DeNiro playing Frankenstein's monster was great idea, and the performance feels true to the character in the book. Sadly it comes off as if he were cut out from another film and pasted into this farce. Seeing it in the theater back in 1994, I was embarrassed for everyone involved except for Branagh, who can share the blame with the producers in making this thing. Grown adults were pointing at the screen and laughing, and not just when John Cleese showed up. His scene was the first unintentionally funny one - Cleese's dour character was straight out of about twenty Python sketches. But the "birth" scene, dripping not just with melted jello but with shallow, pointless undercurrents of mother and child and homo-eroticism, was made more ridiculous with comically timed editing. It's one of the worst things I've ever seen in a Hollywood movie. You've got to wonder what people are thinking sometimes when making a horror film - did Branagh, or whoever had final cut of this thing, get chills up their spine at any point? Could they feel anything other than blind, empty sensation? "Yeah! That does something!" Yeah, it makes the movie really suck. This movie is a lot of things, mostly a really good lesson in really bad film-making, but it is not scary, nor does it carry any of the message or subtext of Shelly's book. One would like to think that Branagh approached this as an assignment with a big paycheck, which could cut him off from some of the blame, but from his blustery, overstuffed interviews at the time, he took it, and himself, very, very, very, very seriously, and I'm sure he thought he was adding something profound to the great cannon of the Frankenstein legend. What a pompous fraud.