Frankenstein and Me is both a modernist deconstruction of the fanboy delights of Famous Monsters and Frankenstein, and one that also quite cleverly plays into the legend as well – there is a delightful throwaway coda right at the end just after the monster has been forgotten about, which shows that it was not a crazy dream after all. But as much as it is a genre homage, the film is an even better paean to childhood – of the pain of growing up a dreamer who is constantly being pressured to conform. Burt Reynolds plays rather well as the father who has never achieved the dreams of Hollywood he once had and who gently, warmly inspires his sons to be a dreamer too. For all the critical attention that focused on Reynolds ‘comeback’ role in Boogie Nights (1997) around the same time, the far more low key Frankenstein and Me contains a far better performance from Reynolds. The film manages without a step wrong to get the childhood emotions down without sentimentalizing anything or simplifying the complexity of the issues. There is a very nice scene where young Jamieson Boulanger counters his mother’s entreaties to do what he is told in school by explaining that the teacher is not a good teacher, a scene that is praiseworthy for its all too rare challenge to the conformist assumptions that underlie all children’s films.

American-born but Canadian based director Robert Tinnell originally started out working on cheesy exploitation movies – he also produced Surf Nazis Must Die (1987). As a director he has made a number of these genre children’s films. Also worth checking out is Kids of the Round Table (1995), about a schoolkid finding Excalibur in the present-day, and in particular the fine ghost story Believe (2000), which features similar themes to this of an intelligent youth with a love of horror being forced to clamp down on his imagination. Nowadays, Tinnell works as a writer of graphic novels.