The Invisible Man's Revenge (1944)

Film: The Invisible Man's Revenge (1944)

Stars: Jon Hall, Leon Errol, John Carradine, Alan Curtis, Evelyn Ankers, Gale Sondergaard, Lester Matthews

Director: Ford Beebe

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 stars

This month we are devoting all of our classic film reviews to Golden Age Horror films that I saw for the first time this year.  If you want to take a look at past titles (from this and other seasons of this series), look at the bottom of the page for links.

We are today not only hitting the halfway point of our Golden Age Horror marathon (hopefully you've been enjoying the series!), but also hitting the finale of our many Inivisible Man franchise installments.  In the original run of the series, Universal made five pictures that are part of the "Canon" for the franchise, though they were loosely connected, with strange interludes into romantic comedy (The Invisible Woman) and wartime propaganda (Invisible Agent).  The finale of their original run, though, is focused back on the mad man fantasies of someone the world can't see...though sadly it is also a complete failure, losing a lot of the "sacrificed humanity" angles of the picture by making the titular character too vicious to redeem.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about Robert Griffin (Hall), who has just escaped from a sanitarium after murdering two orderlies, and goes to visit his old friends Sir Jasper (Matthews) and Lady Irene Herrick (Sondergaard), who were supposed to safeguard a joint diamond mine venture the three had, but the fortune has been lost while Robert was locked up.  Robert says as recompense, they have to let him marry their beautiful daughter Julie (Ankers), but they refuse & have him ejected from their home.  Robert gets his revenge by coercing Dr. Peter Drury (Carradine) to make him invisible, and he uses this to blackmail the Herricks, forcing them to sign over their entire estate to him & let Robert marry Julie...if he can get his visibility back.  Robert can get it back, but only through the blood of another human being (which would kill them), and only for a short while.  He does this at first through killing Dr. Drury, and then by trying to kill off Mark (Curtis), Julie's real intended.  Before he can kill Mark, though, he is attacked by Dr. Drury's (invisible) dog, and is killed, never fulfilling his revenge.

As I mentioned, this movie hues more closely to what we'd expect from the earlier pictures in the Invisible Man franchise, but it also is pretty limp.  Hall is not Claude Rains or Vincent Price, and that shows when he basically just plays his creepy lead character as uncomplicated & filled with hate.  It doesn't help that his revenge is gross on-the-surface.  He's not a wronged man for much of the film (it's never clear if Jasper & Irene actually misused his money or just lost it while he was gone), and trying to blackmail their daughter into a lifetime of servitude seems unusually gross.  That the heinousness of his demands feels so glossed over is the weirdest part of The Invisible Man's Revenge.

The movie features two actors who were regular players in the Universal canon.  John Carradine here plays the mad scientist, and is the best part of the movie.  Carradine made hundreds of films (his Wikipedia page lists 233 movies, and it's almost certain he made appearances in more), making him one of the most prolific actors in Hollywood (unlike someone like Eric Roberts, who I feel makes independent films as stunts, virtually all of Carradine's films were for either major studios-he only occasionally was part of Poverty Row films, which makes Carradine's achievement more impressive in my estimation).  He's always good, but is sidelined for much of the picture, taking away his joy.

Evelyn Ankers also appeared here, and has appeared throughout our three seasons.  I'll be honest, I couldn't pick out Ankers in a lineup despite seeing all of these films-the women's roles, unless you get something where they're an actual monster like Bride of Frankenstein or Dracula's Daughters, are so underwritten in Universal Monster movies you can have someone like Ankers, who appeared as the love interest of the Invisible Man, the Frankenstein Monster, & the Wolf-Man without making much of an impression.  On Tuesday, we'll go with arguably the king of the Universal Studios lot during this era, and talk about the contributions of the one man who donned virtually every guise in the Universal Monster canon.

Past Horror Month Reviews (Listed Chronologically): The Golem, The Phantom of the Opera, Dracula, Frankenstein, Freaks, The Mummy, The Old Dark House, The Invisible Man, The Black Cat, The Bride of Frankenstein, Mad Love, The Raven, Werewolf of London, Dracula's Daughter, Son of Frankenstein, The Invisible Man Returns, The Mummy's Hand, The Invisible Woman, The Wolf Man, Cat People, The Ghost of Frankenstein, Invisible Agent, The Mummy's Tomb, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, Phantom of the Opera, Son of Dracula, The House of Frankenstein, The Uninvited, House of Dracula, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man, It Came from Outer Space, Creature from the Black Lagoon, Revenge of the Creature, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Blob, The Masque of the Red Death