Director – Sam Newfield, Screenplay – Fred Myton, Producer – Sigmund Neufeld, Photography (b&w) – Jack Greenhalgh, Music – David Chudnow, Special Effects – Gene Stone, Art Direction – Fred Preble. Production Company – PRC (Producers Releasing Corporation).
Cast
George Zucco (Dr Lorenzo Cameron), Glenn Strange (Petro), Anna Nagel (Leonora Cameron), Johnny Downs (Tom Gregory), Robert Strange (Professor Blaine), Gordon Demain (Professor Fitzgerald), Reginald Barlow (Professor Warwick), Sarah Padden (Grandmother), Mae Busch (Susan)
Plot
Resenting having been ridiculed by his academic colleagues for his theories about human-animal transformation, Dr Lorenzo Cameron has relocated to the swamp town of Ashdown with his daughter Leonora. There he attempts to perfect his experiments using his slow-witted manservant Petro as a test subject. He succeeds in injecting Petro with a formula that turns him into a werewolf. Cameron then plans revenge on his former colleagues by unleashing the transformed Petro to kill them.
Sigmund Neufeld and his brother Sam (who Anglicised his name as Sam Newfield) were the sons of immigrants to the US. They founded the low-budget studio PRC (Producers Releasing Corporation) that operated between 1939 and 1947. Throughout the 1940s, Sam and Sigmund were responsible for making a prolific series of low-budget films in the crime, horror and Western genres, even several Long Ranger films. Sam in particular has a reputation as the most prolific director of all time with 250 films to his name, many under various pseudonyms. (See below for Sam Newfield’s other genre films).
British-born actor George Zucco (1886-1960) became PRC’s in-house mad scientist. Zucco had appeared as Professor Moriarty in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1930) and in supporting parts in a number of the Universal monster movies. He was snapped up by PRC for the likes of The Black Raven (1943), Dead Men Walk (1943), Fog Island (1945) and The Flying Serpent (1946), as well as made appearances in assorted other mad scientist films for other studios of the era.
The Mad Monster needs to be placed into perspective. It was made in the 1940s after the great wave of horror films that came in the 1930s following the success of Dracula (1931) and Frankenstein (1931), a period that is referred to as The Golden Age of Horror. Frankenstein and the films that followed created the archetype of the Mad Scientist. By the 1940s, mad scientist films were being churned out by poverty row studios like Monogram and PRC – indeed, George Zucco and Bela Lugosi and to a lesser extent Boris Karloff made these films their bread and butter during the decade. In The Mad Monster, Robert Strange even gets to utter the line “What good can come of meddling with the laws of nature?” which could easily serve as the title of an essay about mad science cinema.
(l to r) Mad scientist Dr Lorenzo Cameron (George Zucco) and his wolf man creation (Glenn Strange)
Universal produced one of their classic monster movies with The Wolf Man (1941), released in December 1941, which created the essential tropes of the Werewolf Film. The Mad Monster was released five months after The Wolf Man on one of PRC’s quick turnaround schedules and features mad scientist George Zucco turning imbecilic handyman Glenn Strange into a werewolf with a series of injections. (This does come with the novel pretext where Zucco claims that he is conducting the experiments in order to create an army of werewolf soldiers for the War Effort!) All before Zucco enacts a revenge scheme where he sets the werewolf gardener loose to eliminate the colleagues who scorned him.
Most of Sam Newfield’s films are painfully impoverished. I thought that The Mad Monster was better than some of his other films that I have watched. George Zucco provides a magnificently sinister presence, while Newfield creates some atmosphere that it slightly more than rudimentary in all the creeping around the mist-covered sets. The main drawback of the film is that Glenn Strange’s wolf man doesn’t look that menacing – he walks upright, has facial hair and a rather ludicrously unthreatening mediaeval pageboy hairstyle.
The film also stars Glenn Strange who would go on to play the Frankenstein monster in Universal’s sequels House of Frankenstein (1944), House of Dracula (1945) and Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948). Lead actress Anne Nagel also played in a number of other works around this time including Black Friday (1940), Man-Made Monster (1942) and The Green Hornet (1940) and sequel. Surprisingly, the lead for the film is top-billed as the nowadays almost completely unknown Johnny Downs, a former child actor in the Our Gang shorts since the silent era. Downs plays one of the smartass reporter characters that were popular for the era.
Sam Newfield’s other genre films include:- the sf/Western Ghost Patrol (1936), The Invisible Killer (1939), Dead Men Walk (1943), The Monster Maker (1944), Nabonga (1944), White Pongo (1945), The Flying Serpent (1946), Radar Secret Service (1950) and Lost Continent (1951).
