PodBill Just what I expected

Odelecol Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

TrueHello Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

Abbigail Bush what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

utgard14 Poverty Row cheapie starring George Zucco as a mad scientist who doesn't take kindly to being mocked by his peers. These were more innocent times so instead of shooting into a crowd with an assault rifle, he turns his simple-minded gardener into a wolf-man to get even with those who scoffed at him.Glenn Strange's turn as the title monster is sure to elicit some laughs from most of the viewers today (and possibly even back then). Just think of those old "which way did he go, George" cartoons and you pretty much have Strange's performance here. Zucco is, of course, lots of fun as the villain. He isn't as well-remembered as Karloff or Lugosi or Price but he's a horror legend in his own right. It's an enjoyable movie of its type. Yes, it's cheap-looking and laughable at times, but it's also a lot of fun if you take it as it was intended.

Bezenby You've got to love a film that opens with a mad scientist injecting a big lummox full of a concoction of wolf's blood and a catalyst, the guy transforming into a werewolf, and then the scientist having an argument with a bunch of guys who aren't really there, and all in the name of turning the US Army into a bunch of killer werewolves in order to win World War 2. That's a film that truly endears a fella pretty much straight away.Our mad scientist is living in disgrace after being publicly humiliated by his peers, and the lummox is his gardener, a gentle giant called Petro (at least he's gentle when not rampaging around the place as a werewolf). The scientist's daughter also lives with them, in a house out in a swamp somewhere, and her boyfriend is a reporter back in the city. Get this though, when a young girl is killed by the werewolf, the report comes to the conclusion that it must have been a forgotten race of prehistoric lizards that walk on two legs what done it. You've got to love this film.So, you've got the reporter snooping around with gun toting locals, the mad scientist preparing his revenge on his peers with his werewolf guy, and the werewolf himself starting to transform of his own accord. It's all good, right? It helps that George Zucco plays the scientist as a cold heartless fiend, complete with maniacal laugh. Check out the scene where he learns a child has been killed – he doesn't give a crap! He just wants his ex-mates dead, and to be honest I'm not sure he thought out the rest of his plan.The sympathetic element comes from Petro the gardener, who admits he doesn't have the 'book learning' to understand why he's being injected with something or other (and the scientist doesn't mind slapping or whipping him either – that's gratitude). Also, the low budget shows when the swamp scenes come around. It looks like they had a tiny stage to work with and try to film the same place from many angles. That said, it just adds to the general goofiness of the film. Mad Monster is pure, daft werewolf action from start to finish, thanks to the plentiful werewolf scenes and Zucco's cold as ice performance.

MARIO GAUCI I have always been wary of horror programmers from the Golden Age of Horror, primarily because they degraded such genre icons as Bela Lugosi and John Carradine, who were somehow unable to find work in A-grade films around this time; however, these Z-movies also gave the opportunity for character actors like Lionel Atwill and J. Carroll Naish to have their own star vehicles and let rip with the villainy. Perhaps the most prolific – and unhinged – among the latter group was George Zucco (who, apart from appearing in the occasional prestige production, was also the best incarnation of Professor Moriarty in THE ADVENTURES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES {1939}), and I have decided to incorporate a handful of his efforts in the current "Halloween Challenge".This film, then, is also one of a quartet I will be checking out revolving around werewolves: PRC obviously attempted to jump on the bandwagon of Universal's latest monster THE WOLF MAN (1941) with this one, but the result is so lame that one would do best not to compare the two. Even worse than a family curse or being 'marked' by lycanthropy is the notion of having someone turned into a monster by being injected with a serum extracted from a genuine wolf (except the film-makers here apparently could only lay their hands on a coyote!). In fact, the real protagonist here is not the creature (played in human guise as a dim-witted Ozark – derived from the Lenny character in John Steinbeck's "Of Mice And Men" – by Glenn Strange!) but the mad scientist (Zucco, of course), with the title further confusing the issue! Incidentally, Lon Chaney Jr. had incarnated both Lenny in the 1939 film version of the afore-mentioned literary classic and Lawrence "The Wolf Man" Talbot! Anyway, Zucco is the usual disgraced genius who in the film's very opening scene imagines himself lecturing the 4 eminent colleagues who had publicly humiliated him and forced his resignation. This being the war years, his original plan was to build an invincible army of werewolf soldiers(!) but, if the ultra-sluggish Strange was anything to go by, the outcome of these experiments would doubtless have proved disastrous to the Allied cause! In fact, out of his targets, he only manages to eliminate one (the only other fatal attack being completely unrelated to his 'mission', committed upon a little girl whose mother is actually played by frequent Laurel & Hardy foil Mae Busch!)! Strange's werewolf make-up is as much a slapdash job as the script itself, barely concealing his facial features and accentuated by the cheapest of dime-store fangs! By the way, Zucco has the obligatory clueless daughter who, just as inevitably, is romanced by the very man (in this case a scoop-seeking reporter) who will eventually bring about his downfall. Amusingly, Zucco goes to the house of his chief nemesis with Strange in tow to demonstrate his theory but then contrives to absent himself and have the victim administer the transforming drug to the harmless-looking handyman…which then takes forever to produce the desired effect, so that the supposedly intrigued man of science has already gone back to his bit of dead-of-night reading, thus being ostensibly oblivious to the change from man into monster!; another intended prey, in fact, is even asked to give Strange a lift to town with the metamorphosis subsequently occurring inside the car in mid-journey! Unsurprisingly, the leading lady eventually comes face to face with the werewolf but is saved in the nick of time, whereas the scientist expires at the hand of his own creation (the former had earlier kept the latter in check by the use of a whip, apparently a pre-requisite of such cheapies!) which, rather than via the proverbial silver bullet, gets his in the fire that consumes Zucco's remote country-house!! A word on director Newfield: he is considered among the most prolific American film-makers ever (with almost 300 titles to his name over a period of 30 years!); this was actually his very first horror movie (reportedly shot in just 5 days!), which rather explains its considerable narrative shortcomings compared to a more satisfactory later effort like THE MONSTER MAKER (1944).

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.