Director: Jack Pollexfen
Cast: Lon Chaney Jr., Max Showalter, Marian Carr, Ken Terell, Ross Elliott, Robert Shayne

Sadly, it seems in this day and age of ours, people are in many ways losing respect and interest into certain aspects of humanity's past. This includes with the artform known as motion pictures. For example, take a good look at streaming services such as Netflix and Amazon Prime Video, at least here in Canada. Finding movies earlier than 1990 often is extremely difficult... especially the further back in cinematic history you go. Also, the youth of today seem for the most part to turn up their noses at older movies. They consider movies that are in black and white to be boring (though they will watch music videos that are filmed in black and white.) Even if an older movie is in color, they would still consider them old-fashioned and tame stuff. To them, I say wait a minute, hold on. With a little detective work, you can find really old movies that still have some bite and power today. Just look at the silent era, for example. In 1916 there was a feature-length movie called Where Are My Children? that has a plot centered on (believe it or not) abortion - a topic that to this day is still hot stuff. The silent era dealt with a lot of other issues that also bring up some controversy today. In the D. W. Griffith movie Broken Blossoms, the plot deals with interracial romance. Later in the silent era, the Lillian Gish-starring The Wind implied rape in one sequence. Nudity in the silent era, while not common, did pop up here and there, and even extended for the first few years of the talkies era. The talkies had their own share of hot topics that covered a lot of ground, everything from characters sleeping around while not being married, to homosexuality.

But then in 1934, a jerk named Will Hays came in and spoiled everything for all of us for the next few decades. Don't get me wrong - there were certainly a lot of good movies made during the next few decades, but Hollywood filmmakers had to try a lot harder to get even somewhat controversial material past the censor. There were also a lot of times when these Hollywood filmmakers didn't even want to take the least amount of risk with the possibility of offending someone. This is more evident in movies that were aimed not at exclusive adult audiences, but movies that it would be safe to take the entire family to. Certainly in this time period that I am talking about, people from audiences to filmmakers in a number of aspects weren't as sophisticated as they are today. You could get away with stuff back then like singing cowboys that seemed to live in strange time periods that combined both modern conveniences with those found before the 20th century. But when the 1950s rolled around, there was suddenly the discovery of a vast audience for horror, sex and science fiction on the silver screen. Despite this demand, filmmakers (with a few exceptions like Herschell Gordon Lewis and Russ Meyer) for the most part seemed reluctant to push the envelope too much, possibly thinking that shutting out youths and prudes would hurt their business. So with the combination of censors hovering overhead with filmmakers and audiences being more naive than now, the result were a number of movies that seem laughable today. Seeing things like no blood when someone is shot or severely beaten... laboratories and equipment of mad scientists looking like they were slapped together with whatever was available... primitive makeup and rubber suits to depict monsters... these and other period touches can understandably provoke amusement to viewers in this day and age.

You can certainly laugh at a lot of stuff in decades-old movies that simply wouldn't fly in a movie that was made in this day and age. But I think you have to remember that several decades from now, there will be a lot of viewers that will find something to chuckle about in movies in our present day and era. Although I'm a 1980s child, I admit there are some things in that era's movies that when I rewatch today seem out of date. So I think a lot of the time when you sit down to watch an older movie, you have to prepare yourself to see things not in modern day eyes, but instead a reflection of its times. But yes, sometimes it can be a lot of fun to laugh at an old movie that's in a style unlike in movies today. When I came across Indestructible Man and decided to sit down and watch it, I decided the best way to watch it was with both a viewpoint of this being an example of 1950s entertainment and with an eye out for unintended humor. This way, I would be able to tell readers what the best frame of mind would be to watch the movie themselves. The title figure starts the movie as an ordinary man - if you could consider Charles "Butcher" Benson (Lon Chaney Jr., The Wolf Man,) ordinary. We quickly learn that he's been arrested and sentenced to death for participating in a Los Angeles armored car robbery. He's lead to the gas chamber of San Quentin, but before he's executed, he swears vengeance on three people. Those people are Charles' two accomplices in the robbery, "Squeamy" (Marvin Press) and Joe (Ken Terell, Attack Of The 50 Foot Woman), who testified against him in his trial. The other person Charles wants to kill is his lawyer Paul (Ross Elliott, Kelly's Heroes), who not only obviously did a bad job at Charles' trial, but also was the one who got Charles tangled up in the robbery in the first place. After Charles is gassed, his body is illegally taken possession by a scientist named Dr. Bradshaw (Robert Shayne, The Giant Claw). In a quest to find cures for various medical problems found in mankind, Dr. Bradshaw experiments on Charles' body, giving it electrical shocks after injecting a special serum. But this not only results in the unexpected resurrection of Charles, Charles now has super strength as well as a body that is invulnerable to any force directed on it. Charles has lost his voice, but his reaction to his resurrection and new powers is to promptly breaks out of the laboratory and head back to Los Angeles. It soon becomes clear that Charles is not only out for revenge against those that betrayed him, he wants to also reconnect with his burlesque sweetheart Eva (Marian Carr, Kiss Me Deadly), who knows where he hid the armored car robbery loot. Los Angeles cop Lieutenant Dick (Max Showalter, Bonnie's Kids) is soon on the case shortly after Charles claims his first victim during his rampage, and eventually realizes what he's dealing with. But how do you stop an indestructible man?

I won't beat around the bush here - by today's standards, Indestructible Man will strike many viewers as being primitive in just about any way that they can think of. Are there any strengths? Well, I do admit that the screenplay by Vy Russell and Sue Dwiggins (who each only wrote one other screenplay) does an impressive job by explaining the entire setup and showing or mentioning all the players (save for Dr. Bradshaw) in the first three minutes of the running time. Also, towards the end of the movie, the Paul character gets a clever idea of how to get police protection when the cops aren't interested in protecting him from Charles. Other than those two things... well, as I said, the movie is primitive. Possibly due to the movie's budget really low, the screenplay depends a lot on the narration of the character of Lieutenant Dick to fill in a lot of gaps in the narrative. For example, since Charles' execution is never shown, Dick has to tell the audience why, when Charles was last seen in his death row prison cell, his body is suddenly in the possession of Dr. Bradshaw. However, even this frequent narration doesn't answer some pointed questions, like why the character of Eva hasn't handed over or even mentioned to Lt. Dick an envelope Charles gave her prior to his capture, why the now mute Charles doesn't use pen and paper to communicate with Eva when he visits her after his resurrection, or just how the authorities conclude very quickly that the resurrected Charles is indestructible. For that matter, it's not revealed why towards the end, the authorities out of the blue come up with a possible way that Charles may be able to be stopped.

Some of the movie's stupidity can't be blamed on writers Russell and Dwiggins, but on the direction of Jack Pollexfen (The Atomic Brain) such as how Charles' haul from the armored car robbery seems to fit in less than half the depth of a box about the size of a box of Mandarin oranges, or how it takes longer than you might think for a pursuing Charles to catch up with Squeamy once spotting him, despite Squeamy being on crutches. More on Pollexfen's direction shortly - I first want to mention that despite the circumstances, some of the cast members do perform admirably. As Charles' sweetheart Eva, actress Marian Carr gives her character some real heart, not coming across the least bit tarty and instead more like a normal woman under trying circumstances. (Circumstances that may understandably explain why she stupidly shows Paul the aforementioned envelope - which she hasn't opened - and leaves it for Paul to open when she exits the room.) And as the dastardly Paul, Ross Elliott manages to give his character a sleaziness that is believable and shows he's no good. As for Lon Chaney Jr. in his role as the title person, well, by this stage of his career, his best days were already long behind him. He looks bloated and very tired, and he can't seem to make any sparks even in scenes like when in his prison cell he swears vengeance. Even when he's given the chance to portray his character's indestructible and super strength nature, Chaney just lumbers awkwardly through these moments with not that much enthusiasm.

Indestructible Man had so much potential with this angle of someone being a kind of superman. Not only that, but with the revenge angle in the narrative. Who among us has never dreamed of having superpowers, but also getting payback from his or her enemies? But the movie shoots itself right from the start with Charles not only just having a mere three people on his enemy list, but [spoilers ahead] he doesn't get his revenge with all of these people. Oh, there are a few other people along the way Charles tangles with along the way, but Pollexfen can't seem to depict this violence much more than Charles lumbering around just slightly more elaborately than his normal sluggish demeanor. Even some seemingly no-brainer moments, like when Charles meets one of his victims at the top floor of the famous Bradbury building in Los Angeles, and Charles quickly tosses his victim to the ground below, are unbelievably botched (believe it or not, we not only don't see the victim fall down, we also don't see his body afterwards, just see the face of a shocked witness of the scene.) As for the science fiction portion of the movie, like Dr. Bradshaw's resurrection of the deceased Charles, it is rushed by so quickly and without any real detail that it goes beyond laziness and becomes utter contempt for the audience, even those who saw it back in 1956. But seeing Indestructible Man today - at least with more sophisticated eyes - these unconvincing scientific elements and the other feeble touches in the movie do provide a reasonable amount of unintended amusement. Even during the moments when the movie is just lame without provoking giggles, it does give satisfaction in that that you'll know you would be able to take this premise and make a movie significantly better than this, even if you haven't made a movie before. Maybe your movie might still not be overall successful, but it would be Academy Award material compared to this.

(Posted May 13, 2026)