The Universal Monsters. A stable of cinematic creatures that
served as the progenitor for the modern craze surrounding cinematic universes,
which itself has found repeated non-success in the post-MCU landscape. Dracula
Untold was retrofitted to be part of the ‘Dark Universe’, and the results are
unsurprisingly rushed, and the less said about the Tom Cruise vanity project
(well, more so than any of his others, at least) The Mummy from 2017, the
better. Hell, even before then with the works of Stephen Sommers in the
2000’s, attempts to bring back the classic monsters kept shooting themselves in
the foot as far as trying to create serialised franchises out of them.
But now that Universal has stopped putting the cart before
the horse, and are letting individual films stand on their own for a change, we
have the latest attempt to bring back the old guard. And holy shit, this is
easily the best attempt yet.
