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Post by kooshmeister on Jun 28, 2016 6:59:31 GMT
I'd heard of this little gem from the year 1940, but never seen it before. It proved quite interesting when I finally saw it. Reclusive biologist Dr. Alexander Thorkel, who has been incommunicado for almost a decade somewhere in the jungles of Peru, out of nowhere writes his old colleague Professor Kendall about needing three experts to come at once to his isolated Peruvian home near an abandoned gold mine. No explanation. Kendall contacts one of the three people Thorkel has requested, Dr. Rupert Bulfinch, but warns him that Thorkel is a difficult man to work with and advises against going. Bulfinch insists on going, though; knowing Thorkel purely by reputation as one of the most legendary biological scientists in history and wanting to finally meet the guy. Biologist Dr. Mary Robinson is another individual Thorkel wants very badly. However, she and Bulfinch strike out with the third guy, who gets sick. So they're forced to go for the second best expert in that field, fugitive American engineer Bill Stockton, who is hiding out in Peru after committing unspecified crimes and who needs to have his US arrest warrant held over his head to make him come. He'd rather just lie around sunbathing and drinking himself to death than do anything remotely scientific, you see. They rent some pack mules from miner Steve Baker, who insists on accompanying them, ostensibly to ensure his mules are taken care of, but, in reality, his interest is really piqued when he learns WHERE Thorkel's little hideaway is; near that abandoned gold mine. So they arrive after a perilous trek through the jungle. Upon arriving they're greeted first by the scientist's Peruvian servant, a lovable Ethnic Scrappy named Pedro, and then by Thorkel himself, who has a completely shaved head, very thick glasses and a mustache that makes him look like the love child of Hideki Tojo and Heinrich Himmler. He seems nice enough, anyway. But to hear Pedro tell it, strange things have been going on. For one thing, animals mysteriously vanish from around the compound, including his horse, which he can't find. Then there's Thorkel's previous colleague, Dr. Mendoza, who apparently just up and quit. Thorkel invites all three scientists to take a look through a microscope outside on a picnic table, not in his laboratory, which he keeps locked at all times and forbids anyone from entering. They all identify an excess of iron in some cells on the microscope slide, which pleases Thorkel immensely. He then thanks them for their services, says he hopes they'll stay the night, and apologizes in advance if he's too busy working to see them off tomorrow morning, before running into that aforementioned locked lab and shutting himself in. He doesn't come out all night. Not that they can see, anyway. The visitors are... stupefied to say the least; did this guy really invite them thousands of miles just to look through a microscope? Apparently, yes; yes he did. As it turns out, Thorkel's thick-lensed glasses ain't just for show. The man is nearly legally blind. And everything he's doing hinged on identifying one problem in his work, and his poor eyesight prevented him from simply looking through the microscope to see what it was, hence the need for trained professionals to basically be his eyes for five minutes. After figuring out what the problem was, he can adjust his work accordingly, and do... whatever it is he's doing and now he has no further need for them and wants them to get off his damned lawn. But they won't get off his damned lawn. Figuring they deserve an explanation, they elect to remain. Thorkel is... annoyed when he discovers they have basically camped out in his front yard the next day, but does his level best to ignore them. That night, Steve pokes around back and discovers that Thorkel has dug a great big whopping hole in the ground, into which he routinely raises and lowers a Frankensteinian electrode thing connected to the main building by way of lead-lined tubing. Gathering some rocks for analysis, he shows them to Bill, who identifies them has basically being uranium ore. He and Steve get it into their fool heads that Thorkel is mining uranium and that this is his big secret. Uranium, after all, is highly valuable. So they start scheming to blackmail the scientist with this information, intending to threaten to tell everyone what he's doing unless he cuts them in. This will prove to be... not exactly a healthy thing to do, considering the last guy to threaten to tattle on Dr. Thorkel was the aforementioned Dr. Mendoza. And the last time we saw him, way back at the beginning of the movie in the prologue, he was having his head pumped full of enough radiation to make his skull glow through his skin...
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Post by kooshmeister on Jul 4, 2016 5:51:43 GMT
As it turns out, Thorkel is merely tapping the uranium's radioactivity as a power source to do something else. And whatever it is, it was enough to make Mendoza demand Thorkel burn his notes and abandon his work, which is what led to his impromptu chemotherapy treatment gone horribly wrong. So it is when Bill and Steve, along with Mary and Bulfinch, who also found out about the uranium, are caught snooping in Thorkel's lab along with Pedro who really, really wants to know what the fuck his employer did with his favorite horse, that the scientist suddenly becomes very loose-lipped and cooperative. Right this way, here in this next room I'll show you everything, he says, leading them into an adjoining room with a big Whatever-matron, but emphatically being the last one in, so he can shut the door behind them and flip a big switch.
The five of them awaken to find themselves in a dark room, clad in togas, and very confused. Suddenly, a giant door opens, blinding them with bright light. When their adjust, a giant-sized Dr. Thorkel stands over them. They've been shrunk.
Thorkel has been working with a uranium-powered shrink ray. Why, we don't know. He's crazy. His evil plots don't have to make sense. The missing animals all got shrunk. And then died. And then fed to his cat! But when they identified the excess iron in that prepared slide, Mary, Bill and Bulfinch helped him overcome whatever the problem was, and they've become his first successfully shrunken (living) test subjects. At first it seems as though Thorkel genuinely means them no particular harm beyond having shrunk them. But during a routine examination of the tiny Dr. Bulfinch, he discovers that Bulfinch has grown an extra couple of inches. Bulfinch realizes he and the other shrunken humans are slowly growing back to normal size; the shrink ray's effects are only temporary!
Unfortunately for him, and, well, everyone, he makes the mistake of pointing out to Thorkel how screwed this makes him.
Initially, Thorkel's only concern is that he has failed. But Bulfinch makes him realize that when they return to normal size they're going straight to the cops. And considering he has at least one dead body buried somewhere on the property, the last thing he needs is the Peruvian police poking around. One cotton swab of ether later and Dr. Bulfinch has been OD'd out of existence, a fate Thorkel plans for the others, but Mary's scream at the horrifying (heh) sight of her colleague basically being swabbed to death makes Thorkel realize the others saw! And heard! The four remaining teeny humans escape into the surrounding jungle. Now they must fight to survive long enough to return to ordinary size, and also evade the gigantic Thorkel...
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Post by bobby on Jul 5, 2016 23:04:04 GMT
An adaptation of this film (credited to Henry Kuttner) was the cover story for the June 1940 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories.
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Post by kooshmeister on Jul 6, 2016 3:12:35 GMT
Another adaptation, credited to "Will Garth," which was apparently a house pseudonym of the publisher. Some people think Henry Kuttner did this one, too, but I read somewhere he denies having written it.
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Post by Michael Connolly on Jul 6, 2016 11:36:22 GMT
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Post by kooshmeister on Jul 6, 2016 18:58:09 GMT
What I find interesting is that taglines for the novelizations (or at least the Garth one) seem intent on painting Thorkel as the main character and not the villain. Going purely by the original cover for the Garth book, if you hadn't seen the film, you'd think "Dr. Cyclops" was some kind of pulpy genius anti-hero, as opposed to a near-sighted middle-aged misanthrope.
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Post by bobby on Jul 8, 2016 23:09:34 GMT
I actually saw a copy of the original 1940 edition of the "Will Garth" novelization on the shelves at a local used book store in 1989. But the dust jacket had been cut into pieces and glued to the book, so I passed on it. (Probably a mistake.)
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