The Neanderthal Man * (1953, Robert Shayne, Joyce Terry, Richard Crane) – Classic Movie Review 8346

Director E A Dupont’s 1953 black and white sci-fi  horror movie The Neanderthal Man stars Robert Shayne as mad scientist Professor Clifford Groves, who takes his serum and turns a cat into a saber-tooth tiger and a mute servant girl into a bushy eye-browed ape woman, and then takes his own serum himself and turns himself into the ugly killer Neanderthal Man (in a silly mask).

Alas, Dupont’s movie is a disappointing, grungy-looking, low-everything regulation mad scientist chiller. The acting, black and white photography (by Stanley Cortez), scripting (by producers Aubrey Wisberg and Jack Pollexfen) and production are all very poor, and it is not even much fun for a laugh at its expense. Well, OK, maybe occasionally it is, as when the Professor goes crazy insulting his disapproving colleagues or when the saber-tooth tiger very briefly appears as a stuffed animal with long teeth added and whiskers drawn on.

In his heyday, director Ewald André Dupont made the 1925 German silent classic Variety.

Also in the cast are Richard Crane, Doris Merrick, Joyce Terry, Robert Long, Dick Rich, Beverly Garland, Tandra Quinn, Lee Morgan, Eric Colmar, Robert Easton, Frank Gerstle, Anthony Jochim, Marshall Bradford, William Fawcett, Tom Monroe and Robert Bray.

The Neanderthal Man is directed by E A Dupont, runs 77 minutes, is made by Global Productions and Wisberg-Pollexfen Productions, is released by United Artists, is written by Aubrey Wisberg and Jack Pollexfen, is shot in black and white by Stanley Cortez, is produced by Aubrey Wisberg and Jack Pollexfen, scored by Albert Glasser and designed by Walter Koestler.

‘What primitive passions…what mad desires drove him on…? He held them all in the grip of deadly terror…nothing could keep him from the woman he claimed as his own!’ Yea, yea, bla, bla, bla, bla,

© Derek Winnert 2019 Classic Movie Review 8346

Check out more reviews on http://derekwinnert.com