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One good thing that can be said of Maggie Gyllenhaal's "The Bride!" -- a movie not overburdened with good things -- is that it features a ferociously committed (or perhaps exhaustingly demented, your call) lead performance by Jessie Buckley. The movie is ... not a remake, but basically a feminist riff on James Whale's 1935 "Bride of Frankenstein," which was the sequel to Whale's 1931 horror landmark "Frankenstein," which was of course based on Mary Shelley's 1818 novel of more or less the same name.

The movie begins going wrong right at the start, when we're confronted with the ghost of Shelley (Buckley), speaking from the beyond and telling us that "Frankenstein" wasn't the story she had really wanted to tell. That tale, she says, would have been "the most frightening of all -- a love story."

This isn't the zippiest way to launch a movie, so it's a relief to be taken next to what seems like a speakeasy of some sort in 1936 Chicago. Here we meet a woman named Ida (Buckley again), apparently a gangster's moll of some sort. This scene, with its gruff mobsters and ambient party girls, strongly suggests Prohibition -- although Prohibition ended in 1933 (a niggling chronological ambiguity of a sort that undercuts the film elsewhere as well).

Ida becomes an annoyance to a pair of tough guys on hand and soon gets thrown down a flight of stairs, at the bottom of which she is found to be dead. Now there arrives in town a mysterious stranger with a face full of scars and staples. This is "Frank" (Christian Bale) and he's come to see a local mad scientist named Dr. Euphronius (Annette Bening, not at all recalling Ernest Thesiger's peerlessly creepy Dr. Pretorius in Whale's earlier "Bride"). Euphronius is seeking a way to "reinvigorate" the dead, and Frank -- left alone by the death of his creator -- is yearning for a friend (and "an intercourse," as he precociously puts it). In short order, he and Euphronius, searching for a suitable corpse, are wielding shovels in the graveyard where Ida happens to be buried. Exhuming her body, they take it back to the doctor's laboratory and -- in a giant burst of fritzing electricity -- bring it back to life.

Now transformed into Frank's "bride," Ida erupts in fits of yelling and gibbering and even crazy-legged dancing. (There's an elaborate black-and-white dance scene, actually set to "Puttin' on the Ritz," that is boldly copped from Mel Brooks' 1974 "Young Frankenstein," and later we get a long car-chase sequence that leans heavily on the 1967 "Bonnie and Clyde.") As the reincarnated Ida, with her explosion of platinum-blonde hair, Buckley strongly recalls '30s film star Jean Harlow if she had been plugged into a wall socket; and her mad mugging and cavorting -- actually pretty entertaining, if you ask me -- all but blow the underplaying Bale off the screen.

As the movie passes the two-hour mark, a viewer might wish that it had been trimmed a bit (the studio, Warner Bros., compelled a re-edit of Gyllenhaal's first cut). Useful excisions might have been made in the unnecessary in-and-out babbling of the otherworldly Shelley and the scenes featuring a dull detective (played by the director's husband, Peter Sarsgaard) and his secretary (Penelope Cruz), who is of course much brighter than her boss but is kept down by vintage sexism. No surprise.

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To find out more about Kurt Loder and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators website at www.creators.com.

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