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 A "crazed scientist" meets up with a "mentally warped Robert Griffin" and the
result is invisibility. Griffin comes back to England after being in Africa
for five years. His partners left him to die there and now he learns that they
aren't going to share in the wealth they got on their mutual expedition.
"Striking terror through his invisibility, he robs them of their property - and
their daughter." 1944, 78 minutes, VHS
This is the fifth and final movie in the Invisible series by Universal. All
that remained to be done with the Invisible Man after this picture was to team
him up with Abbott and Costello in one of their horror comedies (well, actually
he would be in two of them - you may recall the brief cameo of his at the end
of Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein). I've read where some people think that this final effort in the "serious"
Invisible Man movies is a welcome step up from the previous two entries (Invisible Agent and The Invisible Woman), but as I took in the ridiculous and
fairly incomprehensible plot, I was aching to see John Barrymore look around
the set in an effort to find the lines he had so studiously written all about
so that he could complete a scene. I was hoping to see butlers fall down for
no reason. I was pining away for Nazis to have ink dumped in their faces. I
was even wishing to hear the melodramatic voice of one Vincent Price, spewing
forth maudlin dialogue to a scarecrow. But all I got was John Carradine in one
of the most tired and least believable gimmicks these horror flicks can throw at
you, but more on that later. Things start off with Jon Hall again taking a
stab at monster immortality in the title role (he played the role more than
anyone else). He is getting off of ship and heading to see some of his former
pals
who live in the snooty section of London. A newspaper headline tells us that
he's an escaped lunatic who has killed three people when he busted out. We
also learn
that he is going to see his former friends because he says they conked him on
the head and left him to die in the jungles of Africa, while they went merrily
on their way to discover a big diamond mine or something.  He shows up at these people's house and blusters about, waving some ratty piece
of paper in their face that looks like it had been kept in his wallet about as
long as the condom I kept, I mean my friend kept, in his during high school.
The paper is supposedly some kind of contract that says something like, "We
will give the Invisible Man one-half of the diamond mine if he survives us
whacking him on his baby skull and leaving him in the bug-infested jungles of
Africa." His friends have a different take on what went down, saying that it
wasn't their fault and that they had no choice but to leave him for dead and by
the way, we don't have any money anymore. How they're stilling living in a
mansion that resembles Mandalay or at least the set of the mansion in The Invisible Woman is anybody's guess. While Griffin is rambling on about how they done him
wrong, they drug his drink and then have their butler toss his crazy (but still
visible) arse out into the weeds. Griffin then somehow manages to fall into a
river (who put that there?) and is rescued by a lovable tramp named Herbert
Higgins. I'm assuming that HH is supposed to be there for comic relief and at
this point I was searching for any kind of relief since it was already obvious
that this was going to be perhaps the worst Universal horror movie of allllll
time! Now, I'm not going to sit here and tell you that some of those Mummy
sequels or that any Bela Lugosi (except maybeThe Wolf Man or Island Of Lost Souls - hey he wasn't that bad after, all, huh?) movie like The Raven or Dracula was
any kind of pleasure cruise, but this movie just lathered the idiocy on
thick. The lovable tramp soon begins to get on your nerves with his overdone
accent and goofy schemes (he gets a lawyer to come to the house where Griffin's
buddies live and threatens to sue them up and down England if they don't come
across with a nice settlement for Robert). That little plot turns out the way
you would expect a legal case thought up by a bum living in shack on a river
that is all too happy to fish out lowlifes that fall in, to turn out. So
Griffin and the tramp part ways and Griffin is out in the dark and stormy
night when he happens upon an out of the way house inhabited by John Carradine
playing a mad scientist named Dr. Peter Drury. This was something like one of
twelve movies that he was in that year (1944), including one of the worst Mummy movies in that series (The Mummy's Ghost). Now, please understand, I've never found him to be a bad actor or anything,
he is usually the bright spot in dreck like this, but if you're going to be
making twelve movies a year, a few of them are going to be the worst of all
time. That's just the law of averages.  Carradine's character is one we've all seen before, from movies like The Raven and Baron Blood. He's a whacko doctor that gladly takes in any stranger in the middle of a
stormy night and performs some kind of whacko surgery/experiment on them, even
though they are obviously dangerous fugitives. Haven't these saps heard of a
peephole? Don't answer the door when you see that it's somebody like Robert
Griffin huffing and puffing out there. But of course, Dr. Peter Drury answers
the door and promptly begins boring Griffin and viewer alike with his
completely ridiculous theory about how to make things invisible. He throws
phrases like "optical density" around and Robert is kind of nodding his head
and listening to the invisible parrot (really!) and watching the Doc walk his
invisible dog and immediately says, "sign my dumb ass up pronto, Chief!" I
might also add that we get some more depth on the doctor than we do anyone
else in the movie when he starts jabbering on about being mentioned in the same
breath with famous scientists whose names I don't recall, but I was thinking
that we might give credit to Drury for inventing Olestra because this movie was
giving me the runs about this time. Then we get some character development on
his invisible dog who's name escapes me, so we'll call him Spike, because when
the trailer park will allow me to get a dog that's what I'm going call him or
her. Spike's tale is one of torment and bullying. All the rich, snobbish dogs
from the mansions up the road picked on him and peed on him and generally
wouldn't let him join in their reindeer games until one day when Dr. Drury gave
him a dose of his invisibility formula. That's when Spike struck back! I
don't want talk out of school, but let's just say a certain invisible dog got
even on some certain bullying rich dogs. Man, I'm glad Spike didn't go
to my high school! Though some of you may be satisfied with a tale of a mad scientist and his
vengeance-starved invisible mutt, this is merely a subplot (though the dog
actually figures prominently in the abysmal finale) and our focus must,
unfortunately return to Robert Griffin (who apparently is no relation to all
the Griffins in the previous movies, even Invisible Agent where Jon Hall played an Invisible Griffin there as he does here!). Robert
Griffin sees a way to even up the score with his no-good, backstabbing pals so
he tells the doctor to hook him up with some invisible juice and away we go!
He beats down the doctor on the way out, since the doctor wanted to show off
the Invisible Man to his uppity scientist colleagues. Griffin is now invisible
and heads back to the tramp's house. Why he needs HH's help again, I'll not
even attempt to puzzle out, but it leads to a very lengthy dart throwing scene
and an equally lengthy scene where the Invisible Man is demanding that Harold
Higgins make him some damn pancakes! Eventually, the Invisible Man realizes
that times a wasting, though the 78 minute running time doesn't really fly by
so much as taunt you as the minutes ever-so-slowly tick away until you are free
to resume a productive existence. So Griffin goes back to the mansion he was
tossed out of. He is going to get his money and steal their daughter. What?
Yep. He saw this really big painting of her in the mansion and decided that he
was madly in love with her and must have her, even if it means stealing her
away from her nosy reporter boyfriend to whom she is engaged. Nosy reporter?
Oh no! This is the part of the movie that you get your invisible pranks,
floating knives, doors slamming shut, chair cushions depressing for no apparent
reason, me getting depressed for obvious reasons, etc. Somehow, Griffin's old
pal
convinces him that if Griffin would just make himself visible again, he could
have the money, the girl, whatever. You and I may have thought long and hard
about that and whether this wasn't just a ploy to get IM out of his hair, but
Griffin thinks it's the deal of the century and hauls ass back to Dr. Drury's
house to see if he can't become visible again.  Drury tells Griffin that the only way to become visible again is to get a
transfusion of blood from someone. This is sort of like how they did it in the
second movie, The Invisible Man Returns . In this case, however, there's a catch. It takes all the blood from a
single person to get the job done, thus you will need to kill someone to get
visible again. Griffin hears this and says, no prob, doc, where do you sign up? The upshot is the doctor gets his blood sucked out, the house goes
up in flames and Griffin runs off back to that mansion yet again. Spike who is
now visible also escapes. Back at the house Robert ends up embroiled in a
melee in the wine cellar with the nosy reporter (Griffin has returned to being
invisible, the effect of the blood transfusion only temporary) and it is Spike
who comes in to save the day by ripping the throat out of the Invisible Man.
Dog bites man? That isn't news, Dog chomping Invisible Man? Now that's news!
A convoluted and generally stupid affair, the movie doesn't really make it
clear what was going on with Griffin and his pals. Did they really cheat him
out of all that stuff and try to kill him? If so, they sure weren't punished
for it in the movie. If not, why drug him and have him tossed out of the
house? Just report him to the fuzz as the escaped lunatic killer he is.
There were no sympathetic characters (except maybe Spike) to get involved with
and root for. The Invisible Man was a lunatic with the brain of a gnat. We
didn't see enough of anyone else to really care and what we did see sure didn't
make you worry for their safety. Heck, I don't now if his pals were punks or
not, but I suspect they probably were. You could tell, because his wife had
this evil dark hair and sneer that mean old broads wear like it's Chanel No. 5
or something. The story itself was a maze of coincidence and improbable
decision making by the star. Would he really go and try to turn visible again
just because his buddy said once he did that everything would be copacetic?
What was the Invisible Man's plan anyway and what was this business with him
stealing a woman who didn't even know him? What is this guy, crazy or
something? This movie was a big frustrating mess that finished off a series of
movies that started out with so many interesting ideas then slipped into a
downward spiral of worsening sequels until this one. The Invisible Man's Revenge was more like Montezuma's Revenge if you ask me.
Reviews © 2004
MonsterHunter
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