Arrow 4K Ultra HD Film Review

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994) • 4K Ultra HD [Arrow Video]

When a brilliant but unorthodox scientist rejects the reanimated corpse he revived in a laboratory, his creation escapes and swears revenge.

Intended to capitalise on the success of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), a different fate awaited Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein two years later. Both projects have Francis Ford Coppola (The Godfather) in common — who directed Dracula, then produced this — and the motivation for both films was adapting the original stories more closely, but employing all the technical grandeur of then-modern filmmaking. Coppola’s Dracula had its critics, but it grossed $215M at the box office and earned Academy Award nominations, whereas Kenneth Branagh’s take on Frankenstein could only muster $112M and likely killed further updates of classic horror literature.

Filmmaker Frank Darabont, who made The Shawshank Redemption the same year, co-wrote Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, later calling it “the best script I ever wrote and the worst movie I’ve ever seen” on…