The Flash (Robert Iscove, 1990)

Flash-backs, and red glad rags.

Now here's a point - a "Flashpoint", if you will - we have something of a surfeit of scarlet speedsters these days.  Whether it's the continuing adventures of Grant Gustin as the Fastest Man Alive in the CW's The Flash (in it's fourth season at time of typing), being about to debut of the big screen in the form of Ezra Miller in Justice League (Zack Snyder [and Joss Whedon], 2017) or various appearances in animated adventures voiced by TV's forgotten Ferris Bueller Charlie Schlatter and Alex Niforatos among others, DC Comics' crimson comet has never been so ubiquitous.

Timely enough then, if time be need be, to take a retrospective genuflect at the first live-action iteration of the iconic sonic boom dodger - the 1990 television series starring John Wesley Shipp (Bastian's dad in The NeverEnding Story II: The Next Chapter [George Miller, 1990], Dawson's dad in perpetual teen-angst whine fest that blighted my late teens Dawson's Creek [1998-2001] and the current Gustin-flavoured Barry Allen's dad in The Flash - the guy does seem to have somewhat cornered the market in playing dads).  I wasn't aware of the fact that an actual ongoing TV series was extant at the time, it having being shown on Sky in the UK a few years before we got round to having satellite television (though an uncle did have a BSB "Squariel" for those old enough to actually remember what they were and find it amusing - a decision up there with "Beta will outlast VHS, it's just a fad" and "I'm saving up for a Laserdisc player" in the Great Moves irony stakes), but the pilot movie did appear on the shelf of the local video shop, seemingly as a new stand-alone superhero movie in its own right (followed a year later by Flash II: Revenge of the Trickster [Danny Bilson, 1991], guest starring Mark Hamill himself as the villain, a 'sequel' whose slightly uneven feel was by dint of being two episodes of the series edited together.  A further trip to the Well of Diminishing Returns would lead to my baffled reaction of "Another one?!?" as Flash 3: Deadly Nightshade [Bruce Bilson, 1992] arrived unbidden to an uncaring world and even my childhood self would suspect that this wasn't a "real film").

A while back, i postulated in a piece for the rather nice website We Are Cult upon the notion of a 'Marvel Phase Zero' - a an early stage of the Marvel Comics Universe pre- Jon Favreau's 2008 Iron Man consisting of the various TV pilots and series of the late 1970s and early '80s (the original article can be found here: http://wearecult.rocks/the-original-dr-strange-and-other-stories-marvels-phase-zero ) - and perhaps the DCEU, such as it currently is, had their own incipient epoch in the '70s and '80s; Christopher Reeve's four Superman outings and Michael Keaton's Gothamite Dark Knight being of the period.  The Wesley Shipp incarnation should, in my opinion, stand proud in these ranks of DC's emergent age alongside the aforesaid heroes, as well as Lynda Carter's Wonder Woman, Helen Slater's Supergirl and Dick Durock's Swamp Thing.

The setting of course is Central City, a twilit noirish urban sprawl almost but not quite identical in look and feel to the Gotham of Tim Burton's then-recent Chiropteran Crusader blockbuster Batman, but on a slightly smaller televisual scale (this being filmed at the Burbank studios of Warners rather than Pinewood).  This small-m metropolis is under siege from a criminal motorcycle gang known as the Dark Riders led by the enigmatic, charismatic (and probably systematic and hydromatic) Pike - played with a scene chewing elan by Dex Dexter of Dynasty Michael Nader, finally getting the Alexis role of butch bitch and having his own henchmen to boss about and abuse.  On the tail of the Riders' trail of havoc and destruction is newly promoted chief of the Central City police Jay Allen (Tim Thomerson, a familiar face in numerous Charles Band movies but chiefly Jack Deth in 1984's Trancers and its many sequels, as well as incarnating the eponymous Dollman [Albert Pyun, 1991]), scion of a family of CCPD cops headed by patriarch Henry Allen (M. Emmett Walsh, who's starred in... oh, everything, really, from Blade Runner [Ridley Scott, 1982] to The Pope of Greenwich Village [Stuart Rosenberg, 1984] to Sundown: the Vampire in Retreat [Anthony Hickox, 1989] to providing the voice of Cosmic Owl in Adventure Time [2010+]).  Henry's pride in his eldest son's following in his flat footsteps is matched by his antipathy toward's his younger son's choice of criminal investigation vocation, Barry (Shipp) being a 'mere' forensic science investigator - or a CSI as i believe they're known these days ('tis perhaps only by the caprice of chance of network that the present Flash series didn't find itself titled CSI: Central City).

Barry balances his daily routine of dodging his father's long streak of pithy remarks at the family dinner table with long day and night shifts of lab work alongside compatriot Julio Mendez (Alex Desert, Swingers [Doug Liman, 1996], Becker [1998-2004]) as well as trying to find personal time for his love life with beautiful bohemian artist Iris West (Paula Marshall, whom i remember well from such films as Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth [Anthony Hickox, 1992], Warlock: the Armageddon [Hickox again, 1993] and Full Eclipse [O HAI, ANTHONY, 1993]).  Run down and run off his feet with the demands of life and the nine to five in the morning overtimes as he does his part to analyse clues to help take down the Riders and their anarchic spate of bombings and robbings, Barry finds running very much a theme when one dark  and stormy night the elements come together and a stray bolt of lightning strikes the scientist (rather than the postman, as Wayne Coyne predicted) and the convergence of flash of cosmic light and the rack of frothing and broiling chemicals that his blasted body belts into transforms him into (all together now) "THE FASTEST MAN ALIVE".

Recovering rather quickly and checking himself out of hospital, Barry begins to realise that his brush with the beyond via a bolt from the blue may have some side effects when he runs to catch the morning bus and suddenly finds himself accelerating uncontrollably at high velocity for miles before barreling down the beach like a bullet, kicking up clouds of sand and getting in the sea before emerging from the brine gasping for breath and finding that the friction of his velocity his reduced his clothing to rags.  Finding that he must consume vast amounts of food to replace the calories burned by his speedy metabolism, Barry reluctantly engages with Dr Tina McGee (Amanda Pays, Theora Jones of Max Headroom [1985, 1987-88], as well as starring in late '80s SF horrors The Kindred [Stephen Carpenter and Jeffrey Obrow, 1998] and Leviathan [George P. Cosmatos, 1989]) of S. T. A. R. Labs - despite his misgivings at their shady past and alleged unethical experimentation - in an effort to understand his new found abilities and attempt to control the biological battleground of his body.  After confiding in Barry that the ruined reputation of her laboratory is because her former partner (in both the sciencing and sexing senses) tested an experimental drug upon himself and sacrificed himself upon the altar of knowledge, Tina supplies the nascent speedster with a prototype Soviet scarlet suit invented to withstand the intense pressures of deep sea diving as an ingenious method of cutting down on the wear and tear of his ensemble coming unseamed as he speeds around a test track.

After it is revealed that the villainous Nicholas Pike was Jay Allen's former partner (his facial dueling scars the result of the elder Allen discovering his crooked compadre's nefarious undertakings and leaving him for dead), Pike sees Jay heading the CCPD task force charged with bringing him down on the local news show hosted by Joe Klein (the ubiquitous Richard Belzer of every cop show going for the past hundred years) and decides to lay and bait a trap for his erstwhile comrade in arms utilising the charms of the alluring Lila (Lycia Naff, who played Ensign Sonya Gomez in a couple of 1989 episodes of Star Trek: the Next Generation before essaying the role of T. C. in the Troma-tastic Chopper Chicks in Zombietown [Dan Hoskins, 1989]).  After Jay falls for the obvious should-be-jailed bait and Pike takes his cruel retribution, Barry manages to rocket to the scene of the crime only in time to cradle his dying brother in his arms and fling back his head to howl the requisite "Nooooooo!!!" at the uncaring sky.  What should rightfully be a cliched scene is sold, though, by the acting of both Thomerson and Shipp.  Vowing to avenge his sibling, Barry asks Tina to fashion more of the speed suit: "I need a hood, to cover my face - and gloves, so i won't leave fingerprints" (there's all those years at forensic detection school paying off right there) and becomes a red clad avenger of the night, taking down Pike and his gang and ending their cycle of cycling destruction in a furious Flash of vengeance.

An effective superhero origin story in its own right (something that DC, Wonder Woman [Patty Jenkins, 2017] aside, seems to find it increasingly difficult to manage on screen these days) as well as the pilot for a TV series, the 1990 version of The Flash went on to have a big influence upon the modern televisual incarnation.  Not only has John Wesley Shipp appeared multiple times in the newer show as both Henry Allen and original Flash Jay Garrick, but both Amanda Pays and Alex Desert have made appearances as Dr Christina McGee and Captain Julio Mendez respectively, while their original roles of lab chum and sexy but frosty scientist with dead fiancee have been assumed by Carlos Valdes' Cisco Ramon and Danielle Panabaker's Caitlin Snow respectively.  While Iris West (played by Candice Patton) has a major co-starring role in the current show, sadly Paula Marshall's Iris only appeared in the pilot and was absent from the subsequent series.

Maybe if Anthony Hickox had directed...

Sherlock: A XXX Parody (Dick Bush, 2016) NB: NSFW. LOL. WTF.

In which things get quite a bit NSFW, and we muse upon the phenomenon of the porn parody.

(NOTE: This blog entry is going to be discussing the content of a mucky movie, and may well use some Rabelaisian and/or scatological language, and imagery which may produce powerful sensations in the brain and body.  "Consider yourselves...WARNED!", as James Dean Bradley so eloquently yelled at the beginning of 'Repeat UK')

Ah, the pornographic parody film - so ripe for satire, lampoon and pastiche of any given subject but with the added bonus boon of boobs.  Perhaps best remembered (by me, at any rate) for the early-2000s glut of straight to DVD Seduction Cinema 'classics' starring Misty Mundae and Darian Caine, such as Playmate of the Apes (John Bacchus, 2002 - co-written by and featuring scream queen Debbie Rochon as 'Dr Cornholeus'), Lord of the G-Strings (Terry M. West, 2003) and SpiderBabe (Johnny Crash, 2003 - starring Ms Mundae as 'Patricia Porker'), there has always been something of a genre bent being exploited: in recent years Axel Braun has produced a steady stream of semen-specked superhero scripts for Vivid Entertainment, spoofing and spoffing characters such as Batman, Superman, She-Hulk, Marvel's Avengers, Spider-Man,Wolverine, the X-Men and Wonder Woman (as well as other genre-related titles such as Game of Thrones, Ghostbusters and Charmed [featuring a Prue Halliwell who actually gives me less conflicted sexual thoughts than the original, which is odd but true]).  Britain's favourite genre product of the BBC (as in British Broadcasting Corporation, rather than in its porn acronym sense) has had several sexy makeovers, including the Adult Channel's 2006 Doctor Screw which followed hot on the heels of the Christopher Eccleston season of Who with Mark Sloan as a leather-jacketed and priapic Time Lord (though his spiked hair and goatee beard make him more of a young War Doctor than an alternative Nine in my book), Wood Rocket's The Doctor Whore Porn Parody (Lee Roy Myers, 2014) featuring almost startlingly accurate randy reprisals of the Eleventh Doctor, Amy Pond and Rory Williams by the brilliantly names Brian Street Team, Jodi Taylor and Richie Calhoun respectively, and the same year's The Doctor (directed by the fnarr-fnarr monikered Dick Bush) from KaizenXXX - which confirmed its canonical status by opening with Mark Sloan of Doctor Screw being injured (must be all of that tumultuous buffeting from the tremendous buggering) and regenerating into new incarnation Danny D, who has lost none of his libido in the transition.

From the same production company and director, we come to 2016's Sherlock: a XXX Parody (is it just my grammatically-picky brain that flinches and wants that to be "An XXX Parody"?  I suppose if you read it as "Triple X" it works...), which sets its sights and sweaty palms upon another of Steven Moffat's (a man who knows a bit about dodgy sexual exploits and bad jokes himself) TV shows.

Opening with a title sequence (aerial shots of London, familiar buildings and monuments) and theme tune that is redolent of the BBC's Sherlock whilst being different enough to just about skirt copyright, we start with the fundamentally-titled A Study in Brown (alimentary, my dear Watson!) with Dean Martin (no, not the piss artist cum singer cum actor!) as a gruff Lestrade calling in Holmes to help with the latest case to have him baffled, which interrupts Sherlock (the ludicrously-endowed Mr Danny D) as he indulges in an experiment to "test my deductive skills against all manner of distractions" as he's fellated by French fancy Nikita Bellucci - leading to a gag wherein Sherlock responds to both Lestrade's telephonic enjoinders to join him at the crime scene and his imminent unspooling in the gagging Gallic girl's gob by shouting "I'm coming!  I'm COMING NOW!" with an elated vehemence that both perplexes and pleases the puzzled policeman.  Another witness to this startling scene in Sherlock's study is medical student Jane Watson (played by the gorgeous crimson-maned Ella Hughes, who has actually made an appearance in a season six episode of Game of Thrones itself - with its alternate name of Tits and Dragons almost qualifying it as a porn parody in of itself, albeit with less jokes), who has arrived with a case for the celebrated sleuth but ends up with a casa - becoming his new flatmate in 221B Baker Street, perhaps aiming to parallel US 'modern Sherlock Holmes' series Elementary with its cross-gender casting of Dr Watson (in Elementary's case Lucy Lui as Joan Watson).

Holmes and Watson attend the murder scene, to find the latest in a string of corpses that show signs of having had intercourse ("Not just any sex - look at the beads of sweat: this guy was really going for it!" observes the sleuth) whilst expiring from poison ("So she likes to have sex with them whilst they dies?  Sounds... delightful" says a dubious Jane): very much a case of a petit mort post mortem.  The production plays with the tropes of Moffatian Sherlock, such as Holmes' 'mind palace' -

"If you don't mind, Jane," says Sherlock as he folds himself into his armchair, "i'm going to enter this information into my mind palace."
"Your mind palace?"
"Yes, my fucking mind palace!  Is there an echo?"

- and the technique of quickly flashing Holmes' thoughts up in text form on-screen (like the 'datablasts' of Violet Berlin and Andy Crane fronted '90s gaming show Bad Influence! and Lee and Herring's pioneering Fist of Fun), such as "slight bruises on penis", "he fucked even though it hurt", "he had to fuck" and "fuck or die" as Sherlock pieces together the clues from the case to cum come to the conclusion that the victims were poisoned by a Sexy Killer (no, not Sarah Young, nor Macarena Gomez neither) and forced to engage in a vigorous fuck session in order to obtain an antidote - no one yet having achieved the climax of this cunning linguist's plan.  The culprit is revealed to be the French girl who aided Sherlock in his oral examination earlier - Ms Bellucci now sporting a red wig - who reveals that she has already introduced the venom into Holmes' system and he must play the naughty game of death as she proffers her box to him (an actual small box, not her box box just yet).

"The antidote is locked in this safe."
"That's voice activated!" deduces Holmes, somehow.  "They tried so hard, didn't they... Let me guess - the sound of your orgasm is the only thing to open it?"

After the revelation that he only has 30 minutes in which to get the siren to squirt, and pausing only to wonder whether or not to order the pizza now, the dying detective deploys his dong.   The action that follows includes oral both ways - as Holmes is rewarded for his cunnilingus with some spit-drenched suckage - as well as doggy-fashion (Ms Bellucci's shrieks as Mr D's very generously-proportioned member ploughed into her from the rear causing me to wonder whether we were in for an abbreviated episode, as surely those squeals would activate the box?), anal (i assume sitting down would be involving a soft cushion or one of those inflatable ring things for a while) and reverse cowgirl before the desired decibel level is achieved (during some vigorous anal choke-fucking) and then Holmes unloads his ribbons of liquid joy onto the villainous vixen's buttocks and quaffs the antidote.

After all that though, i'd have to personally opine that Ms Hughes as Dr Watson, with her red hair and pale skin and clad in a leather jacket and a pair of jeans that accentuate her lovely buttocks, possibly did more for me than the carnal scenes in the episode.  Why is none of your business, but maybe i'm just jaded like a cankered whore these days.

Episode two is once again punningly titled - this particular spin on Conan Doyle being The Sign of Whore - and entails Sherlock receiving a mysterious text message from the elusive Irene Adler, instructing him to go to number 14 Baskerville Road.  The detective duo promptly arrive at the assigned address to find themselves in a sex club, greeted by a buxom receptionist (Linsey Dawn McKenzie - something of a UK porn legend in the '90s, and a favourite of those who like to see their sex starlets endowed with elephantiasis of the chesticles.  Mammoth mammaries, Mycroft!) and the proprietor of this pleasure palace of impropriety who introduces herself as Irene Adler (the estuary-accented and slightly chavvy Chantelle Fox), who challenges Holmes to "a little game" if he can "pick out and fuck the girl [she's] describing".

"Um, sorry, wait - did you say 'fuck'?" asks an agog Watson, "we have to fuck them?"

"This is a very sexual place, Miss Watson.  A place for sex" is the reply, and possibly the best example of that kind of gag i've seen in a movie since "Greeks.  Men from Greece!" in Tom Green's opus Freddy Got Fingered.

After standing back to admire a display of his deductive skills that has him narrowing the description of a dominatrix down to the spexy secretary, Watson is surprised to hear Sherlock passing the sexing duties over to her ("Now go ahead, bang her brains out chop-chop!") and finds herself soon busily engaged in some receptionist rumpo involving a spanking session wherein Ms McKenzie smacks her alabaster buttocks a nice shade of pink.  There follows some oral fun before the toys are produced - then inserted, then produced again - before a judding climax involving a very slippery nipple as Watson teases Adler's henchlady by rubbing her perky breasticles against her clitoris allsorts.

Episode three sees the series give up on turning Conan Doyle Holmes titles into puns and resorts to the simple "does what it says on the tin" title of Sexbomb, wherein Sherlock is working solo (Watson being away on her honeymoon, her husband having been introduced via a series of gag scenes - as opposed to gagging scenes which do happen in these sort of thing but are quite different - in the earlier episodes).  He finds himself working alongside Inspector Sally Hopkins (Darlington's premier sexport Sienna Day), with whom he has an antagonistic/flirty banter relationship, on a case wherein a young lady (Carmel Anderson) has had a time-bomb strapped to her nether regions (a less erotic version of this scenario was played out in the Red Dwarf episode 'Entangled' - Craig Charles' charms being slightly less alluring than Ms Anderson's on that occasion).

"Thirty minutes 'til the big bang" says Hopkins in one of the most blatant signposts in a not exactly subtle series, before falling for the fiendish (and as yet unseen) Moriarty's trap by drinking what appears to be a glass of water but is in fact "that new female dodgy Viagra [that's] been all over the news - i need an antidote within the next few minutes, otherwise i'll die" (delivered with all the mortal panic of a malfunctioning toaster) "only your spunk can save me now!"  Our priapic private investigator duly obliges of course, going straight in for some rimming of the policewoman's puckered posterior and ere long tongue is replaced by schlong for "a dip in the brown" that turns her frown upside down.  This vigorous bout of bumming in various positions leads to Sherlock, who's got the medicine that she needs - in the wise, wise words of Lana Del Rey - filling her prescription good and proper and delivering it directly into her cupped hand to scoop and swallow as directed.  How many times a day is not specified, but i hope it's only once, the lad looks knackered.

Oh, on the way out he defuses the bomb and frees the girl.  I'd almost forgotten about her.

The fourth fit of febrile fun bears the moniker of Carnal Knowledge, neatly encapsulating the twin obsessions of both the production and the title character: the eternal yearning for both the pleasures of both the flesh and the sophia of wisdom (or, as Sir Steven Patrick Morrissey put it, "Does the body rule the mind, or does the mind rule the body? / I dunno.").  Or perhaps i'm giving Dick Bush's writing a little too much credit.  I dunno.

After being summoned by Lestrade to yet another murder scene, this time that of a terrorist suspect, Sherlock makes quick work dismissing the 'evidence' on hand - the various books and documents (along with a bomb) having been planted in the dead man's bedroom, as well as noticing that the necklace bearing religious symbols has caused an adverse reaction to the skin pre-mortem signifying that he didn't usually wear such an item - and concluding that the victim (who is sprawled before them on a bed with a large purple vibrator plunged into his chest) is the latest pawn in the game being played against him by the shadowy Napoleon of crime Professor Moriarty.  Arriving back at his Baker Street lodgings, Holmes sends a text as urgent as his restlessly twitching member to Irene Adler asking her to meet him, his "I want answers" being auto-corrected to "I want anal", prompting the wholly (hole-ly?) appropriate response of "Bugger!"  In timely fashion, Holmes enters his lodgings to rather serendipitously find Irene - this time the genuine article, you might say, rather than the decoy from the club earlier - waiting for him wearing nothing but high heels and a pearl necklace (an actual one: wait for it!).

"Sherlock!" cries flustered faithful landlady Mrs Hudson (June Smith) "I took Miss Adler's coat - but she didn't have any clothes on underneath!" before fleeing the room when her embarrassed enquiry as to whether tea should be served is met by Irene asking instead if there is any lube in the house.  As you do, when circumstances look like it's about to be needed.

"I do love playing with people" purrs the ardently amorous Miss Adler (played by the gorgeous Italian-born queen of the British grot industry, Stella Cox - a Tyrrhenian temptress more "Ream 'us!" than Remus, and guaranteed to make one's Alba Longa), prompting a frustratingly Freudian conversation between Sherlock and herself ("Sex.  All about sex." / "Isn't everything?") before his accusation that she is working for Moriarty and knows something of his plans, and that if she gives him the vital information to foil the professor's plot he will afford her protection.

"Saving those close to you isn't your forte" she smiles.
"You're not that close to me" counters Holmes.
"I could be.  Maybe then, i'll tell you something" she says, sashaying to the mantelpiece and presenting her pert and peachy posterior and fingering her fillable fundament.

Obviously within seconds the twitching 'tec has taken the hint as is up behind her like a rutting Rottweiler, blithely taking the cup of tea offered by an aghast Mrs Hudson (who swiftly exits so traumatised she may as well be pursued by a bear) and sipping from it before resting it upon the dimples of Irene's lower back.  Possibly indulging a repressed cosplay fetish, he places his iconic deerstalker hat on her head and bends her over his armchair (with Union Jack cushion - how 'Cool Britannia'.  Is it 1996?) for some Sherlockian sodomy so eager and vigorous (can't blame him for excitedly ploughing that furrow i must say) that's it's bound to leave bruises in the morning.  Don't it turn my brown eye blue, as the old song goes.

In the finale, Game On, it transpires that the majority of the preceding events have been set in motion by the devious deviant Moriarty (played by the marvelously pseudonymous Fred Passion giving a less OTT performance than Andrew Scott, at least) who has - in an inversion of the events of Moffat / Gatiss' Sherlock's premiere episode - been passing himself off as Holmes' brother Mycroft to gain the trust of Watson, whom he now kidnaps and lashes to a Bond villain-style laser trap.  Sherlock is faced with the old "which switch?" dilemma with one deactivating button but two from which to choose, and so decides to opt for the patented Steven Moffat "cool shot in which the hero fires a gun at a random piece of equipment" get-out-of-a-cliffhanger gambit (C.F.: Sherlock 'The Great Game', Doctor Who 'The Time of Angels') before using his preternatural mental prognostication skills to outmanouvre and physically take out Moriarty's henchmen in the manner of Robert Downey Jr.'s Sherlock Holmes (Guy Ritchie, 2009).

"Fuck me, Sherlock - that was very unlike you!" exclaims Watson as she is untied.
"The only solution to winning his Game is not to play", responds the gnomic gumshoe, with a neat solution that perhaps should have occurred to Bruce Lee in The Game of Death and everyone in Game of Thrones.  The twosome then rather thoroughly consummate their professional relationship, including the lovely Ms Hughes lying on a leather couch with her head back and taking Mr D's egregiously proportioned member down her throat, followed by some very eager and frantic doggy-style and cowgirl positions.

After Moriarty is surrounded and taken away by the regular constabulary and Sherlock has received a message from Irene assuring him that she's alive and not a victim of one of Moriarty's deadly assassins, there's even a guest appearance in the closing Baker Street scene by Danny D in the guise of his other porn parody character - that of the TARDIS-travelling titular Time Lord from The Doctor (Dick Bush, 2014), giving any fan of Doctor Who and Sherlock who's made it to the end unspent the crossover that Moffat never did.  Which is nice, i guess.

'"My dear Holmes!", I ejaculated' - Dr Watson in 'The Adventure of the Resident Patient' by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, 1893.

Frankenstein (J. Searle Dawley, 1910)

The Gothic horror tradition in both film and literature can ultimately trace, if not its genesis, then its apotheosis back to that legendary storm-wracked three day weekender on the shores of Lake Geneva at the Villa Diodati in the summer of 1816 when the legendary 'Mad, Bad and Dangerous' George Gordon, Lord Byron gathered together the elements of himself, his fellow Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, Shelley's soon to be wife Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, and Byron's personal physician Dr John Polidori - and together they infused the spark of undying life into the nascent Gothic genre.

The horror movie's debt to literature was recognised in James Whale's seminal 1935 The Bride of Frankenstein, which opened with a prologue set at the Villa (recast as the standard Universal Horror storm-lashed turret upon a craggy peak) with Mary (Elsa Lanchester) recounting her tale to Byron (Gavin Gordon) and Shelley (Douglas Walton), a scenario fully fleshed out on film by Ken Russell in Gothic (1986) - a superlative filmic fictionalisation of the epoch-making events of that eventful eldritch evening.

Long before Whale's dramatisation of this dark genesis of not only the nascent Mrs Shelley's Frankenstein but also Polidori's The Vampyre and two decades before William Henry Pratt changed his professional name to Boris Karloff and strapped on the iconic asphalt-spreader's boots and neck bolts in 1931, yet almost a century after that dank and dismal day of dreadful dreaming, the first Frankenstein was filmed by the Edison company at their New York studio facility in the Bronx.

Condensing the plot of the novel down to a one-reeler running a scant silent fifteen minutes, Searle's adaptation introduces us to medical student Victor Frankenstein (played by the splendidly-named Augustus Phillips) saying his goodbyes to his fiancee Elizabeth (Mary Fuller, whose life spanned a tragic arc from being an actress as lauded as Mary Pickford in such roles as the lead in the first ever American film serial What Happened to Mary [Charles Brabin and Ashley Miller, 1912] and the dual role of Mary Mayne and her mother Mrs Mayne in Lucius Henderson's Mayne main event of 1916 The Girl Who Feared Daylight before her career ending abruptly in 1917 and spending her last quarter century in the mental hospital in which she would die) before leaving home to dwell and toil amidst the shaded groves of academe.

After a time jump of two years (swiftly conveyed through an intertitle that also explains to us that Frankenstein has, in this brief span, "discovered the mystery of life" [though not how sweet it is or how he found it - we'd have to wait until Mel Brooks' 1974 Young Frankenstein to have that conveyed to us through the medium of song]), we find the student of the metaphysical sciences pacing pensively in his cluttered quarters, before deciding to pen - or, rather, quill - a letter to his beloved before beginning his alchemical wedding of science and nature:

"Sweetheart: tonight my ambition will be accomplished.  I have discovered the secret of life and death and in a few hours i shall create into life the most perfect human being that the world has yet known", he writes, shortly before all his dreams of an alpine ubermensch are torn asunder.

The cinematic representation of Frankenstein's creation of his creature has since 1931 been indelibly linked in the audience's mind with James Whale's tour de force of thunder and lightning and the crackling, sparking and arcing mechanical apparatus of Kenneth Strickfaden, and yet it's worth remembering that the brief description given in the novel contains nothing of elevating gurneys or kites or lightning rods - "It was on a dreary night of November that i beheld the accomplishment of my toils.  With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, i collected the instruments of life around me, that i might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet" - and indeed reads as much as the work of a magician or an alchemist than a physicist: more sorcery than science.

So Phillips' Frankenstein doesn't go about his act of asexual reproduction (and , let's face it, which student hasn't spent long sweaty hours in his room doing the same?) by sewing together the pieces of cadavers, but pours a sequence of elixirs into a cauldron before closing the fomenting mixture behind iron doors with a handy peep-hole with which to spy on his neon-genesis (evangelion not supplied).  The 'CREATION' sequence really is a tour de force, in which we see his hubbling-bubbling homunculus slowly forming from the frothing elements - apparently achieved via the simple method of burning a waxen figurine and running the film in reverse, we seem to see the flesh congealing and coalescing upon the very bones of the Creature, it's skeletal arm flapping wildly like an errant Muppet as the muscles and flesh begin to form upon it to create the Creature played by Charles Ogle (another veteran of the silent screen, including not only co-starring with Mary Fuller in What Happened to Mary, but also starring opposite her erstwhile rival Mary Pickford in Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm [Marshall Neilan, 1917]*): Ogle's creature bears the elevated brow later made famous by Karloff. but also a stooped hunched walk more akin to Quasimodo and a wild shock wig and talon-like fingernails.

After the standard sequences of Frankenstein rejecting his creation, and the Creature stalking his creator and his bride like some flailing human striving to search for Yahweh and Shekhina (but in sepia-tinted black and white and in under a quarter of an hour, so we probably don't have time for philosophy all that much), the Creature finally meets his end when, rejected by his 'father', he catches sight of his reflection and - in rather a good trick shot - at first vanishes to leave nothing in the room itself but only his reflection in the mirror, and then the reflection changes to show only Frankenstein himself.  The nightmare vanishes, to leave only the waking dreamer - the father left to deal with the consequences of his misbegotten, forgotten son.

(*The book The Rivals of Frankenstein by Michel Parry [Corgi, 1977] lists a film entitled Franenstein [sic] of Sunnybrook Farm as a "nudie rip-off" directed by William Rotsler in 1971.  To the best of my knowledge, this is a product of M. Parry's inagination, but answers on a postcard please if anyone knows any better.)