Poverty Row cheapie starring George Zucco as a mad scientist who doesn't take kindly to being mocked by his peers. These were more innocent times so instead of shooting into a crowd with an assault rifle, he turns his simple-minded gardener into a wolf-man to get even with those who scoffed at him.Glenn Strange's turn as the title monster is sure to elicit some laughs from most of the viewers today (and possibly even back then). Just think of those old "which way did he go, George" cartoons and you pretty much have Strange's performance here. Zucco is, of course, lots of fun as the villain. He isn't as well-remembered as Karloff or Lugosi or Price but he's a horror legend in his own right. It's an enjoyable movie of its type. Yes, it's cheap-looking and laughable at times, but it's also a lot of fun if you take it as it was intended.

Spurned mad scientist George Zucco stands at the head of a long table lined with empty chairs. What do his enemies think of him now? His experiment is a success! He gloats over the empty seats—his imagination filling them with former colleagues cringing before his eloquent, triumphant and vengeful lecture.Yes, Zucco is not only a mad scientist, but an angry one, too. The frightening product of his unconventional research will soon be his means of wreaking his revenge on the former colleagues who disgraced him and his "crazy" ideas.Hired hand Glenn Strange is the unfortunate focus of Zucco's research and experiments. A mysterious transfusion involving a captive wolf transforms Strange from a large but weak-minded handyman into a—well, a wolfman.Also part of the plot is Zucco's daughter (Anne Nagel), who doesn't like this spooky house and wants to go back to the city so she can see her boyfriend (Johnny Downs), a newspaper writer who takes a professional interest in the strange goings on down in the swamp country where Zucco has set up shop.Zucco is happily ruthless as the revenge-driven genius; he lets loose one of the all-time great mad scientist laughs around the one hour mark. Strange has a somewhat unique role: as the big dumb handyman who doesn't understand the strange "dreams" he is having, he's part Lenny Small from Of Mice and Men, part Lawrence Talbot from The Wolf Man.The story and script are never especially surprising, but the cast give it their best shot. At 77 minutes, the picture is actually a bit longer and more ambitious than many PRC productions; it does include a fair amount of philosophizing about the true aims and responsibilities of Science (nothing too inspiring, however). A big finish is actually pretty exciting…even if any viewer thinking ahead would probably have seen it coming.All in all, it is a pretty standard 1940s B horror movie—and thus good fun for those of us who enjoy such nonsense.

George Zucco was a fine actor, often playing gimlet-eyed villains with a lascivious intensity. However even he couldn't save this dull and flat-footed B flick.Zucco plays the usual mad scientist, Dr. Lorenzo Cameron, who believes that wolf's blood, injected into humans, can create an invincible army of wolf men who can win the World War II (go figure!) Experimenting on Pedro the handyman(Glenn Strange) Zucco creates a werewolf that looks rather like the ones Dave Allen used to play in his comedy sketches! Pedro is obviously based on Lennie from Of Mice And Men, and you almost keep expecting him to say "Duh, okay, George!" There's one startling moment when the werewolf kills a child by reaching in through the window and grabbing it, but for the most part this is a routine and pedestrian - very pedestrian - 77 minute tread through all the old clichés that are done far better in other movies.We also get the revenge motif from the Devil Bat worked in, in itself a borrowing from Son Of Frankenstein!Zucco is wasted, and you only have to see him in films such as Adventures Of Sherlock Holmes, The Mummy's Hand and Dr. Renault's Secret to see how wasted. A few atmospheric swamp scenes are all it has to offer, really. And the scene where Zucco demonstrates his wolf-man technique to those who doubted him (again shades of Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde) is unintentionally hilarious.Not one of the better 40s B movies.

Thankfully you don't need a lot of "book learnin" to understand where this thing's going... Obviously a poverty row cash-in on Universal's big hit THE WOLF MAN (which was made just one year earlier), this finds the always-watchable George Zucco in another of his patented "mad doctor" roles as brilliant, vengeance-minded scientist Lorenzo Cameron. Cameron, who has set up shop deep in the swamp lands of what I'm presuming is the Louisiana bayou, is plotting revenge against four of his former peers who both humiliated him and forced him to resign from his previous job. You see, they scoffed at his claims of being able to mix man with beast to create an unstoppable army of wolfman creatures that would come in handy during war-time. Thankfully Cameron has found the ideal test subject for his wolf blood injections - a hulking, child-like half-wit named Petro (Glenn Strange). Petro is pretty clueless as to what's going on, doesn't ask too many question and lets the doc strap him down to a table and shoot him up with whatever happens to be in his syringe. This results in a time-lapse change of man turning into a werewolf. Cameron lets him out of the mansion using a secret passageway, so you basically get a big guy (Strange was 6'5") dressed in overalls with a bushy beard, hairy paws and a set of over-sized plastic teeth, running around in the woods the majority of the time. After an eyewitness sees the beast and a little girl is killed, the locals grab their rifles and organize a posse to hunt it down. Dr. Cameron, who can control the beast with a whip and also has a handy antidote to reverse the effect, also drags Petro along to the big city to try to track down the professors who had made a mockery of his original theories and destroyed his reputation in the process. Also hanging around the house is Cameron's daughter Lenora (Anne Nagel), as well as Lenora's nosy reporter boyfriend Tom (Johnny Downs), whose first inclination is that they're dealing with an upright-walking prehistoric creature (!)Though a typically chintzy PRC flick in many ways, with unimpressive sets, cinematography and make-ups, as well as a fairly bland supporting cast, it remains watchable thanks to the histrionics of star George Zucco. I have no clue why Downs received top billing; he shows up half-an-hour in and really doesn't have a whole lot to do, nor is he all that impressive doing it. This is Zucco's show all the way and he's great ranting and raving, talking to himself while fantasizing that he's talking to his peers ("I'm not interested in your imbecilic mouthings!") and temporarily sliding in and out of sanity. Strange seems to have patterned his performance as the hilariously naive and slow-talking semi-retarded country bumpkin around the entire oeuvre of Lon Chaney Jr., from his turn as Lenny in OF MICE AND MEN, to his performance as the aforementioned WOLF MAN. In any case, Strange and Zucco do a fairly good job playing off one another. My favorite part is when Zucco calls him his "guinea pig" in front of a colleague while Petro just sits there grinning and staring at a doorknob. Some of the foggy swamp scenes are pretty atmospheric, too.