Ricerche diaboliche

Monster on the Campus (1958)

*** (out of 4)

Entertaining Universal Sci-Fi about a college scientist who turns into a monster after his blood is mixed with that of a prehistoric fish. I've been wanting to see this for quite some time but never got around to buying the VHS since it was released just as I was jumping on the DVD format. The wait was certainly worth it even though the film isn't really anything other than your typical Jekyll and Hyde story. The film goes by at a very quick pace and the monster looks great, although it's a shame we only get to see him twice. I was somewhat shocked at the rather violent third death scene. The film also contains one of the dumbest girlfriends in sci-fi history.

Although this film reportedly wasn't one of director Jack Arnold's favorites, I personally have enjoyed it very much through many viewings. The story is a Jekyll-Hyde variation, but it offers real suspense and some genuine scares from a director that knows how. The only (minor) disappointment is the creature's makeup (not seen 'til near the end), which unfortunately is revealed to us in a brightly-lit room; makeups like this are more effective when glimpsed fleetingly in the dark. That small quibble aside, this film offers lots of scary fun for those in the mood. (The same can be said of Arnold's earlier films for the same studio, "It Came From Outer Space" (1953) and "Tarantula" (1955).

I've always enjoyed this film that turned out to be Jack Arnolds last horror film and I really do not understand why some people think this is awful. There are some flicks that you don't have to take seriously and all you have to do is sit back and have fun watching. Sure, its silly but most 50's sci-fi is. Why is this worse than others? The music that is used is from other Arnold films most notably "Tarantula" and I'm sure Universal used the same score for countless other movies. A lot of Arnold regulars pop up like Whit Bissell, Phil Harvey, Ross Elliott, Richard Cutting and of course Mr. Ziffel, Hank Patterson! Eddie Parker plays the monster here in make-up, not Arthur Franz and Parker was also in "Tarantula" in two roles. Both as lab assistance who die of that deforming disease. Troy Donahue in one of his early roles is Jimmy and he's especially wooden. But Arnold knows exactly how to tell a story no matter how silly and the scene with the giant dragonfly is fun, so is the whole movie.

A college professor obtains an ancient life-form whose fluids soon turn deadly.

Looks like Universal just couldn't give up their werewolf franchise. So they reworked it, replacing full moons with prehistoric "coelacanth" fluid. Seems the stuff turns modern creatures into vicious prehistoric counterparts. So a sophisticated modern guy like Prof. Blake (Franz) turns into a hairy, monstrous hominid, and Hollywood 1958 scares drive-in kids the way necking teens hoped.

You gotta give actor Franz credit. He treats the drive-in material like it was Ben Hur. There's not a hint of camp in the sometimes campy material. But then it's got not only studio backing, but ace sci-fi director Jack Arnold ( e.g. The Incredible Shrinking Man {1957}) at the helm. So the camera never falters even when the cardboard monsters do. (Please, couldn't they have re-worked that awful dragonfly.) Thus, the results suggest eye-level Hollywood professionalism at its most challenged. All in all, it looks like the studio was aiming for respectable sci-fi on the order of Arnold's previous It Came From Outer Space (1953). In my view, Universal only half succeeds, no thanks to the generally poor special effects. Anyway, give actor Franz a combat Oscar for pressing on fearlessly under adverse circumstances. And give director Arnold a Lifetime Achievement Award for excelling in a genre generally bypassed by snooty media critics.

(If memory serves, the coelacanth talked about in the movie was a "missing link" first discovered in the 1930's. Its fish-like body crucially contained fleshy fins, indicating it could move about on land, thus confirming scientific hypothesis that life evolved from the sea.)

A previous commentator writes that: "The story is totally ludicrous and a feeble, shameless attempt to promote evolution. Only a leftist loony would believe this stuff."

Just to set the record straight, the concept of "evolution" promoted by the film is a gross distortion of actual evolutionary theory, suggesting as it does that evolution involves some sort of mystical forces and that certain so-called "living fossils" contain some sort of substance which somehow counteracts these forces. None of this actually makes in any sense, however, in terms of the actual science.

To sum up, evolutionary theory is perfectly valid science, and there's nothing particularly shameful about promoting it as science, contrary to what the above poster might think. OTOH, the movie's conception of what evolution actually means is just plain silly.