PodBill Just what I expected

Reptileenbu Did you people see the same film I saw?

Beanbioca As Good As It Gets

Quiet Muffin This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

Edgar Allan Pooh . . . THE MAGNETIC MONSTER are WATCHING OLD PAINT DRY and SEE THE GRASS GROW SOYLENT GREEN. Despite little backing from a U.S. film industry quaking in its boots over the prospect of potentially offending America's Northern Bully (Canada), THE MAGNETIC MONSTER does the best job it can--given its extremely limited resources--of revealing the True Story about an otherwise covered-up Real Life incident in which a rogue Canadian scientist suffering from tunnel vision nearly enabled Earth to be spun out of the friendly confines of our Solar System to become a wandering Dead Planet. At the time of this imminent Human Extinction Event, U.S. "A-Men" operating out of the Office of Scientific Investigation, were poised "on call" in nearly every American city. A-Man "Jimmy Stewart" finds a murderous molecule Hell-bent upon Earth's destruction at THE MAGNETIC MONSTER opens. After four slayings and many more close calls, Jimmy finally corners Hedwig's angry nanometer deep down a Nova Scotian mine. But as Jim's closing in for the final kill, crazed Canadian "Dr. Benton" begins shouting "Soylent green is people!" Oh, the horror, the horror!

ebeckstr-1 MM is a lesser movie, and not nearly on par with the best the 50s had to offer by way of American scifi flicks. It pales in comparison to movies like Them, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Thing from Another World, The Monolith Monsters, 20 Million Miles to Earth, Forbidden Planet, It Came from Outer Space, Tarantula, The Mole People, and others. Not all of these are superb movies, but all of them are far more entertaining than The Magnetic Monster.MM suffers from the same problems as a good many scifi films from that era. Unlike any of the above listed examples, MM is filmed in a documentary style, which also characterized some of the lesser film noir of the same time period. Exposition is handled mainly through very boring voice-over narration. In this way, instead of conveying information and through interesting character interactions or suspenseful plot reveals (watch The Thing for a perfect example of how it should be done), we have to listen to the protagonist drone on and on in sci-babble through his voice-overs. In addition, the movie makes liberal use of Air Force stock footage leading up to the climax. The climax itself consists largely of re-used footage from what I believe is the 1935 scifi movie, Trans-Atlantic Tunnel (worth a look, BTW). All of the above alludes to the main problem with MM: a bland, uninteresting script which never draws the viewer in after the fashion of the better scifi movies from that era. Most of the movies I listed above make a sincere attempt to present entertaining dialogue, and those with less complex scripts still create suspense through competent pacing and editing. Some of them, such as Them and The Thing, inject some humor into the script, thus investing the movie with another level of entertainment, while also fleshing out the characters a bit more. MM possesses none of these attributes, which is somewhat surprising, given Curt Siodmak's involvement with the film. He was both a competent writer and a reasonably talented director (perhaps not coincidentally, he conceived the story for Trans-Atlantic Tunnel).Anyway, Magnetic Monster is worth a look, I guess, if you are a connoisseur of 50s American scifi; but I suggest you go in with low expectations.

Robert J. Maxwell A routine but kind of amusing entry in the science-fiction series of the early 1950s. I missed the first half hour or so, so I'm filling it in from sequelae of the early events.Some ancient experimental physicist invents a new element with lethal powers. Like the man-eating plant in "The Little Shop of Horrors," it must be fed a certain amount of energy on a regular schedule, or it turns magnetic, attracts every metal in sight, and destroys life. So far, so good. Only the thing, which started off as hardly more than a pinpoint of matter, gets bigger with every meal. Soon it will be so big and so dense, it will throw the earth out of orbit and you know what happens next.And, man, this element is heavy. The movie is loaded with all kinds of scientific jargon. Most of it got by me. But I did catch the fact that the molecular weight of this thing is somewhere above one thousand. This brought me to instant alert, Darwinian points quivering. A cloud of half-remembered concepts drifted back into my ken from high school -- molar mass, molecular weight, Avogadro's number, isotopes -- but somewhere along the way they'd lost much of their semantic luggage. I think I can feel a molar mass right now with the tip of my tongue. It's right back there, see? It's been bothering me for a week, doctor.Anyway, I get the impression that this thing is pretty "heavy". There is also a suggestion that when the original physicist discovered this element, he pulled off a kind of slow-motion replica of the Big Bang, the instant when the universe was created out of nothing. The result of the Big Bang was a couple of "forces" like gravity and a horde of hydrogen atoms. That's okay, as far as it goes. But if the universe is everything that now exists, and if it's expanding, what the hell is it expanding INTO? Well, never mind that. The attempt to stop this thing from growing becomes frantic, along the lines of "The Andromeda Strain." The only way to stop it is to bombard it with more electrical energy than it can possibly absorb, so it chokes to death. The computer arrives at a minimum of 900,000,000 volts, which is an awful high figure. I mean, your brain only generates a measurable 10 microvolts. Well, that's about the average; I can't speak for any particular brain.The US has no such generator but Canada does, buried beneath the ocean depths in Nova Scotia. Canada reluctantly agrees to its use. The underground control room is about the size of a large living room and is filled with curious knobs, buttons, levers, and winches. Richard Carlson and his buddy, King Donovan, place the entirety of the dangerous mass in the death chamber and begin activating the Super Duper Generator. Does the plan work? Well, we're still here, aren't we?

moonspinner55 Richard Carlson stars in this earnest, cautionary sci-fi as an agent from Boston's Office of Scientific Investigation discovering to his horror that a renown scientist has independently developed an artificial radioactive element which has taken on a life of its own. This isotope feeds on the energy around it, which doubles its size, and in time will harvest enough power to knock planet Earth right off its axis! Not-bad suspense thriller--with both textbook physics and non-textbook logic--smoothly incorporates footage from the 1934 German film "Gold" for its rousing conclusion. A low-budget entry in the man-made monster genre, but certainly an enjoyable one. ** from ****