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Hal Moffat is a college student that is disfigured in a laboratory accident.
Years after the fact, he reappears to get revenge on those responsible. They
say that star Rondo Hatton was "the featured brute of more than a dozen
Hollywood films." The director (Jean Yarbrough) is called a "veteran "B" movie
director" and is credited with making She-Wolf of London. It is noted that this was Rondo's last role before he "passed away several
months before the film's release." They close with this: "Turn down the lights
and follow a maniac with blood on his hands and murder on his mind. But don't
forget to lock your doors!" 1946, 59 minutes, DVD
Back in the mid forties, the only thing required to find fame in the movies was
nothing beyond 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 the
Great War (not to be confused with the Greater War that followed about 20 years
down the road). The bad guys dumped mustard gas on him and he got sick. After
these events, sources differ as to what happened. I've read things 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 Manwas 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, thought they probably
should have) washing their hands of the whole sordid affair. Unfortunately, a
million years later, we are still subjected to the shameless exploiting of
Rondo through the miracle of home video (and now DVD!).  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. Anytime 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. We see him checking
out the old hangout where he and his pals used to unwind after winning the big
game or something. He hides behind some bushes and waits for one of the
patrons to leave and ends up killing her. Her name is Joan Bemish and we would
later learn that she used to run around in the same social circle as Hal.
Following this little bit of mayhem, the Creeper is chased by the fuzz and
cornered near this apartment building. In spite of his gross disfigurements,
he makes like my little cousin who my family wants to make it perfectly clear
is "presumed innocent of all charges" and 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. They never tell her they're cops so she
just figures that the Creeper is a regular joe who just has a whole bunch of
people after him to let him know that he dropped his wallet or something near
some skank who was laying in the weeds with her spine sticking out of her butt.
After they leave (how come they didn't notice she was blind?) 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. When you get to hear Rondo say his
lines, it's one of those deals where you wince and wonder how he ever managed
to remember his lines in the first place. If there was a less natural actor, I
haven't seen him or her (but then, I must confess I've never seen Mariah
Carey's Glitter, so who knows?) The way he emotes sounds like Andre the Giant on a bad day.  We then switch to the next day where we see a wide-eyed kid that works in a
grocery store. He's all 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." There are some dreadful scenes at the police station where the cops are
getting pressured by the mayor to get this Creeper guy. They even attempt some
minor comic relief with the detective and the lieutenant in charge playing
along with the whiney mayor by having the lieutenant
yelling at the detective (but just for show). Really bad scenes - you've got
Rondo, why
focus on these doofuses? The cops find out where the Creeper was hiding and
discover the kid's body. They also get ahold of 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 bump tumors with Virginia.
Joan 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 (probably a Cornhusker). 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. He goes over there and using his
cat-like reflexes, is able to sneak past the police guard that is set up around
the house (they've anticipated the Creeper would try and strike there, but not
that he'd be so cunning as to slip in an unlocked basement window!). He steals
some jewels, kills Cliff and gets away. He gives the jewels to Helen, telling
her to sell them for money to get the operation. She tries to do this and is
busted by the cops. Since she's blind and a woman, they immediately believe
that she thought all this stuff with Hal was on the level. A sting is set up
at Helen's place and she lures the Creeper there with her piano playing. The
cops catch him, it turns out she'll get her operation anyway, and one of the
cops tries to hook up with her ending the movie. 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 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. Because his origin is so lame (temper tantrum
throwing football/chemistry student), his revenge plot is of little interest.
There's no reason for him to be killing anyone except Cliff (and maybe
Virginia) and without any reason for the rest of the rampage, those incidents
become filler, rather than developing suspense, plot, or character. 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 (disparaged by women,
feared by men, loved by dames that can't see how ugly he is, and he even had a
heart of gold and tried to help out the blind girl). I was only surprised that
he didn't die trying to save the blind girl from a burning orphanage or
something. 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.
Reviews © 2004
MonsterHunter
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