Last night I took a break from my Boilermaker obsession to watch a cheesy horror movie from Steven’s DVD collection of 50 Horror Classics. We picked The Monster Maker (1944). I had been disappointed by the lack of monsters in the last Horror Classic we viewed, so I thought I would be safe choosing one with “monster” right in the title.
The real monsters, unfortunately, were the makers of the movie, passing off this dull piece of bologna as a thriller. I suppose you’ll have that in a collection of 50 movies priced to sell.
I had great hopes for it when I read the plot summary in one of Steven’s movie books: a mad scientist injects a piano player with some stuff that makes him a giant, particularly his hands. That reminded me of Mad Love, in which Peter Lorre fixes up a pianist with a new pair of hands that just happened to have come from a knife-wielding assassin.
In Mad Love, Lorre is obsessively in love with the pianist’s wife. In The Monster Maker, the evil doctor wants the pianist’s daughter, who looks exactly like the doctor’s dead wife. Have you ever seen anybody look EXACTLY like somebody else? I never have, but it seems to happen in movies all the time. The most notable case of the phenomenon is House of Wax (1953, starring Vincent Price), in which the evil sculptor finds a whole bunch of people who just happen to look exactly like the figures in his former wax museum.
So I basically sat through The Monster Maker comparing it unfavorably to other old horror movies. The monster, when he finally shows up, is pretty scary looking, but he doesn’t threaten anybody I liked, so where’s the suspense there? There is a scary scene involving a gorilla and the evil doctor’s doormat assistant. I won’t say more, in case you ever watch the movie.
When we first meet the evil doctor, he’s scary right off the bat, in a psycho, stalker sort of way. When he meets the beautiful girl who looks like his dead wife, he kisses her hand and gives her the scary eyeballs a la Bela Lugosi. He uses the eyeballs to better effect on his hapless assistant, who he is apparently in the habit of hypnotizing. I wish they had made more of the doctor’s back story. Maybe an extended flashback, which they had plenty of time for, because the movie clocked in at 64 minutes.
Then again, the movie was dull enough at 64 minutes. The back story sounded compelling with the assistant and doctor telling it to each other; there’s no saying they wouldn’t have messed it up trying to dramatize it. I wouldn’t say the movie was a complete waste of time, but if you happen to catch it, you won’t feel bad running out to the kitchen to get a snack, which both Steven and I did.
It is fun to write reviews of dull movies, though. I look forward to the next one. We saw a title of Vampire Bat that looked good. Stay tuned.
Mohawk Valley Girl 