Beanbioca
As Good As It Gets
Rexanne
It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny
Bob
This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.
Geraldine
The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.
Aaron1375
I saw this film on the cult television riffing show, Mystery Science Theater 3000. Basically, this film is yet another take on the Universal classic, The Wolf Man with the only new aspect a mad scientist is the cause behind the terrible creature that roams the area. Not particularly bad, but not really much good in it either as it is very slow moving for a film that clocks in at only 77 minutes. Still, the acting is not too bad in this one and so it is a bit tolerable. Not sure I would care to see this without MST3K, but if I did it would be only to fill in the blanks as they must have cut a lot out of this one to make the episode because they had a short preceding it. In the end though, nothing to out of the ordinary as far as monster movies during its time.The story has a scientist who is working on a formula to mix the blood of an animal with that of a human being. The animal in question is a wolf and the man in question is the scientist's gardener who apparently believes that if you are a gardener you have no right to question anything your employer tells you to do. The result a wolf man...though it actually looks more like one of the monkeys from planet of the apes with a pair of Dracula novelty teeth. The scientist wishes to sell his creation to the army so that the army can have an army of animal/man hybrids at their disposal, but first he must have his revenge upon the men who criticized his work! That, of course, will be his undoing.This made for an okay episode of MST3K considering it was a first season episode which I consider their weakest season. They were still feeling their way at this point and it shows. The movie is preceded by a Commando Cody short and I see no reason for the short to be in front of this one. This film is 77 minutes long, that is plenty long enough to fill out an episode of MST3K. Maybe one small short, but this one took up the first block of the episode. Most films that have to have shorts to fill up the first block clock in at under an hour. Still, the jokes are rather good in the film portion of the film and make what would otherwise be a mundane Wolf Man clone into something a bit more humorous to watch.So, not a great film, but nothing to terribly horrible either. Just kind of a bland film featuring a Wolf Man and a mad scientist. I am sure there were several such films back in the day, in fact, I know there were as several have been showcased on MST3K. The film is a bit uneven too as it seems to take place in several time periods almost. You have the mansion, you have the city and then you have the people living in a swamp that almost seem to be living in a different time period than the rest of the film. In the end though, I say this film would have been better had the monster been just a little bit madder.
WakenPayne
This Is A Truthfully Boring & Stupid Movie. I Only Saw It Via MTS3K...The Only Thing Not Turing My Brain Into Liquid Was The Breaks That Joel & The Bots Took. I Thought That I'd Eventually See The "Manos" Episode...I DON'T WANNA LIVE! The Movie Is Quite Easily One Of The Worst I Have Ever Seen. The Wolf Guy Stated At One Point That He Hardly Had An Education...He Made It Abundantly Obvious To Everyone. The Mad Scientist Does A Performance In The Movie So Bad That It Would Make Dolph Lungren Think Better About Himself As An Actor & Mean It Truthfully. This Underacted Piece Of Crap Should Only Be Watched Via MTS3K. You Can Watch The Film Unedited On IMDb For Free But Its Not Worth The Time.
Clay Loomis
OK, this movie seems to have been pretty well covered by earlier comments, but there are a couple of items I wish to add. The mad scientist is producing a serum from the blood of a caged animal in order to turn a man into a werewolf. If we suspend our disbelief enough to buy into that, fine. But the animal in the cage is a coyote. That would make a werecoyote. Did audiences in 1942 not know the difference between a wolf and a coyote? They're easy to tell apart. That's weak.Secondly, this movie was covered in the third episode of MST3k (on the Comedy Channel). It took Joel and the bots a number of episodes to get up to full riffing steam, and they weren't up there quite yet on this one. They DID add enough to this snoozer to keep you awake until the end, but it was not one of their better episodes. They never even mentioned the glaring omission of an actual wolf, and THAT joke was just hanging in the air waiting to be smacked.
catfish-er
I'm working my way through the Horror Classics 50 Movie Pack Collection and THE MAD MONSTER is one of the movies in the set.I am sure that George Zucco was a good actor; but, this was only the second film in which I saw him, the first being DEAD MEN WALK, in which he played two parts. However, even good acting couldn't save THE MAD MONSTER.Zucco plays a mad scientist, Dr. Cameron (who was banned from academia because of his unethical and inhumane experiments). He believes that he can control evolution by bringing out the characteristics of one animal into another.In this case, like so many others of its ilk, it is a transfusion of (I assume) wolf's blood into humans. His goal is to create an invincible army, which he can control through the antidote. The subject of his experiments is his hired hand, a retarded gardener, whose dialogue slows down this snail-paced classic to almost a full-stop. Beyond his experiments, Dr. Cameron also plots revenge on those who discredited him, using his transformed gardener. However, he loses control of his subject, who begins to transform without the transfusion -- yikes! The werewolf transformations are classic Hollywood stop-action / makeup effects. No doubt these were groundbreaking techniques of the time; but, in today's digital age it's hard to imagine audiences being scared by this.