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Saturday I attended a rare screening of the 1910 Edison Frankenstein, at the Loew's Jersey Theatre, a semi-restored 1929 film palace (and I do mean palace--it's huge) in Jersey City. Only one print of the film exists, owned by collector Alois Dettlaff, who spoke at the event; he'd never before allowed it to be shown outside his home state of Wisconsin. It's a strange, very short (14 min.) interpretation, which differs radically from the Shelley and Whale versions. Dr. Frankenstein doesn't cobble the Monster together from body parts but grows him in a kind of giant cannibal's pot, watching the process through a peephole. The stop-motion birth sequence resembles decay in reverse: the creature grows from the inside out--bones first, then flesh, then skin and hair (and rags for clothes).* The finished Monster looks like a cross between the Elephant Man and a Kabuki actor, wearing elf shoes and leggings.
Other recent Big Screen adventures: City of God is one of the most violent films I've ever seen, made even more disturbing because an awful lot of the people firing big guns and being killed by them are children. Think the bleak urban quasi-documentary style of Bunuel's Los Olvidados (set in a notorious slum of Rio de Janeiro rather than Mexico) combined with blaxploitation-cum-Tarantino cinematic highjinks. This is a gripping and, I'm sorry to have to say, entertaining sociohorror/action/coming-of-age film (the director's mordant humor helps the audience process all the tragedy). David Perry gives a good rundown of the plot here (thanks to Bruno for introducing me to this writer).
Also bleak but completely absorbing is Lilya 4-Ever, about a teenage girl in post-Soviet Russia dragged into prostitution by a whirlwind of negative forces: parental abandonment, lack of a social safety net, bottom feeders on the make. It reminds me a bit of Von Trier's Breaking the Waves in that the girl is very sympathetic and appealing and what she goes through is horrendous. The "bathtub scene" is particularly haunting in its casual brutality. Again, the director finds exactly the right tone to make a moral film that's not preachy or (too) exploitative.
Finally, please go see Phone Booth instead of Identity, while the former's still in theatres, and put some money in Larry Cohen's pocket. He's one of our smartest filmmakers and even though this is only from his script, he's clearly the auteur (fortunately paired with the directing talents of the Falling Down/Car Wash Joel Schumacher, as opposed to the Batman & Robin Joel Schumacher). It's an intricate, high concept plot: man pinned in phone booth for entire movie, taunted over the receiver by omniscient sniper, vaguely recalling a Joseph Stefano-penned Outer Limits episode from the 1960s called Fun and Games, in which a mellifluous-voiced ET probes the sordid, petty inner lives of a couple of very ordinary Americans, as they struggle for survival in an elaborately contrived game. ("Mwa-ha-ha-ha! Why did you run away from him, Miss Hanley? So that he can eat all of the food? Or so he can do all of the fighting? Your heart is a bottomless box of virtuous motives, isn't it?"--that's Stefano, not Cohen, but I love those lines.) Good discussion of Phone Booth by Armond White here; not sure what he's saying exactly about Cohen vis a vis the classic films of the '70s, though.
* The "fleshing out" sequence is a staple of current horror films (Hellraiser and Hollow Man come immediately to mind) but the 1910 version is closer to the low budget scares of Eraserhead or the Lovecraftian glop in Quatermass 2. The stop-motion-plus-decay also made me think of the Brothers Quay.