Im Sumpf des Grauens

You have to like a movie that offers the heroine (Beverly Garland in this case) running through a swamp during a rainstorm wearing high heels. Okay, to be fair watch this scene carefully and you will notice her heels change into sneakers in the long shots. Anyway, this very unusual plot offers a scientist (George Macready who was the villain in the 1945 Columbia serial THE MONSTER AND THE APE) who believes he can help crippled people to grow new limbs by injecting them with serum from alligator glands. Guess what happens. Richard Crane (from TV's "Rocky Jones, Space Ranger")is a war hero who was literally blown apart but who healed overnight thanks to the serum but something goes wrong and he start mutating into a . . .but then you saw the title of the movie didn't you? His new bride (Beverly) follows him to the forboding bayou mansion where his mother lives (Freida Inescourt from RETURN OF THE VAMPIRE, 1944) and soon uncovers the truth about the bizarre experiments. She tries to tell hubby that she will stand by him no matter what but that's kinda hard when every day he looks more and more like a 'gator. Also around to complicate things is Lon Chaney Jr as Mannon, a drunken Cajun (without a French accent) who hates alligators. Lon wears a hook on his left hand that he is constantly adjusting on camera. he also shoots at some (real) alligators from all of 10 feet away and misses! Sure the premise is silly, but if injecting a person with alligator glands can turn them into a gator remember that George Zucco created a werewolf by injecting a man with wolf blood in THE MAD MONSTER (1944). If THE ALLIGATOR PEOPLE had been made 15 years earlier I'll bet it would have come out of Monogram or PRC. Give it a try, you just might find yourself having fun.

A honeymoon is cut short when a maimed war hero(Richard Crane) seeks healing. The newlywed bride(Beverly Garland)tracks her husband down in a Louisiana bayou getting injections of a serum from alligator glands. A mad scientist tries to heal cripples with his bizarre experiments. After awhile the injected mutate into...well you can guess by the movie's title. Veteran actor Lon Chaney Jr plays a crazed Cajun with a left hook(pun) and a strong aversion to 'gators'.

Great scenery and background score. Special effects are pretty neat. Garland is beautiful and flawless in this Sci-Fi thriller. Notable support from George Macready, Bruce Bennett and Frieda Inescort. This is an attention grabber and well worth your while.

This 1959 Fox picture was actually filmed in Cinemascope; I've never seen it that way. The television and video version are severely cropped from aspect ratio 2.35:1 to 1.33:1 - you're missing almost half the picture. I'm sure they will correct this if it ever comes to DVD. We need see the expansive mansion and exotic swampland locales in their entirety, as well as the giddy climax of the alligator man's LONG, horizontal snout. Top-billed Beverly Garland (here a brunette) is very good as a woman seeking her missing fiance, now holed up in a mansion with a doctor (George MacCready) who's trying to cure him (he was in an accident) with reptilian serum. The man's domineering mother (Frieda Inescort) also resides, protecting and hiding her son from all, including Garland. Lon Chaney is superb as a drunken, one-handed hunter who detests alligators. The music is also eerie and effective. However, the film's plotline begins to fizzle out, with the fiance escaping from the laboratory and not doing much and the film sinks, like quicksand.

With a crazy title like "The Alligator People" this late '50s shocker is much too vulnerable to jokes and attacks, and that's unfortunate because it's actually much better than you might think, and the subject matter is taken quite seriously. Beverly Garland plays a newlywed wife named Joyce who despairs when her husband (Richard Crane) ducks off the train they're honeymooning on to make an urgent phone call, and then is never heard from again. Desperate, she tries without success to locate him until she eventually gets a lead that he could be at a house secluded off in the swamplands of the Louisiana bayou. Once there she is made aware of unusual experiments gone awry which involved her husband, and faces the horror that he is gradually turning into a scaly reptilian creature. His mother (Frieda Inescort, who's pretty bad in this) tries to discourage Joyce in her search and at first does not give her a welcome reception.

Miss Garland is quite believable and sincere in her part, and this is a nice-looking black and white film shot in the cinemascope process, showing off some nice imagery in the land of alligators and snakes. Also adding to the experience is Lon Chaney, one of the uncouth local Cajun men who sports a hook in place of his left hand, having been a victim himself of an alligator attack. He never lets these "dirty, stinking gators" forget it either, as he constantly gets drunk and fires his gun at them, and tries to run them down with his jeep when they cross the road. One of the best lines in '50s schlock cinema may be when Lon yells to the human victim of the story: "I'll KILL you, Alligator Man... just like I'd kill any four legged gator!!". Chaney is also involved in a violent rape sequence, which is pretty shocking for those times.

The scaly makeup for Richard Crane in its early stages is pretty effective, but when he emerges in full alligator-headed form later on, the first instinct is usually to laugh. But this is a '50s monster movie, after all, and many creatures of this era have been bizarre. Once you get past the initial sight of the Alligator Man, the result actually comes off not too bad at all. This is an enjoyable movie of its type for the period, and also comfortably short at only 75 minutes. *** out of ****