The Neanderthal Man

Wheeler (Frank Gerstle), a tourist-hunter in the California High Sierras, is not believed by the patrons of Webb's Cafe when he claims to have run across a live tiger with tusks. Among the scoffers is game-warden George Oakes -- until he is driving home later that night and the critter hops on the hood of his car.

The general idea of this film is pretty standard -- you have a mad scientist who wants to turn people into Neanderthals and cats into saber-toothed tigers. There are plenty of scientific arguments that can be made against this being possible, but let us just ignore that...

He gets especially upset when his theories are presented to the local natural history society and they scoff at him. Interestingly, he includes Piltdown Man as part of the evolutionary chain of man -- a fossil that was determined to be a hoax in November 1953, around the same time as this film came out...

What could be considered really sad about this film is that it comes from director E. A. Dupont, who used to be somebody. Once upon a time, he was a big name in the world of German silent cinema, writing and directing "Variete" starring Emil Jannings and with Karl Freund operating the camera. A classic film. And now, at this point, he is directing cheesy science fiction with cheesy makeup and no real directorial flair. This is your average science fiction film of the 1950s, with almost no notable names (besides Dupont). He could have done better...

The one possibly notable name is Beverly Garland, who played the waitress. Although not A-list, she did go on to appear in multiple Roger Corman films and continued acting up through the 2000s on shows such as "7th Heaven". Some could say Robert Shayne was notable, but aside from bit parts in "North By Northwest" and "Invaders From Mars" he hardly left his mark.

Although perhaps talking this movie down, I am not saying you should avoid this film, but just be prepared for the average 1950s flick, probably not something you will tell your friends about. For those who really must see it, Scream Factory has released a nice blu-ray of the film, with a fairly decent transfer (though no special features).

A haughty Professor becomes intent on proving that mankind's gradual evolution did not necessarily affect his quotient of intelligence. Despite the distinguished directorial credit, this is a thoroughly routine horror programmer of the 'mad scientist' variety, with more than its fair share of unintended hilarity amid the general tackiness. In fact, I would go so far as to say that, as played by Robert Shayne, the doctor here is the rudest in film history and watching him let rip with insults at his staid, disapproving colleagues was a hoot! Typically for this sort of fare, the all-important serum is first tested on animals or 'lesser' humans – in this case, a perennially terrified domestic cat is turned into a saber-toothed tiger and a mute servant girl into a bushy-eyebrowed ape woman (albeit, apparently, just long enough for her to sit for some photographic evidence of the veracity of his claims) – before applying it to himself. The proverbial redneck hostility to a marauding tiger preying on their livestock and later a simian kidnapper of women is present and accounted for; what is more surprising is that the middle-aged professor has a good-looking and much younger fiancée who still relishes hopes of dragging him from his laboratory off to a church altar and, naturally, once the young urban expert hero comes along, he falls for the charms of the professor's clueless daughter. The TNT-culled print I watched left an awful lot to desire so, in spite of my reservations, I acquired a superior copy of the film the minute it was over!

An ultra-cheesy '50s monster flick in which we get to see Robert Shayne (Inspector Henderson from TV's ''Adventures of Superman'') shamelessly recite hilarious dialogue and feverishly overact, as a dedicated mad scientist who's found a way to reverse the evolutionary process! It's the treat of the film to watch him rant and rave about his idiotic theories without applying the brakes. First he turns a common house cat into a fierce saber-toothed tiger, accomplished by the effects team utilizing close-ups of a fake model; later, he jabs himself with a serum that transforms him into the title character. You've got to get a load of this ape-man's face; it's one of the most ridiculous-looking of all film monsters, obviously an over-the-head mask you'd buy in any Halloween shop, and completely expressionless with a rubber muzzle and painted set eyes that don't move. For his creature, the filmmaker should have chosen to stay with the crude third or fourth stage appliances during the chintzy transformation sequence.

A real hoot, and a good deal of fun if you go for these types of silly yet entertaining creature features. We also get to see a young Beverly Garland in the cast, although a double for her is blatantly used in a sequence where she dons a bathing suit and models for a photographer. **1/2 out of ****

An awful lot of people don't like this film but it has some wonderful things in it and some off the wall things too. Robert Shayne plays the mad scientist with the ever-adoring fiancee in a truly over the top fashion. In one sequence while he is ranting about being left alone (a sequence straight out of the original Frankenstein), she tousles his hair so that it goes in all directions at once and seems a total send-up of the would-be dramatic moment at hand. In addition, every time the scene shifts to the mountains and countryside an incredibly lush theme is played that seems like something out of an old Lowell Thomas documentary travelogue! In the beginning of the film there is an inexplicably jazzy score playing while a man is attacked in his car by a sabre-toothed tiger. At times we glimpse the tiger who has ordinary teeth and yet when we see it in extreme close-up after being killed or in a kind of freeze frame as it attacks a car it has its sabre teeth. In another sequence we are to believe that an ordinary cat can be turned into a sabre-toothed tiger through use of a regressive serum that takes it back to its ancestors-- at least I think that's what's going on! Despite all of these oddities the film has a clear narrative and is lively enough to hold one's interest, if just in watching out for the next oddity. One is left wondering why the neanderthal man's teeth are so bad for example when in fact ancient peoples had fine teeth when we find them usually because of their ability to chew and tear with them and keep them well honed. But this fellow seems to have set on by demented dentists. Then there is the whole theory of regression into our ancestors using an argument that brain SIZE is what is most significant, not considering that development of smaller, more effective portions of the brain might evolve over time. Instead, we get here an anti-evolution theory that is so bad it is scoffed at even by the semi-literate faculty in this film. And then Mr. Shayne tells us that in "regressing" to the neanderthal state he will be going back "one million years" when in fact neanderthalers flourished 100,000 years ago, not a million, and it is never explained why he is regressing to the neanderthal state and not some other pathway of human evolution. I had a lot of fun attempting to find what I thought were staggering gaps in the overall presentation of this film BUT I enjoyed the various goofy characters, the narrative clarity and the ability of director Dupont to keep the low-budget proceedings moving about briskly. I think if you are not too demanding, have a puff of anthropology in your background and enjoy movies made solely to entertain you'll enjoy this one. By the way, the movie was HEAVILY influenced by the Bridey Murphy phase the whole country was going through at the time this movie was made!!! An American housewife named Virginia Tighe, through hypnosis, claimed to have regressed to becoming a 19th century woman named Bridey Murphy. The whole country was taken up with the belief that we could all regress to earlier lives...and that formed the inspiration for the screenplay and the outrageous theories presented in this film.

****SPOILERS**** In the "Neanderthal Man" Robert Shayne, Prof. Clifford Groves, plays a somewhat whacked-out scientist who's obsessed in proving his theory of "Devolution". In that man has actually devolved not evolved from pre-historic times to today where his brain is about a quarter the size of the brain of the Java Cro-Magnon or Neanderthal Man.

At the Naturalist Club Prof. Groves is almost laughed off the platform by his colleagues for saying that and in a fit of anger and indignation he tells them that their nothing but a bunch of ingrates and mental midgets and that a man of his brilliance is too good to have anything to do with them.

Back at his home in the High Sierra Mountains Prof. Groves goes to work in his lab to prove that he's right and make those anthropologists at the Naturalist Club who made a monkey out of him and his theories pay for what they did by showing those fools just how right he was and is. Making a cave women out of his housemaid Celia, Tandra Quinn, with a serum that he developed he next turns his house cat into a large and vicious saber-tooth tiger who breaks out of his lab and causes havoc in the countryside by killing the local farmers livestock.

All this attracts Dr. Harkness, Richard Crane, a L.A paleontologist who with the insistence of local game warden George Oakes, Robert Long, goes up to the High Sierra and hunts down and kills the big cat.

Getting Prof. Groves to go with them to identify the tiger it somehow disappeared. Obviously Prof. Groves found the dead saber-tooth tiger earlier that morning and hid it in order not to have his secret experiments exposed.Prof. Groves is so obsessed with his experiments that he completely ignores his bride-to-be Ruth, Doris Merrick, who came to visit him as he buries himself in his work in the study on the size of the human and pre-human brain.

Later Prof. Groves injects himself with his serum and turns into a Neanderthal Man but instead of getting smarter he gets more wilder and goes out in the range and kills a number of campers and hunters. Prof. Groves doesn't even look like a Neanderthal Man he looks more like an extra from the movie "Planet of the Apes".

Robert Shayne really overdid the mad scientist act and was so off the wall and unstable in many scenes in the movie that it made you wonder why nobody in the film noticed just how insane he was and didn't call the police or park rangers to have him taken away and locked up in a hospital room before he hurt himself or anyone else.

Later Dr. Harkness enters Prof. Groves lab and sees a number of cats in cages and vials of serum and injects one of the cats with it that it later turns also into a saber-tooth tiger. Prof. Groves is hunted down and shot by a sheriff's posse in the hills but escapes only to be attacked by the tiger who ends up killing him. After Prof. Groves dies he turns back into a modern day civilized human being from the pre-historic brute that he was.

It's a shame that Prof. Groves had to learn the hard way about his theory of brain size that bigger doesn't always mean smarter.