead, she's like, no, individually go around and stab all million of these guys. Yeah, I know that there are just absolutely a thousand dead bodies hanging around in here, but stab them one at a time instead of destroy the thing that's going to animate them. There's so many scenes of her in her gargoyle form stomping around on the catwalks in there and just looking this way and that. They are...

When fucking Adam finds out about this whole plot to, like, reanimate corpses and use them as bolstering their ranks, and he goes back to the gargoyles and is like, hey, I mean, we're pretty far into this, so I'm skipping over a lot. We're jumping around. We're not doing a whole lot of the Doctor subplot, which does not matter at all. There's some things from it that I want to talk about, but yeah, yeah, it's fine. But he's like, hey, I've established a romantic relationship with Lady Doctor, and so here's the thing.

if I tell you what's going on and I get the book back or whatever, will you just let me and lady doctor leave? And then I'll tell you where their base of operations is. And literally tells them, Hey, they're going to make a shitload of me's in order to have an army. And Leonor's response is like, yeah, that sounds great. Anyway, as soon as he leaves, Gideon, go kill that guy. And I'm like,

Fucking why? Why would you command your dude to be like, oh, kill the dude who just gave us all the information and also wants to murder demons? That guy sucks and I hate him. Yeah. No, the Doctor subplot, basically, there's a point where Frankenstein, or Adam, learns that Niberius has the book. And Niberius walks into his two scientists and he's already like, what if I brought you the body of Adam Frankenstein? And this time he's like, here, here's the book. It's Frankenstein's real notes. And they're like, what the fuck? Is this real? You tell me. But then she gets the willies about the whole situation and escapes and is chased by Zuriel the demon.

and is rescued by Frankenstein who kills Zeriel and demonstrates that he is a created being and immortal and able to kill Zeriel, rescues her. They go back to her house and she's like, what's your part in this? He's like, I don't really have a part in this. I want a promise that was made to me by Victor centuries ago. There's a whole like tiny reference subplot to the Bride of Frankenstein arc happening throughout the movie. I wanted Victor to make me a companion. Another like me. So that's all I care about is that or also getting out of this. I rescued you because I didn't want you to be part of it. But honestly, I'm kind of hands off on trying to rescue your partner. I'm not part of the war. It's this whole thing. Yeah. She gets petulantly mad at him about this.

She already knows that her boss is a demon prince and that everyone who works for him besides her is demons. And then he's like, don't go back to your building. And she's like, well, I have to go talk to my partner who also works at the building. Yeah, because the partner calls and is like, hey, weird shit or whatever. And she's like, oh, get the fuck out of there. I'll meet you at a bus station. And he's like, Frankenstein's like, that's super dangerous. That is definitely a demon trap. At least, I don't know, let me shadow you and try and rescue you again. And then she opens the door and is like, why don't you just look out for yourself? It seems to be the only thing you're good at. And then slams the door and I'm like...

Lady, all he did is save your life like 10 minutes ago. You have known him for five total minutes. And of those five minutes, four of it was rescuing you. Why are you this petulant? Why are you so jingoistic about the eternal conflict between gargoyles and vampires that you don't entirely believe is real? Yeah. When Frankenstein's monster finds her and Adam's just like, hey, there's a whole war and you're working for demons and I'm working for the gargoyle queen. And she's like, all right, buddy. Maybe the reanimation process did some brain damage to you. I love that she's willing to go to the Frankenstein is real.

And then that's as far as she's going. Well, at least with that, I'm like, I believe it. She's a reanimator herself. She's working in the field of reanimation. So if she's like, all right, yes, you're the original creation, but you've obviously gone unhinged. But then he murders a demon in front of her. And of course the demon, as we've mentioned, fucking fire snakes his way down and blows a hole in the floor of the building they're in. Yeah. And she's like, oh.

I don't know about this war. And you're like, you have literally watched a demon explode. Yeah. And then after her being like, I don't know about all this. Frankenstein's like, look, I don't really have a part in this. I just want to survive. I'm just trying to do what I can to survive and keep what's mine, which includes this book. And she's like, well, if all you care about is yourself. And I'm like, you made a rapid shift from learning that this war existed to being gung-ho about it. And specifically being gung-ho about this other guy's involvement in it. Yeah. Real judgy, real quick on that one. It's just such a great scene to watch her be like, well, I'm going by myself because I think you're not committed enough to sparkle motion. And she like slams the door and I'm like.

You're walking to your death because you're slightly pissed off at a dude you just met. Is that really your plan right now? Oh, it's so dumb. The whole thing is so dumb. But he...

She leaves, and he gets attacked by Gideon because Gideon got sent to murder him. And he ends up murdering Gideon. With his own axe. Yeah, good job. Gideon has these two little hand blades that he carries around as a weapon. And then it turns out, at one point in the movie, he puts a stick in the ground and slides the hand blades onto it to make it into a cool axe out of three other parts. Good. Why are you doing this? Why are we doing the click-click stuff? This is a supernatural monster movie. You don't need to click together cool weapons. No, we have to. We don't have guns in this movie, so we've got to do something like that. Yeah, so he gets thrown out of a building by...

Gideon, but Gideon flies down and ends up getting impaled on his own axe by Adam, and Gideon's like, you know God will surely damn you for this. Oh, he already has. First of all, God's got no church or his prudence on me. That's been the whole point of this. Also, if God gave a fuck, maybe he'd, I don't know, send some actual angels or make those angels make more gargoyles. But apparently God gives...

No fucks. There is at least one line where Miranda Otto gets to, they're like, he's a soulless monster. God has no place for him. And she's like, yeah, but God could have killed him at any point in the past 200 years and didn't. So he's probably around for some kind of reason. There's also a point where Gideon's like, oh, let's fucking murder him. And she's like, well, he's alive and all life is sacred. He's like, but he was not born of man. She's like, neither were we. And yet immediately, the next time we see her, it's like, nah, I went back on all that because you were around when a human got killed. Yeah, now she's mad.

But yeah, there's even a scene later where he gets like, uh, Niberius is like, look, Frankenstein, you're going to come with me and I'm going to make millions of copies of you. Or, and then he's talking to a scientist and he's like, it's just a tool. We're just going to use it for what we need. And then we get Dr. Wade's heroic, not it, he be like, why are you involved in the pronoun fight now? What is happening?

How is everyone so concerned about that aspect of this? But when fucking Niberius is like, all right, well, you've got the journal, you've studied it, you know what to do. And she's like, but I won't because that would be bad. And I know you're going to make like thousands of demons. And he's like, cool, I'm going to murder your friend. And the only way to bring him back is to reanimate him. And that gets her to start the reanimation process. I guess he'll come back with a demon in him. That's pretty good, I guess. That's like a B. It's so weird to be like, but she knows the whole plan is to reanimate dead bodies and then put demons in them. And your idea of coercion is...

But what if you reanimate this dead guy who's your friend? You want to see him as a demon too? I'd be like, no, I'd still, still know. No, thank you, but no, that's not a good argument. It wouldn't be resurrecting my friend, it would just be having a demon parade in my friend's body, which would be worse. I also like that when he goes to kill Marcus, the friend or whatever, he has like a green fish claw as his real demon hand, but then when he turns into a full demon later in the movie, he's just light pink. Well, I guess he could do it. He's a demon, he could be lots of colors, don't worry about it. It don't matter. He turns from a green fish claw to pink regular human hands with talons on them. Yeah, so eventually,

Fucking Frankenstein manages to... And at this point, he's also sort of taken the name Frankenstein. Yeah, well, I mean... Because he's Adam and Frankenstein. That's why I've been okay with calling him Frankenstein and not Frankenstein's monster or whatever all the way through this is because at the end, he literally gives himself the title line where he's like, I am Adam. I am human. I, Frankenstein. And you're like, all right, well, I guess if you're calling yourself that, then it's open season. All right, I guess you're into it. Thanks for the permission. Yeah, there's a point where someone's like, oh, you are truly your father's son. You are a Frankenstein. And he's like, sure, why not? Right, whatever, I'm Frankenstein. But he just looks at the audience. You have permission.

To just call me Frankenstein. I expressly permit everyone to call me Frankenstein. I know that was the name of Victor, my creator, but you can also call me that and it's cool. Don't worry about it. Yeah, just call me Frankenstein. It's going to be fine. Okay, everybody? All right. Now credits, please. But his whole deal at the end here is he's like, all right, so I'm going to lead the gargoyles to Niberius by showing up.

because he doesn't show up in the cathedral. He shows up near it. And some of the gargoyles are like, hey, Frankenstein's down there. And Leonore is like, yeah, let's fucking all leave the cathedral and go get him. Leonore gets dumber the longer this movie goes on. And she's just like, all right, everybody, let's get him. I know we lost our greatest warrior to him already. Let's sacrifice more to a guy that doesn't matter. And then we get a great sequence of the gargoyles chasing him and him just clowning on them. He doesn't want to kill him. No, because he's trying to lead him to Niberius. By the time he gets to Niberius is like...

weird complex a shit ton of demons come out and finally the gargoyles are like oh he's leading us to where the demons are yeah we're dumb and bad and then we get a classic 2014 movie moment when uh victor adam goes forward to face all the the demons and they're all getting ready to fight him and then kevin grevio who would tell this point has been like the heavy the big mean heavy guy that's standing right behind uh bill nighy in every scene with a super deep voice being like so we have a problem you know that kind of thing so he's like much bigger than all the other demons. So he shoulders them all out of the way in his demon form and walks out all like, I'll take care of this one. This one to me. And then he just immediately gets picked up and murdered by a gargoyle. Because again, the best thing the gargoyles can do in this movie is to have their feet appear from the top of the frame and yank someone out of the scene. If that was all they did, they'd be super powerful.

So we get a fight between the remaining gargoyles and demons in a courtyard while Frankenstein goes to try and rescue Dr. Her name is Tara. Tara Wade. Wade. Tara Wade. You know, that's not close to any famous people's real names or anything. Yeah. But meanwhile, Leonor and her two bodyguards are also infiltrating the building to try and find the part underground where all the bodies are stored.

Yes. So we have three groups happening. Now we get a setup for a sequel because there is a demon doctor guy. Molokai. Molokai has all of the research and everything on a little thumb drive. And when he realizes that gargoyles are invading, he just grabs all of it and fucks off. But he's already pressed the reanimate button on everything. Yeah, so he's our little sequel setup. He disappears. We already told you what happens with Leonore in this scene. She stands around dumbly and looks at the room until bad shit starts happening. And when Adam fights Nibirius, we're like, oh, he's way stronger. Because instead of just immediately getting fucking fire snaked by getting stabbed by a holy weapon, he manages to take...

several hits from these little axe blades because he stole Gideon's weapons like an asshole. And instead of using the cool two sticks that he's had for this whole time, he's like, fuck it, I'll take this guy's weapon. He doesn't have the two cool sticks again from the moment that Gideon kidnaps him and throws him into the... Yeah, as soon as he murders Gideon, he takes his weapons. Yeah, but yeah, he hits him a bunch and...

Nibiris is like, stupid, you can't hurt me. I'm a demon prince. I'm not like these other idiots you've been fighting. And because you're soulless, I'll put a little mark on your head and summon a demon into you. Yeah, and then that just doesn't work. Like a demon comes flying up and tries to go into him and you get Nibiris being like, you have happened to take over. Now my child rise. Good news, you got a cool body. You look like Aaron Eckhart. Good job, man. You like the Dark Knight? I got you one of them. Thank you for smoking. Remember, he was in a better movie six years ago? I probably shouldn't have brought this up. But instead, he's like, I am not your child. I'm me. Fuck you. I apparently have a soul now, so eat it, Nick.

when he earlier managed to hit Niberius with axes and it looked like it wasn't doing anything, he had carved in all the horizontal parts of the- Three slashes across the chest. Of the gargoyle order, and now he does the vertical slash, which means that he marks Niberius with the symbol of the gargoyle order, and he blows up into not one, not two, but four fire snakes. Four even bigger than normal fire snakes that spin around, go up into the air, combine into one giant fireball that when it goes to descend, takes the entire complex with it. Yes, and there's a point where you think Leonor's gonna die, because she's watching as this collapse into hell is sucking down all the bodies. that were about to be animated with demons. And then she's like, oh, we gotta go. And so her and her two bodyguards start flying up. And you see a shot of her flying right up into this hellbound turbo fireball and being like, well, grimly nodding, which is about as much as you can expect these terrible CGI gargoyle renders to do. And then she flies right into it. You're like, oh, I guess she sacrifices herself for no reason. Great. But then she just comes out the other side glowing a little bit. Yeah, she comes out the other side being like, oh, well, I'm a gargoyle. I can only be killed by something, a creature without a soul, but that's just a fireball and it can't murder me. But I do have in my talons, Terra and Adam because I saved them. Yeah. Because I guess I found them mid rubble falling.

somehow, and got them, and now they're safe. Yeah, I was kind of hoping that that sequence would be, like, another sequel set up. You know, like, oh, when she flew through the big old Niberius fireball, she got, like, a little Niberius. She got a little Niberius. Yeah, so now she's got a little Niberius. So now she's, like, a demon gargoyle. She's Demona. But, uh, yeah, she rescues those two, and then pretty much we go right to Frankenstein, standing in front of the burning building and being like, Aye, Adam! Aye, Frankenstein! Credits, please! Yeah, I gotta say.

Now that we are done with this. Yes. I thought for sure that they were going to try and set up that, like, you could also use the same process to make gargoyles. Yeah. Yeah. Anything. I thought a lot of setups. I thought there were going to be so many reasons for anyone to give a shit about Frankenstein. The thing I kept waiting for was an explanation for just a simple question. Why gargoyles? Exactly. I'm like, you are in basically every single way in this movie. Just angels. Just angels. Why are they gargoyles? Like, when you kill them, they turn into bright light and ascend to heaven.

They fly. Why gargoyles? Was the CGI cheaper for stone dudes than it was to put wings on regular guys? I think that was part of it. The other thing I kept thinking was whoever made it didn't want to make angels an anti-hero character in the thing. They want to have a scene where Gideon...

who's already, you don't want to make it so that angels are bad guys. Angels are bad guys. They had already seen Legion and they were like, oh fuck, they stole our lunch. Exactly. So that's kind of, I was like, oh, they don't want to do, they don't want to recreate Legion and they don't want the angel, they don't want the bad guys to be angels. So their gargoyle is like a healthy, healthy buffer between angels and something that's okay to be bad guys. But it just comes off as so weird. You spend the whole movie being like, gargoyles? Why gargoyles? Yeah. You know, that Disney show was in the 90s. It's time has come and gone. It really does take you out of it because when you're like,

All right, Underworld. This is basically trying to be an Underworld movie with a secret war between two monsters. Yeah, but vampires and werewolves have been taken already. I'm like, Lycan. But even then, you're like, all right, vampires, werewolves. Great. Classics. Done. And they're like, all right, what are we going to do? Demons and... Demons and... Creatures in the Black Lagoon. Mummies. Literally, I would have been more okay with it being like, oh, it's demons versus mummies. I'd be like, you know what? Sure. Too close to the mummy movies. We have to go with ghosts. Invisible men. Yes. Demons versus invisible men. And women. And non-binaries.

Movie's even more about pronouns now. Nobody knows. Everyone's invisible. That's why you have to always ask for the pronouns first. Yeah, just pick a movie monster type. Gargoyles is just a weird out there choice. It's just strange. It's weird enough that I was like, the fact that you should have just been angels keeps taking me out of this. All right, let's go ahead and get into our bests and worsts. What is the best thing for you, Jeff, in I, Frankenstein? I already said it very way back in the beginning. I think even before we play the music, there's a part where when Frankenstein comes back to challenge Niberius, like to be like, I've come to kill you and take what's mine. And Niberius just goes, you've returned, Frankenstein. And I was like.

That's what I wanted to hear Bill Nighy say. I want some good line reads. I want Bill Nighy to have to engage with the premise of the film, please. That's all I want. And I got it when he was like, welcome Frankenstein. We've been expecting you. I, the demon prince, Neberius. Enemy to the gargoyles. I shall destroy the gargoyle queen. And you're like, God, this is some real D&D bullshit you got going on here. It really does feel like a Mandela effect view into an alternate universe where the White Wolf books were very different. That's the biggest feel I got from this where I was like, oh, well, are there five kinds of gargoyles that you can be?

But yeah, my favorite is Bill Nighy's line readings when he has to ham it up and actually say Frankenstein. What about you? What's your favorite thing? I'm going to say the, God, my one favorite thing in this, if I'm boiling it down to a single thing. Then you are. Is the scene where they recapture Adam and have him strapped to the chair and his insistence that, like, the only thing he cares about is freedom. I was like, look, look, Eckhart, you're acting. You're doing it.

I love fucking Aaron Eckhart, too. This is such a dumb movie. It's a shitty movie where he doesn't get to do much, but for one scene, you're like, look at you putting in the chops. Yeah, like, I'll be honest. When you told me this was the pick, I was like, I vaguely remember that movie, but I like Aaron Eckhart too much to remember that he was in it. So in my mind, I had just been like, oh yeah, I think this has Gerard Butler. I mean... He might be Van Helsing. I don't remember who was that guy.

Who was Van Helsing? In the movie Van Helsing. I don't remember. Was that Wolverine? Was it Hugh Jackman who played Van Helsing? I think it was Hugh Jackman. Okay. But yeah, I was like, Aaron Eckhart didn't do this. He wouldn't do this. He would never. It was Gerard Butler. Not my Aaron Eckhart. Gerard Butler says yes.

All right. Pick the worst thing in this movie. It's definitely the science babble that's close enough to be wrong. That's the worst thing in this movie. He's just like, well, if you could get the electric eels can deliver a voltage of up to 500. If they could do that consistently three times, five minutes at a time. And I was just like, don't, don't bring, don't do this. Don't go, don't go halfway into science because then you're just going to have me be like, fuck you. I've read a lot about electric eels. They can only do it for like two milliseconds at a time. Stop, stop it. Just stop it.

Also, you don't know anything about the difference between voltage, joules, amperage. You have no idea how electricity works. Just say megavolts. Just say, we need a million megavolts. If we can't get enough gigajoules, then this will never... Just do that. It's a thing that you're like, a shot from an electric eel would kill anyone. It's like, no, they're not especially fatal.

Oh, goodness. A shock from one hurts like hell, I'm sure, but it won't kill you most of the time. Yeah, I would assume. I mean, maybe if it hits you like square in the chest, it's like your heart rhythm up. It's the same like what happened with Steve Irwin, where like normally a stingray isn't going to kill you, but if it stings you in the heart, then yeah, you're going to have a bad, you're going to die. But electric keels, you have to really be working to get murdered by an electric keel. You got to commit to the bit. It'd be easier to kill someone one by freezing it and stabbing someone with it. Near the heart. You know, near it.

All right. That's my least favorite. What about you? I'm going to say the worst thing in this movie to me is, I mean, almost certainly has to be Leonore's continuing, just weird stupidity. It starts out and she's like, I'm a protector of all life and Adam is also alive. And so we will protect him. And I see in him the chance for good. And then just, he was around when a cop died. He's trash now and an absolute piece of shit. Fucking murder him. And I'm like, what happened here? Why is, and why are you so dumb? He just told you that demons are planning to make a full fucking like.

Tens of thousands strong army. And you're like, oh, well, fuck that guy for telling me that. Kill him. It's so dumb. It's very dumb. Because there's a point where Gideon's like, you can't just let him leave. And she just looks at him madly and then goes, well, follow him. And as soon as you know where the book is, kill him. It's so strange. Why? None of that matters. Yeah, it's very unusual. God, I can't find any reference that says that Miranda Otto is related to Socrates Otto. I would have thought it was obvious because they're both from the same place and they have the same name. You can even kind of see some similarities. But there's no references to it. None. No reference. I guess I'm just wrong and they're not. I guess.

Anyway, there you go. Let's go ahead and give each of us a rating from zero to five to give a rating out of ten. Jeff. Two and a half. This is the kind of movie where I could watch it and just laugh at how dumb it is. Like, it's not so bad that I spent the whole movie being mad at it. Instead, I spent the whole time just being like, that's stupid. So it's definitely the kind of movie where I could watch it with friends or if it was on. I know I keep saying if it's on on a day, you're bored. I haven't watched fucking network television in 15 years, so I'm not sure why that's my frame of reference. Oh, yeah. But yeah, it's a two and a half. If someone put it on and you happen to walk through the room, you'd be like, I guess. Yeah, so it's a two and a half for me, dog. What about you?

I'm going to give it a two. I didn't, I wouldn't. If someone had it on, I'd be like, turn this off. I mean, it definitely is one of those things we're watching it. I just kept being like, anytime they go, we need to take Frankenstein to the Gargoyle Queen. I was like, God damn it. This is some dumb horse shit. Stop saying things. But it just, it's not quite at the level where I'm like, oh, it's good enough to sit around with friends and make fun of. If you had to anyway, like you have a podcast and you have to do that. Yeah, sure. It's all right. It's fine enough. It's a two. It's not the worst thing ever.

Jesus Christ, it's not good. So four and a half out of ten is bad. I think it's not good. Okay, so it turns out that while Miranda and Socrates Otto are both Australian actors, Socrates Otto is descended from, oh, some nationality. Let's just go ahead and assume Greeks, because it is. She's Greek. Let's assume. Good old Socrates here. But yeah, so they're not related. It's just a weird coincidence. Weird coincidence. All right, just making sure that was clear. Thank you for clearing that up.

All right. Thank you so much for joining us for this episode of Movie Mastery. We will, of course, be doing more of this. We'll be back in two weeks with another episode. And if you would like some more content, then we'll be reviewing Othello. Can you imagine us reviewing Othello? Well, it's more content. Hey, hey, you? Yeah. Good. Bring it in. Give me some daps. That's my dap. That's all I wanted. Good job. You did it. I appreciate that stupid pun. I love it. No, we're going to watch Auto Man.

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