Frankenstein Adjacent Movies

When Caleb Smith (Domhnall Gleeson) wins a week-long vacation with the CEO of tech megagiant Blue Book, the reclusive wunderkind Nathan Bateman (Oscar Isaac), he does not — as any sane corporate drone might — fake a sudden case of the vapours to avoid spending an entire week with an insufferable tech-bro billionaire. Instead, he dutifully helicopters out to a compound so remote it may as well have “villain lair” stamped on the welcome mat.

After making the absurdly long pilgrimage into the wilderness, Caleb is immediately handed a Non-Disclosure Agreement thick enough to stun cattle and then introduced to Ava (Alicia Vikander), an impossibly sophisticated humanoid robot whose translucent circuitry kindly informs the audience she is not a human woman. Caleb’s role is to serve as the human component in a Turing test — but not the usual “is she human?” variety. Everyone can see the glowing neon ribs. Nathan wants to know if she is sentient.

The trouble is, Nathan is, in strictly ethical terms, a bit of a bastard. He’s been abusing, manipulating, imprisoning, and casually discarding his thinking, feeling creations for their entire “lives.” What’s worse: he’s proud of it.

What Ex Machina excels at is keeping the motives of its three leads beautifully opaque. Is Caleb helping Ava because she is a fellow mind deserving of freedom, or because Nathan has designed her face and personality around Caleb’s porn-viewing habits? Is Ava genuinely alive in the way we are, or is her “consciousness” nothing more than exquisite code? Is freeing her an act of moral courage, or is Caleb essentially developing feelings for a very expensive Roomba with legs?

When Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum) decides he’s had quite enough travel sickness, he unveils a rather radical solution: break matter down to its component parts, beam it across the room, and rebuild it atom by atom on the other side. What could possibly go wrong?

Oh. Right.
It’s a Cronenberg film.
Oh dear.

Based on the 1957 short story and technically a remake of the 1958 film, The Fly ’86 drags the premise into the neon-slick 1980s, sexes the story up, slathers in gut-wrenching practical effects, and creates something far greater than the sum of its greasy, pulsating parts.

In a jealous fit — wrongly assuming his journalist girlfriend Ronnie (Geena Davis) has slithered back to her editor/ex, Stathis (the Platonic ideal of an ’80s bell-end in a turtleneck) — Brundle jumps to human trials. Unfortunately, his computer doesn’t understand genetics, so it pops a human and a housefly into the same blender. Horror ensues, slowly and gloriously.

As brilliant as the plot, makeup, and script are, what happened behind the camera is almost as fascinating as watching Goldblum shed teeth, fingernails, and dignity.

Seeking somewhere to sleep — and more importantly, somewhere to resurrect things — Herbert moves in with clean-cut med student Dan Cain (Bruce Abbott). After an incident involving a dead cat, some screaming, and an impromptu demonstration of his glowing green goo, Dan becomes Herbert’s lab assistant. Mostly because hunchbacks with heavy Eastern European accents are hard to find in Massachusetts.

As Dan’s relationship with his girlfriend Meg (the dean’s daughter) spirals into “you’re spending too much time with that weird jar man” territory, Dr Hill reaches breaking point. Shortly after, Herbert decapitates him with a bone saw. That’s when things finally start to get freaky.

Re-Animator has all the existential terror of Frankenstein, but delivered with a wicked grin. The cast leans gleefully into the madness — from Jeffrey Combs stealing every frame he’s in, to David Gale chewing more scenery than any flesh-eating ghoul could hope for.

The film has deservedly become a cult classic, thanks to its grisly effects, scalpel-sharp humour, and manic energy. It feels like a glorious patchwork of ideas and limbs, brought to life by the lightning of some unforgettable performances.

Our very helpful cosmic pen pals sent back a recipe for a clean-burning fuel and a nifty tweak to our genetic code. Being curious sorts who had evidently never read The Modern Prometheus, government scientists decided to go right ahead and splice alien DNA into a healthy human ovum.

The problem is that the baby they grew in a lab started to mature at an alarming rate, and before long they had a twelve-year-old girl locked in isolation. For reasons best known to themselves, they then decided to murder her. Escaping highly trained government goons with the combined powers of gymnastics and blind luck, Sil — the genetic experiment — makes a break for it.

An elite response team is quickly assembled: an empath, a molecular biologist, an anthropologist, and a black-ops mercenary, all overseen by the always-excellent Ben Kingsley as shadowy government fixer Xavier Fitch. Their job is to hunt Sil down, by which point she’s already hit the next stage of her evolution and become a fully matured model with one overriding biological imperative: mate.

For a girl with such a twee name, May Dove Canady (Angela Bettis) proves that still waters run psychotic in Lucky McKee’s masterclass in isolation and ostracisation. Though it was considered a box-office failure, clawing back only around 37% of its budget, critics praised its slow, menacing pace and its portrait of a strange young woman driven to make herself a new friend — literally. Over time, May has deservedly become a cult classic, thanks in no small part to Bettis’s delicately unhinged performance.

May is crushingly lonely, perched just over the bridge between quirky and deeply unsettling. She works as a veterinary assistant and, as a child, was bullied relentlessly for a lazy eye. Though corrective lenses have long since fixed the problem, May still struggles to connect with people, clinging instead to a doll her mother gave her — sealed in a glass case and repeatedly described as her only real friend.

May’s hobbies include dressmaking, volunteering to read to blind children, and murdering people for spare parts to stitch together into a rough approximation of the human form… wait, what?

As her isolation curdles into psychosis, May becomes convinced that since there are no perfect people — only perfect parts — the most logical solution is to take the best bits from those around her and assemble a friend of her own. She’s simply taking her mother’s childhood advice to heart: if you can’t find a friend, make one.

The final creation is named Amy — an anagram of May, and a homophone of ami, the French word for “friend.”

Well played, Lucky.
Very well played.