Monster On The Campus

Coelacampus

Monster On The Campus
USA 1958
Directed by Jack Arnold
Universal/Eureka Masters Of Cinema 
Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Primitive spoilers lurching your way.

So the third and final film presented in the Eureka Masters Of Cinema Blu Ray set Three Monster Tales Of Sci-Fi Terror, in as amazing a transfer as you could possibly want, is the great Jack Arnold’s last sci-fi/horror movie, Monster On The Campus... an attempt to cash in on the phenomenal success of AIP’s I Was A Teenage Werewolf. In this one though, it’s the authority figure Professor Donald Blake, played by the always likeable Arthur Franz, who is the victim of inadvertent transformations while the teenage contingent of the movie, as represented by the likes of future teen star Troy Donahue as Jimmy, no less, are on the sidelines as observers to the monster shenanigans in this one. 

So the film starts off with the delivery of a coelacanth being brought in a van to the Dunsfield University, specifically to the lab/classroom combination used by Professor Blake (yeah, I know, I’ll get to that character name in a little while, true believers). Blake is dating Madeline, played by Joanna Moore, the daughter of the principal of the university. However, the bloody water washed off by this creature, which we find out later has been treated with gamma radiation to help keep it fresh, drips down form the van and Jimmy’s German Shepherd, Samson, has a drink. It’s only a matter of minutes before the dog goes berserk and attacks people, its canine teeth grown to twice their size. After a while the dog returns to its normal, docile self but, before then, lots of other things have happened.

Professor Blake must be the unluckiest scientist in the world. Not only does he accidentally snag his hand on the tooth of the coelacanth when he’s moving it, he also accidentally dunks his wound in the same bloody water. It’s not long before the professor transforms into a ‘badly masked up’ ape man (courtesy of Bud Westmore, demonstrating here that he obviously didn’t have much of a hand in the great Millicent Patrick’s Creature From The Black Lagoon design... read my review of the book The Lady From The Black Lagoon for further information on that right here) and he kills a girl before waking up, transformed back into a man with no memory of the incident, just as concerned as the police with catching the vile killer who did such a thing. It turns out later that, you are only affected once by the blood but, like I said, unluckiest scientist in the world because, after shooing away a dragon fly which had been feeding off the coelacanth, it returns in a two foot long giant form and the professor has to kill it with a dagger before it eats itself out of the net he’s tried to capture it with. However, when he’s moving its body, infected blood from it drips into the bulb of his pipe and, it’s not long before he’s inhaling coelacanth blood fumes and turns into the ape man again... killing his police bodyguard (assigned to him should ‘the killer’ return). 

And so on and so it goes. This is not remembered as much as some of the other famous ‘atomic era’ Universal monster movies of the 1950s and, it was their penultimate grab at this kind of movie for the decade, but it’s entertaining enough even though some of it, such as the awful mask used to create the ape creature, signifying man’s transformation back to a primitive state, is quite laughable. But the giant dragonfly, even though it’s obviously a mechanical creature with the only moving parts being the flapping wings, is actually pretty good, I thought and I would love to have seen more done with a movie just about these things. 

As usual for the time, the acting is all good stuff and everyone is taking it all very seriously, including the great Whit Bissell, playing a doctor in this one (of the many creature movies in which you can see him in). There are also some nice in-jokes in this one too, all taken in deadly earnest of course, such as when somebody rings a Dr Moreau in Madagascar to get some information about how the coelacanth was packaged and shipped. This is, of course, a reference to the title character from H. G. Wells ‘man to creature’ novel, The Island Of Dr, Moreau. Stuff like this will always keep me watching... as will the music with it’s bold stingers and sinister noodling. 

What’s not a joke and what hit me straight away on this viewing (I obviously didn’t remember this film from the last time I watched it over a decade ago but, it all came back to me as I was looking at it on this wonderful new presentation), was the main protagonist/antagonist’s lead character, Dr. Donald Blake. Now I’ve said on a fair few of these 1950s Universal B movie monster reviews that certain elements seem to have inspired the creators of the early 1960s Marvel comics, such as Stan Lee, Steve Ditko and Jack ‘King’ Kirby and... this one is no exception...

Donald Blake would, of course, in a few years, be the alter ego of The Mighty Thor, back in the days when the frail human would bang his cane into the ground and (without even saying the magic word Shazam, which was obviously another inspiration from Fawcett’s original Captain Marvel comics) suddenly transform by a lightning bolt into Thor (although Blake does get a brief mention in the 2011 Thor movie... but as an entirely different character). Also, one of the ‘plaster of Paris’ masks of man’s faces throughout the process of evolution, displayed in Blake’s classroom, looks amazingly similar to the original Jack Kirby artwork of The Incredible Hulk. I’m not sure if that is a coincidence or not but, given the evidence of other obvious ‘cinematic influences’, there’s a chance that we might be looking at the prototype of Hulk right there, especially if a shot from the film including that prop was ever used in any publicity photos of the time. 

And, yeah, I don’t have much more to say about Monster On The Canpus. It’s actually, despite the bad mask worn by the title campus dweller, quite an entertaining and quirky picture. Definitely one which is worth screening alongside the other similar movies of this period and, frankly, I can’t imagine it looking any better than it does here. As I said, both the print and the transfer are absolutely excellent... like it was shot just last week. Definitely a must purchase for fans of the genre of this period, for sure.