Reviews

I wasn't expecting too much from this 1950s horror film but the idea that Dr. Jekyll was an innocent victim of another man's scheming to get his money and estate and this other man happened to also be...wait for it...a werewolf was clever and unique. The film's plot however becomes obvious and most viewers will guess what's going on at the get-go. Arthur Shields, brother of Barry Fitzgerald, is annoying and cloying right from the outset as he portrays a man who claims to represent the late Dr. Jekyll's best interests but who is actually a rampaging fiend who seeks to trick Jekyll's daughter in the same way he tricked her father and obtained the vast Jekyll mansion and estate. Emphasis throughout is on atmosphere with fluid dissolves and what the Germans called stimmung or heavy atmosphere in the silent film days. The entire film appears to be seen through a haze and Gloria Talbot't's visions of herself as a werewolf are overlaid so as to make everything appear to have occurred in a nightmare. This is very effective and beautiful, especially the camera tilts that make her world seem to be slipping away from her. Some oddities do occur. John Agar wears a bizarre striped sports jacket in the latter part of the picture which seems incongruous. He is also slow to reason out what is going on around him even though the audience is way ahead of him. Arthur Shields, just like his brother, Barry Fitzgerald is incredibly irritating and annoying throughout with his unctuous comments all done in Irish brogue. It's almost like being tied down and forced to watch Going My Way again starring his brother. And the oddest thing is that Shields' real teeth are so bad that when he turns into a werewolf his teeth actually improve. I believe that's the only time that a werewolf's dental work got better during a transformation sequence in the history of the cinema. Gloria Talbott looks lovely and contributes a solid performance here. She was a queen of fifties horror but was versatile enough to play many roles. In fact she was omnipresent on early television and was also a star of many many western programs due to her athletic ability. John Agar was also a constant horror film star and also a frequent veteran of westerns, part of the John Wayne entourage, and he was Shirley Temple's ex-husband! Agar was never a very good actor and he doesn't contribute much to the success of this film but part of that is the script that makes him appear dull witted and his plan for surprising a werewolf with a big club is just plain stupid. All things considered this is a surprisingly entertaining film played partly as a mystery more than a shocker. The unnecessary comic monster intro and finale feel put in by the producer to goose up the film as does the scene where a half-naked extra girl is leered at by the werewolf, a scene thrown in to the coming attractions for this movie to make it seem more lurid than it actually was. None of that tampering was necessary. I liked the look of the film. Ulmer could create a mood in the old Germanic sense-- it resembled more Nosferatu (1922) and The Golem (1920) more than the rather flat clear look of most fifties films such as Creature From the Black Lagoon or The Hypnotic Eye. It's a throwback to a style that Ulmer was familiar with from his early days in the German silent cinema and this film should be remastered and presented on a large screen where its striking visual beauty could be better appreciated, especially since it was achieved with an amazingly limited budget.

MIKE FARRELL and TERI GARR are two fine actors who have a fine chemistry together and elevate this by the numbers wrong man child killer movie way above where it should be but there are serious plot and continuity problems that mar the film, as one reviewer has already noted, and the ending is nothing less than infuriating and actually mystifying. Here are some of the problems. Farrell buys girl scout cookies from a little girl who is soon abducted and murdered but...what happens to the cookies? Both boxes simply disappear from the story. A farmer who could give MIKE an alibi is suffering from Alzheimer's or dementia and yet is operating dangerous heavy machinery perfectly well. A scene clearly shows the murdered child getting into what appears to be Farrell's car and yet no explanation is given for this and the woman who remembers this fact suddenly never discloses what she just recalled to the cops. Virtually everyone around MIKE is hostile to him as the media attacks him as a serial child killer and yet once he makes up his mind to just return to work despite not knowing the final result of the search for the killer everyone seems to love him again. The scene where the real killer is found is inserted into the film AFTER the scene where MIKE returns happily to work amid supporting staff members... making no sense. I don't know what movie the other reviewers were watching but I prefer a movie of this very basic sort to make coherent sense. It is even more offensive that this was released in this slapdash manner because much of it is really well directed and builds up considerable frustration and tension as one watches. Mike Farrell and Teri Garr are two of the very finest actors of their era and in 2018 neither are remembered by that many young people for the fine entertainment they offered us back in the day. Teri Garr has suffered in recent years from a debilitating illness and it saddens me so much because her presence on a talk show such as David Letterman or in any sort of film was a guarantee of fun and quality. She brought a sincerity to every film role she ever played. To surround her with such unnecessary carelessness suggests that the film was undergoing script modifications as it was being shot and edited and that the creators and especially the producers didn't care enough about the result. My wife kept saying throughout the film "where are those girl scout cookies and what happened to them?" It's a fair question.