A Bloody Good Time 9.18.08: A Salute to Igor
Posted by Joseph Lee on 09.18.2008
After 70+ years, the hunchback gets his due.
Welcome to A Bloody Good Time. Last week I presented you with six remakes you should be excited for. There were a lot of responses, mostly concerning the upcoming Friday the 13th series reboot.
Lucas Mucus (clever name) had this to say: My only thing about the Friday the 13th film is that I hope they do it right. Jason has a ton of potential to be more than what he was, and be a totally sympathetic villian. You know the bit, he was bullied which inadvertently led to his death due to counselors not giving a shit bout him. Hopefully they play this aspect of him up and give him more depth than just a walking slaughterhouse.
I think the majority of Jason fans would love to just see Jason as a walking slaughterhouse. Could he be more sympathetic? Sure, they actually tried that route a few times in the original series. Will he? Probably not. I think at this point producers should know fans are going to cheer for Jason anyway so there's no need to make him sympathetic. We know his story, we just want to see him kill some naked teenagers.
411 reader gutter said: My thing with friday the 13th and a lot of folks will point this out...Jason wasnt the killer in the first movie it was his mom.
Yes, it was. As natedoggcata and Toddo rightly pointed out, Jason's mom is scheduled to make an appearance. This is rebooting a series, and remaking the first three-four films of the series, all in one. So she's not going to be around for the entire movie. There's a "big plot twist" in the first ten minutes according to Michael Bay, so expect that to be his mom losing about fifteen pounds.
Brad McLeod had a gigantic rant that I'm not going to repost here, but essentially he said: Sorry, you can't "reboot" a 20+ year history of a character. This is real life, there is no reset button.
No, Brad, this is fiction. Reboots happen a lot in fiction, throughout it's various forms: novels, comic books, television, music. Especially if a character has run it's course, which Jason has.
I will once again direct you to Arnold Furious' Series Link, because he covers the entire Nightmare on Elm Street series. I loved New Nightmare and Freddy vs Jason, for the record.
Now onto this week.
This Friday, there will be a new animated feature called Igor. Sure, this isn't a horror movie by any means, but the film's lead character has his feet firmly planted within the genre. In fact he has been a horror character for many years. I thought it was only fitting that with the new movie coming out, A Bloody Good Time gives a salute to Igor, and his many different incarnations.
The first Igor in horror films wasn't even called Igor. His name was Fritz. Played by the brilliant character actor Dwight Frye, Fritz was a demented hunchback who helped Henry Frankenstein prepare his creation of life. Of course it's Fritz who grabs the criminal brain, and it's Fritz who torments the monster to the point of escaping Frankenstein's castle. Igor (or in this case, Fritz) is very associated with Frankenstein, however, only the movie gave life to the character. The book had no hunchbacked assistants to Dr. Frankenstein. So if you want to thank anyone for Igor's birth, thank director James Whale.
Igor would next appear as Ygor in two films, Son of Frankenstein(1939) and Ghost of Frankenstein(1942). This time he would be played by Bela Lugosi. The typical assitant to the mad creator version is ditched. Lugosi's Ygor is a deranged sociopath with a broken neck. He revives the monster to try and use it as a tool for revenge. In Son, Ygor becomes the monster's only friend, and when he apparently dies, the monster is grief-stricken. However the character returns in Ghost, reviving the monster yet again. Ygor does it this time with the purpose of planting his own brain in the monster to live forever. As you can guess, the Frankenstein movies had become a tad convoluted at this point.
The Igor name would also appear in Mystery of the Wax Museum(1933), when the curator Ivan Igor is the man responsible for the crimes. Played by Lionel Atwill, this Igor was very crippled and relied on assitants who would murder people and then dip them in wax to create life-like statues. He nearly does the same to Fay Wray, but is saved and Igor is gunned down, falling into a vat of wax. Wax Museum would later be remade into House of Wax in 1953. The evil curator was now played by Vincent Price, but he was no longer an Igor. The Igor this time, played by a young Charles Bronson, was a deaf-mute who assited Price's curator in his killings.
Igor's role as the hunchback assitant would be parodied and mocked in many films. The first of these was Young Frankenstein in 1974. This Igor, who demanded that you pronounce it "eye-gor". This time he would be played by Marty Feldman, and he assisted Gene Wilder's Frederick Frankenstein (Fronk-en-steen) in creating a monster, played by the late great Peter Boyle. Like Fritz before him, Eyegor gets the wrong brain and scares the monster into attacking. Of course Eyegor is played for laughs here, having a sarcastic wit and generally making jokes at others' expense.
Igor would make many appearnces over the years, even if he wasn't named as such. For example, Riff Raff in The Rocky Horror Picture Show is an Igor. He also appeared in various Dracula movies, cartoons and eventually Van Helsing in 2004, where he yet again assisted someone, Dracula, in his master plan to take over the world through vampire babies, or something to that effect.
This Friday, the character will finally get his due. Voiced by John Cusack, the Igor in Igor finally decides he's had enough with the assitant role and decides to create his own invention for the annual science fair. No longer saying "Yes master" and throwing the switch, Igor creates life. While not a horror film at all, the character is horror in origin and I imagine lots of jokes will be made at the genre's expense. I expect it to be funny. Go see it if you think the character deserves it's due.
Here's a trailer:
That's it for this week. It's a little on the short side, but as I said, I've been putting a lot of work into The Top 100 Greatest Horror Films Ever Made. Good news is, the list itself is actually done, now I just need to do the write-ups and pictures and everything. It'll be twenty films a week for five weeks during October, starting on October 2nd.
Next week, I'm going to prepare you for the best by presenting the worst. That's right. The top ten worst horror films ever made. See you then.
