Cast:
Albert Dekker (Dr. Alexander Thorkel), Thomas Coley (Bill Stockton), Janice Logan (Dr. Mary Robinson), Charles Halton (Dr. Rupert Bulfinch), Victor Kilian (Steve Baker), Frank Yaconelli (Pedro Caroz), Paul Fix (Dr. Mendoza), and Frank Reicher (Professor Kendall) Directed by Ernest B. Schoedsack (#283 - King Kong, #604 - Mighty Joe Young, #709 - The Most Dangerous Game, #914 - Son of Kong, #2057 - Blind Adventure)
Review:
Okay, here's a semi-interesting thing about the movie: it was made in three-strip Technicolor that was apparently a first for the horror movie. The movie was apparently planned out on blueprints before shooting when it comes to certain sequences (you may wonder what the title refers to: late in the movie, the group takes the doctor's glasses and smash one of the lenses, which therefore means he can see from one eye, get it?). The movie was written by Tom Kilpatrick and an uncredited Malcolm Stuart Boylan (a screenwriter that apparently was the co-founder of the U.S. Coast Guard Auxillary)* This was the penultimate movie for Schoedsack as a director, who had a mix of noted work such as say, co-directing The Most Dangerous Game (1932) and King Kong (1933) to go along with stuff such as Outlaws of the Orient (1937). The last movie he did was nine years later with Mighty Joe Young [1949], as his vision became diminished in later years when testing equipment in World War II.
I really wish I could get into this, because there are some interesting things to look at and the movie has one useful performance. But it isn't that much more than schlock when you really get down to looking at it beyond the projection effects, particularly since most of the characters are really, really, not that interesting. You would think a movie that starts with a flourish of color to go with showing the initial weirdness of our title character...and that's really it. To put it mildly, Dekker is the only one who bothers to try for the movie because he has one interest in mind: shrinking stuff. But beyond the coke-bottle glasses and the bald head that reminds one of perhaps a mole-man, he only makes the movie semi-watchable because you would rather the film just be about his mayhem. Instead, he kind of takes a backseat once he shrinks folks down (the setup is ridiculous too: he summons a bunch of people to prove his stuff works, tells them to immediately leave and then gets mad - what did he think was going to happen?). No I'm not kidding, he has a sleeping habit that the shrunken folks take advantage of up to a point, with them at one point sneaking away to mess around with the new room they've discovered along with looking at books (the funny thing is his shrinking thing kind of stinks anyway, since they are only temporarily shrunk down to 12 inches). A good chunk of what people like about the movie relies on either the effects or Dekker, because the other people are really plain, with Logan being the only one that makes an attempt at something beyond stock. Dekker only has mild intensity and I really think the visual (bald, glasses) is more interesting than the actual character: it begs for something really bitter and spiteful when you're talking about someone who likes to deal in shrinkage. The effects are pretty fine quality (albeit one that makes sure to not go in close-up and makes sure to try and blend as much as possible with say, a killer cat) but again, the tension isn't really there to accompany the wonder you want to have in a sci-fi horror movie. The movie doesn't even give the villain a grisly death: they just cut a rope and boom, he falls into a pit (call me sick, but I thought they were going to try and find a way to get the shrinking machine onto his sorry self or their initial plan: wait until he was asleep to blow his face off with a gun). As it stands, it never really gets to its full potential and is therefore just a mild curiosity that looks a bit interesting but can't make it all fit together.
Overall, I give it 6 out of 10 stars.
*Wikipedia once claimed it was based on the story "Dr. Cyclops" by Henry Kuttner, a prolific writer of stories in his day (such as "The Twonky" and "Vintage Season", which were also turned into movies). But hey.
No comments:
Post a Comment