As of October 2025, there had been 423 movies featuring some version of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.
204 short films, 78 TV series and 287 episodes of TV shows also featured the creature and it's easy to understand why.
Mary Shelley's tale is an Icarus story.
It's about man striving to be God, flying too close to the sun and then crashing.
It's about a surgeon creating life and the consequences of what happens when he rejects his creation.
It's a cautionary tale too about scientific ambition giving way to disappointment and regret long before we had the real life example of 'Oppenheimer'.
The first movie of Shelley's story was J Searle Dawley's 1910 silent film with Augustus Phillips and Charles Ogle.
James Whale's 1931 Universal Pictures adaptation with Boris Karloff as The Creature was arguably the most influential, conjuring up the image of a square headed creature that would dominate screen depictions and Halloween costumes for years to come.
Audiences would over the years come to believe this version of the creature was actually Frankenstein - not the scientist.
And while there were plenty of horror movies based on Shelley's story, the creature would become a figure of fun in comedies like Frank Capra's 'Arsenic and Old Lace,' 'Charles Barton's 'Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein,' Gerald Thomas' 'Carry On Screaming' and Mel Brooks' 'Young Frankenstein' which directly parodied the 1818 novel.
Later, more serious adaptations like David Wickes' 'Frankenstein' with Patrick Bergin, Kenneth Branagh's star studded 'Mary Shelley's Frankenstein' with Robert de Niro and Paul McGuigan's 'Victor Frankenstein' with James McAvoy and Daniel Radcliffe returned to the spirit and occasionally the letter of the tale to varying degrees of success.
Yorgos Lanthimos delivered a twist on Shelley's book in the Oscar garlanded 'Poor Things' with Emma Stone, Mark Ruffalo and Willem Dafoe.
And now we have Guillermo del Toro's 'Frankenstein' - an 18 year labour of love for the Academy Award winning, Mexican director.
Based on the original screenplay for Kenneth Branagh's critically 1994 derided version of the novel, it seeks to reclaim the vision of the original screenwriter Frank Darabont.
The screenwriter infamously claimed his version of 'Mary Shelley's Frankenstein' was the best screenplay he ever wrote but Branagh's final product was the worst film he had ever seen.
Aiming for a pretty faithful version of Shelley's story, del Toro casts in his version Oscar Isaac as Baron Victor Frankenstein, giving us a brief glimpse into the surgeon's childhood with the death of his mother, played by Mia Goth, during the birth of his younger brother.
Christian Convery's childhood version of Victor is subsequently raised by a violently and psychologically abusive, father Leopold, played by Charles Dance.
After forging a career in medicine, Isaac's adult version of Victor is later expelled from the Royal College of Surgeons in Edinburgh for reanimating corpses.
Telling Shelley's story from the perspective of Victor and the Creature, Isaac's scientist is the first to recount his version of the tale after being rescued by Lars Mikkelsen's Captain Andersen in the Arctic from the raging creature.
Not only does Victor tells of his traumatic childhood and his repudiation by the medical establishment, we also see him fall in with Christoph Waltz's arms manufacturer Henrich Harlander who bankrolls his experiments and helps him construct a laboratory in a vacant tower.
Victor becomes smitten with Harlander's niece Elizabeth, also played by Goth, who is engaged to his younger brother Felix Kammerer's William and spurns his advances.
With Henrich keen to see some progress, Victor amasses body parts harvested from soldiers killed in the Crimean War and executed criminals.
He orders silver conductors to channel lightning and electro charge the lymphatic systems, hearts and brains of the corpses he is trying to reanimate.
We discover Harlander is desperate for success because he has syphilis but he is told by Victor his body cannot be reanimated because its organs are infected.
Angered by this, he attempts to sabotage Victor's experiment but plunges to his death during a thunderstorm.
During an eventful night, the scientist goes to bed believing the lightning conductors have not animated The Creature he was hoping to bring to life.
However he wakes up to discover Jacob Elordi's Creature towering over his bed.
Victor is, however, unable to handle the enormity of his scientific achievement and maltreats his creation.
But why?
Del Toro shifts the narrative to the perspective of the Creature after he is rejected by Victor and in many respects this is the stronger half of the film.
Elordi simply outguns Isaac who delivers a very hammy performance and really undermines the film.
In del Toro's version, Victor is clearly the monster with barely any redeeming features.
The sympathy lies totally with The Creature and rightly so.
Elordi subsequently delivers a sensitive performance.
However stripping out much of the humanity from Isaac's Victor imbalances the film to the extent that he becomes one dimensional.
As a result, the audience has little or no sympathy for a scientist whose dream has turned into a nightmare and it is simply because he lacks sufficient empathy for his creation and is also consumed by jealousy.
Goth makes an impression, though, as Elizabeth Harlander and there is a definite chemistry in her scenes with Elordi.
Waltz unfortunately overacts as well as her uncle while Dance delivers his very polished, callous villain party piece.
Kammerer is pretty underwhelming, although David Bradley certainly engages audience sympathies as the blind man who shows real compassion to The Creature.
Mikkelsen does a pretty solid job as the ship captain who hears both sides of the story.
As you'd expect, Del Toro delivers a visually sumptuous film with the help of cinematographer Dan Laustsen, production designer Tamara Deverell, costume designer Kate Hawley and set decorator Shane Vieau.
However, while 'Frankenstein' is undoubtedly a feast for the eyes, at a two and a half hours running time it sometimes drags.
Full of sound and fury, del Toro's film is a plea for sensitivity and compassion but it gets drowned in the bloated bombast in this curate's egg of a film.
And that's a real pity because you can certainly see the love the Mexican has for the material and the effort he puts in.
Next up is a version from Maggie Gyllenhaal, 'The Bride' which has been described by its star Jessie Buckley as a punk reworking of the story.
With Christian Bale, Annette Bening and Gyllenhaal's brother Jake on board, it'll be interesting to see if she can eclipse previous versions and avoid their pitfalls.
('Frankenstein' received its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival on August 30, 2025, had a brief release in UK and Irish cinemas on October 17, 2025 and was made available for streaming on Netflix on November 7, 2025)
ICE ROAD: VENGEANCE
Let's shift from a new version of a horror classic to an action sequel that few of us demanded.
'Ice Road: Vengeance' is US director Jonathan Hensleigh's follow-up to his 2021 thriller 'The Ice Road' with Liam Neeson, Laurence Fishburne, Amber Midthunder and Holt McCallany.
Released on Netflix in the US and Amazon Prime in the UK and Ireland, it benefitted from the COVID lockdown and ended up performing strongly on both streaming services when it debuted despite a host of underwhelming reviews.
Nevertheless Neeson is back as Mike McCann, the North Dakota based ice trucker who is wrestling with his grief over the death of his aphasia suffering Iraq War veteran brother Gurty in the previous film.
Honouring a promise to scatter Gurty's ashes in Nepal on top of Mount Everest, Mike heads to the South Asian country where he hires Fan Bingbing's Dhani Yangchen, a local guide in Katmandhu to help him navigate the terrain.
Boarding a bus full of tourists called the Kiwi Express driven by a high spirited New Zealand driver Geoff Morrell's Spike, Mike doesn't realise he has unwittingly stumbled into a local dispute over a hydroelectric dam.
Shapoor Batliwalla's Ganesh Rai has clashed with a corrupt businessman Mahesh Jadu's Rudra Yash over the dam.
In fact, Yash has hired a team of mercenaries to enforce his will.
With them already offing Ganesh's elderly father, his son Saksham Sharma's Vijay realises his life is in danger and helps his dad hide in the Annapurna Highlands.
Boarding the Kiwi Express, he joins Bernard Curry's American professor Evan Myers and his daughter, Grace O'Sullivan's Starr and two other travellers, Amelia Bishop's Jeet and CJ Bloomfield's Yug.
During the journey, Jeet and Yug turn out to be hijackers who have come to kidnap Vijay.
A fistfight ensues where Yug is dispatched by Mike and Jeet is overpowered by Dhani but during this scrap, Neeson's Irish American trucking hero punctures a tyre which forces the bus to a halt in Kodari.
Monish Anand's policeman Shankar turns up to rescue Vijay and arrest Jeet but Mike, Dhani and Professor Myers soon realise something is not quite right about him.
Shankar is on Rudra's payroll and they have to rescue Vijay who the corrupt cop and his boss are torturing to find out the whereabouts of Ganesh.
Escaping on the Kiwi Express with Vijay, Professor Myers is killed in the process while Mike and Spike sustain injuries.
Can our heroes stay several steps ahead of Rudra, Shankar, Jeet and their goons?
And can they also protect Vijay and Ganesh?
Hensleigh's previous 'Ice Road' film was full of dreadful dialogue and predictable plot development.
The Winnipeg set movie was an action thriller that toyed with the notion of being a disaster film.
It was, of course, meat headed nonsense, providing yet another vehicle for Neeson to growl and scowl his way through a sub-standard action movie that enabled him to thump bad guys.
'Ice Road: Vengeance' does exactly the same.
There's loads of toe curling dialogue between Mike and Dhani about what it is like to be a lapsed Irish American Catholic and a Buddhist.
The baddies are incredibly one dimensional and the plot is incredibly one dimensional.
It's another action movie where Neeson goes through the motions and it reaches its nadir when the urn containing Gurty's ashes ends up being used in an action sequence.
There's no point in appealing to the Oscar nominated Neeson anymore to stop tainting what was once a strong CV with ridiculous action nonsense.
He simply isn't going to and expect at least two more in the form of Guy Moshe's CIA action thriller 'Hotel Tehran' with Zachary Levi and also Mark Vanselow's cross country pursuit film 'The Mongoose' with Marisa Tomei, Ving Rhames and Michael Chiklis.
Expectations will be low for those movies.
Sadly they nearly always are these days for a Neeson movie.
Although we still hope for beyter.
('Ice Road: Vengeance was released in US cinemas on June 27, 2025 before being made available for streaming in the UK and Ireland on September 4, 2025 and in other countries on Netflix on September 15, 2025)
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