X-Files Director's Cut Review: More Gore Can't Fix It
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- The X-Files: I Want to Believe director's cut, retitled "Vrach Frankenshteyn" (Russian for "Dr Frankenstein"), debuted on Disney+ on Friday and is buried behind the "Extras" tab for the 2008 original.
- Chris Carter has promoted the re-release's added grisly content, but the reviewer argues the new gore merely makes the same preposterous, underwritten story more unpleasant to look at.
- The film's villains — Janke Dacyshyn and his dying husband Franz Tomczeszyn, who kidnap women so surgeons can attach Franz's head to their bodies — receive almost no dialogue or interior life, which the reviewer calls the movie's central failure.
- David Duchovny's Mulder spends most of the runtime tailing vehicles through snow while Gillian Anderson's Scully battles a Catholic hospital for permission to perform experimental stem-cell treatment on a terminally ill boy.
- Billy Connolly plays Father Joe, a convicted paedophile priest whose psychic visions are the FBI's only lead on a missing female agent, adding a moral complication the film never fully explores.
- The reviewer contrasts the film with Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, arguing Shelley's creature works because she gives it inner life — exactly the dimension Carter omits, leaving the seriously gory payoff in the final 20 minutes emotionally flat.
Why it matters: Carter's re-release was framed as a chance to rehabilitate the weakest theatrical entry in the X-Files franchise, but the first review concludes the original film's problems were script-deep rather than gore-shallow — meaning this revision leaves the 2008 film's reputation essentially unchanged and reinforces that the franchise's creative decline with that sequel was structural, not cosmetic.
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