The X-Files: I Want to Believe – Vrach Frankenshteyn (now on Hulu) promises a fresh take on a disappointing film – and, as the title implies, on a very old story. The original I Want to Believe underwhelmed audiences when it debuted in 2008, six years after the first run of The X-Files TV series concluded (and 10 years after the first feature film, the superior The X-Files: Fight the Future, was a significantly bigger hit). And that tepid response found director/franchise creator Chris Carter tinkering with the product, first with an extended cut for its DVD release, and now with a stripped-down version that trims the run time to 98 minutes and emphasizes the horror elements Carter was compelled to remove in order to get a PG-13 rating. So: Does this Vrach Frankenshteyn improve upon the shrugworthy initial version, or is it yet another case of a director’s cut promising more than it can deliver?

THE X-FILES: I WANT TO BELIEVE – VRACH FRANKENSHTEYN: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT? 

The Gist: We open cutting between two sequences: A woman being stalked and abducted by two men, late at night, at her secluded West Virginia home, and an FBI search party being led by an eccentric man to a spot in the middle of a snowy expanse, where they find a severed arm. Cut to former FBI agent/current medical doctor Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson), who’s trying, mostly in vain, to come up with an effective treatment for a child patient with a rare disease. She’s approached by the FBI’s Mosley Drummy (Alvin Joiner, a.k.a. rapper Xzibit), who wants to find her old partner, disgraced ex-agent Fox Mulder (David Duchovny), who’s in hiding, wanted by his former employer for malfeasances we saw in the old TV series. 

Turns out the FBI is willing to drop the charges against Mulder so he can help wrangle the eccentric man from the opening scenes, since he’s a psychic assisting the agency in finding a missing agent. The situation opens the door to a repairing of Mulder, the paranoid I-want-to-believer, with the skeptical Scully, who’ve apparently been sleeping with each other. But don’t get too invested in that, since the romance between them is excised from this version of I Want to Believe, a lot like the serial-killerish villains of the movie perform backwoods surgery on their victims for reasons that venture into spoiler territory (for an 18-year-old movie, ha), although the Vrach Frankenshteyn tacked onto the title provides a grim hint as to what they’re up to.

So here they are, Mulder and Scully, together again, working with Drummy and Agent Whitney (Amanda Peet) to, well, piece together the clues for this increasingly complicated case. The psychic guy, Father Joe (Billy Connolly), is a former priest and convicted pedophile, and of course, only Mulder believes his psychic powers are real. Meanwhile, Scully’s subplot stirs some rather fraught text about religion, as the priest administrators of the Catholic hospital where she works insist that she shouldn’t put her young patient through the invasive stem cell treatment she’s cooked up. Is it God’s will that this boy should die? We’ve got Mulder’s faith butting up against the FBI’s science, and Scully’s science butting up against the church’s faith. But of course we remember how Scully the Christian always thought Mulder’s belief in the paranormal was silly. These people contain multitudes, I tell you.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? After the recent releases of Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein and Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride!, our Frankenstein cups runneth over a bit these days. Dedicated X-Files fans will inevitably compare it to the Emmy-winning 1997 episode The Post-Modern Prometheus, considered to be among the series’ best.  

Performance Worth Watching: Connolly fulfills his duties as the colorful supporting star, further confirming his status as one of the more talented character actors in the business. 

Sex And Skin: None, which is a bummer to y’all Mulder and Scully ’shippers.

Our Take: The core mythology of The X-Files had wrapped up by the time I Want to Believe hit theaters, so without little grey men and UFOs in the mix, the film functioned primarily as a touchbase for Mulder and Scully’s relationship. But as previously mentioned, Carter cut the majority of that stuff out for Vrach Frankenshteyn, rendering it even more of a standalone, “monster of the week”-style thriller. But keeping the skeptics-and-believers character tension intact was a smart calculation on Carter’s part, because it’s the only thing that holds this sloppy narrative together. There’s ambition in his ideas here, and this cut of the film emphasizes the fraught ethical parallels between the villains’ actions and Scully’s fight to keep a boy alive through experimental means. You’ve got God’s will over here, and the science of humanity over there, and they crash together like rams headbutting over a mate.

The film is quite admirable from a technical standpoint, Carter using well-chosen locations, strong cinematography and moody lighting to create some gloomy atmosphere, and crisp editing keeps the story moving at a steady, mid-to-uptempo pace. There’s an urgency to this 98-minute film (cut down from the theatrical version’s 103, and the extended version’s 108) that holds our attention but doesn’t skimp on the themes. Is that enough for one to overlook how the story tends to fall apart in the sloppy third act, which hinges on coincidences, conveniences and narrative shortcuts? Mostly. The original film was messy, and Vrach Frankenshteyn retains some of that messiness, more heavily emphasizing horror tones via the addition of a few medium-to-soft-R-rated bits of gory violence — there’s only so much that can be salvaged from an 18-year-old film without doing expensive reshoots. But hey, at least it’s slightly less messy than before.

Our Call: The X-Files: I Want to Believe wasn’t a bad film, just mediocre. Vrach Frankenshteyn improves upon it just enough to make it mediocre-plus. So STREAM IT, although its status as anything beyond a curiosity for X-Files diehards is in serious question.

John Serba is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Werner Herzog hugged him once.