Back in the mid forties, the only thing required to find fame in the movies was nothing more than some horribly disfiguring disease. How else to explain Rondo Hatton’s brief and unremarkable run as a screen heavy in a couple of low budget horror flicks released during the period? While Rondo’s off-screen life may be entertaining fodder for a feature film (think Ed Wood, but focused on Tor Johnson instead of Eddie), the man’s “talents” didn’t extend much beyond the bulbous and elongated face they used to sell him as a bad guy.

Rondo was a normal guy who went and fought for his country in World War I. The bad guys dumped mustard gas on him and he got sick. After these events, sources differ as to what happened. I’ve read where people swear that his condition (acromegaly) was caused by this exposure to the gas, but others are equally staunch in saying that one had nothing to do with the other. I don’t suppose it made much difference to Rondo.

What this acromegaly caused is the production of growth hormone after a person is all grown up. Deformities result since the growth hormone is causing certain parts of Rondo to grow (soft tissue stuff on hands, feet and face) while the rest of Rondo doesn’t grow. The result is a Rondo that Universal felt obliged to exploit as a misshapen villain.

Rondo died in early 1946, before The Brute Man was ever released, and Universal promptly sold it to PRC (and no, I don’t believe that the P and R stood for Poverty and Row, though they probably should have) washing their hands of the whole sordid affair.

The City (if it had a real name, I don’t remember. This movie was almost a hour long! How many details do you expect me to recall in such an epic?) is wracked by the murderous rampage of the Creeper. This is a dude who runs around at night breaking people’s backs. At least that’s what I’m assuming – the newspaper headline telling me this was partially chopped off so that all I saw was something like “CK BREAKING FREAK KILLS AGAIN!” I guess it could have been “DUCK BREAKING” or “LICK BREAKING” but that doesn’t seem like something that Rondo would be guilty of.

As you may have already surmised, this is one of those movies where the plot is continuously recapped for no good reason by those spinning newspaper montages. We’ll see someone get killed followed up by a headline to that effect. Then we’ll see that the police are under pressure to find the Creeper. The next thing you know, we’re reading a headline along the lines of “PS STUMPED BY DISFIGURED MOVIE STAR’S RAMPAGE.” We all can guess the first word is most likely “Cops” though a part of me wishes it were “Pimps” or something.

Along with the newspapers whirling around like some type of informative Sit-N-Spin, we get the “only in the forties” montage of police cars careening through the city streets, squealing tires (laying tread or baking rubber to you folks in the crowd with mullets) and responding to each emergency with “all available Model Ts.” This gives the movie that Keystone Kops aspect you’d probably were hoping for since the rest of the goings on are so awful.

Don’t get me wrong – guys in funny hats with Snidely Whiplash mustaches are no where to be seen and these scenes are very brief, but so little of interest goes on, any action is welcome. Whenever a blind piano playing woman is giving lessons to a smart mouthed girl in a horror film, you realize that you’re going to have to take your entertainment where you can get it.

Rondo plays a guy named Hal Moffet, a hideously disfigured guy with a chip on his lumpy shoulder. His targets are some old college chums for the most part and anyone who looks at him wrong the rest of the time. His first stop is the old hangout where he and his pals used to unwind after winning the big game or laying tread to some cheerleaders.

He kills an old acquaintance and is cornered by the police near an apartment building. In spite of his gross disfigurements, he scrambles up the fire escape and through a window into one of the apartments. Luckily it’s the apartment of Helen Paige. She is played by Jane Adams and we all remember her doormat-like personality from her role as the hunchbacked nurse in House of Dracula. In this movie she expands her range with a different handicap, namely blindness, apparently leaving all the hunchbacking this time around to Rondo.

Since she’s blind, she doesn’t really mind strange men breaking into her apartment looking for a place to hide. You know how blind people are. The cops come and look around, but don’t find him. After they leave (how come they didn’t notice she was blind? Or mention they were cops?) she and Hal talk a little bit and she treats him really nice and he’s kind of touched by that and this is one of the beauty and the beast gimmicks we’ve seen a thousand times before done a thousand times better.

We then switch to the next day where we see a wide-eyed kid that works in a grocery store. He’s obsessed with this Creeper news that the radio plays in between playing the latest Guy Lombardo smash. His employer is an old geezer that doesn’t understand the younger generation and wonders why they’re obsessed with crap like the Creeper and the jitterbug. A mysterious note has been slid under the door and it’s a little grocery list so that the Creeper can make his world famous green bean casserole.

The kid eagerly takes the order down to the address which turns out to be something along the lines of a storage locker out at the docks. Inside is the Creeper, who has worked up a Rondo-sized appetite after a night of killing and maiming. He waits until the kid leaves, then sneaks out and gets the bag of food. Of course the kid is just hiding around the corner and is peeking in the window. The Creeper notices him out of the corner of his eye and sneaks out the back door of his little shack, gets behind the kid and the next thing you know, the old geezer is accepting applications for the position of “stupid, pimply-faced store clerk.”

The cops find out where the Creeper was hiding and discover the kid’s body. They also get an old newspaper clipping that talks about Hal Moffet, Joan, and two other people, Clifford Scott and Virginia Rogers. This is their big clue and they go talk to Cliff and Virginia who are now married. Cliff is played by Tom Neal, of Detour fame. He was also famous for doing six years at Folsom for killing his wife in real life.

Cliff tells the cops all about Hal Moffet via a very long and silly flashback. They were all pals in college. Cliff and Hal both wanted to burn rubber with Virginia. Joan (the first victim) was a girl that had the hots for Cliff, but she really didn’t seem to play much of a part in things. In fact, it makes little sense that Hal would want to kill her.

At this point in time, Hal was a handsome, athletic guy with a temper. Cliff was smart and helped Hal with chemistry. However, Cliff wanted to take Virginia out so he intentionally screwed up Hal’s class work and so Hal had to stay after class in the lab, mixing dangerous chemicals together. This movie is so club-footed in its story telling that they then have Cliff and Virginia walk by the lab and make faces at Hal in the window, causing him to throw a beaker full of ugly onto the ground. It explodes all over him and disfigures him. Cliff and Virginia can’t imagine why Hal is back after all these years to kill them.

The Creeper periodically goes back to visit Helen and she wants to touch his face, but you and I know how that goes. Anyway, she’s got one of those old movie-type blindness – the kind that can be miraculously fixed if she gets an expensive operation. This leads the Creeper to try and kill two birds with one stone when he goes over to the Scotts’ house to kill them. He figures he can kill them plus steal some jewels that Helen will be able to pawn for the money for her operation. Hal shows what a dumb jock he was by thinking that the stolen jewels of two people that you just murdered will be no problem for a blind chick to pawn at the local pawn shop.

Monumentally egregious use of celluloid by Universal. Whatever money they got from selling it to PRC was way more than they deserved. While we applaud Universal’s obvious exploitation of the deformed Rondo and its efforts to feature this non-actor in several movies based solely on him being a real live circus freak, there can be no justification for putting him in such a dull and dull-witted movie.

The Creeper’s origin is like something a comic book villain would have had in one of the lesser (much lesser) Marvel Comics of the early sixties. Rondo has zero charisma and when he’s not muttering his lines like they were being fed to him a word at a time, he’s looking like he has no clue where to stand or how to stand in any particular scene.

The blind chick and the ugly guy angle was so predictable that you wonder if Universal had just given up on this Creeper gimmick altogether and was just dumping in all the ugly guy cliches they could manage into a single movie. He’s disparaged by women, feared by men, loved by dames that can’t see how ugly he is, and even has a heart of gold and tries to help out the blind girl!

Rondo made some other movies, so if you want to see his mustard gas puss in action you might try one of those, or you can just gaze at his picture in this review and figure that’s all you really need to know.

© 2008 MonsterHunter