Movies

What Hump? Mel Brooks’ YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN Plays Midnights This Weekend at The Tivoli!

By Tom Stockman | October 8, 2014

“I am not a Frankenstein. I’m a Fronkensteen!”

YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN plays this weekend (October 10^th and 11th) at the Tivoli as part of their Reel Late at the Tivoli Midnight series.

Good comedies are rare. Great ones are rarer. Great parodies are needles in the haystack, and this is it. The parody can be brilliantly funny (most are horrid), but YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN is near perfect.

Mel Brooks hit all nails right on the head in his black & white classic from 1974. Taking its themes from the Mary Shelley novel and providing some spot-on homage/parody to the James Whale classic BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN (and plenty of references to SON OF FRANKENSTEIN as well), YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN is a breathless laugh and a half. In a weak comedy, you have the entire cast setting up one character for the laughs. Here, you have every character providing humor in every scene. None more than the late Marty Feldman as Igor, who slyly seems to know that he is in a parody movie. (Note how his hump changes sides and his occasional hilarious double takes and asides).

Teri Garr is a combination of fabulously sexy and extremely funny – a difficult combination to pull off. Madeline Khan is hysterical as usual as the frigid fiancé Elizabeth, whose long dormant sexuality is awakened by the monster himself. And of course, there is Gene Wilder, the straight man in this madness, deflecting jokes, setting up pratfalls, while all the while trying desperately to bring his monster to life. Also play close attention to the Inspector, a small role played by Kenneth Mars, who played the psychotic Nazi composer Franz Liebkind in Brooks earlier film THE PRODUCERS

YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN has not aged a bit. See it midnights this weekend and laugh and laugh and laugh!