Hellen I like the storyline of this show,it attract me so much

Redwarmin This movie is the proof that the world is becoming a sick and dumb place

Zlatica One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

Guillelmina The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

MARIO GAUCI What little reputation this film has is very mixed, so it is no surprise my own reaction proved likewise. Revolving around an intriguing concept, yet the script (by genre regular Edward Dein) is seemingly at a loss about what to do with it: an eminent and much beloved physician (George Macready) lies dying and, in desperation at the unfairness of it all, his wife (lovely Jeanne Bates – who, late in life, somehow got to appear in two David Lynch movies!) renounces God and asks the Devil for help; immediately afterwards, a mysterious woman (Rose Hobart – from the 1931 DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE) turns up, restores Macready to health and basically starts running his life. While happy to see her husband get better, Bates soon notices that his personality has changed – becoming distant, aggressive and even loses interest in his work: in short, alienating everyone around him – so that she actually wishes he had died back then! All of this sends her running into the arms of Macready's best friend, Erik Rolf (looking like a cross between Glenn Ford and the young Orson Welles...or, for that matter a local film-buff friend of mine, Robert!!): his character and relationship to the couple is pretty ambiguous – he acts almost as their spiritual adviser (thus being instantly and openly averse to Hobart's machinations), yet is a constant presence even at social engagements, hardly deigning to keep the 'love triangle' situation in check! Anyway, Macready's negligence costs a colleague's life and the once-respected doctor is put on trial…only this takes us back to the very beginning, so that all that went on in the interim turns out to have been nothing more than a death-bed hallucination – the moral being that one must face up to death with dignity and resignation, apparently after having done one's bit for the good of mankind (which should have especially resonated with wartime audiences)! The film offers more than adequate atmosphere (courtesy of future double Oscar-winning cinematographer Burnett Guffey) and Hobart (with an icy demeanor and a devilish coiffure to boot) is quite good – the combination of which leads to its eeriest moment, the very first appearance of the Devil's envoy in which she is unperturbed by a car running her over and then, after following her in a tilted camera angle shot, no less, she is seen literally electrifying her surroundings! However, as I said at the start, the plot is insufficient as Macready is not seen doing much of anything after he is revived (what was the point, then?) and Hobart actually has to prod him towards committing murder (naturally because it constitutes the extremity of an evil deed)! That said, the choice of target (the 'pastor'/rival) would benefit each of them – only he flubs it and, so does the film, since this clearly Lewtonesque sequence is kept on going much longer than necessary!; consequently, the inherent suspense in having the 'sleepwalking' Macready (armed with an ice pick long before BASIC INSTINCT [1992]!!) stalk Rolf by night out on the streets is gradually diffused…particularly with the unintentionally comic off-screen effect of the sudden opening of a rising street elevator's hatch sounding like Macready had bumped into some dustbin or a mailbox around the corner! Mind you, I am glad I acquired the film also because, as it happens, this viewing actually urged me to get back to work on my unfinished review of the slightly similar but far superior ALIAS NICK BEAL (1949; which I had originally watched on my birthday back in August) – in which Macready now actually (and atypically) takes on the role of the Minister Of God who strikes fear into (and eventually brings down) the Agent Of Hell.

Michael_Elliott Soul of a Monster, The (1944) * (out of 4) Forgotten horror film from Columbia about a doctor on his deathbed whose wife prays, to good or evil, that he lives. He gets better thanks to a mysterious woman but what they don't know is that this woman put the soul of a monster into the doctor's body. There's a very good reason Columbia hasn't released this sucker on any home video format and that's because it's pretty damn bad. I took me three viewings before I could watch the entire film without falling asleep. The film tries very hard to recapture the mood and feel of a Val Lewton film but it fails on all levels.

John Seal Try as it might, this Columbia programmer just can't quite get over the hump. Even with George Macready and Rose Hobart heading the cast, there are too few scares and far, far too much walking. Rose walks (and almost gets hit by a car). George walks with a knife in his hand. Rose walks some more. Bland co-lead Jim Bannon even goes for a stroll. In fact, there's so much shoe leather burned in this film that I humbly offer Sole of a Monster as a more suitable title. It's all shot well by Burnett Guffey, and there IS a modicum of Lewton-style atmosphere, but the stifling straitjacket of Christian spirituality (not to mention the cheat ending) ultimately undoes whatever good work went into this production. An intriguing but ultimately disappointing failure.

sol **SPOILERS** Very esoteric and little know film about "Good" an "Evil" that has to do with a man on his deathbed within moment of leaving the world that he gave, in saving the lives of hundreds of people, so much of himself to.Dr. George Winson,George Macready, has done so much and asked so little in helping those who needed his help as a brilliant surgeon and psychologist. Infected by an incurable disease, from one of the patients that he saved, George is now in the hands of the Almighty waiting for his final curtain call. It's then that George's bereaved wife Ann, Jeanne Bates, goes a bit off her noodle, mind, begging for anyone, in this world or the next, to please save her husband from the faith, death, that's now waiting for him.Ann should have known better and left things the way they were but her love for George and wanting him to live turned the man into a monster. Not the kind and caring saint that he was before he fell into the deadly coma that's slowly taking his life away from him. It turns out that Ann summoned this "Evil Spirit" in the form of Lilyan Gregg, Rose Hobart, who despite giving her husband back his life forgot, on purpose of course, to give him his soul back with it. Now fully recovered and in excellent health George was not exactly the person that his friends family and patients knew him as. Stuck up and irritable as well as rude to everyone, including his loving wife Ann, he came in contact with it's obvious that George just isn't himself. It's George's best friend Fred Stevens, Eric Rolf, who soon sees the metamorphose that he went through and in an effort to save George's soul tries to get the poor and confused man help. It's then that Lilyan trying to keep George under her evil control turns George,like a guided missile, on Fred only to be stymied when Fred who happened to find a crucifix, lying there in front of him on the sidewalk, in just the nick of time to stop the crazed and icepick waving George in his tracks.It soon become a struggle between George who's Godly goodness, despite him having no soul, is slowly getting the upper hand over the evil Lilyan. It's then when Lilyan really goes all out to get George to murder his loyal and admiring assistant Dr. Vance,Jim Bannon, and then have him sent straight to the hot seat, the electric chair, for it. It's this way that Lilyan can have George by being sent to the place where the sun don't shine, and where it's hot as blazes all the time, all for herself for eternity.*****MAJOR SPOILERS****The surprise ending is a bit uneven in that it left you up in the air to just what exactly it's trying to tell you. Not in George's mental state but in the condition he finds himself in as the movie ends. Still "Soul of a Monster" is by far one of the best, as well as one of the most unknown, movies about the struggle between "Good" and "Evil" ever to come out of Hollywood. The film is surprisingly nowhere as corny or predictable as you would have imagined, before you saw it knowing it's storyline, it to be and that by far is the biggest surprise, together with the surprise ending, in the movie.