"Well, don't you see, he's typical of the man who has married a whore--" Anatole France, reimagined.
Boris Karloff goes without saying, but then came realism, Randy Quaid's temper, De Niro's ferocity coupled to Branagh's need for succor, Peter Boyle's hilarious send up, Jennifer Beals and Sting, Aaron Eckhart's relatively recent fizzled attempt. The Revenge of Frankenstein, with Peter Cushing, is a transitional knock-off of Shelley's novel, more minimalist than the time stamped Karloff, it's outer-lying framework, as written by Sangster and James, combines a whiff of vampirism and perpetual reconstitution, with Cushing emanating a false humility and ruthless process, some years before directors suddenly had to display fealty to the Enlightenment transitioning into early Victorian anxieties, treating the novel like scripture. The book endures because Mary Shelley annihilates domestication. Scripts may give Dr. Frankenstein a feminine halter in a tug of war with the hubris of the God complex, but Shelley doesn't dwell on doomed love for long in her fast paced death chase.
Quaid's trappings in the role are of menacing sympathy. Such a creature would be developmentally challenged. What Wickes tapped into in 92 isn't so far removed from Quaid turning dodger of justice across the border today; even when actors snap, they still tap into their greatest strength which now makes them difficult to bridle. There is a wee bit of Frankenstein as creation myth in Vanilla Sky too.
The Cushing reprisal points to where science fiction went after such adaptations, in the analog age: transplantation. It might be far simpler to stay with this macro-biological grafting than manipulating gene switches toward the transhumanism of Weiner's uneven study. Weiner's main problem as an author is he attempts to fuse too many choices.
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