Lon Chaney, Jr. plays the title role in Man Made Monster, a man who through
electricity is turned into a killer. The doer of this evil deed is Lionel Atwill playing
the part of the mad scientist with the usual relish he brings to these kind of roles.
It all starts out when Chaney is the sole survivor of a bus crash which hit a power line. All the other passengers are electrocuted when the downed power lines hit the bus. But Chaney emerges with a few cuts and bruises.
Turns out he has a carnival act of sorts in which controlled amounts of electricity pass through his body and it's given him a certain tolerance level. Chaney agress to live with Dr. Samuel Hinds and his niece Anne Nagel to be a human guinea pig for some relatively benign experiments. But Hinds's associate Atwill has other ideas and his experiments turn Chaney into a walking dynamo who can electrocute at a touch and needs those jolts of electricity from Atwill to stay alive.
As I said before Atwill is the real star of this film. He must have chewed two living room sets of furniture in Man Made Monster, but it all works beautifully for his performance. Frank Albertson is also around as a wisecracking reporter and love interest for Nagel.
Chaney seems always cast as the good, but doomed soul, a part played well in Of Mice And Men and the original Wolfman movie. In Man Made Monster he's not simple minded like Lennie Small, but he's a happy go lucky sort when we first meet him. He does change and horribly.
In the end its not humans who do him in, but rather the properties of electricity itself. Watch this good horror flick from Universal to see what I mean.
It all starts out when Chaney is the sole survivor of a bus crash which hit a power line. All the other passengers are electrocuted when the downed power lines hit the bus. But Chaney emerges with a few cuts and bruises.
Turns out he has a carnival act of sorts in which controlled amounts of electricity pass through his body and it's given him a certain tolerance level. Chaney agress to live with Dr. Samuel Hinds and his niece Anne Nagel to be a human guinea pig for some relatively benign experiments. But Hinds's associate Atwill has other ideas and his experiments turn Chaney into a walking dynamo who can electrocute at a touch and needs those jolts of electricity from Atwill to stay alive.
As I said before Atwill is the real star of this film. He must have chewed two living room sets of furniture in Man Made Monster, but it all works beautifully for his performance. Frank Albertson is also around as a wisecracking reporter and love interest for Nagel.
Chaney seems always cast as the good, but doomed soul, a part played well in Of Mice And Men and the original Wolfman movie. In Man Made Monster he's not simple minded like Lennie Small, but he's a happy go lucky sort when we first meet him. He does change and horribly.
In the end its not humans who do him in, but rather the properties of electricity itself. Watch this good horror flick from Universal to see what I mean.