Review – The Killer Eye

Shit slinger David DeCoteau has amassed quite a collection of aliases throughout his career. In this effort from 1999 – one of six he directed that year, according to IMDb – he goes by Richard Chasen. The story – to the extent that there even is one – is about a scientist who allows an eyeball monster to cross over from the eighth dimension and have vague, softcore sex with a handful of dumb people. Given how thoroughly the niche market for this sort of thing has been eclipsed by easily-available porn on the internet (particularly Japanese tentacle stuff), this movie is likely to appeal only to a tiny group of viewers who were at just the right stage of puberty when it first hit video decades ago and are now for some reason nostalgic about the experience. Wish I’d skipped it

Review – Donovan's Brain

Funny how the word "brain" in a movie title is an almost infallible indication that it's going to be a mad scientist picture. And this one certainly doesn't disappoint on that count. An expert in keeping brains alive after death finally gets what he's been wanting – a human subject – almost literally dropped in his lap when the freshly-dead body of a plane crash victim is brought to his isolated desert lab. Things go wrong when 1. the donor turns out to have been an evil man and 2. The brain has the psychic ability to assume control over the doctor's will and force him to misbehave. The concept is clever enough, and the actors – even the future Nancy Reagan – do what they can to overcome the picture's relatively low budget. Mildly amusing

Review – The Devil Bat

Giant bats are killing the townsfolk. How does suspicion not immediately fall on the creepy doctor with the foreign accent (Bela Lugosi)? Well, if people are trying to celebrate diversity and avoid stereotyping, they needn’t have bothered. The foreigner’s responsible. Indeed, he’s hatched a particularly bizarre scheme to use electricity to make ordinary bats grow to the size of German shepherds and then program them to attack anyone wearing a perfume or aftershave laced with the doctor’s special chemical. The picture is as ridiculous as the description makes it sound. See if desperate

Review – Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed

At this point I’m willing to agree with the title’s imperative. Once again Peter Cushing steps into the role of the world’s most famous mad scientist. But this time around the guy’s a real creep. He blackmails a young doctor and his wife into helping him resume his experiments, and then he furthers his career with murder and rape. Even the usual parade of corpse hacking and brain swapping has become so commonplace that nobody seems to care much about it anymore (except of course for a few meddling townsfolk). See if desperate

Review – Frankenstein Created Woman

Of all the Hammer Frankensteins, this is the most convoluted. The orphan of an executed murderer grows up to be a gopher for the good doctor (Peter Cushing) and his assistant. After an altercation at a local pub, the young man ends up tried and convicted for a murder he didn’t commit. After seeing him guillotined, his distraught girlfriend (former Playboy model Susan Denberg) drowns herself. Enter Dr. Frankenstein, who uses an energy field to trap the lad’s soul until it can be inserted into the girl’s body. Back from the dead and thirsty for revenge s/he goes on a killing spree targeting the actual culprits. Though we’ve clearly strayed a distance from Mary Shelly’s creature and creator, I guess I’ve seen worse things done with the Frankenstein name. Mildly amusing

Review – Corruption

Peter Cushing’s name in the credits gets me set for some creaky Victorian skullduggery from Hammer Studios, so I was a little disappointed to learn that this wasn’t a Hammer production and the setting was 1968 contemporary. That notwithstanding, we get a fair amount of creepy murder. Cushing plays a surgeon seeking a way to repair the burned face of his fashion model fiancé. Unfortunately the cure he comes up with involves glands from other women, the more recently dead the better. After the good doctor reluctantly commits a handful of murders, the crime spree is interrupted by a pack of hippie housebreakers who are less Manson Family scary and more acid-is-groovy-kill-the-pigs stupid. I was intrigued by the rare complicity of the love interest. Usually the mad scientist’s girlfriend/wife has a “he was doing what?” moment somewhere along the line, but here the woman knows what’s going on and even forces the hapless doctor to kill just to maintain her beauty. The poster proclaims “Corruption is not a woman’s picture! Therefore no woman will be admitted alone to see this super shock film!!” Their loss, I’m sure. Also released as Carnage. Mildly amusing

Review – Doctor Blood's Coffin

If your family name is Blood, wouldn’t it be a good idea to either change your last name or seek work in a profession other than medicine? I mean, who would voluntarily see a physician named Doctor Blood? That’s like trying to get students to enroll in a class taught by Professor Homework. And yet the denizens of a small English village don’t seem to have a problem with this guy. Of course relations take a turn for the worse when everyone learns he has a secret lab in an abandoned mine where he’s trying to revive corpses by implanting fresh hearts from vivisected victims (which seems like it would be something of a zero-sum game rather than a genuine boon to humanity). We finally get a Frankenstein-y monster in the last few minutes, but the first hour and a half of the picture are pure boredom. See if desperate

Review – The Invisible Man

Though greatly overshadowed by director James Whale’s other horror masterpieces (namely Frankenstein and The Bride of Frankenstein), this one’s worth a look. Of course one of its major failings is that the good stuff is front-loaded. The scene in which Claude Rains removes his bandages and reveals nothing underneath is one of the great moments in horror cinema (not to mention an incredible special effects triumph at the time). But it happens in the first 15 minutes of the movie, and nothing after that packs the same punch. The story is a loose adaptation of a novel by H.G. Wells, here turned into the tale of a scientist gone mad with the power conferred by his invisibility formula. I loved this movie as a kid – I even went as the title character for Halloween one year – and even now its charm endures. Worth seeing

Review – The Corpse Vanishes

As does Bela Lugosi’s career. After being the toast of the horror movie world in the 1930s, his career sped right through the guardrail and over a cliff. This picture is from 1942, but already it’s so cheap and dreadful that it presages what would eventually become of this tragic, talented actor. In this ordeal he plays a mad scientist who knocks out brides on their wedding days and then snatches their bodies, drags them back to his lab, and sucks out their bride juices to make an eternal youth formula for his aging wife. Though the cast might have done something better with a better script or at least better film stock, this turns out to be a romp of incompetence. See if desperate

Review – The Return of Doctor X

Though the original is a minor genre classic, this picture is an early example of the practice of making sequels that have little in common with their predecessors. A mad scientist has figured out a way to keep his illness at bay and prolong his life thanks to an elixir refined from the blood of unwilling “donors.” The drama incorporates some then-current information about blood typing, which was interesting. It also features Humphrey Bogart as the villain, sporting a genuinely bizarre hairdo and paint job. But the lack of solid plot and character beyond that make this more of a historical curiosity than a worthwhile viewing experience. Mildly amusing

Review – The Ape

Boris Karloff is sort of a mad scientist Boo Radley in this odd picture from 1940. The townspeople distrust him, and local kids throw rocks at his house. But he’s actually trying to help a wheelchair-bound woman by working on a serum to cure her paralysis. Unfortunately, his experiments require “donations” from the locals, which he obtains by masquerading as an escaped circus gorilla. Not exactly Karloff’s finest moment. See if desperate

Review – The Man with Nine Lives

This movie has a few interesting notions about freezing. First premise: it’s possible to freeze a human being and then bring her back to life. Second premise: this can be accomplished by packing the person in ice and turning some fans on her. Third premise: this cures cancer. It’s hard to say which of these premises is the most ridiculous, and that in turn makes it hard to accept this picture at face value. Once again Boris Karloff plays a mad scientist revived from the dead – or at least the deep freeze – to continue his experiments. If only they’d just let the guy work, maybe he wouldn’t go mad and start doing all kinds of creepy tests on unwilling victims. Mildly amusing

Review – The Man They Could Not Hang

Well, technically they did hang him. He just didn’t stay dead. A scientist (Boris Karloff) invents a device that will revive the freshly deceased, which will in theory allow surgeons to kill their patients, perform surgery without struggling with anesthesia, and then bring them back to life at the end. But his first human volunteer dies when the police interrupt the experiment before the good doctor can revive him. Convicted of murder and sentenced to death, our hero swears revenge on the judge, jury and prosecutor. Naturally this seems like an idle threat until the doctor’s assistant uses his device to bring him back to life. He picks off six jurors individually, but then he goes after the rest by luring them all to his booby-trapped house. The picture has its moments – such as the odd revival device, a series of bottles and tubes that doesn’t look like it would do all that much – but for the most part it’s a run-of-the-mill mad scientist revenge picture. Mildly amusing

Review – Doctor X

When a “moon killer” begins preying on the local populace, police attention naturally falls on the patients of Dr. Xavier, a researcher supervising a whole asylum full of mad scientists. An intrepid, obnoxious reporter tries to get to the bottom of the mystery while making passes at the good doctor’s daughter (Fay Wray). The pace is highly uneven, going from edgy – at least by 1932 standards – to goofy with no warning (disappointing for a Michael Curtiz production). Further, the picture was shot in an early version of Technicolor, giving it the appearance of a poorly-colorized black-and-white production. Still, it has a few genuinely eerie moments buried amid the strange plot twists and lame attempts at comedy. Mildly amusing

Review – The Curse of the Fly

Though those wacky scientists have managed to extract all the literal insects from the system, they still haven’t managed to work all the bugs out of their teleportation chamber. The system now stretches from England to Canada (shades of Marconi’s early experiments with long distance wireless), but it’s still a tad unreliable. And of course by “a tad unreliable” I mean that people put through it tend to come out mutilated on the other end. The plot twists, turns and eventually grinds to a halt. See if desperate

Review – Bride of the Monster

Bad script. Bad acting. Terrible production values. Bizarre editing. Bela Lugosi. Tor Johnson. Must be an Ed Wood movie! In all honesty, this isn’t the worst movie I’ve ever seen. It lacks the charm of Glen or Glenda? and the renown of Plan 9 from Outer Space. But in a way that actually makes it easier to watch. One can set aside the greatest-cult-movie-ever hype and just enjoy it for what it is: a delightfully incompetent attempt at a picture about a mad scientist with a giant squid problem. Mildly amusing

Review – The Black Sleep

This movie has a few things going for it. It’s got a stellar horror cast, including Basil Rathbone, John Caradine, Tor Johnson, Bela Lugosi, and Lon Chaney Jr. (though the last three don’t have a single line between them). It has an intriguing premise: a mad scientist performs personality-destroying surgery on unwilling victims in order to figure out how the brain works. It even has a cool title, a reference to the death-simulating drug the good doctor uses to sedate his patients. If only the pace hadn’t been quite so laconic; I was nearly in a black sleep myself by the end of it. Mildly amusing

Review – The Devil Doll

The scariest thing about this movie is Lionel Barrymore parading around in drag more than half the time. Of course as an escaped convict seeking revenge on the trio who had him wrongfully imprisoned years ago, he can perhaps be excused for disguising himself as an old lady. What is harder to excuse is his decision to employ the shrinking technology developed by one of his convict buddies and try to reduce his enemies to doll size. For the most part this is a special effects vehicle from 1936, and though the composite shots aren’t all that impressive by 21st century standards, they were probably pretty hot stuff in their day. Overall I’ve seen better horror movies from this period in film history, but I’ve seen worse as well. Mildly amusing

Review – The Invisible Man Returns

Has the invisible man ever been played by the same actor twice? I expect it’s hard to get a guy to repeat a role in which his face is hidden (or not there to begin with) throughout most if not all of the picture. And of course the studio has no particular need to keep the same actor in the role. Thus while Claude Rains made the original role famous, this time around it’s a young Vincent Price behind the bandages. Sadly, this movie doesn’t offer much that we didn’t already get in the first one. As a result, it’s a bit on the boring side. Mildly amusing

Review – Primal Rage

It came from the ’80s! And I mean the deep, deep ’80s. Mall hair. Mopeds. Flashdance-esque music. Characters named Debbie. Buried somewhere under all this is a mad scientist plot involving crusading student journalists, animal research, and the accidental release of some kind of infection or whatnot that turns placid college students into rampaging lunatics. So when the already-unstable frat boys get a good dose of it, look out! The concept’s interesting enough, but the script is so bad and production values so low that it ends up playing out as just another crappy slasher movie. Mildly amusing