The Magnetic Monster (1953)

Too many fans seem to be blown away

Such a frustrating disappointment

just watch it!

Don't Believe the Hype

The script of this low budget (no one could afford a scientific adviser) film consists of an incoherent jumble of misused terminology with a side story that the main character's wife is going to have a baby (no mystery here - we know how that happens). The plot says that Denker created this thing (it's called an element in the script) by bombarding serranium (a fictitious element name) with alpha particles for 200 hours. Note that this was done in his clandestine laboratory above the local appliance store. Now we find that magnetism and radioactivity, two unrelated phenomena, are the result of this creation. It magnetizes stuff around it but the magnetized stuff behaves in odd ways. The source is found to be above the ceiling but the metal objects move horizontally across the floor or counter. So they catch up with Denker with the stuff in a briefcase and store it in the cyclotron for safe keeping - wrong. That's not what one does with a cyclotron. Supposedly, this thing has the ability to absorb energy and convert it to mass (a great misapplication of the Einstein equation E = mc(squared) and so the cyclotron gets destroyed when it goes through one of its energy absorbing episodes. Whether it is one atom getting bigger or one atom making other atoms we are not told, only if no one can stop it the Earth will be ejected from its orbit. This is so bad. Never mind the ending. Along with the misapplication of scientific terminology the makers of the film want us to believe that the plane carrying the thing to Canada changes from a T-33 Trainer on the ground to a F-86 Saber jet after takeoff in the air. It shouldn't take much to realize that error and to correct it but no. In conclusion, don't pay money to see it or the time for that matter unless you get your kicks out of watching things that Mystery Science Theater 2000 would pan. I can't believe that so many reviewers actually thought it was good.

This is very good 1950's science fiction. At the center is Curt Siodmak, a pretty good writer who involves us in a tale where the use of a particle accelerator causes magnetism to go crazy. It results in implosions that could eventually end all life on earth. It's up to Richard Carlson and King Donovan, staples in the movie genre of the time, to come up with a solution. This is post atom bomb time and we are treated to a lot of moralizing about life and its preciousness. This could have gotten out of hand but is reined in pretty well. I thought the science was reasonable and the acting quite good. Stereotyping was kept to a minimum and allowed the principles to do their thing. Very good scene in an appliance store at the beginning.

MM is a lesser movie, and not nearly on par with the best the 50s had to offer by way of American scifi flicks. It pales in comparison to movies like Them, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Thing from Another World, The Monolith Monsters, 20 Million Miles to Earth, Forbidden Planet, It Came from Outer Space, Tarantula, The Mole People, and others. Not all of these are superb movies, but all of them are far more entertaining than The Magnetic Monster.MM suffers from the same problems as a good many scifi films from that era. Unlike any of the above listed examples, MM is filmed in a documentary style, which also characterized some of the lesser film noir of the same time period. Exposition is handled mainly through very boring voice-over narration. In this way, instead of conveying information and through interesting character interactions or suspenseful plot reveals (watch The Thing for a perfect example of how it should be done), we have to listen to the protagonist drone on and on in sci-babble through his voice-overs. In addition, the movie makes liberal use of Air Force stock footage leading up to the climax. The climax itself consists largely of re-used footage from what I believe is the 1935 scifi movie, Trans-Atlantic Tunnel (worth a look, BTW). All of the above alludes to the main problem with MM: a bland, uninteresting script which never draws the viewer in after the fashion of the better scifi movies from that era. Most of the movies I listed above make a sincere attempt to present entertaining dialogue, and those with less complex scripts still create suspense through competent pacing and editing. Some of them, such as Them and The Thing, inject some humor into the script, thus investing the movie with another level of entertainment, while also fleshing out the characters a bit more. MM possesses none of these attributes, which is somewhat surprising, given Curt Siodmak's involvement with the film. He was both a competent writer and a reasonably talented director (perhaps not coincidentally, he conceived the story for Trans-Atlantic Tunnel).Anyway, Magnetic Monster is worth a look, I guess, if you are a connoisseur of 50s American scifi; but I suggest you go in with low expectations.

It's April, 2013, an age of scientific advance Mr. Carlson surely would have loved to have seen, and TCM just had a Richard Carlson tribute evening. All his best. These movies have lost nothing of their fascination from the time I first watched them as a young child through now as I'm just a tinch shy of my "golden years". Those of us who fall into this age category have the wonderful advantage of having seen science fiction be translated into science fact. We were the dreamers who saw the beginnings of the space age through these incredible films of the 50's of which Richard Carlson's were among the best. This movie, along with Riders to the Stars, were his first attempts to try to provide more science "fact" than "fiction" and they still to this day provide excellent film watching. They also are from a period where films still relied mainly on actually telling a story, as opposed to whip fast computer generated graphics to provide all the entertainment. The Magnetic Monster delves into the relatively unknown to the average person, but terrifying world of nuclear material, and a batch of it that seems to actually be alive and with a voracious appetite. I found it more like watching a documentary than a film and this one stuck with me, even after all these years. It's well worth a watch and if you have young children, especially age 8-11, try to get them to take a watch with you. I'm sure many a scientist today got their initial thirst for science from some of Carlson's wonderful films. ENJOY!!