After discovering a strange gas during his work on Mayan burial rites, a professor uses it on his assistant in order to murder for his girlfriend, the woman he loves, only for the trail of corpses left behind to lead the police right to him.
This turned out to be quite an enjoyable if flawed effort, mostly through the complete inactivity presented here. Because the main just of the storyline is that he's trying to win his girlfriend over to marry her, a lot of his screen-time is spent running off to find her but never coming out with his feelings once he does find her, making the reason for the journey quite unnecessary when nothing happens and instead it just turns into a tedious drag when it launches into yet another trip around the world as he follows her musical tour with the doctor in tow. Even with his secret romance towards her being as clichéd as it ever is, that these scenes here comprise the majority of the middle section of the film means that the main focus has nothing going on despite ample evidence that something fun could happen as the transformation occurs quite early on in the film due to the running-time constraints which just make this all the more obviously dull and dragging. As well, the finale is so rushed and just completely underwhelming that there's a dramatic lack of urgency over the entire affair and making it just seem all the more ludicrous overall as it transpires. That said, there's still some fun here with the storyline being quite original of utilizing the Mayan nerve gas and the regenerative properties being tied in with actual historical atrocities in a clever bit of retroactive rewriting, and the scenes of him in the laboratory operating on the different subjects early on make for a rather cheesy time with the portrayal of the classic cinematic mad scientist in such films. Several of the murders are quite creepy, and the continued marching off into the cemetery to recover body parts needed for the procedure make for a rather fun time and gets some chilling moments into the effort, and the make-up effects for the transformation look rather nice if pretty cheap overall. While there's problems, it does have some good points about it.
Today's Rating/PG: Violence and suggested animal violence.
This turned out to be quite an enjoyable if flawed effort, mostly through the complete inactivity presented here. Because the main just of the storyline is that he's trying to win his girlfriend over to marry her, a lot of his screen-time is spent running off to find her but never coming out with his feelings once he does find her, making the reason for the journey quite unnecessary when nothing happens and instead it just turns into a tedious drag when it launches into yet another trip around the world as he follows her musical tour with the doctor in tow. Even with his secret romance towards her being as clichéd as it ever is, that these scenes here comprise the majority of the middle section of the film means that the main focus has nothing going on despite ample evidence that something fun could happen as the transformation occurs quite early on in the film due to the running-time constraints which just make this all the more obviously dull and dragging. As well, the finale is so rushed and just completely underwhelming that there's a dramatic lack of urgency over the entire affair and making it just seem all the more ludicrous overall as it transpires. That said, there's still some fun here with the storyline being quite original of utilizing the Mayan nerve gas and the regenerative properties being tied in with actual historical atrocities in a clever bit of retroactive rewriting, and the scenes of him in the laboratory operating on the different subjects early on make for a rather cheesy time with the portrayal of the classic cinematic mad scientist in such films. Several of the murders are quite creepy, and the continued marching off into the cemetery to recover body parts needed for the procedure make for a rather fun time and gets some chilling moments into the effort, and the make-up effects for the transformation look rather nice if pretty cheap overall. While there's problems, it does have some good points about it.
Today's Rating/PG: Violence and suggested animal violence.