morrison-dylan-fan Taking a look at a Mill Creek box set that a fellow IMDber has kindly sent me,I spotted that the set contained 2 George Zucco movies,which led to me getting ready to find out how mad the monster could be.The plot:Wanting to prove all the scientists who have called him mad wrong, Dr. Lorenzo Cameron decides to use his servant Tom Gregory as a test case,by crossing his DNA with wolves in order to create a wolf army (as you do!) Taking Cameron's injection,Gregory transforms into a werewolf.Wanting to get his revenge on those who doubted him,Cameron sends werewolf Gregory out on revenge attacks.As fear spreads across the town of a monster who is half beast and half man,a local reporter begins to suspect that Cameron may somehow be involved.View on the film:Running at an epic (for Poverty Row) 77 minutes,the screenplay by Fred Myton does very well at stopping the movie from running out of steam,by crossing the mad scientist with the creature feature and murder mystery. Daringly killing a child,Myton gives the werewolf an extra bite by making the hunt for the unknown killer be one that increases the viciousness of the werewolf.Sending Gregory/the wolf out for the kill,director Sam Newfield displays a surprisingly subtle touch for the murders,with the killing of a girl being perfectly delivered in a chilling manner.Slithering across the screen, George Zucco gives a delightful performance as Cameron,who is so slippery that Zucco almost slides across the screen,whilst Johnny Downs gives Gregory dollops of charm,as Gregory's aw-shucks are replaced by murderous howls.

bkoganbing Watching this awful film from PRC I kept thinking of Betty Hutton from Star Spangled Rhythm saying she was doing it all for defense in that all star wartime flag waver from Paramount. Though George Zucco's mad scientist is far from Betty Hutton, even mad scientists are entitled to be patriotic and contribute what they can to defeat the Axis.Zucco's idea is to create an army of werewolves and by injecting wolf's blood into his farm hand Glenn Strange and creating a prototype werewolf. As for Strange when he's not being a werewolf he's a simple soul, in fact a complete ripoff of Lon Chaney, Jr. in Of Mice And Men. All he needed was the rabbits.For those colleagues who called him mad Zucco is setting Strange on them when he's in werewolf mode. All this is disturbing to Zucco's daughter Anne Nagel and her boyfriend Johnny Downs who happens to be a reporter. Boy does he get the scoop of the year.Even Zucco who had these mad scientist roles down pat in these grade Z films couldn't summon enough energy for a real performance. He did chew the scenery a lot just to keep the audience awake.This sounds more like a scheme he could have sold the Nazis.

Prichards12345 George Zucco was a fine actor, often playing gimlet-eyed villains with a lascivious intensity. However even he couldn't save this dull and flat-footed B flick.Zucco plays the usual mad scientist, Dr. Lorenzo Cameron, who believes that wolf's blood, injected into humans, can create an invincible army of wolf men who can win the World War II (go figure!) Experimenting on Pedro the handyman(Glenn Strange) Zucco creates a werewolf that looks rather like the ones Dave Allen used to play in his comedy sketches! Pedro is obviously based on Lennie from Of Mice And Men, and you almost keep expecting him to say "Duh, okay, George!" There's one startling moment when the werewolf kills a child by reaching in through the window and grabbing it, but for the most part this is a routine and pedestrian - very pedestrian - 77 minute tread through all the old clichés that are done far better in other movies.We also get the revenge motif from the Devil Bat worked in, in itself a borrowing from Son Of Frankenstein!Zucco is wasted, and you only have to see him in films such as Adventures Of Sherlock Holmes, The Mummy's Hand and Dr. Renault's Secret to see how wasted. A few atmospheric swamp scenes are all it has to offer, really. And the scene where Zucco demonstrates his wolf-man technique to those who doubted him (again shades of Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde) is unintentionally hilarious.Not one of the better 40s B movies.

capkronos Thankfully you don't need a lot of "book learnin" to understand where this thing's going... Obviously a poverty row cash-in on Universal's big hit THE WOLF MAN (which was made just one year earlier), this finds the always-watchable George Zucco in another of his patented "mad doctor" roles as brilliant, vengeance-minded scientist Lorenzo Cameron. Cameron, who has set up shop deep in the swamp lands of what I'm presuming is the Louisiana bayou, is plotting revenge against four of his former peers who both humiliated him and forced him to resign from his previous job. You see, they scoffed at his claims of being able to mix man with beast to create an unstoppable army of wolfman creatures that would come in handy during war-time. Thankfully Cameron has found the ideal test subject for his wolf blood injections - a hulking, child-like half-wit named Petro (Glenn Strange). Petro is pretty clueless as to what's going on, doesn't ask too many question and lets the doc strap him down to a table and shoot him up with whatever happens to be in his syringe. This results in a time-lapse change of man turning into a werewolf. Cameron lets him out of the mansion using a secret passageway, so you basically get a big guy (Strange was 6'5") dressed in overalls with a bushy beard, hairy paws and a set of over-sized plastic teeth, running around in the woods the majority of the time. After an eyewitness sees the beast and a little girl is killed, the locals grab their rifles and organize a posse to hunt it down. Dr. Cameron, who can control the beast with a whip and also has a handy antidote to reverse the effect, also drags Petro along to the big city to try to track down the professors who had made a mockery of his original theories and destroyed his reputation in the process. Also hanging around the house is Cameron's daughter Lenora (Anne Nagel), as well as Lenora's nosy reporter boyfriend Tom (Johnny Downs), whose first inclination is that they're dealing with an upright-walking prehistoric creature (!)Though a typically chintzy PRC flick in many ways, with unimpressive sets, cinematography and make-ups, as well as a fairly bland supporting cast, it remains watchable thanks to the histrionics of star George Zucco. I have no clue why Downs received top billing; he shows up half-an-hour in and really doesn't have a whole lot to do, nor is he all that impressive doing it. This is Zucco's show all the way and he's great ranting and raving, talking to himself while fantasizing that he's talking to his peers ("I'm not interested in your imbecilic mouthings!") and temporarily sliding in and out of sanity. Strange seems to have patterned his performance as the hilariously naive and slow-talking semi-retarded country bumpkin around the entire oeuvre of Lon Chaney Jr., from his turn as Lenny in OF MICE AND MEN, to his performance as the aforementioned WOLF MAN. In any case, Strange and Zucco do a fairly good job playing off one another. My favorite part is when Zucco calls him his "guinea pig" in front of a colleague while Petro just sits there grinning and staring at a doorknob. Some of the foggy swamp scenes are pretty atmospheric, too.