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| Horror |
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THE MONSTER MAKER
Rating: 
USA. 1944.
Director – Sam Newfield, Screenplay – Pierre Gendron & Martin Mooney, Story – Lawrence Williams, Producer – Sigmund Neufeld, Photography (b&w) – Robert E. Cline, Music – Albert Glasser, Art Direction – Paul Palmontella. Production Company – PRC.
Cast:
J. Carrol Naish (Dr Igor Markoff), Wanda McKay (Patricia Lawrence), Ralph Morgan (Anthony Lawrence), Tala Birell (Maxine), Terry Frost (Bob Blake), Alex Pollard (Stack)
Plot: At a recital by pianist Anthony Lawrence, Dr Igor Markoff becomes fixated on Lawrence’s daughter Patricia who resembles his late wife and afterwards obsessively sends her presents. When Lawrence goes to tell Markoff that his attentions are unwanted, Markoff knocks him out and injects him with a dose of acromegaly that causes Lawrence to become hideously disfigured. Markoff has perfected an antidote but the price he demands for it is that Lawrence let Patricia be his.
The Monster Maker is a routine mad scientist cheapie from the 1940s. It was directed by Sam Newfield, who’d made an awful lot of B Westerns and a few other genre films such as The Mad Monster (1942), White Pongo (1945), The Flying Serpent (1946) and The Lost Continent (1951), and was produced by Sigmund Neufeld who’d produced most of Newman’s 100+ Westerns.
In all regards it is a routine poverty row mad scientist effort. It is dully photographed and directed. J. Carrol Naish is really cast in a Bela Lugosi role – he plays with a foreign accent, lots of melodramatic menace and even has a handy killer gorilla in his lab, and is in all ways but name playing Lugosi. Presumably Lugosi wasn’t available for the part. The mad scientist scheme of injecting people with acromegaly seems rather on the banal side, although there is a good shock revelation of a deformed face partway through. Acromegaly has been used in horror films several times since, including Tarantula (1955) and Doomwatch (1972), as well as real-life acromegaly sufferer Rondo Hatton who played a sinister heavy in a number of horror films of the era – Jungle Captive (1945), The Spider Woman Strikes Back (1946), House of Horrors (1946) and The Brute Man (1946).
Copyright Richard Scheib 1999-2012
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