joepm28

The Bride of Frankenstein is one of those films that have become such an icon of cinema that it's become a caricature of itself - and the innumerable riffs that have played off of it.

The plot doesn't need to be repeated, it is just so embedded in our collective consciousness.

The sets and the scenes are all top notch.

And the acting is just one fantastic turn after another. These include the comic element of Una O'Connor as Minnie (one can't help but see Cloris Leachman performance in Young Frankenstein!), as hysterical villager and servant to the Baron. Then there are the semi-serious performances of Colin Clive as Baron Frankenstein and Valerie Hobson as Elizabeth, his wife, as they ham it up. Finally, there are the just over the top performances of Boris Karloff as the Monster, Ernest Thesiger as Doctor Pretorius and, best of all though a very brief role, Elsa Lanchester as The Monster's Mate, the Bride of Frankenstein! Lanchester's reveal is absolutely stunning and her mere minutes of screen time are unique beyond anything before or since. Stunning!

It's hard to watch The Bride of Frankenstein and not have Young Frankenstein keep running through your head. Such is the highest accolade as well as a curse of when a classic film has been so effectively parodied. Even with that, The Bride of Frankenstein remains one of the all time great monster movies of the 1930's.

I binge watched through all five episodes of The Snow Spider (just about a total of 2 1/2 hours) and it was outstanding!

While very much a series for children, The Snow Spider will be appreciated by the child in all of us. The story is quite simple - a young boy, Gwyn, 'loses' his sister, Bethan, on his fifth birthday when she goes out to look for a lost black sheep from their farm on a stormy night. While looking, Bethan has a magical encounter and is gone. This becomes a key element when four years later, on his ninth birthday, Gwyn is given some magical gifts by Nain (his grandmother), a believer in the myths, lores and old ways of the Welsh.

The cast is outstanding and the scenery is so evocative of the Welsh countryside. Top notch all around.

The series does have some darker elements about coping with grief and with the bullying children often endure in school. These are all well done and integral to the story as Gwyn learn to handle his magical powers. For me, and I'm sure for many who delved in the realm of fantasy of books in our youths, The Snow Spider falls right in that genre of the works of L Frank Baum and E Nesbit. Again, outstanding!

For some reason I thought Five Nights at Feddy's 2 was a sequel to Willy's Wonderland, a Nicholas Cage film from 2021. That film was so bad, it was good, much of it due to Cage's crushing performance. Well, while the FNAF franchise preceded Willy's Wonderland, Willy's got their movie out first using the trope of haunted, deadly animatronic pizza joint characters. And it was way better, like 6 stars versus the 4 stars I'm giving to FNAF 2.

Since I never saw FNAF, I was left floundering throughout this film as to what was going on. The film offers no coherent thumbnail sketch of what happened prior, so that was strike one.

Even so, the plot is incoherent for much of the film and - even worse - this wasn't even compensated by solid scares, shocks or violence. So bland and thus strike two.

Third and final strike, the awful acting. Every one was so, so wooden. Even Wayne Knight, who can be hysterical, was awful.

FNAF 2 is not worth the price of a pizza to get in to this broken down version of a Chucky Cheese.