I really enjoyed this movie,, not quite sure why but I just did. A scientist is badly disgraced by his employers because his theories and experiments are not conventional, so abruptly he is dismissed from the company,, he decides to carry on his work in a dilapidated mansion that is out of sight, he uses his gardener as a guinea pig for all of his experiments, the experiment sort of a blood transfusion, to turn the gardener into a werewolf.. the scientist's daughter becomes suspicious of her father,, and her boyfriend happens to be a reporter, so she tells him what she thinks her father is up to ,, and the reporter starts to snoop around and gather up some information,, meanwhile our mad scientist is making plans for a serum to use against his former employers to get revenge on them for dismissing him from the company,, very decent "b" movie.

It's certainly ambitious. That's perhaps the best thing that can be said for this rather ... strange (as in Glenn Strange, who played the monster) movie. Apparently trying to cash in on the recent success of Lon Chaney's "The Wolf Man," this blends elements of that movie along with ideas from "Frankenstein" and "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" among others and turns out an inept but still somewhat amusing horror picture.Strange played Petro, the simple-minded servant of Dr. Cameron (George Zucco). Cameron has stumbled upon a way of turning humans into ravenous, murderous beasts by injecting them with the blood of animals - in the belief that they could be used as an invincible army (remember that this was made during World War II.) In the midst of explaining what he was doing he claimed to have discovered the "secret of life." (How this was the secret of life was unclear to me.) For his efforts, Cameron is drummed out of the academic community, and continues his experiments on Petro. There's little surprise here. Cameron is able to transform Petro, but he can't control him, and eventually Petro starts to transform without the injections, leading up to a "Frankenstein-ish" style of ending inside a burning house.Yes. It's ... ambitious. Not good - not by a long shot. Not original - not by a long shot. But ambitious as it tries to weave the various threads from different stories together. Not much effort was put into the makeup for Strange. His "werewolf" looked like a guy with bushy hair and a beard, and his fangs looked rubbery to me - they seemed to bend and twist at times. The setting of the old house surrounded by mysterious swampland constantly shrouded in fog and mist was moderately effective in creating a "spooky" environment. I liked the thought here, but it just wasn't carried out particularly well.

A mad scientist(George Zucco)uses his sweet-natured, but dumb gardener for odd werewolf experiments, with a diabolical plan to create a race of wolfmen. Ostracized by his peers in the scientific community, Dr Lorenzo Cameron(Zucco) vows to succeed and prove all of them wrong. Petro(Glenn Strange who would later star as Frankenstein's monster in the Universal House of.. series) is so well mannered and child-like(obviously an "Of Mice and Men" Lenny imitation), Dr Cameron takes advantage of him. Certain respected scientists criticized the mere notion of Cameron's experiments(the transfusion mixing the blood of man and beast)calling his work a "perversion of science". Petro really confides in Cameron, and does, ever so softly, question why the doctor is experimenting on him. Cameron becomes so mad, because of the negative response towards his work(he takes great pride in his mad science), he uses Petro, when in werewolf form, to kill those who considered him a kook of the scientific community. "I've discovered evolution..I've discovered the source of life," he announces to a future victim who scoffs at his proclamation.The Mad Monster is basically a slow-moving poverty row cheapie with some okay transformation sequences of Strange from man to wolf and vice versa. Could be of great interest to werewolf fans and has an early Strange performance as a mild mannered simpleton of tall stature. Harmless as man, but dangerous as a werewolf. I thought the facial make-up favored, at times, Planet of the Apes or one of the monsters from "Island of Lost Souls", other times, Strange looks like a drunken bum with a bedraggled beard and hair cut.Zucco is fiendish from start to finish, never in a normal state of mind, always plotting and planning, cooking up schemes to get revenge against those who caused him embarrassment and insulted his pride. Johnny Downs, for some reason, gets top billing as a newspaper reporter who is in love with Anne Nagel's Lenora(Cameron's daughter), drawing the ire of her pops because of his snooping ways. Gordon De Main is Professor Fitzgerald, Reginald Barlow as Professor Warwick, two of the respected scientists who shun Cameron for his evil research, paying a hefty price for challenging his integrity and moral standing. Director Sam Newfeld sure shoots a hell of a lot of footage within the foggy swampland set, but most of it consists of Strange, in werewolf make-up and overalls, walking in circles. I think Strange does a good Lenny bit and earns our sympathy since he is a victim whose mental vulnerability makes him a great subject for Cameron to experiment with, at his heart's desire..when Petro mentions how he would like to have brains like Cameron, the scientist says he doesn't require anything from him except brute strength! It seems like Zucco had starred in a million of these kinds of movies.

I'm working my way through the Horror Classics 50 Movie Pack Collection and THE MAD MONSTER is one of the movies in the set.I am sure that George Zucco was a good actor; but, this was only the second film in which I saw him, the first being DEAD MEN WALK, in which he played two parts. However, even good acting couldn't save THE MAD MONSTER.Zucco plays a mad scientist, Dr. Cameron (who was banned from academia because of his unethical and inhumane experiments). He believes that he can control evolution by bringing out the characteristics of one animal into another.In this case, like so many others of its ilk, it is a transfusion of (I assume) wolf's blood into humans. His goal is to create an invincible army, which he can control through the antidote. The subject of his experiments is his hired hand, a retarded gardener, whose dialogue slows down this snail-paced classic to almost a full-stop. Beyond his experiments, Dr. Cameron also plots revenge on those who discredited him, using his transformed gardener. However, he loses control of his subject, who begins to transform without the transfusion -- yikes! The werewolf transformations are classic Hollywood stop-action / makeup effects. No doubt these were groundbreaking techniques of the time; but, in today's digital age it's hard to imagine audiences being scared by this.