The Mad Monster (1942)

That was an excellent one.

Excellent, a Must See

What a freaking movie. So many twists and turns. Absolutely intense from start to finish.

It is both painfully honest and laugh-out-loud funny at the same time.

What is wrong with you people? The rating is in the 3's. One idiot says Glenn Strange rips off Lon Chaney Jr. and he can't even spell Chaney. OK we have a kids monster movie from the 1940's. A kids movie, no adult would be caught dead in a theatre watching this in 1942. Today we analyze the plot to infinity about whether this scene was believable etc.... It's a kids monster movie, not Citizen Kane. Suspend your current political correct state of mind and enter a 1940's kids movie. It's fun, trust me.What do we have? We have George Zucco, one of the best raving mad scientists of all time, playing a mad scientist. We have a werewolf unlike any other (that is a good thing). We have rural bumpkins getting torn to pieces. Great. We have Universal's scream queen Anne Nagel making a much appreciated appearance.The idiots who watch MST3K have ridiculed this movie so it must be bad, right? Wrong. Our current society watches endless superhero movies today and praises them as masterpieces. While old movies made for kids are ridiculed. Hmmm... a psychologist could have a field day with that.

I have always been wary of horror programmers from the Golden Age of Horror, primarily because they degraded such genre icons as Bela Lugosi and John Carradine, who were somehow unable to find work in A-grade films around this time; however, these Z-movies also gave the opportunity for character actors like Lionel Atwill and J. Carroll Naish to have their own star vehicles and let rip with the villainy. Perhaps the most prolific – and unhinged – among the latter group was George Zucco (who, apart from appearing in the occasional prestige production, was also the best incarnation of Professor Moriarty in THE ADVENTURES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES {1939}), and I have decided to incorporate a handful of his efforts in the current "Halloween Challenge".This film, then, is also one of a quartet I will be checking out revolving around werewolves: PRC obviously attempted to jump on the bandwagon of Universal's latest monster THE WOLF MAN (1941) with this one, but the result is so lame that one would do best not to compare the two. Even worse than a family curse or being 'marked' by lycanthropy is the notion of having someone turned into a monster by being injected with a serum extracted from a genuine wolf (except the film-makers here apparently could only lay their hands on a coyote!). In fact, the real protagonist here is not the creature (played in human guise as a dim-witted Ozark – derived from the Lenny character in John Steinbeck's "Of Mice And Men" – by Glenn Strange!) but the mad scientist (Zucco, of course), with the title further confusing the issue! Incidentally, Lon Chaney Jr. had incarnated both Lenny in the 1939 film version of the afore-mentioned literary classic and Lawrence "The Wolf Man" Talbot! Anyway, Zucco is the usual disgraced genius who in the film's very opening scene imagines himself lecturing the 4 eminent colleagues who had publicly humiliated him and forced his resignation. This being the war years, his original plan was to build an invincible army of werewolf soldiers(!) but, if the ultra-sluggish Strange was anything to go by, the outcome of these experiments would doubtless have proved disastrous to the Allied cause! In fact, out of his targets, he only manages to eliminate one (the only other fatal attack being completely unrelated to his 'mission', committed upon a little girl whose mother is actually played by frequent Laurel & Hardy foil Mae Busch!)! Strange's werewolf make-up is as much a slapdash job as the script itself, barely concealing his facial features and accentuated by the cheapest of dime-store fangs! By the way, Zucco has the obligatory clueless daughter who, just as inevitably, is romanced by the very man (in this case a scoop-seeking reporter) who will eventually bring about his downfall. Amusingly, Zucco goes to the house of his chief nemesis with Strange in tow to demonstrate his theory but then contrives to absent himself and have the victim administer the transforming drug to the harmless-looking handyman…which then takes forever to produce the desired effect, so that the supposedly intrigued man of science has already gone back to his bit of dead-of-night reading, thus being ostensibly oblivious to the change from man into monster!; another intended prey, in fact, is even asked to give Strange a lift to town with the metamorphosis subsequently occurring inside the car in mid-journey! Unsurprisingly, the leading lady eventually comes face to face with the werewolf but is saved in the nick of time, whereas the scientist expires at the hand of his own creation (the former had earlier kept the latter in check by the use of a whip, apparently a pre-requisite of such cheapies!) which, rather than via the proverbial silver bullet, gets his in the fire that consumes Zucco's remote country-house!! A word on director Newfield: he is considered among the most prolific American film-makers ever (with almost 300 titles to his name over a period of 30 years!); this was actually his very first horror movie (reportedly shot in just 5 days!), which rather explains its considerable narrative shortcomings compared to a more satisfactory later effort like THE MONSTER MAKER (1944).

It's certainly ambitious. That's perhaps the best thing that can be said for this rather ... strange (as in Glenn Strange, who played the monster) movie. Apparently trying to cash in on the recent success of Lon Chaney's "The Wolf Man," this blends elements of that movie along with ideas from "Frankenstein" and "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" among others and turns out an inept but still somewhat amusing horror picture.Strange played Petro, the simple-minded servant of Dr. Cameron (George Zucco). Cameron has stumbled upon a way of turning humans into ravenous, murderous beasts by injecting them with the blood of animals - in the belief that they could be used as an invincible army (remember that this was made during World War II.) In the midst of explaining what he was doing he claimed to have discovered the "secret of life." (How this was the secret of life was unclear to me.) For his efforts, Cameron is drummed out of the academic community, and continues his experiments on Petro. There's little surprise here. Cameron is able to transform Petro, but he can't control him, and eventually Petro starts to transform without the injections, leading up to a "Frankenstein-ish" style of ending inside a burning house.Yes. It's ... ambitious. Not good - not by a long shot. Not original - not by a long shot. But ambitious as it tries to weave the various threads from different stories together. Not much effort was put into the makeup for Strange. His "werewolf" looked like a guy with bushy hair and a beard, and his fangs looked rubbery to me - they seemed to bend and twist at times. The setting of the old house surrounded by mysterious swampland constantly shrouded in fog and mist was moderately effective in creating a "spooky" environment. I liked the thought here, but it just wasn't carried out particularly well.

George Zucco was a fine actor, often playing gimlet-eyed villains with a lascivious intensity. However even he couldn't save this dull and flat-footed B flick.Zucco plays the usual mad scientist, Dr. Lorenzo Cameron, who believes that wolf's blood, injected into humans, can create an invincible army of wolf men who can win the World War II (go figure!) Experimenting on Pedro the handyman(Glenn Strange) Zucco creates a werewolf that looks rather like the ones Dave Allen used to play in his comedy sketches! Pedro is obviously based on Lennie from Of Mice And Men, and you almost keep expecting him to say "Duh, okay, George!" There's one startling moment when the werewolf kills a child by reaching in through the window and grabbing it, but for the most part this is a routine and pedestrian - very pedestrian - 77 minute tread through all the old clichés that are done far better in other movies.We also get the revenge motif from the Devil Bat worked in, in itself a borrowing from Son Of Frankenstein!Zucco is wasted, and you only have to see him in films such as Adventures Of Sherlock Holmes, The Mummy's Hand and Dr. Renault's Secret to see how wasted. A few atmospheric swamp scenes are all it has to offer, really. And the scene where Zucco demonstrates his wolf-man technique to those who doubted him (again shades of Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde) is unintentionally hilarious.Not one of the better 40s B movies.