I generally try to find something interesting in every movie I watch, whether it’s a great movie or an awful movie. But the best I can say about Dr. Cyclops (1940) is that I really liked the radiation suit. It has a savory, in your face, Steampunk art flavor going for it. Its lack of expression is itself an implied menace. Delicious.
The rest of it? It’s formulaic. A mad doctor in a jungle somewhere sends for a couple of other scientists to help him identify something under a microscope, because his eyes have gone bad. They come, they identify, he thanks them and tries to send them away. Wounded professional pride makes them refuse his orders, and he traps them in his secret radiation chamber, fueled by radium he’s been mining. They wake up and find they’re about a foot tall (shades of Attack of The Puppet People!), but they courageously fight back against cats, dogs, caimans, and the crazed doctor himself, winning the day in the end.
The acting’s bad, the casting’s poor (it appears the mineralogist was just a tall 15 year old doing a bit of acting for bucks), the title is weak weak weak, the plot is fairly bad, even if there was a little morbid tension in trying to guess just how they were going to do in the evil scientist, and at one point they had the Latin American porter wearing what could only be described as a diaper. In fact, one time it’s a white diaper, another time it’s red. We saw a colorized version via the Svengoolie television show, and that wasn’t particularly good, except for the green flashes during the radiation scenes.
Avoid avoid avoid, this is just really dull. When it’s not grating, see said mineralogist. But the radiation suit could be on a poster.
