The Brute Man (1946)

Its opening credits might announce itself as a PRC movie, but there is no doubt that The Brute Man (1946) is really a Universal production, from the presence of Jean Yarborough in the director's chair and Ben Pivar producing, to the over familiar sets and Hans J Salter's musical score.  A quick follow up to House of Horrors (1946), the film was sold to PRC following Universal's decision to cease B-movie production, (the studio was also, reportedly, concerned to avoid charges that it was exploiting star Rondo Hatton, who died before the film could be released).  Whatever the official reasons for Universal washing its hands of The Brute Man, there's no doubt that it is a dismal film: depressing and downbeat, with no real heroes and a 'monster' whose brutality precludes any audience sympathy for him, despite the script's attempts to give him an origin story and a supposedly redeeming relationship with a blind girl, (who turns him into the cops, regardless).  It is easy to see why a studio desperately trying to create an new, upmarket, image wouldn't want to be associated with such a film. The Brute Man was the last of a cycle of Universal B-movies that sought to exploit Rondo Hatton's acromegaly, which, as it progressed, gave him an ever more misshapen appearance, distorting both his body and face.  Usually cast as the main villain's thuggish heavy, in films such as The Pearl of Death (1944), Jungle Captive (1945) and The Spider Woman Strikes Back (1945), his last two films saw him take on the mantle of lead 'monster', playing a brutish criminal known as 'The Creeper', whose favoured method of murder is to break his victims' backs.

There was a certain logic to Universal promoting a man suffering real-life disfigurement as its new monster at this time.  With real life horrors perpetrated by very human monsters during the 1940s, as World War Two raged, Universal's pantheon of fantasy monsters - Frankenstein's Monster, Wolfman, Dracula, Mummy and Invisible Man, seemed far less relevant and horrifying to audiences.  With their cycle of films effectively winding down in 1945, with House of Dracula, it doubtless seemed to Universal executives that replacing them with a very human monster of the kind that you might find lurking around contemporary cities, therefore easily relatable to for audiences, was a natural next step.  But it also represented very poor taste, something noted at the time by critics and audiences. Not that that would stop film makers from continuing to exploit the physically handicapped and sick for shock value in cheap horror films - just look at the way dwarves and midgets, for instance, continued to be portrayed as evil, simply because they were 'different', to recent times.  Of course, it certainly didn't help that the films featuring 'The Creeper' were desperately cheap and depressing affairs.  The main asset of both House of Horrors and The Brute Man is the creepy, noir-like atmosphere and 'late night' feel that director Jean Yarborough managed to bring to both.  But while the first film in this putative series, House of Horrors, was, by comparison, a relatively slick affair, The Brute Man, running at less than hour, feels perfunctory, giving the impression that it is made up of scenes and script fragments left over from its predecessor, roughly and arbitrarily assembled.  Unlike House of Horrors, which throws the audience straight into the plot and has 'The Creeper' being used as a pawn in someone else's schemes, The Brute Man puts him front and centre, bogging itself down in a turgid revenge story as he tries to kill those he holds responsible for his disfigurement.

The film does have its moments - the murder of a delivery boy, for instance, provides a jolting shock and top-billed Tom Neal has only a couple of scenes before being rather casually killed off - but they aren't enough to sustain it as a thriller.  The paucity of its plot is highlighted by the amount of padding, in the form of flashbacks and the whole blind girl sub-plot, the film requires to bulk out its running time.  The nearest thing to a sympathetic character the film can muster is the blind girl, (played by Jane Adams in probably the movie's best performance), although her decision to turn 'The Creeper' in feels abrupt and seems to require little in the way of moral qualms on her part.  The flashbacks explaining how 'The Creeper' came to become disfigured do nothing to recast him as a tragic victim - even as a young and handsome student he is a jealous jerk with a violent temper.  They also do nothing to make his victims seem sympathetic - they too, in their younger versions, come across as insufferably smug jerks who become even more insufferable as they grow older.  Not even the police can manage to provide any kind of moral lead, with the chief detectives seemingly disinterested in carrying out any investigations, instead just waiting for 'The Creeper' to strike again, in the hope of catching him.  As for 'The Creeper' himself, it is painful to watch a clearly ill Hatton, (who died shortly after filming was completed), stumbling through his role, struggling to speak his lines and barely able to perform the physical exertions the part required.  It just adds to the overall air of misery that hangs over The Brute Man and leaves you wondering how much worse any further sequels might have been, had the series not been cut mercifully short by Hatton's death.