Father Malone's Weekly Roundup - The Bride! (2026)

Welcome back midnight viewers to Father Malone's a weekly round up. I'm Father Malone. The dog beside me is Ripley Jean. I slathered a microphone and a ham. I know you are bride to none, you little punk princess.

How have you been everybody? I'm all right, none of us are feeling too awesome lately. But I'm not here to cry to you. I'm here to talk Turkey. I hate turkey from day one.

No one appreciated the annual holiday of Thanksgiving more than myself because at the end I didn't have to fuck with turkey for a solid year. Let's talk at cinema of late. We're gonna get right into it. I was bound and determined this past week to get one of these roundups out to you. In fact, I pep talked myself into it.

Surely one of these entertainments will strike your fancy, pull you up and shake you around. Oh no, no, no. It wasn't for lack of trying, though, but it was going to be another situation of doing a half hour talking about something that I found not that great, and I would just be killing time by beating up on it. So here is what I'll say about what I did watch. I love Carl Urban.

He makes a fucking terrific pirate, and most of the cast of the Bluff make terrific fucking pirates. And the stuff at sea is magnificent. The rest of it is John Wick in the nineteenth century Cayman Islands with hand grenades. There are hand grenades, which, as an achronistic and dunk as that might be, makes more sense than Priyanka Chopra Jonas as an action star. She can do the bloody choreography and looks good doing it, But I do not believe she is, or ever was a pirate.

How can this be the grown version of the little punker pirate with a mohawk and the steely look that we keep getting in these brief flashbacks that character at that point in their life might have been an interesting watch. But this story woof reminded me of the movie Wonderland. Have you ever seen Wonderland? With Val Kilmer as John Holmes. John Holmes is, of course, the well endowed porn star that served as the basis for Dirk Diggler in Boogie Knights.

Wonderland starts with titles telling us that John Holmes was the king of porn, and he starred in over a thousand adult films, and he slept with over fourteen thousand women. And then this is the story that happens after that. What what are you talking about? No, I wanted to see that movie which that story is Boogie Knights. But like I said, if you're a fan of Boogey Knight and you have not seen the documentary Exhausted, do yourself a favor, because clearly pt Anderson watched that documentary a lot before he sat down to write Boogie Knights.

One last digression. Is it odd that the film Boogie Knights doesn't feature the song Boogie Nights? Am I the only one that that bothered? Maybe? So?

Anyway, I couldn't stand the bluff. People might have a good time with it, but I was bored twenty minutes in and then it did not improve. And actually, Carl Urban, as much as I love him, seems to drift in and out of his quasi Irish accent. And I don't know, man. Anyway, surely a remake of one of my favorite Japanese horror flicks of all time will cheer me up, right?

Yeah? Sure? The Dreadful, starring Sophie Turner and fellow Game of Throne start Kit Harrington, is a remake of Oni Baba, which is one of the most atmospheric, slow burned thrillers you will ever see, a film that, in addition to all of that, manages to be a crazy feminist statement in like nineteen sixty Japan. It's the tale of an elderly woman and her daughter in law. Her son has gone off and died in battle.

They keep themselves alive by robbing returning soldiers of their arms and armor and selling them, and how their dynamic changes dramatically once a new element, a young, able bodied soldier, becomes introduced into their lives. The Dreadful swaps the locale for the English coast. And they should have stopped right there and said, you know what, instead of a remaking Only Baba, let's just go back and watch Only Baba as you all should. So you see. Given how much I hated the possible reviews, and believe me, I could have gone deep on both of those films, the only option was no new Roundup and her frequent co host and I got to say one of my better friends best is a bit final, you know.

But anyway, Mike White of the Projection Booth allowed me to drop an episode of his show that I guessed that on in the place of the round up this week. Oh a word on Monsieur Blanc. Now stop me if I've told this one before, but it's worth repeating. Back in ninety three, I was working as a projectionist. I was showing reservoir Dogs.

Met all of the reservoir Dogs, met Lawrence Bender and Tarantino, and basically all of the independent film scene came to this theater at one point or another, and I loved reservoir dogs. Loved reservoir dogs. My theater had been a vaudeville house in a previous life, and the lobby was just a corridor basically, with the concession stand directly in front of you as you entered, and then on either side were the theater doors Theater one, Theater two. But to the left and right on either side were staircases that led up to the restrooms and actually a huge connecting hallway. And I don't know how this theater never turned it into a lounge or anything, but anyway, it doesn't matter.

They've gutted the theater since then and turned it into a bicycle shop. Well, as soon as I heard mister Blonde ask about listening to k Billy super sounds of the seventies. In the middle of Reservoir Dogs, in that jangly guitar of Stuck in the Middle with You comes droning up, I would slip out of the projection booth and park myself on one of those staircase landings and watch, without fail as the nauseated and horrified came stumbled out of theater number one. I considered myself a cinema referee at that point. Okay, you're all set, you can go back in.

There will be no more torture, and they didn't show anything. By the way, I. Don't think Tarantino got skilled as a filmmaker until Kill Bill, but his instinct in that scene to drift away to a bit of graffiti that reads watch your Head was pretty fucking solid, and getting to watch its direct impact on the movie going public was a stunning reinforcement of the power of cinema. I read everything I could get my hands on of Tarantino's This was during the release of Reservoir Dogs, so nothing else of his had actually come out. I got to read true romance Natural Born Killers, which by the way, started out as one screenplay in its initial incarnation.

It was a movie about Clarence Warley, screenwriter and how his creations Mickey and Mallory came to life. And it's all from a script that Roger Avery started writing. You know that Tarantino took that script and rewrote it and got two movies out of it. I was also able to get my hands on pulp fiction, which it was a little more clear there the Roger Avery connection. That is a great script.

I never gave a shit about the fractured timeline business. The movie is an anthology, just the same as Trilogy of Terror. It just so happens that these characters recur, and it's crime, not horror. Anyway. I had more than one argument, not mild disagreements, but screaming matches with a number of film school dildos or the endless horde of pretentious art house fuckers who argued down the violence and the language of reservoir dogs.

And not one of these high minded pricks, these lovers of all world cinema, those who would end up making the Independent Spirit Awards happen had they ever said to me, you know that Reservoir Dogs is just a ripoff of City on Fire, because that might have shut me up. I wasn't introduced to that idea until a friend of mine, the one with a stack of fate magazines by his bedside, lent me a videotape called who do you think You're Fooling? It's on YouTube and there will be a link. That tape put the zap on my head, man seen by seeing comparisons of the two films. There was a follow up when pulp fiction came out, and it made the case even more so.

You can call it Tarantino does hip hop. You can call it recycling. You can call it postmodern picking at the detritus of all the culture deemed not worthy of praise. And it is all of those things, and it's fucking plagiarism. Great artists, Steele, Fuck you.

This isn't a mural based on a Fresco. It's snatching plots in dialogue from a recent recent movies with the unspoken understanding that most of America wasn't seeing those movies, nor would they. Sure we'll fess up that it's an homage after the fact, but we'll keep pretty mum that Hey, I saw this awesome Hong Kong flic about diamond thieves and an undercover cop and thought, what would I do with that idea? You dig everybody? Twenty years later and I find myself invited onto a cold check of the night Stalker podcast to talk horror in the Heights.

I never liked that episode, but I enjoyed talking to co host Mike White, and clearly we got on because we've done two series now as well. There's four years here on midnight viewing. And the point of all of this is, I'm thank you for allowing me to drop a guest spot of mine in the place of last week's round up. A very gracious move of the guy who made that videotape exposing Tarantino all those years ago. Small world, Strange world.

They ought of sale tickets? Are you ready to segue? Michael Madson, mister Blonde showed up to the premiere of Everybody Says I Love You, which was happening at my theater. It was a cast and crew screening the West Coast cast and crew and hanging out on the Toronto about an hour or so before the show is Michael Madson. So I go out to have a cigarette and I lighted up and he says, what's that you got there?

A Marlborough. Then he pulls out a pack of Lucky Strikes and says, why don't you smoke this and be a man? And I said, because then I'd end up sounding like you. My late wife, my bride, loved that story because she loved Michael Madson. When she and I got back together seventeen years after parting, one of the many, many possessions she brought to our new family was a door poster of Michael Madson as mister Blonde, leaned against the side with fast food cup in his hand.

So, basically, life size mister Blonde has lived with me from then on. He's still here, He's in the closet beside me. So I had to keep on loving reservoir Dogs even with all the dirty pool plagiarism, because she loved it, My bride. Can anybody help me, please? I didn't want this, I didn't want any of this.

Please help. Help Before it happened you, that's. An accidental, an accident. We dug you up, we brought you back to life. Get on the stage and I call her that, this nursname.

What do you want with the dead girl? I'm the same, born from the dead. I am, I'm monster? Yeah, so am I. That's welcome?

Is that black hole. The corrupt are going to see? Life is here and it's coming to you from the monsters. Yes, yes, you'll please. I'm sorry?

Are you sorry for? Did you do something wrong? I mean you thought you might get away with. But I've got some in a say. And I'm saying it.

The Bride, Oh, Drakensteine. No, just the Bride. Scared. Oh, we're talking about The Bride starring Jennifer Beals. Remember that version with Clancy Brown as the Monster.

That was my favorite portrayal of the creature as a character. There he was named a victor and his creator was Charles Frankenstein for no good goddamn reason, who was played by Rimstone and Trica, looking sting good old Gordon Sumner taking time from telling ten sum nurse tales to remind us what a fucking terrible actor he is. I liked it that version of The Bride's Tale. You can't held the candle of the one we're talking about today, though, you know everything I watch or listen to or read any bit of culture I'm consuming. I'm perfectly happy to be entertained by.

If it happens to challenge me, Well, I can derive equal, if not a bit greater pleasure, but poetry, actual bolt of lightning, clarity of vision for a brief moment, a eureka, there is more to the universe than we could scarcely imagine. Moments are really what I'm looking for, and those are rare. I'll settle for moments of a reverie. Those are pretty fucking rare as well. So leave it to Maggie Gillenhall to come along and say, hey, let's make a movie made of those.

Now, this is technically a remake of the Bride of Frankenstein itself, a movie that might have been a sequel on par with Son of Frankenstein or Frankenstein Meets the wolf Man if not for original Frankenstein. Filmmaker James well Well had zero interest in return to Baron Frankenstein in his Monster, having you know, told the whole fucking story already. When he was offered the chance to make a passion project of his One More River, he reluctantly agreed to return to the lab but it was to be under his terms, and he immediately threw out a draft for a sequel entitled The New Adventures of Frankenstein The Monster Lives. Another whole script was drafted by the studio to no one's satisfaction, and finally Wail himself hired John Balderston and then playwright William Hurlbut, who took off from the original novel's idea of Frankenstein making a mate for the creature and spun it into a holy new bit of fiction.

In the book, Frankenstein creates the creature's bride but destroys her before she's reanimated. Fun fact elsa Lanchester, who played the bride, was a redhead, and so is the bride. The pictures of the actual wig are available online in living color. We've all been laboring under the notion that it was a white striped brunette. Lies.

Also, if you want to see miss Lanchester late in life, you can check her out in an episode of Night gall a segment called Green Fingers, which you can hear us talk about here on Midnight Viewing. She is unhinged in it. And if you can't get enough Lanchester, then you should check out one of her three albums. I have Elsa Lanchester Sing's Body cock Me Songs on. LP No Wonder.

I can hardly wait for Doc to come along. At every aperture a boy's found, and as I seven ate them, there's just one thing that's wrong. There aren't enough peoples to go around. Few peak in mine, see why you will see a sight most festidious. I a few peak in Mizebo.

You'll no longer be a free If you think that you will be, why not try. Eh little known fact about her She was a vaudeville performer who'd sing dirty songs on stage. Those albums are basically her act. But that is the past. Since then, we've gotten The Bride hundreds of times, and cartoons and comics and films.

I've always been a big fan of Magenta's transformation at the end of Rocky Horror. Today we're discussing the Bride exclamation point, though I have a sneaking suspicion from an early line of dialogue that the actual title might have been The motherfucking Bride. It's nineteen thirty six here, but it might as well be nineteen eleventy. I imagine Tim Burton's Gotham City can be found at the end of one of this film's highways. Speaking of Tim Burton, I'm not hearing anyone mention his name in relation to this film, and I'd argue that he's as big an influence as anyone, not necessarily the black and white aesthetic, but the outside as misunderstood monster.

The bride could easily have a scissor hands in her bloodline, and while this movie is all about her, it resembles her husband more so in that it's a film stitched together from other films and genres and media and politics, gender, sexual and otherwise. It's a patchwork pastiche and it's pretty funking audacious. Overall. There are bits of modern swagger and an especially large swath of the film inspired by seventies experimental filmmakers like Laura Mulvey or Sally Potter, and a knowing avant garde influence of someone like Derek Jarmin. This bride wouldn't be out of place hanging out with the punker legions in his film Jubilee.

All the while, the film delivers a lover's on the run story that most obviously resembles Bonnie and Clyde, with their exploits being widely devoured and imitated by like minded folk. There's also some Rodgers and a Staire, some Nick and Nora Charles Hell. There's even a bit of a primer on the difference between Hawthorne and Melville. And like the Bride of Frankenstein, it begins with Mary Shelley herself in the dial it was Elsa Lanchester in an imagined scene between her and Byron and her husband. Here it starred Jesse Buckley great in both roles.

She's having a moment what with this in the Academy Award nomination for Hamnet. This is an in your face, fourth wall, all wall shattering portrayal, because if you're gonna make her a character, you've got to do it right, or at least make it fucking weird, which they do. Not only is this movie all the other things that I've mentioned, it's also a ghostly possession flick, as Mary Shelley has waited a century to say what she'd actually meant with that little horror book of hers, waited for the right body to inhabit, which is not a full possession either. It's more like all of me with Steve Martin stuck with Lily Tomlin controlling half of his body. If Steve Martin's primary personality was that of an amnesiac woman and Lily Tomlin was represented like a case of witty Tourette syndrome, Mary Shelley here is constantly bursting past the Bride's personality to shout truth to the void.

Now the original Bridan Frankenstein introduced us to Pretorious, the even matter mad scientist who spurs the creation of the Bride in the first place. That character is found nowhere in the Frankenstein book, but he's given remade new life here as doctor Euphronius. And here's where my years of studying Latin and ancient literature finally pays off. I guess Euphronius is a super odd shout out to an ancient Greek potter. He was known for painting anatomy, so I guess it ties in.

But that's odd, Man, really odd. She's played by Annette Benning in a amused and blustery and sometimes cruel performance. Man She's always been the fucking bee's knees. I remember when she dropped out at the catwoman role and Batman returns and I thought at the time good because they had already announced it was Michelle Pfeiffer. And nothing has dissuaded me from the notion that we got the movie in performance we were meant to.

But watching Avan Benning just keeps soaring over the years in every film and every varied fucking role she chooses kind of makes me wonder what her Catwoman would have been like. Now, unlike most of Frankenstein's stories, we've gotten this isn't to give me a mate, or I'll murder you tail. When it comes to the Bride's resurrection, Frank the Monster comes literally hat in hand, asking for Euphronius's help. In this world, everyone knows about the real experiments done a century ago by doctor Frankenstein, and they also know that his monster is still loose in the world I mentioned this movie is audacious, right, and Frank is played by another fucking heavy hitter, Christian Bale, giving us a Frank we really haven't seen before, no small feat considering what Frankenstein haven't we had at this point.

Well, like everything else going on in the Bride, this Frank is the sum of his parts, so we get the entire gamut of emotion, but particularly joy. That's the Frankenstein we've never really landed on before. I mean, let's face it, Frankenstein's monster is the first emo teenager living the dream of confronting God for your miserable existence. As such, he's usually pretty fucking mopi in all the depictions thus far, all he needed was a little love in our boyfriend. He becomes a dancing machine.

Don't we all good for you? Frankie. All of it is shot gorgeously. Everything is so fucking considered. I'm thinking of the glass coffee cups the bride and Frank and Doctor Euphronius are sipping from, and the horror of the bride's smashing ones so casually.

The costumes are fucking cool. Frank and his Homburg hat and black kerchief brought up to obscure the scarred lower portion of his face. It kept giving me vibes of the shadow who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men. And let's talk about the splotch, the mark that blocked on the bride's face, the one that when I saw it initially gave me a sinking feeling that this would be closer to Lisa Frankenstein than the Bride of Frankenstein. But man, it works like a fucking sigil, and it's such a clever overall reworking of the Bride's often imitated, never duplicated look.

The hair straight up shocked into place, with the white stripes slashing in either direction. They've turned that on its head here, well, quite literally. She's all pale and cadaverous, with her dark locks replaced with a platinum tangle. And the negative image is the black mark on her cheek, which wends its way around her neck and down her forearm to her fingertips, much like stitching. The mark itself is expelled formula used to bring her back from the dead.

She coughs it up and it stains everything it touches. The movie starts in Chicago, where together the Bride she doesn't know her true name, and frank start hitting the town until the town starts hitting back, and then its skull crushing and let's lam it to the Big Apple time. And as lively as the movie has been in the Windy City, it really hits its stride in New York. And I kept thinking about Maggie Gillenhall in the Deuce, that fucking magnificent television series about Times Square and forty second Street and how it rose in the seventies through sex and crime, and then in the mid eighties when all of those people's usefulness had expired, they were all discarded and pushed out so the real criminals, investment banks and developers could take over.

She was a producer on that series to starring, and it kept getting echoes of the show as The Bride and Frankie drop into the famed movie houses of Times Square. Gillenhall wouldn't get in the director's chair herself until just a few years ago in twenty twenty two with The Lost Daughter, which happened to also starred The Bride herself Jesse Buckley. In addition to directing The Bride, Gillenhall wrote this script. And not only is it crazy to me that the movie got made, but it's in theaters right now with an eighty million dollar price tag. I'm not saying that incredulously.

I'm saying it's one of the few times of late I can think there's hope for the industry as a whole. And to think that this was at Netflix to start with a higher budget. I guess they figured the same old fucking story was more important and pulled the plug on the bride. Not everything works. The film is punctuated with surrealist conversations between the bride and Mary Shelley, which can be a bit on the nose even if they are stunningly realized, and the constant war in the real world between the bride and Shelley's personalities can come across like Robin Williams in the midst of a cocaine fuel free association.

Having Alexander Heck negotiate the pieces, like having Charles Manson as a male nurse can be fine. Trump's starting again bestro jingle, it doesn't hurt, It's not bad. I fade Burnshafe, cramp Fest, a pinch. Pound, and I'm not sure we need to spend as much, or really any of the time we do with their pursuers, a detective duo played by Peter Sarsgard and Penelope Cruz. What weight does a man hunt have if our leads in the middle of being chased by trigger happy police can enter a high society party and start serving drinks and blend in and then the scene eventually turns into a big musical number, a number which attempts to but doesn't quite succeed in supplanting the other use of putting on the ritz by a Frankenstein he of the Young Variety, and Gillenhall has a tendency to speechify and moralize a little too, demonstrably slowing the action down a few times to point out the iniquity of life for anyone deemed different or monstrous, usually after a clumsy example of the expected, such as the most dreaded, over used plot point of all time, the attempted rape.

I can't give highest marks to a film that shares its lead motivation with Cameron Poe from con Air. I keep reading comparisons to Purple Rose of Cairo or Broadway Danny Rose. Let me tell you something, Woody Allen is nowhere near this fucking movie, even as a progenitor as far as nineteen thirties characters obsessed with the magic of movies. Then it's definitely British author creator Dennis Potter and his entire body of work, in particular both versions of Pennies from Heaven, where a desperate hero spends a goodly portion of his life imagining himself in grand movie musicals. Here, in Frank's case, his obsession is a Robbie Reid, a Fred Astaire proxy played by Jake Gillenhall.

At his SMARMI best I mentioned Bonnie and Clyde because everyone is going to mention Bonnie and Clyde. Hell, there's a character after them named Clyde. But I'd say this movie overall bears a much more striking resemblance to my favorite example of the lovers on the real genre. That's nineteen fifties gun Crazy. That's the one with Peggy Cummins and John Dall, not Drew Barrymore and James Lagurow.

This film shares that one's immediacy in sensuality and general sense of danger. I'm going to watch The Bride again as soon as i'm able. Like I've said, it has problems, but the problems are overreaching of striding a little too far out into the deep end and having to be pulled back to shore. But I'll fucking take that any day over the same formulas they keep spitting out at us. At least this film is trying to get you to feel something new, and I'd say in the world of classy, thoughtful, elevated retellings of the classic monsters.

So far, the ladies are kicking ass Invisible Man and now the Bride. They stand head and fucking shoulders over Nosferatu and the wolf Man and that fucking mummy flick Ish. You know, I feel so much better having seen this. Long Live the Bride. How about a sequel now, Husband of Frankenstein and all the right wingers that lose their minds?

That is going to do it for the weekly round up this week. Thanks for your patience everybody. Obviously I've switched things up here. You're supposed to be listening to a Star Trek episode right now, but that's going to be out on Friday, So tune in on Friday. You know what we're doing.

It's gonna be Star Trek Fest, and then the week after, just a couple of days after is going to be Hammerhouse of Horror. So or is advice versa? I don't know. Everything's available on the Patreon right now. Thanks everybody.

I'll talk to you next week At