Dr. Cyclops (1940)

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Once considered a classic of its kind, Paramount’s Dr. Cyclops hasn’t aged well despite (then) state of the art special effects and a chilling performance by Albert Dekker as Dr. Alexander Thorkel, a scientist who summons a research team to his Peruvian jungle laboratory only to turn his discovery -- a shrinking ray -- on his colleagues when paranoia and professional jealousy get the best of him. Resembling a literal “egghead” (dickhead?) with his shaved cranium and owlish spectacles, Dekker’s cyclopean sociopath is motivated purely by ego and amoral scientific curiosity -- traits that converge in the film’s grimmest (and only frightening) scene when he casually murders a miniaturized rival scientist because he fears his shrinking ray is wearing off. Alas, that’s as good as Cyclops gets, and the rest of the film focuses, to little effect, on his tiny captives’ attempts to escape from and ultimately dispatch their colossal captor.

Directed by Ernest B. Schoedsak of King Kong fame and graced with a lush Technicolor palette of cool greens, blues, and pinks, Cyclops is nevertheless sabotaged from the start by a disastrous error in tone typified by a cutesy cartoonish score -- presumably intended to soften or provide relief from the horror -- that instead robs its darker scenes of all menace. Compared to the existential nightmare of the similarly themed Incredible Shrinking Man (1957) -- shot in stark black-and-white with noirish, jazzy music, and resonant with socio-philosophical undertones -- Cyclops largely fails as a fright film and offers no compelling subtext to its ultimately routine story. Again and again, scenes of potential horror are neutered by the inappropriate music or by bits of low comedy (there’s even ethnic humor in the form of an oafish Latino bearer who gets scared a lot), leaving the viewer largely unsympathetic to the film’s pipsqueak protagonists who spend much of the action running like mice from hiding place to hiding place trying to escape from a cat, a sudden storm, and an alligator. Naked beneath improvised togas of white cloth and featuring (in Janice Logan’s Dr. Mary Robinson) a strong female character, the tiny team brims with opportunities for subversive sexual wit (a la Tod Browning's Devil Doll or James Whale's Bride of Frankenstein), but the viewer waits for it in vain. The end result is a mildly entertaining but ultimately disappointing film that fails to make its mark as either sci-fi, horror, or camp.

B-

(Copyright 2011 by S.L. Jones; all rights reserved)