Frankenstein and Me Review

Three films fight inside this one, a monster picture, a grief story and a small town coming of age tale, and none of them wins. Jamieson Boulanger plays Earl, a boy who hoards Famous Monsters magazines and convinces himself that a figure pulled from a wrecked carnival sideshow is the genuine creature. Burt Reynolds turns up in dream sequences as the dead father, coasting on charm in a part that seems to have taken a long weekend. Louise Fletcher brings more gravity than the script has earned.

The monster material is handsome in a homemade way, fog and a rubber mask doing honest work on a budget that plainly could not afford better, while the daylight scenes are flat and televisual, lit like a Sunday afternoon rerun. Ryan Gosling, fifteen and mostly employed to be exasperated at his older brother, finds two or three moments of unforced timing and has nothing to build them into. The worst of it is the pacing. Long stretches stall in schoolyard business that leads nowhere, and then the ending the film has promised for an hour goes by in four minutes.