Dr. Cyclops (1940) [REVIEW] | #giantmonstermarch

I’ve mentioned this before alongside Bert I. Gordon’s The Cyclops (which we’re actually gonna review this year), and i since came in possession of a restored DVD copy of it, so let’s follow up the teasing, by tackling what’s actually a very important B-movie, with 1940’s Dr Cyclops, directed by Ernest B. Schoedsack, better known for something called King Kong released 7 years prior.

Ah yeah this it’s a bit of classic, even though nowhere as good or influential as King Kong (few films are ever as such, after all), not only for its status as the first true american sci-fi film in Technicolor, but because it did establishing a trend that would continue for a decade and that the 50s would flip around leading to 1957’s The Incredible Shrinking Man, as in shrinking people to minuscule dimensions, in this case by a mad scientist that wants to shrink people in order to reduce the impact of humanity on the enviroment.

And doesn’t take well when a group of people that go on an expedition to the jungles of the Amazon encounter his lab and instead of leaving (after basically being told to fuck off immediatly), keep snooping about his uranium reserves and such, so human free guinea pigs for his experiments!

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It Came From Beneath The Sea (1955) [REVIEW] #giantmonstermarch

It was another age. Another time.

The land was green but not good, as it was irradiated with radioactive sludge.

It was indeed the age of the atoms, the nucular spectacular of what new horrors science could do, and then eventually what kind of cinematic entertaiment companies could spun out of the Atom Age fad, monster movies being the more obvious one, as even the second Godzilla movie was more cheesy, and more in tone with other disaster flicks where the giant creature stomping and romping about was in some way born or mutated by radioactive fallout.

Before mutated anything, there was a man that already stunned the world of cinema with its special effect wizardry, Ray Harryhausen, having learned the ways of the magic known as stop-motion animation from his mentor, the legendary Willis O’Brien, whom worked on bringing the original King Kong to life, as well as the dinosaurs in the 1925 film adaptation of The Lost World.

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The Cyclops (1957) [REVIEW] | #giantmonstermarch

Really scraping the bottom of the Bert I. Gordon barrell with this one, but i did mention it twice before, and – as i said when reviewing 2008’s Cyclops – it’s not like we’re drowning in cyclops movies, at all, and this one has some of that “so bad it’s good” qualities, so for this year’s Giant Monster March’s finale it’s time to end as we begun, meaning to fall face first into a vat of Gouda, groan like a fuzzy giant toddler and “do the cyclops”.

At least it has Lon Chaney Jr. past his prime as a Universal horror star but not yet being reduced to a pathetic, drunken parody of himself (the epitome of that would be him in 1971’s Dracula VS Frankenstein, which nowadays is kind of a cursed movie as it was the undignified end of many actors careers and lives), not yet, here we have him in his post-glory phase were he did a lot of work pretty much any support roles in any kind of movie, mostly westerns, exotic adventure flicks, and horror films once in a while, mostly cheap, low budget, often indipendent productions.

The Cyclops definitely fits the bill, being a Bert I. Gordon film and what that entails, and here a plays a villanous mining expert in search of uranium, part of a posse led by the wife of a pilot that disappeared 3 years ago in the jungles of Mexico, as she still believes he’s alive despite all odds, but guess what, it’s a 50s b-movie, so the mining for radioactive material results in mutated everything, from spiders, lizards, eagles, mice and whatever animal stock footage Bert could superglue together.

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