Deadbeat Dad

Film: Frankenstein (2025)
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on various players.

I am not shy about my love of the work of Guillermo del Toro on this blog. I don’t often go to the theater, but Frankenstein is the first live-action del Toro film in a bit that I haven’t seen on its release. GdT has a reputation of loving his monsters. He’s also someone who, if you go through his films carefully, always makes humans worse than the monsters he shows us (or makes the standard vampires worse than the mutant vampires in Blade II). This is a running theme for him, so Frankenstein was an inevitability.

The running wisdom of the original Mary Shelley novel is that smart people realize that Frankenstein is the doctor, not the monster; wise people realize that Dr. Frankenstein is the monster. Del Toro is going to stay true to this. Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac) is absolutely the villain of this story, while the creature (Jacob Elordi), while monstrous in appearance and sometimes in action, is clearly being depicted as an innocent.

Little Wooden Boy

Film: Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on Fire!

It was always going to be a case of “when” when it came to Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio. I will watch anything that del Toro does, and at the very least, I needed to keep my streak of seeing everything the man has written or directed alive. I also knew that this has been a passion project of del Toro for years, and if nothing else, that’s going to make it worth seeing.

On the surface, this version of Pinocchio would seem to be just another version of the story that everyone knows. That truth doesn’t go beyond the surface, though. This is a complete reimagining of the basic Pinocchio story. The basics are still the same—an old man carves a wooden puppet that, through some magical means, the puppet is granted life. Through a series of Cmisadventures, and guided in some respects by a cricket that acts as his conscience, the puppet learns life lessons on his way to becoming a real boy.

Born for it

Films: Nightmare Alley (2021)
Format: Streaming video from Hulu Plus on Fire!

I went into Nightmare Alley with high expectations and a good amount of trepidation. Why? The expectations come from the fact that Guillermo del Toro is my favorite working director by a large margin. He’s one of the few directors of whom I have seen everything and will continue to see everything that he directs. One the other hand, this feels like a departure from del Toro’s oeuvre, similar in some respects to Crimson Peak, but without the supernatural attachments. Also, I love the original 1947 version of this film and I was worried that this might not live up to it.

I’ll drop the opinion here so that you can jump to the end if you want to avoid any spoilers. Nightmare Alley is being touted as not a remake of the 1947 film, but a new adaptation of the novel. This version is much more stylish in many ways, and it’s the sort of cast that anyone would dream of. It’s also substantially longer than the first film, adding a good 40 minutes or so to the running time (although, admittedly, much of that is credits). I like the film, but it does feel bloated to me, and I think it would be a better film with a trim of 20-30 minutes. That said, I’m not sure what I would trim.

Ten Days of Terror!: Mimic

Films: Mimic
Format: HBO Go on big ol’ television.

How do you deal with the worst film of an acclaimed director? That’s exactly what I’m faced with when approaching Mimic. I love the work of Guillermo del Toro pretty much out of hand. Even his flawed movies are interesting and worth seeing. It’s my opinion that Mimic is the most flawed of his movies, so flawed in fact that he disowned the film after it was released since he felt that his own work was so constantly changed and affected by the demands of the producers.

Mimic starts with a fatal plague that has struck New York killing hundreds of children. Because this is a movie, deputy director of the CDC, Dr. Peter Mann (Jeremy Northam) recruits Dr, Susan Tyler (Mira Sorvino), an entomologist to help. Dr. Tyler, using the magic of genetic manipulation, creates a new species of large insect she dubs the Judas. This new breed secretes an enzyme that accelerates the metabolism of cockroaches, which are the carriers of the plague. With their metabolism ramped up, the roaches starve to death no matter how fast they ingest food. Soon, the roach population of New York is virtually non-existent, the plague is gone, and everyone is happy. Since the roaches were bred essentially sterile, no one is concerned about what might happen to them.

The Heart Wants What the Heart Wants

Film: The Shape of Water
Format: Classic Cinemas Charlestowne 18.

I would be lying if I suggested that I didn’t have high hopes for The Shape of Water. I always have high hopes for anything touched by Guillermo del Toro, and that’s especially true when he’s sitting in the director’s chair. The Shape of Water is the film I’ve been waiting for since I saw the first trailer. The movie has been given a slow open, and now, about a good month after the film officially opened, the closest theater showing the movie is a good 45 minutes away. Still, I see all of del Toro’s movies in the theater, so it was only a matter of time before I went to see it.

I’m going to spill the beans a little here. The Shape of Water is good, even very good. It is as beautiful as any of del Toro’s films and perhaps quite a bit more beautiful than many of them. But it doesn’t quite rise to the level of great. There are moments that are as good as anything del Toro has ever done. But I guessed the ending, and the ending is something the film doesn’t quite earn.

Wednesday Horror: Cronos

Films: Cronos
Format: Streaming video from Kanopy on laptop.

The school I work for has an extensive online library that recently has included a film library. If only this had shown up a few years ago! Still, better late than never, right? There’s plenty of interesting films in the Kanopy library, including Guillermo del Toro’s first film, Cronos. This is an auspicious debut. While it’s unpolished in certain ways, it also shows a lot of the themes that del Toro will hit on for pretty much his entire career. One of his main themes is that for del Toro, the worst monsters are always human. Sure, there are monsters in his films, but many of them are just doing what they are more or less programmed to do. While they can be terrible and frightening, they are no more evil than a shark or a hungry lion. People are always capable of the greatest good and the worst evil.

Cronos is something like a vampire story. It’s very different from the traditional vampire tale, though. This isn’t a grand Gothic romance. In fact, it’s far closer to a tragedy, where the people we are going to be following are caught up in events that they have no control over, and that will change them terribly through no fault of their own. We start with a little bit of voice over that tells us of a 16th-century alchemist who wanted to extend his life. He created a device he labelled the Cronos device. He disappears, only to be discovered in 1937 in the collapse of an old building, his heart pierced by a piece of the debris.

Ten Days of Terror!: Crimson Peak

Film: Crimson Peak
Format: Goodrich Randall 15 Theater.

Anyone who knows me knows that I’m a sucker for Guillermo del Toro. I admit it—I like the guy’s movies. A big part of that is that I like how he uses monsters. For del Toro, monsters and ghosts may be agents that alert us to horror but are never the true purveyors of horror. No, for del Toro, humans are always both the best and the worst creatures in the world. We are, for him, capable of the greatest good and of the most shocking atrocities. I knew the minute I saw the trailer for Crimson Peak that it would be one of my rare trips to the theater. And so it was.

We begin with Edith Cushing (Mia Wasikowska) standing bloodied and cut telling us that ghosts are real. The bulk of the film then takes place in flashback to show us how Edith came to this state. We flash all the way back to her childhood and the death of her mother, who returns as a black and skeletal figure to Edith to warn her of Crimson Peak. This warning is repeated years later when Edith has grown and has tried her hand at writing a ghost story novel. Denied publication by a New York publisher probably because she is a woman in Victorian-era society who has written something without a romance, she endeavors to type her novel instead to not be betrayed by her feminine handwriting.

Ten Days of Terror!: The Devil's Backbone

Film: The Devil’s Backbone (El Espinazo del Diablo)
Format: DVD from personal collection on laptop.

The Devil’s Backbone is one of those rare movies that appears on all three of my horror movie lists. It’s also a film I’ve avoided reviewing for some time. The reason for that is simple: I love The Devil’s Backbone like it is one of my own children. From the first time I saw it, this film rocketed into my all-time top-5 and has stayed put. What the hell do I say about it more than it’s damn close to perfect and everybody should watch it? Glowing, effusive, ridiculously positive reviews aren’t that much fun to write or read, but that’s what we’re in for here. I love everything about this movie.

For those who have seen Pan’s Labyrinth but not this one, we’re in similar territory. Pan’s Labyrinth is, in many ways, the younger sister of this film. Change the girl to a boy and change the fantasy aspects to a ghost story and you’ve got the basic idea. We’re still in the Spanish Civil War and we’re still in a film where the story works as a metaphor for the war and the war works as a metaphor for the story.

Princess Moanna

Film: El Laberinto del Fauno (Pan’s Labyrinth)
Format: DVD from personal collection on big ol’ television.

Within the first 20-25 minutes of El Laberinto del Fauno (Pan’s Labyrinth), we have seen a fairy, met the faun of the title, and have seen two men murdered in cold blood, one by being brutally smashed in the face with a wine bottle by the commandant of a military camp. In each case, we are shown the main themes of Guillermo del Toro’s film. The fairy is not a cute critter from a Disney film. The faun is no benign beast of the forest. The commandant (Sergi Lopez) is a true monster in human form.

Few directors are able to blend the idea of the fantastic with the terrible world of the real as well as del Toro. It’s familiar ground for him--Hellboy and particularly The Devil’s Backbone walk these same avenues, but both of those films have a very different vision than this one. The release of this film put del Toro on the map in many ways, particularly for the art house crowd. There’s a reason for that—this film is in many ways the highest realization of del Toro’s personal vision.