Monstruo en la noche

Poster tagline: TEST TUBE TERROR-BEAST AMOK ON COLLEGE CAMPUS! CO-ED BEAUTY CAPTIVE O A MAN MONSTER! STUDENTS VICTIM OF TERROR-BEAST!!! Neither silly enough to be fun, nor good enough to watch again. In any case, unworthy of the name of Jack Arnold, probably the best filmmaker of the Golden Age of Science Fiction. An average director of his time could have made this and the result would have been the same. The whole thing revolves around the last surviving prehistoric fish that Prof. Blake had brought to his lab. He gets infected from it three times (a cut, a splash of the fish blood from a pipe, and an experiment with an injection directly into a vein) and each time he turns into – well – a Neanderthal!! In the first transformation he kills his friend, in the second he kills the detective who’s after him, and in the last he runs like a Stone Age man across the countryside, with a torn plaid shirt and an axe in his hand, making menacing grunting noises, which is quite at odds with the rest of the film, where he philosophically ponders the narrow line between being human and being an animal. The make up effects deserve praise – neat prosthetics with hair – it’s a pity that the four minutes or so that we get to see it are not enough to fully enjoy it. (12.03.2012)

The American production Monster on the Campus is a classic example of American B-movie production from the 1950s. There is nothing groundbreaking about it. The moviemakers were simply trying to entertain their audience and perhaps even scare them a little. They probably succeeded because the mask of the monkey man is so badly made that it terrified me. This movie is a nice trip back to the 1950s, although nothing exceptional. (20.02.2020)