The Neanderthal Man (1953)

The Neanderthal Man (1953) bears a lot of similarities to Jack Arnold's Monster on the Campus (1958).  Most fundamentally, both films feature scientists who find a way of regressing animals and subsequently themselves to earlier evolutionary forms.  But whereas Arnold's movie was a relatively well resourced Universal B feature, The Neanderthal Man, independently produced and distributed by Eagle-Lion, the successors to poverty row's PRC, is clearly made on a much more limited budget, with a poorly realised monster and scrappy looking sets, (it's remarkable the number of windows that look out onto brick walls).  The key difference between the two movies' scenarios are that whereas in the later film the scientist's transitions into an apeman are involuntary and he has no memory of his murderous activities whilst in this state, in The Neanderthal Man the scientist has experimented on himself deliberately, with the intent of transforming and is well aware of his apeman activities.  Ultimately, it becomes a relatively straightforward Jekyll/Hyde variation, with his alter ego channelling all of the scientist's darker urges and thoughts.  Unfortunately, the film seems to take an age to get anywhere, with much running time devoted to another scientist - who is up in the mountains where the first scientist's house/lab is situated investigating reported sightings of extinct sabre tooth tigers - laboriously piecing together the evidence and slowly concluding what the audience have known from the outset - that the first scientist and the apeman are one and the same.

We're kept waiting until the latter part of the film for the monster's onscreen appearances, with lots of overly talky scenes set in bars, hotels and living rooms occasionally punctuated by some sabre tooth tiger attacks.  There are also far too many characters, often poorly delineated from each other, wandering around the mountains, just waiting to be attacked.  Unsurprisingly, the narrative doesn't flow smoothly, with too many cul-de-sacs and distractions from the main story.  It really doesn't help that the makers seem to have a very cavalier attitude toward prehistoric life: the sabre tooth tigers (created by the scientist experimenting on domestic cats with his serum) are just that, regular tigers with fangs stuck on them.  As everyone surely knows, sabre tooth cats weren't, in reality, related to modern cats at all, being a separate and parallel evolutionary line from a common ancestor, meaning also that it is unlikely that a domestic cat could regress to a creature that wasn't its ancestor, (let alone bulk up to many times its natural size in minutes, then regress back).  The film also seems shaky as to exactly what a Neanderthal man was, with the creature in the film depicted - via a very poor mask incapable of expression and with unblinking eyes - as some kind of generic movie apeman.  Most bizarrely, he runs around fully dressed in the scientist's clothes, (doubtless because the budget wouldn't run to a full apeman costume).  To be fair, the film is ahead of its time in that the scientist is obsessed with proving that Neanderthals were actually intelligent human ancestors, in opposition to the then widely held belief that they were a savage evolutionary dead end.  (Unfortunately, of course, his experiments seem to prove him wrong).  His attempts to convince his colleagues of his theories becomes mildly hilarious, however, when he includes Piltdown Man as an actual human ancestor.  (The film was unfortunate in that it was made literally months before Piltdown Man was conclusively shown to be a hoax).

Another aspect in which the film seems to be ahead of its time is in the quite clear implication that one surviving female victim of the apeman has been raped, or at least sexually assaulted, by him.  Usually, in films of this era, the closest to such an implication would be the dishevelled state of a female victim's clothes, but here, the girl's dialogue, although it trails off without the word 'rape' being uttered, clearly indicates what has happened to her.  The girl was played by Beverley Garland, in an early role, who would go on to appear in larger roles in many subsequent B-movies.  The film's other main actors were both established B-movie players, with Robert Shayne as the Jekyll/Apeman scientist and Richard Crane as the hero.  In fact, the film has a pretty solid B-movie heritage, co-produced and co-written by Jack Pollexfen, who had also been behind the likes of Daughter of Dr Jekyll, Son of Dr Jekyll, Son of Sinbad, Man From Planet X and The Indestructible Man.  Overall, though, it is vastly inferior to the similar Monster on Campus, which, despite being one of Jack Arnold's lesser efforts for Universal, is far better directed, scripted and produced.  Its story is also far more smoothly and logically developed, (not to mention featuring a much better apeman make up), with the serum for the transformations, for instance, being derived from the body fluids of a celeocanth, rather than being vaguely originated, as in The Neanderthal Man.  While it has quite a few unintentional laughs, even at only seventy eight minutes long, the film begins to drag long before the end.