Hoping to launch a new series, NBC did the monster mash with House of Frankenstein 1997, a three-hour movie stretched across two nights. It was not a graveyard smash, nor a ratings one. Nice try, though, peacock — although maybe you should’ve scheduled it before Halloween instead of the week after?
In a marked detour from Universal’s 1944 House of Frankenstein, the titular spot is a hip Goth club, despite looking like the Hard Rock Cafe and Meow Wolf got together without protection and beget a pop-up experience for The Crow. Its proprietor (Greg Wise, Johnny English) has a team in the Arctic Circle looking for the frozen corpse of Frankenstein’s monster to display in his Los Angeles hotspot. Lo and behold, they find it!
However, the mute monster (Peter Crombie, 1988’s The Blob) is alive — alive, I tell ya! — and flees to the L.A. streets, where his facial scars and odd coloring won’t look out of place. He’s saved from homelessness by a kind pal (Richard Libertini, Fletch) who teaches him how to eat Froot Loops.
Meanwhile, Det. Vernon Coyle (Adrian Pasdar, Near Dark) investigates a serial killer dubbed “the Midnight Raptor” — actually a vampiric man-bat whose flight is rendered by director Peter Werner (I Married a Centerfold) in RGB Predator vision. As if that weren’t a full docket, Coyle’s also hunting a man who turns into a wolf, but at least that intros him to a near-victim (Meet the Parents’ Teri Polo) who’s totally DTF.
As scripted by J.B. White (NBC’s Peter Benchley’s The Beast), House of Frankenstein 1997 ends with closure, yet also a clear path toward further adventures the network chose not to take. That decision was wise because even juggling so many balls, the made-for-TV “event” is about twice as long than it needs to be.
The first half is the strongest, with Pasdar and Polo using their likability to overcome foolish dialogue, culminating in a sex scene that’s actually erotic, primetime limitations be damned. The hokey second bides time before pretty much lifting its club-set climactic showdown from the previous year’s From Dusk Till Dawn. As expected, the effects are telepic-chintzy with one notable exception: the makeup for the man-bat. The less said about the werewolf transformations, the better. —Rod Lott