TV REVIEWS : ‘Frankenstein’ Sans the Nuts and Bolts

I t’s alive!

Not.

“Frankenstein,” a TNT cable movie premiering Sunday at 5 and 8 p.m., aims to breathe new life into Mary Shelley’s 1818 fable by adhering more closely to the novel than most of the previous myriad screen treatments. Despite TNT’s ad claims that “the real story is the most horrifying of all,” most of the usual terrorizing elements have been deliberately stripped from this more sober-minded telling.

Sounds swell in theory. In execution, though, while this “Frankenstein” forsakes most claims to being scary in the usual ways, it still leaves in nearly every under-thought, pseudo-philosophic pretension ever found in prior film adaptations. These cliches include the inevitable accusations that the good doctor is “playing God”--scenes so familiar you can almost recite them before the actors do.

For a “real” version of the story, writer-director David Wickes has made some significant changes. No longer is the rampaging monster a cut-and-paste result of grave-robbing. Instead, as Dr. Frankenstein explains in some mumbo-jumbo exposition, he’s developed an electromagnetic cloning procedure with a tank full of orange liquid, from which the creature busts out fully grown. The two being “one,” then, Dr. F. feels what the monster feels and vice versa--doppelgangers in the most over-obvious sense.

Offbeat, goofily handsome Randy Quaid was a good choice to humanize the creature, and his subtler-than-usual makeup job--sans bolts and scars, etc.--goes a long way in proving that all it takes is a few massively varicose veins across one’s face to effectively cross one off the social register. But his increasingly articulate monologues come off as increasingly silly, and as touching as they’re meant to be only in a few fleeting instances despite the actor’s most pitiable efforts.

In the title role, Patrick Bergin, probably best known for hamming it up as a villain in “Sleeping With the Enemy,” proves he can ham it up as a protagonist, too--though he can’t be blamed for not wanting to play Wickes’ stilted dialogue totally straight.

There are three sequences late in the show when “Frankenstein” almost threatens to get jolted to life: one grotesque scene in which Bergin makes a literally abortive attempt to create a mate for his monster, another in which Quaid makes a bloody raid on the doctor’s country mansion, and a climax set incongruously in the Arctic. Those moments aside, this is a stiff of a creature feature, in dire need of less talk and more rock.