Monster on the Campus
Entry updated 16 January 2023. Tagged: Film.
Film (1958). Universal. Directed by Jack Arnold. Written by David Duncan. Cast includes Troy Donahue, Arthur Franz, Joanna Moore and Judson Pratt. 77 minutes. Black and white.
This is one of Jack Arnold's last and poorest sf films, a variation on the Jekyll and Hyde theme: blood from a specimen coelacanth causes living creatures to devolve (see Devolution); a Scientist (Franz) temporarily but repeatedly becomes an apeman (see Apes as Human). The film is, foolishly, structured as a mystery which everybody is too unobservant to solve, and the science is absurd. As critic Bill Warren has pointed out, the main interest is noting the variety of ways in which the unfortunate scientist (whose noble quasi-Suicide is the film's climax), along with a dog and a dragonfly, contrive to contaminate themselves. [JB/PN]
see also: Monster Movies.
links
previous versions of this entry