Jack Harrison and Gil Turner go to Transylvania looking for Frankenstein.
Everybody laughs at them.
Which is fair.
They work for a supermarket tabloid, their assignment comes from Gil’s father, and their evidence is shaky footage of something large wandering around where something large probably shouldn’t be wandering around.
Jack barely believes the story himself.
Gil absolutely does.
Then they arrive in Transylvania and discover that Frankenstein might be the least ridiculous thing there.
So what happens when a monster movie makes the monsters more normal than everybody looking for them?
You get Transylvania 6-5000.
Rudy De Luca builds the movie around that reversal. Jack and Gil arrive expecting castles, frightened villagers, and creatures hiding in the shadows.
They get the castle.
Everything else goes sideways.
Their hotel looks centuries old while happily accepting credit cards. Michael Richards’ Fejos moves through the place like physical coordination is something he heard about once. Carol Kane’s Lupi seems to exist on a frequency nobody else can pick up. Almost every conversation is one wrong turn away from becoming a completely different movie.
And somehow Jeff Goldblum is the straight man.
That should tell you everything.
Goldblum’s Jack responds to the insanity with amused disbelief, while Ed Begley Jr.’s Gil keeps pushing forward because he desperately wants the monster story to be true. The skeptic keeps encountering impossible things. The believer keeps finding them under increasingly stupid circumstances.
Neither one ever gets the investigation he imagined.
Then Geena Davis appears as Odette, looking exactly like the seductive Transylvanian fantasy these guys probably expected when they got on the plane.
Naturally, even that isn’t quite what it seems.
That’s the running joke.
Every familiar monster-movie image arrives slightly crooked.
Joseph Bologna’s Dr. Malavaqua looks like the respectable scientist until he doesn’t. Donald Gibb’s Wolfman looks like the creature somebody should be running from, but he’s hardly the greatest source of chaos in town. And the Frankenstein-like figure Jack and Gil were sent to find becomes less frightening the closer they actually get to him.
Meanwhile, the supposedly normal people lie, panic, misunderstand everything, and generally behave like lunatics.
The monsters aren’t disrupting normal life.
There wasn’t much normal life here to begin with.
That’s also why the mystery works better than it probably has any right to.
Jack and Gil came looking for something they could photograph, slap onto the front page, and sell as proof that monsters exist. They’re not really interested in understanding what they find. They want the freak show.
But the closer they get, the harder it becomes to tell who actually belongs in it.
That’s where Transylvania 6-5000 finds its charm.
It isn’t trying very hard to frighten anyone. It takes the furniture of old monster movies — castles, laboratories, vampires, werewolves, Frankenstein imagery — and treats the whole thing like a giant comedy playground.
Sometimes the jokes are clever.
Sometimes they’re incredibly stupid.
Sometimes Michael Richards enters the frame and apparently decides gravity is optional.
That’s part of the deal.
But underneath all the slapstick is a surprisingly consistent idea.
Jack and Gil travel halfway around the world looking for strange creatures they can turn into entertainment.
Instead, they find a place where everybody is strange and the people who look most like monsters might require the least explanation.
So what if the monsters aren’t the weird ones?
Spend enough time with everyone else in Transylvania 6-5000 and the answer becomes pretty obvious.
The monsters aren’t disrupting the freak show.
They’re just living in it.
Written by Rob Joncas for DeadNoteMedia.
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