Review of Monster on the Campus

Minor as Monster on the Campus might be as an entry in the Universal horror series (it is evidently the last such Universal film to be produced in the USA), it offers the pleasures of a minor production done with thorough professionalism. There is little of the Jack Arnold atmosphere that made The Incredible Shrinking Man one of the great 1950s science fiction films, and that make Creature from the Black Lagoon and It Came from Outer Space worth watching today. It is as if Universal wanted the box office success of those films, only this time done fast and cheap. The science-fiction element—the blood of a deep-sea coelacanth, when ingested, induces short-term reversion to a "prehistoric" state (apparently "they," in the past, were much more bloodthirsty then than "we" are now) is tacky even by '50s sci-fi standards. The hapless scientist, Donald Blake played by Arthur Franz, falls victim to it by the sloppiest set of laboratory standards imaginable—he lifts the coelacanth carcass by its teeth, rinses his hand in the tank's meltwater … the poor goof even manages to get blood into his pipe tobacco. Next thing you, know, Blake suffers fainting spells during which he transforms into a hairy, muscular ape-man—primitive in every way except for a marvelous knack for hatchet-throwing. Worst of all, discovering that the mysterious killer terrorizing the (strangely-deserted) campus of Dunsfield University is none other than himself Blake, not to offer any more spoilers, takes actions that bring the film to a rapid conclusion. Fast and cheap. If the screenwriter, David Duncan, had been given the time to do a re-draft, who knows what Monster on the Campus could have offer us? Time for a remake—this time bringing out the submerged tensions of Blake having to work for his fiancé's father, of the nurse who makes no secret of her attraction to the handsome professor, of the bland teenage lovers who emerge from these horrors curiously unscathed. David Cronenberg, who once said (and demonstrated in The Fly) that it is bad films rather than good films that merit remakes, should chuck his current boring and talky art films and do what he does best by remaking Monster on the Campus!