"Gentlemen, I wish you were here to see the proof of my claim that the transfusion of blood between different species is possible. Perhaps you will change your mind one day soon when Petro tears at your throat."
Dr. Lorenzo Cameron (George Zucco)
At 77 minutes in length, The Mad Monster is not just a relatively long second feature for its day, but also feels as if it is much longer. Less a movie than an example of cinematic Limburger, The Mad Monster is the first of a non-consecutive series of four lower-echelon B movies directed by the legendary hack Sam Newfield (6 Dec 1899 – 10 Nov 1964), one of the most productive directors in film history, that George Zucco (11 Jan 1886 – 27 May 1960)* was to star in for Poverty Row's PRC. Of the four, three, including this one, were scripted by the truly wanting and justly forgotten scriptwriter Fred Myton (15 Nov 1885 – 6 Jun 1955), whose busy career scribbling Poverty Row B-movie screenplays — he worked on 168 movies between 1916 and 1952 — belies his noticeable lack of talent and creativity. Arguably, the most notable projects Myton was ever involved in are the Sam Newfield anti-classic The Terror of Tiny Town (1938 / trailer) and Sam Newfield's historically important "race movie" that is the first "all-colored" musical western Harlem on the Prairie (1937 / full movie). (Both films were big financial successes in their day.)
* Zucco himself was known, in the 1940s, to take every role offered, which is one reason why he so quickly became embedded in B-films and programmers. Of the five movies we here at a wasted life know he made for PRC, Sam Newfield directed (in order of release) The Mad Monster (1942), Dead Men Walk (1943), The Black Raven (1943 / full movie), and The Flying Serpent (1946 / trailer), the last of which is claimed by some as the inspiration behind Larry Cohen's superior cult horror movie, Q: The Winged Serpent (1983). The remaining PRC movie, directed by Terry O. Morse (30 Jan 1906 – 19 May 1984), is the early proto-bodycounter, Fog Island (1945 / full movie).
Trailer to
The Mad Monster:
While Newfield & Myton's subsequently made Dead Men Walk arguably owes its creation to Tod Browning's Dracula (1931 / trailer), The Mad Monster doubtlessly owes its existence to Universal's classic The Wolf Man (1941 / trailer), which was released only five months prior to The Mad Monster and, needless to say, is the much better movie. But while, in the classic Universal horror movie, Lon Chaney Jr's Larry is doomed by the infectious bite of another werewolf, in Dead Men Walk the sub-intelligent and innocent Pedro (Glen Strange [16 Aug 1899 – 20 Sept 1973] of House of Frankenstein [1944] and The Monster Maker [1944]) unknowingly becomes the wolf-man "monster" thanks to the scientific meddling of the vengeance-driven mad scientist, Dr. Lorenzo Cameron (Zucco). Indeed, as only one of the lead males of the movie is truly "mad" — Petro is a harmless imbecile until the mad doctor changes him — the viewer cannot help but think that the true "mad monster" of the title is not Petro, the unknowing, science-created werewolf, but the doctor.
The Mad Monster —
the full film:
While mad scientists don't really need justification for their experiments — they are mad, after all — in The Mad Monster, Dr. Cameron ostensibly wants to create an army of unstoppable wolf men to fight America's wars. But once his unethical experiments with the Petro, the huge and simpleminded handyman of the doctor's isolated house deep in countryside swamps, prove successful, Cameron quickly turns his attention to vengeance and killing those who were responsible for having him stripped of his position at the university and ruining his reputation. But as we all know so well, "the best laid schemes o' mice an' men, gang aft agley"...
"You realize, of course that this country is at war. That our armed forces are locked in combat with a savage horde that fight with fanatical fury. Well that fanatical fury will avail them of nothing when I place my new serum at the disposal of the War Department. Just picture gentlemen: an army of wolf men. Fearless! Raging! Every man a snarling animal! My serum will make it possible to unloose millions of such animal men. Men who are governed by one collective thought: the animal lust to kill, without regard to personal safety. Such an army will be invincible gentlemen!"
Dr. Lorenzo Cameron (George Zucco)
Fred Myton's "original screenplay" is a good example of terrible. Ridiculous and rote and dotted with long dry spots, it overflows with laughable dialogue and one-dimensional characterizations, is dearth of tension and suspense, lacks all sense of atmosphere, and consists of much too many scenes that should have been shorter. Myton does do one rarity, perhaps the only shock of the movie: he has the monster kill a young child. Admittedly, it occurs off-screen, but still: aside from the fact that children seldom die in such movies, it is handled in an intelligently cinematic manner (perhaps cribbed from Fritz Lang's M [1930 / trailer]) with a rolling ball.*
* Who knows who plays the child, but — once again proving the vagaries of fame and fortune — his frumpy mother is played by the former silent-film star and "versatile vamp" Mae Busch (18 June 1891 – 20 April 1946), below not from the movie, who once headlined movies like Erich von Stroheim's lost The Devil's Pass Key (1920) and not lost Foolish Wives (1923 / full film), and the first Tod Browning/Lon Chaney project, The Unholy Three (1925 / full film). An intriguing minor part of hers is as a brothel madam in the pre-code classic Doctor X (1932 / trailer). Her brief appearance in The Mad Monster is the last credited role of the Australia-born actress, who has a star at 7021 Hollywood Boulevard and, way back when she was a known name, was part of a legendary if comic minor scandal. Mae Busch died on 20 April 1946 at age 54 from colon cancer.
Movie Legends — Mae Busch:
While characterization is never a strong point for threadbare productions like this one, the movie's main female character, Dr Cameron's loyal daughter Leonora (Anne Nagel* [29 Sept 1915 – 6 Jul 1966]) is nevertheless notably one-dimensional and perfunctory, a never believable or logical female character but rather an obviously contrived cipher present only because such movies always have a women that: one, is involved with someone else relevant to the plot, and two, must eventually become endangered and scream.
* Not that she shines in any way in The Mad Monster, but Anne Nagel, who as a child wanted to become a nun, participated in some entertaining projects during her 25-year career, such as the Monogram exploiter Women in Bondage (1942 / scene), the screwball comedy The Invisible Woman (1940 / trailer), the Karloff & Lugosi vehicle Black Friday (1940 / trailer), the bad but ultimately entertaining Universal horror, Mad Doctor of Market Street (1942 / trailer), and her last and possibly best film, Armored Car Robbery (1950 / scene) — blink during the last and you'll miss her. Her private life was punctured by a series hard-luck events. First, the same year she appeared in China Clipper (1936 / trailer) and Here Comes Carter (1936), she married a lead actor of both films, Ross Alexander (July 27, 1907 – January 2, 1937); roughly three months later, Alexander, deeply in debt and possibly depressed, killed himself by shooting himself in the head with.22 pistol. (Ironically, Alexander's first wife, the actress Aleta Freel [14 Jun 1907 – 7 Dec 1935], had killed herself roughly a year before he married Anne by shooting herself in the head with a .22 rifle. In his autobiography My Life, Henry Fonda claims that she did it not because of her faltering career but because her hubby, Alexander, was a cheater. Freel's parents had doubts that she even committed suicide...) In 1947, Nagel filed a lawsuit against a doctor she claimed took out organs and rendered her infertile during an appendectomy operation; she divorced her then husband four years later in 1951. There were rumors of alcoholism, and she sank into poverty, eventually dying of liver cancer at the age of 50. Her grave, in Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City, California, remains unmarked to this day.
Equally stock and unconvincing is her relevant-to-the plot boyfriend, the fast-talking reporter Tom Gregory (Johnny Downs [10 Oct 1913 – 6 June 1994]), whom — prior to the start of the movie — she dutifully leaves back in the city, ignorant of where she has gone, when her father absconds to his new secret location "to work". Tom is stupid enough to seriously suggest, at one point, that a dinosaur lizard might be responsible for the child's death, but he is oddly perceptive enough to sleuth out where his girlfriend is. Once there, he vacillates between thinking, whenever Dr. Cameron is unpleasant, that the doc is guilty of something and, whenever Dr. Cameron is pleasant, that he must be innocent. While both Tom and Leonora arguably deserve to become winners of the Darwin Awards, they survive to assumedly decrease the intelligence of the human race.
"I understand they travelled around on their hind legs and made our present day public enemies look like horticultural specimens."
Tom Gregory (Johnny Downs)
Zucco, though obviously having fun with his part, is generally terrible, but occasionally he does dole out enough campiness to become entertaining. Strange's Petro, however, comes across too much like a sub-par imitation of Lenny from Of Mice and Men (1939 / trailer), if not an unintentional persiflage. (Could his performance possibly be the template for Jeff Fahey's disastrous Jobe in The Lawnmower Man [1992 / trailer]?) Making matters worse, despite the threat provided by Strange's physical size and presence, his wolf-man makeup is too cheesy to do anything but engender giggles.
"What good can come of meddling with the laws of nature?"
Prof. Blaine (Robert Strange)
As normal for a Newfield movie, the direction is pretty abysmal: staid and uncreative and mostly point-and-shoot — to the point that when he suddenly does a mini tracking shot, the viewer is almost shocked out of their seat. Jack Greenhalgh's cinematography is likewise abysmal, mostly flat when not over-lit or unclear, but considering the age of this public-domain movie, and the condition of the scratchy celluloid itself, age might be the real reason behind the movie's uninspired lighting and look. There is an interestingly staged scene of mad Dr Cameron lecturing his former colleagues, all of whom are present and interacting with him as ghostly figments of his imagination, but the success of that scene should perhaps be credited to Zucco, for his acting, and the special effects man, Eugene C Stone (13 Mar 1899 – 11 Mar 1975), and not Newfield.
"How would you like a pair of donkey ears? That would fit your insight."
Dr. Lorenzo Cameron (George Zucco)
When it comes to Poverty Row horrors, The Mad Monster counts among those at the bottom of the barrel. It might be better under the right circumstances — watched as a stoned and/or drunk group — but even then, one might find it more entertaining to watch the Mystery Theater 3000 version. In 1945, PRC re-released The Mad Monster on a double bill with the slightly older and arguably marginally better The Devil Bat (1940)...
The Devil Bat (1940):
And now,
a public-service message from a wasted life:
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