This was a B film made by Universal but sold to poverty row outfit PRC for distribution, and there are no big names here and no big budget, but it is very poignant for several reasons, which I will get into later.This is basically a 20th century Frankenstein story. Someone is going around murdering people with his bare hands - "The Creeper" as he is called by the newspapers and the police. The audience sees the murderer from the beginning, and none of the murders seem premeditated. It is initially a deformed man with monstrous strength apparently visiting people he knew before, and when they become afraid or try to scream or run, he kills them in anger. The police almost catch "The Creeper" after the second murder, but he climbs up a fire escape and into the apartment window of a girl playing a piano. The girl seems unafraid of him and when she asks him if he is in trouble followed by knocking on her door, she hides the man and tells the police that she has seen nor heard anything strange. However, the police never identified themselves, and later you can hear running, yelling, and shooting nearby. If The Creeper is in her apartment who exactly are the police shooting at? But I digress. The Creeper learns the girl is blind, cannot see his ugliness and is therefore friendly, plus she didn't know it was the police at the door, because they never said who they were. Like the Frankenstein monster, in a blind person The Creeper has found a friend.Meanwhile the police have connected the first two victims and go to visit two people who were connected to them 15 years before in college and who are now married and doing well for themselves. They tell a tale of a popular athlete, Hal Moffat, who was tutored in chemistry by the husband, but when Hal got a little too friendly with his girl - now his wife - the tutor gave the jock the wrong answers to questions for an oral exam the next day. As a result, Hal failed the oral test and was given a long complicated chemistry experiment to do as remedial makeup work. Always having a bad temper, and realizing he had been deliberately tricked, Hal threw the test tubes to the ground, but the liquid splashed on his face. In the hospital, the doctor told his friends that Hal's features would be deformed, and that even his glands, which effect how features are formed and how bones grow, would be effected.So we have a blind girl who needs money for an operation to restore her sight, a bitter homicidal man who knows that the couple who betrayed him years ago are doing well financially, and who also tends to take violent revenge on anybody who crosses him, and the police who now know who the murderer is, they just have no idea how and where he is living and what he looks like. How will all of this work out? Watch and find out. The poignant part of this is how art so imitated the life of the man who plays "The Creeper", Rondo Hatton. Mr. Hatton was also a popular athlete during high school who was injured by poison gas during his service in WWI. That chemical exposure later caused acromegaly, a slowly progressive deforming of bones in the head, hands and feet, and internal and external soft tissues caused by disease of the pituitary gland. The deformity, which was progressive, broke up his first marriage. He did, however, marry a second time. So it may be that the low rating is from people who do not like the fact that Universal, who had a contract with Mr. Hatton, used his deformity to exploit him in such roles. However, I think his performance was pretty good. After all, there is no time for real dramatic depth in these old B films. I'd recommend it as a well done modern horror film.

Sometimes, the background story of a certain film production is more interesting than the actual film itself. This is definitely the case here. "The Brute Man" and the more or less simultaneously produced "House of Horror" both star Rondo Hatton and only got released after his death at the age of 51. Hatton suffered from Acromegaly, a terrible illness which caused for the bones in his body to deform badly. As an effect from his Acromegaly, Hatton looked like an authentic boogeyman without make-up and thus he quickly got typecast as monstrous and merciless killer, like The Creeper in the two aforementioned titles. Allegedly the good people at Universal Studios became so ashamed and remorseful about exploiting Hatton's looks and condition that they decided to sell the rights of "The Brute Man" to an inferior yet more unscrupulous production company. Is it immoral and completely insensitive to cash in on the physical handicaps of actors and deliberately use their disfigurements to frighten viewers? Yes, probably… On the other hand, it was Hatton's looks that put the food on the table during the last years of his life and made him a cult monument. If he was a "regular" actor, Hatton would have been long forgotten, but now – more than sixty years after his death – he's still a genre legend almost as famous as Boris Karloff or Lon Chaney even though he starred in a lot less films. "The Brute Man" on itself, with its running time of barely 1 hour, is actually a very passable and unmemorable film. Hatton stars as Hal Moffat, but the tabloids and news bulletins baptized him as The Creeper. Moffat is out on a vengeance spree to kill all the people that he holds responsible for the chemistry lab accident that mutilated his face. Whilst on the run for the police, he breaks into the apartment of blind but beautiful and gentle piano teacher Helen Paige. Since she can't see his face and refuses to judge him, a tender friendship develops between them. The plot – as far as there is one – makes very little sense. The film somehow wants us to believe that Hal Moffat is basically a good and gracious person who got wronged by various opponents. But, quite frankly, what happened to him at school is ludicrous and he was responsible for his accident himself. Also, even though he's being sensitive and warm to Helen he still continues his murder spree and also kills innocent people like grocery delivery boys. The police hunt for The Creeper is dull and the entire story is pretty much told in a mere ten minutes.

****SPOILERS**** Introduced as the notorious "Creeper" in the movie "House of Horrors" Rondo Hatton, due to popular demand, is back for an encore appearance in "The Brute Man". It's there where we get to see what caused this man to turn into the monster that he became due to a chemical accident while in collage. The "Creeper" was in fact handsome collage football star Hal Moffat, Fred Coby, who's friend Cliff Scott, Tom Neal, played a prank on him causing him to fail his chemistry class. That ended up leading to his tragic, in mixing the wrong chemicals after classes, accident that changed his handsome looks for the worst.Despite the "Creepers" brutal string of murders during the movie, where Scott was one of them, he's given a sympathetic side in falling for the blind piano player Hellen Paige, Jane Adams. It was Hellen who save him from being arrested by the police by hiding him in her apartment. The fact that Hellen wasn't able to see him and how hideous he looked was the only reason she wasn't afraid of the guy. This has the movie take on a "City Lights" like story with the "Creeper" going on a new murder spree just for him to get the money that Hellen needs for an eye operation to restore her sight. In the end the "Creeper" turns on Hellen herself in feeling that she betrayed by ratting him out to the police which she, in finding out that he's a serial murderer, reluctantly did.This turned out to be the last movie that Rando Hatton made released some seven months after he passed away. In fact the two films that established Hatton as the horror star that he was to become, "House of Horrors" & "The Brute Man", came out after his death making him a movie icon for generations of movies fans to come like the late rebellious and teen anti-hero actor James Dean. Who also became famous, some ten years later, after his signature film "Rebel without a Cause" as well as "Giant" were released after his death that catapulted him to movie super stardom.

One of the later and weaker Universal horror films. The story is about a disfigured man (Rondo Hatton) who blames two old friends (Tom Neal, Jan Wiley) for an accident that caused him to look the way he does. So he takes his revenge by killing a bunch of people. He also befriends a blind lady (Jane Adams). Honestly, the movie has about fifteen minutes of story that it pads out to almost an hour. Universal disowned it and sold it off to the illustrious PRC for distribution. Hatton's performance isn't very good but given his deteriorating condition it's not surprising. He died not long after this was finished. The best performance comes from the always entertaining Donald MacBride as the police captain out to solve the case. Universal horror buffs will possibly enjoy it more than most. One minor note of interest for Universal or Hatton fans: despite films usually trying to portray Hatton as a hulking giant, here we see him standing opposite Adams and Wiley and it's clear that he wasn't even six feet tall.