You Say Igor and I Say Eye-Gor

Apparently the Spanish name Eva is very popular in Hollywood this year because it just appeared in yet another recent movie. Unfortunately, this movie -- Igor -- wasn't as good as the last movie in which it appeared, which is too bad since the good folks at Pixar really could use some competition.

As you might guess, the movie Igor is about a hunchback named -- well -- Igor. Poor Igor -- voiced by John Cusack -- lives in a country called Malaria where all hunchbacks are named Igor. Unfortunately, all these hunchbacks are also forced to work as assistants to the local evil scientists -- evil science apparently being one of the few growth industries left in Malaria ever since a nasty weather crisis put paid to the local agriculture.

This being a modern cartoon, Cusack's Igor yearns to be more than just an assistant -- and indeed manages to invent not one but two items in his spare time -- a talking but not terribly intelligent brain and an immortal but not proud of it rabbit. His master manages to kill himself in a nasty lab accident just before the local Evil Science Fair and Igor finds himself in the position of not only being able to take his master's place but being forced by the local king to take his master's place. Unfortunately, the king -- who looks suspiciously like the mayor in The Nightmare Before Christmas -- isn't above hinting that Igor's failure to win the above mentioned Science Fair could mean his death.

So our “hero” sets out to create the most evil thing he can think of: life. Apparently this is not meant to be a pro-life movie. Nor does the movie quite explain why the immortal rabbit and the animated brain aren't seen as potentially useful items. But then what use can an evil scientist possibly have for immortality? Or brains?

Anyway, poor Igor sets out to create the worst monster ever -- interestingly enough, a female -- and then discovers to his horror that it isn't quite as evil as he'd hoped. Attempts to reprogram the creation -- the above mentioned Eva -- in a more diabolical direction go awry and poor Igor is faced with a hideous Bride-of-Frankenstein-ish creature that is more interested in becoming a movie star than a monster. Igor tries to improvise a way out of this mess, a rival scientist finds out about his invention, and then suddenly plot complications occur. (I hate it when that happens.)

So is the movie worth seeing? Well, it isn't that unwatchable, but it's not that good either. If you have seen Shrek or The Iron Giant, you can probably see most plot twists coming from light-years away, and even Eva isn't half as interesting as similar female characters in The Nightmare Before Christmas or Corpse Bride.

One minor subplot concerning a female character who likes to disguise herself as something other than what she really is could be seen as a parable of racial/ethnic self-hatred, especially when the character rants quite extensively about the ugliness of a being that shares her real appearance. For that matter, the entire movie can be seen as both a political parable and an allegory of assimilation. But then again the TV show Ugly Betty handles a lot of these same themes a whole lot better so you best not get your hopes up too high before seeing this flick. Even a writer as brilliant as Terry Pratchett isn't always that inspired when he writes about Igors, and the kindest thing one can say about the writer of this movie is that he is no Terry Pratchett.