Gods and Monsters

Like the zombies he immortalized as the director of two Frankenstein movies, James Whale lived on well after his career was dead. Sticking closely to Christopher Bram's novel Father of Frankenstein, writer-director Bill Condon imagines the ailing Whale's encounter with a sexy gardener named Clay Boone (Brendan Fraser) who appears to mow his lawn one afternoon. The old wolf's Hollywood tales get the young man slowly out of his clothes, but Whale the director has a grander, more ghoulish performance in mind.

Gods and Monsters is juicily acted and always entertaining, with Ian McKellen ideal as the aging aesthete and Lynn Redgrave delightful as the overprotective Hungarian housekeeper who calls him "Mr. Jimmy" or "The Master." Fraser, however, never conveys what's in it for Clay, and too often the film plays like a ping-pong match with one player missing. (The scene where the pair share oversized cigars is a wonderful exception.) Whale's World War I flashbacks, parallels between horror in the trenches and on screen -- it all proves as creaky as the staircase in a haunted house. Screens at the Copley Place Saturday, September 12 at 7:45 and 9:45 p.m. and Sunday, September 13 at 1:15, 3:15, and 5:15 p.m.

-- Scott Heller

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Film Festival Feature Films

| With Friends like These | Digging to China | Monument Ave. | Rounders | Lolita | God Said, 'Ha!' | My Son the Fanatic | The Mighty | Shattered Image | Gods and Monsters | Xui Xui: The Sent-Down Girl | Without Limits | Clubland | The Inheritors | The Celebration | Urban Ghost Story | The Boys | Living Out Loud | Stuart Bliss | The General | The Kindness of Strangers | Dancing at Lughnasa | Central Station | The Human Race | Double You Street | Oberwasser -- By U-boat to America | The Witman Boys | The Cruise | Confession of a Sexist Pig | Melting Pot |

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More Boston Film Festival information, film descriptions, and show times

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