Horror Movie Review: The Frankenstein Theory (2013)

In horror the word ‘absurd’ or ‘stupid’ should never come to mind in regards to the story. It’s a genre that gives as much freedom to create as a person can imagine. All it has to do is make sense, sort of.

This movie…its story? It is absurd.

Watching The Frankenstein Theory was one of the most enraging movie experiences ever. Utterly stupid, devoid of sense & logic with a payoff that is so insulting the creators might as well have ended it with a massive middle finger appearing on screen.

Oh, and it’s found-footage, sort of.

Professor Johnathan Venkenheim, a character you’ll happily see ripped part within the first few minutes of listening to him drone on, believes that Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was based on fact. He believes that his ancestor was involved & it was his medical efforts that Frankenstein is based on.

His proof? Well there isn’t any as his ancestor conveniently destroyed all of his notes when…get this…the Illuminati got close to discovering his efforts. With the most paper thin evidence & a documentary crew far to willing to go on a wild goose chase he heads for Canada to find Frankenstein’s monster!

This film crew…where do you start with them? Their names are unimportant & the men are easily interchangeable. Seriously, near the end I was convinced that one character had come back to life only to realise it was a different one.

They are bunch of idiots who come from the Blair Witch school of shouting into trees then wondering why their missing pal isn’t answering. These movies insist that what you’re about to see here is true but always have their characters behave in unrealistic ways.

It’s terrible to look at, as if it was filmed on a mobile phone but infuriatingly it seems to not know what it wants to be. At certain points in the movie we get musical flourishes & the loud noises that normally accompany a jump scare moment. Are you trying to tell me that someone got hold of this footage, put it all together & added this stuff for drama?

If so why did they leave in an hour plus of absolutely nothing happening? The Frankenstein Theory follows a similar format to many of the other found-footage movies that have dogged the horror scene for the last few years in that it builds towards a finale that lasts a few minutes at most. The journey should be exciting & tense with a payoff that pleases all. Instead we get a mind-numbingly, idiotic story that has an ending that would be funny if it wasn’t so terrible.

Every death takes place off screen, the monster is only seen at the end & it just raises more questions then it answers. I was hoping for a twist ending, where it is revealed that Johnathan has become so obsessed with his theory that he has descended into madness, created an alter ego of Frankenstein’s monster & gone on a murder spree.

Or maybe that he was in league with the monster bringing the crew there for food. Or that he planned to use them to try & create his own monster…this story is so poor that anything would have been preferable. I’d have even settled for a big DreamWorks musical number at the end instead of the car crash we have here.

Bad, so bad.