The Bride (1985)

This film stars Sting, making it an example of Police brutality.

The Bride (1985)
Directed by: Franc Roddam
Written by: Lloyd Fonvielle

Tagline: “A woman born of electricity...a man driven by passion!”

It’s a dark and stormy night. Baron von Frankensting is sitting around his ancestral home, Schloss Kardboard Kutout, playing “Mousetrap!” with Quentin Crisp and a crash test dummy. For some reason, the game causes Frankensting’s Monster to experience nocturnal emissions, so they pack it in and decide to electrocute Jennifer Beals instead. True to the genre, a bolt of lightning succeeds in reanimating her corpse, but it frizzes out her hair something awful. The newly animated Jennifer promptly loses a game of “Mystery Date,” and the Monster arrives at the lab door to pick her up. It seems that Frankensting is a sort of necrophiliac’s Chuck Woolery, but his matchmaking doesn’t go very well. Emasculated, the Monster stumbles blindly into the forest, where he attends a John Bly workshop and attempts to get in touch with his inner corpse.

The Baron, we now learn, is a radical feminist who hopes to use Jennifer to create “the New Woman.” Equal and assertive. Fearless as a man. Able to bring home the bacon and fry it up in a pan.

Frankensting sits by the fire, contemplating his utopia of sexual equality, when Jennifer toddles in stark naked, squats at his feet, and begins sucking her fingers. The Baron reassesses his priorities.

Meanwhile, in a cave somewhere in the Alps, the Monster is receiving relationship counseling from a dwarf.

Frankensting gives Jennifer the Eliza Doolittle treatment, and her education progresses swiftly. Soon she has learned to wear a hoop skirt and spin rapidly in a circle until she projectile vomits. Meanwhile, somewhere in Bavaria, the Monster becomes queasy, thus proving that there is either a psychic link between Jennifer and the Monster, or that the curried wurst he had at Oktoberfest isn’t agreeing with him.

Frankensting takes Jennifer on a field trip to a mausoleum. A pleasant time is had by all, picking through the loose femurs and ulnas, but the Baron becomes insanely jealous over Jennifer’s infatuation with a rotting skull, and refuses to show her his bone.

By this point, Jennifer has become sufficiently refined that Frankensting and Colonel Pickering decide to take her to the Embassy Ball, after which she belts out the show-stopping number, “I Could Have Danced All Night (If I Wasn’t a Corpse).”

During the ball, she meets the extremely blonde Cary Elwes, who is dressed in a Prussian Hussar’s uniform and looking slightly more Aryan than Beowulf. Pre- dictably, Frankensting becomes jealous of Cary’s skull, and runs off to hide in his secret fort and smoke crack.

Later, in an astonishing scientific breakthrough, the Baron invents glitter, and throws a party to celebrate. But when he peeks into the master suite and finds Jennifer and Cary making out, he goes ballistic, because his parents are coming home soon and he told everyone to stay out of their bedroom.

Even later, Jennifer goes to Cary’s house, and in a tender, erotic scene, they strip down to see which of them has the frilliest underwear. Through their psychic link, the Monster, who is now rotting in prison somewhere, finds his nipples strangely engorged.

Meanwhile, all this talk of engorged nipples proves too much for the Baron, and he suddenly turns into Matt Gaetz at a Girl Scout Jamboree. The Monster bursts into the room to rescue Jennifer, then turns and runs away as Frankensting chases him with a torch, shouting, “Have a little fire, Scarecrow!” They race all over the castle in a weird, pyromaniacal Benny Hill sketch, until Frankensting, after trying several times, finally succeeds in falling off the tower. And while the Baron’s death doesn’t exactly come as a surprise, it does answer a question the audience has been asking with increasing exasperation for the last 90 minutes: Sting, where is thy Death?

As the superimposed face of a dwarf looks on and recites weird platitudes like Obi-Wan Kenobi, the two reanimated lovers go to Venice, where their rotting bodies cause a cholera epidemic that winds up killing Gustav von Aschenbach. The End.

So what have we learned from all this? Well, if you’re a picky guy or gal who just can’t find anybody good enough for you, why not make your own partner, using ordinary items found around the house? (And this really isn’t necrophilia, since Jennifer Beales is alive, ALIVE—it’s just her performance that reeks of carrion). Now you can have a woman with the legs, hips, butt, and breasts of your choice—although she may also have a bad case of the frizzies and a yen for your jumper cables.

However, some say that celebrities shouldn’t be allowed to build their own people since they give them such stupid names. I mean, it’s one thing to be born “Rumer” or “Scout” or “Apple”—you get time to adjust to it, and plan your vengeance on Mom and Dad. (It’s a little known fact that Mitch McConnell was born “Starshine Mushroom Zappa,” but took a new appellation and joined the Republican Party when he turned 18.) But if you’re brought back from the dead by Richard Gere and told that you’re called “Free Tibet Now Frankenstein,” you will have no choice but to go on murderous rampages, throw little girls into lakes, and generally act out. So, we feel that perhaps everyone is better off just buying pre-fab sexual partners, because while they might not come in as many options as do-it- yourself models, they do have better warranties and aren’t as likely to cuckold you with a chorus boy from Naughty Marietta.