Saturday Night Creature Features

I've always been a fan of the Sam Cooke song "Another Saturday Night." I like most of the witty lyrics, including

Another fella told me
He had a sister who looked just fine
Instead of being my deliverance
She had a strange resemblance
To a cat named Frankenstein.

Whether he's referring to the doctor or The Monster, you've got to agree it's not exactly the quality a man wants in a date. But it did inspire me to try out Saturday Night Creature Features, which combine two of my interests--women and monsters--by focusing on female monsters.


Appropriately, let's start with The Bride of Frankenstein. It's interesting how attractive and relatively normal she is. A face uninterrupted by scars, petite but plump lips, and of course that crazy hairdo give her an exotic attractiveness. Where The Monster seems befuddled at the world and staggers through it clumsily, she has an intense stare that sees the world and she immediately knows what she does and does not want, choosing the doctor over her intended mate. Her gown gives her a columnar stature, and automatically makes her more like Frankenstein and less like The Monster in his rough-hewn clothes and huge clunky boots. She is, obviously, a better creation, a straight retelling of the feminist joke about man being God's rough draft and woman the final one. And tragically, inevitably, she rejects The Monster's advances, making this another retelling of The Monster Gaze.