The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
Mad Scientists refers to scientists who are depicted as defying ethical standards and engaged in horrific experiments. The mad part of the title refers less to their sanity and more to their willingness to defy social taboos and engage in experiments of ethical dubiousness.
Mad scientists are frequently engaged in experiments to resurrect the dead, transfer minds/brains into other people’s or animal bodies, transforms animals into humans, create artificial life and such like. Their experiments were always seen as a threat to the social order and doomed or likely to run out of control, where the best solution was setting their laboratories alight by villagers with burning torches.
The heyday of the mad scientist film was between the 1930s and 40s. With the popularisation of the scientist during the Space Age, scientists of the 1950s and beyond became more heroic and friendly. There have still been a plentiful supply of mad scientists since then in assorted B movies. In more modern works, the mad scientist is treated as a comic figure and there have been a number of mad scientists who appear in children’s films.
The third of Abbott and Costello’s comedic meet ups with the Famous Monsters – in this case a series of lowjinks as they encounter Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (played by Boris Karloff)
The animated revival of the Addams Family was a mixed affair. All of the same creative personnel and voice talents return here for a sequel, which takes the Addams Family on a road trip
A classic German Expressionist film where Metropolis‘s Brigitte Helm gives a sizzlingly seductive performance as a woman born via artificial insemination who grows up as an emotionless man-eater
TV mini-series released as a theatrical film in some parts of the world that resurrects Captain Nemo in the present-day. It is Irwin Allen returning to his tv roots where Captain Nemo’s adventures become a blatant attempt to copy Star Wars
The reasoning behind rebooting the Spider-Man franchise after ten years and only three films is a puzzle. That said, this offers an edgier origin story than Sam Raimi’s take and Andrew Garfield makes for a fine Spider-Man
One of the last directorial outings from cult director Larry Cohen. Comic-book artist Eric Roberts is wound up in trying to trace a mysterious ambulance that is abducting women into illicit experiments
Genre-bending film that mixes B movie space opera cliches with rock’n’roll and a David Lynch-ian sense of surrealism. Interesting but the film left me scratching my head trying to get a handle on it
Witty and quite charming low-budget SF film with Don Opper as a gawky android on a space station trying to understand the human condition amid the arrival of escaped convicts
An outrageous gore-drenched version of the Frankenstein story that frequently ventures into bad taste. Despite his name in the title, Andy Warhol had nothing to do with the film
One of the most lunatic mad scientist plots of all time in which Boris Karloff kills an ape then puts on its skin to go out and kill people for their spinal fluids to create a cure for polio
Poverty row cheapie with Bela Lugosi as a mad scientist transformed into an ape-man after an experiment gone wrong who goes out hunting victims for their spinal fluids with his pet gorilla
Film spinoff of the cult animated tv show. This feels like a film overtaken by the effort of trying to be surrealistic, wacky, scatological etc more than it is ever a film that creates gag that are funny
This comes with an insane mash-ups of ideas – modern day Frankenstein monster is thrown back in time to the Civil War (in a process that also creates multiple copies) and ends up fighting on the Northern side
A real Grade Z film. A mind-boggling stew involving John Carradine conducting mad science experiments, technical gaffes aplenty, spy capers featuring Tura Satana and even M.A.S.H.‘s Wayne Rogers on script
Despite the possibilities set up by the title, this features no vampires nor atomic monsters but is an Italian film influenced by Eyes Without a Face about a mad surgeon trying to restore a woman’s disfigured face
You feel that a film about lesbian Japanese schoolgirls vs zombies should have been more interesting. The zombies barely mount to a dozen and the director seems more preoccupied by his softcore predilections
There is a certain genus of films based around coming up with deliberately ridiculous titles. The filmmakers sell you instantly on the film from the title alone but have lavished little care or budget on the actual film
Film set around the premise that babies are secretly geniuses and talk in their own language. This makes a beeline for pee and poop jokes and seems to think we should applaud it for the cutsieness of seeing babies doing adult things
Charmingly capricious and silly adaptation of the comic-strip with a wide-eyed Jane Fonda as the spacegoing heroine. Filled with some wonderfully naughty gags and a production and costume design scheme that goes to a gorgeously deranged excess
Third of the Filipino-shot Blood Island films. This has a slow first half before getting to what we expect of a Filipino monster movie – an overacting mad scientist, a cheesy monster, schlocky gore and gratuitous toplessness
Boris Karloff plays a mad scientist who creates an experimental formula to reverse aging and injects himself with it, only for it to turn into a split personalitied killer
The second sequel to the cult splatter hit Re-Animator is a superior effort to its predecessor, getting the original’s sense of black humour down pat and arriving at a memorably apocalyptic climax
A homage to 1970s SF cinema, full of trippy journeys through transcendental space and white antisceptic corridors. In aiming for this look, the film also forgot a small thing like a plot or coherent explanation of what is happening
A peculiar mixture of 1940s mad scientist and gangster film in which Boris Karloff transplants a mob boss’s brain into the body of a mild-mannered English professor
Disney’s attempt to join the post-Star Wars SF boom proved a flop that flounders in bad writing and ponderous pretensions. On the other hand, it is almost worth watching for the stunning design and effects
The very last gasp of the 1930s/40s mad scientist film, a swansong that brings together an amazing cast from the era including Bela Lugosi, Lon Chaney Jr, John Carradine, Basil Rathbone and Tor Johnson. Slightly better produced than most of the era’s cheapies
A spinoff from Full Moon’s Puppetmaster film series, this stirs killer dolls, mad scientists, psychics and Nazi zombies together in an undeniably entertaining mix
Possibly the most ridiculous film produced during the Anglo-horror cycle in which scientist Robert Flemyng turns daughter Wanda Ventham into a giant vampiric Deathshead moth
Film from Z-budget director Al Adamson that has been slung together from odds and ends of other unfinished films in a laughable ramshackle structure where what starts as a diamond robbery film turns into mad scientist/monster film
An obscure effort from the early days of the Anglo-horror cycle. A medical vampire effort and a Hammer imitator with lavish production values and memorable characters that easily sits up alongside Hammer’s better work
The third of Uwe Boll’s Bloodrayne trilogy and one of his better films. The action scenes are slickly choreographed and the film is largely made by Michael Paré and Clint Howard who play to the gallery with entertaining regard
Uwe Boll sets out to offend everybody in a film founded on making constant insults about its’ plus-size heroine’s weight and bad jokes about the Holocaust, including the Boll playing a comic Hitler
This comes with the interestingly original idea of having the real-life outlaws Bonnie and Clyde come up against Count Dracula. The main thing against the film is a low budget
Boris Karloff and Peter Lorre make an unexpectedly great comic pairing in this mad scientist screwball comedy that comes with an exhaustingly madcap pace
The Bowery Boys were a poor man’s Abbott and Costello; here in one of their most entertaining outings they try to compete with Abbott and Costello’s monster bashes
An unofficial copycat of the Filipino-made Blood Island from exploitation director Al Adamson, a trashy mix involving a dictator’s transplanted brain, Frankenstein monsters and a perverted dwarf
Classic Z budget film about a severed head in a laboratory that has plenty to place it in the bad movie category but is made with such a perverse panache that it is hard to dislike
A low-budget film wherein a teenager falls under the influence of a mad scientist who drills open heads to implant mind control chips. This makes a beeline for gory splatter effects
Another of Guy Maddin’s silent movie pastiches, all shot in a deadpan style throwing together a hilariously convoluted madcap plot involving child detectives, mad scientists and spy capers
Lushly mounted remake of Bride of Frankenstein with Sting as Frankenstein and Jennifer Beals as the Bride. More costume drama than it ever is a horror story.
The first sequel to the 1931 Boris Karloff Frankenstein, which many prefer to the original. Director James Whale comes into his element and provides a whole other level of droll humour that the first film did not have
Sequel to the cult splatter hit of Re-Animator, directed by the original’s producer Brian Yuzna. Jeffrey Combs, Bruce Abbott and David Gale are back. This has some amazing effects work but lacks the first film’s outrageous black humour
Edward D. Wood Jr film with Bela Lugosi creating a race of atomic supermen in the swamps. One of Wood’s more competent films that is an enjoyable variant on mad scientist film that Lugosi spent the 1940s making
The third in a trilogy of satirical films from director Lindsay Anderson and star Malcolm McDowell, this takes a biting crosscut of British society as a hospital prepares for a royal visit
William Castle production about the discovery of a species of insects that can start fires. Easily dismissable as a schlock film but it has an intelligence and eerie insect photography that make it more than that
Not long after RKO had a hit with Cat People, Universal responded with this in which the exotically beautiful Acquanetta turns into a gorilla (actually vice versa). The Jungle Woman went on to appear in two sequels
A Roger Corman produced cheapie about genetically engineered dinosaurs that was quickly rushed out to exploit the success of Jurassic Park. Corman went on to make two sequels
Twelfth of the popular British comedy series, here the Carry On team conduct a bawdy farce on the Hammer horror film that was all the in-thing at the time
A young man recuperates from a brain injury while tended by his father. As he tries to piece together what happened, we discover we are in the midst of a Frankenstein-type film
That rarity of rarities – a quite good Troma film. The zombies are not up to much but the titular girl motorcycle gang are surprisingly well rounded characters
Hearkening back to the spirit of 1980s B budget killer cyborg/android movie, an entertainingly preposterous film in which a girl biker gang are pitted against a mad scientist and his army of killer androids
An incredibly bad monster movie supposedly based around the Latin American urban legend of the Chupacabra. So cheaply made it can’t even afford CGI
The almost indescribable second film from Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet of Delicatessen fame, a Dicekensian street urchin fantasy that takes place in a stunningly designed almost-familiar world filled with eccentric characters
Bruce Lee popularised the kung fu genre but then died. Welcome to the Brucespolitation phenomenon where for several years we had Bruce lookalikes appearing in copycat works. Several Bruce imitators appear here as his clones
One of a host of low-budget mad scientist films Bela Lugosi made during the 1940s, slightly better than most of the others. Here he uses orchids to place brides in death-like comas
Early Anglo-horror film that seems to be trying to push a story about a 19th century doctor (Boris Karloff)’s discovery of anaesthetic gas out of shape and make it into a horror story.
Atomic became the explain-all buzzword for almost every monster movie of the 1950s.This is the novelty of the one and only atomic zombie film, although at heart is no more than a 1940s mad scientist film
From Gore Verbinski, director of The Ring and the first three Pirates of the Caribbean films, a film about a sinister health sanatorium. A beautiful looking film but it is a long time before we ever find out what is going on
This and The Horror of Dracula the following year set Hammer Films on the map. A remake of Frankenstein very different to the 1931 version that comes in vibrant colour and places Peter Cushing’s ruthlessly amoral Baron at the centre of the show
Larry Buchanan was a director whose output rivalled Edward D. Wood Jr in quality. This film about an expedition into the bayous encountering a mad scientist creating human-crocodile hybrids registers fairly poorly on most counts
The third and most undervalued of George Romero’s original trilogy of zombie films, an explosively bared to the bone series of apocalyptic confrontations containing some of the best performances and writing in any of his films
A typical 80s film with a mad doctor resurrecting the dead in the abandoned wing of an asylum amid gory makeup effects. The first film from Brett Leonard who next went on to make The Lawnmower Man
An Amicus film directed by Freddie Francis and with a script by Robert Bloch that proves the dictum that there is no such thing as a good killer bee movie
The first horror film from New Zealand, a gore drenched effort about a mad scientist creating zombies. Directed by much energy even if it suffers a complete lack of plot
Typical Bela Lugosi fare of the 1940s involving one of the most lunatic mad scientist schemes of the era in which he kills his enemies with an experimental aftershave that his bats have been trained to hone in on and attack
Boris Karloff mad scientist film with a fear of science at the most extreme of any work of this era. What seems absurd is the film’s belief that doom will be brought by a device that is nothing more than an EEG machine
Tod Browning film in which Lionel Barrymore is an escaped convict who disguises himself as an old woman where he takes revenge using people shrunken to the size of dolls
An early film from Jess Franco in which an exotic dancer is turned into a mind-controlled assassin who lures and kills victims with her six-inch long fingernails as part of a revenge scheme
This is a standout serial based on the famous comic-book detective, featuring some of the best of all serial cliffhangers and action set-pieces, not to mention wonderfully creative super-science inventions
Very silly AIP comedy that parodies the massively popular James Bond films of the era, as well as features Vincent Price as the villain spoofing his appearances in the studio’s Edgar Allan Poe films
Retelling of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde from cult Euro erotica director Walerian Borowczyk. Not quite the erotic retelling one expects, this nevertheless conducts some radical revisions
The fourth film version of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde starring King Baggot in the title roles. This is very faithful to the story, even if it reads as largely unremarkable today
Classic silent version of the Jekyll and Hyde story. A reasonable if not truly standout version, dominated by John Barrymore’s highly melodramatic performance in the title roles
The definitive version of the Jekyll/Hyde story in this author’s opinion, winning a Best Actor Oscar for Fredric March. Rouben Mamoulian uses some unique directorial effects and laces the show with a strong undercurrent of repressed sexuality
Version of the Jekyll/Hyde story starring Spencer Tracy and with Ingrid Bergman as the dancehall girl he liaises with. This has been made in the vogue for Freudian psychology so the transformation is tricked out with dubious symbolism
Excellent tv movie adaptation of the Jekyll/Hyde story starring John Hannah. This is mounted with exquisite period detail and brings new depths and interpretations of an oft-told tale
Modernised version of the Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde story starring Dougary Scott. The principal novelty here is that the bulk of the story takes place in a courtroom as Hyde is placed on trial for murder
Rather enjoyable latter day Hammer Film, which plays its title pun surprisingly seriously. Ralph Bates and Martine Beswick are perfectly matched as the gender-changing Dr Jekyll
Not a Jekyll and Hyde film but instead about Jekyll’s grandson who conducts a series of experiments in harnessing aggression. An almost sordid exploitation film
One of the classics of mad scientist cinema. A wonderful potboiler of elements with Fay Wray and Lionel Atwill on the track of a cannibal killer who has created an artificial flesh. From the director of Casablanca, no less
From the people behind King Kong, a film in which a mad scientist shrinks a group of people to a few inches tall. Some excellent effects for the era, making this one of the best films on the theme of miniaturisation
Italian-made sequel to the campy Vincent Price starring Dr Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine. Directed by the usually great Mario Bava and overrun by the buffoonish clowning of Italian comics Franco and Ciccio
An excruciatingly bad mad scientist film about a scientist tying to find a body to reattach his wife’s head. This treads only where Re-Animator went before. Much of this feels like it should have been played as a comedy
A film from the heyday of the mad scientist film in which George Zucco turns an ape into a human being. Zucco is on marvellously demented form as the title doctor
One of several Dracula vs Frankenstein crossover films that came out in the early 1970s. This version comes from cult exploitation director Jesus Franco but squanders the opportunities of a great title match
One of the great title matches of all-time and a surprise that Universal never thought to do it. In the hands of Z-budget director Al Adamson it is a wasted opportunity nd Zandor Vorkov the worst screen Dracula ever
Probably the worst film adaptation of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, this opts for a trashy sordidness with a lunatically over-the-top Anthony Perkins in the centre of the show
One of the more enjoyable films from Charles Band’s Empire Productions, a comic-book of a film that assembles an action team of various abilities on an adventure up against a mad scientist
This has the novelty of being shot guerilla-style at Disneyland and Disney World without permission. Nothing prepares you for the amazingly dark work you get, a surreal hallucinatory drift through the park’s underbelly
Woody Allen film that takes the title of the best-selling sex manual and spins it out as the basis of a series of hilarious sex-themed skits. Contains the famous episode with the giant breast run amok
This was the third of Hammer’s Frankenstein films. A usually overlooked entry in the series, this is made into something vivid and quite memorable by Freddie Francis’s direction
A true-bred exploitation film with castaways arriving on an island where they encounter a Nazi mad scientist breeding flesh eating slugs. This has been cited as the first gore film
It’s anybody’s guess what possessed Veronica Lake, a great screen beauty of the 1940s, to return to screens playing a Nazi mad scientist having created flesh-eating maggots. A true Z film if there ever was
Mad scientist cheapie from poverty row studio PRC in which George Zucco has found an Aztec Quetzalcoatl bird and kills his enemies by placing one of its feathers on their person
A classic of 1950s SF that creates one of the most well remembered screen robots. An uncredited adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, there are few other films that devote so much attention to creating a sense of wonder
Surprisingly good 1950s film in which scientist Robert Lansing invents a process that allows him to become insubstantial and walk through walls. The effects are very good and this attains some eerie effect
Frank Henenlotter of Basket Case fame modernises the Frankenstein film Here Frankenstein creates a body out of parts from Time Square hookers. Amusing but eventually a film where the humour is too broad
Possibly THE worst film ever made. Tony Watt throws an mash-up of exploitation elements together in an incomprehensible plot. A film that made me want to hammer a nail through my eyeball rather than keep watching
This Italian exploitation film was one of the first attempts to try modernising the Frankenstein film. Thus Frankenstein is a doctor stealing corpses from the morgue at a modern hospital
The classic version of Mary Shelley’s tale that left the indelible image of Boris Karloff as the dull monster with bolts in its neck. Director James Whale draws on German Expressionist designs to create one of the landmark classics of the genre