Sequels are a fact of life. Movies, although some of us look to them for profundity, are made for selling. (I guess my writing for so long with no profit from it has skewed my view a bit.) Still, The Invisible Man Returns isn’t too bad. In my mind, there were a set of six canonical Universal monster movies: Dracula, Frankenstein, The Mummy, The Invisible Man, The Wolf Man, and The Creature from the Black Lagoon. In reality, each of these successful films was followed by a clutch of sequels, filling the thirties and forties—into the fifties—with monster movies. I never really bothered with the sequels, but some of them are pretty good. And I still haven’t seen the more recent Invisible Man, which I hear is quite good.
When I was a kid, Vincent Price represented horror like no other single person. He had developed a persona that was lucrative and that influenced other monster boomers as well. He was a relative unknown when he was hired for The Invisible Man Returns. His face only appears in the last minute of the film and his voice had not yet settled into its characteristic menace tone that would make him a genre icon. Still, the story has a typical plot for the period. Sir Geoffrey Radcliffe is set to hang for killing his brother—they own a coal mine. Dr. Frank Griffin, a friend of the family and brother of the original Invisible Man, believes him innocent and makes Radcliffe invisible so that he can escape the gallows. As we all know, the problem with the invisibility drug—here duocaine rather than monocaine—is that it causes insanity. Radcliffe discovers the real murderer before going insane, all the while being chased by police.
These “invisible” films demonstrated what special effects could become. Shot in black-and-white, “black screen” technology was used to make Radcliffe appear headless and handless. In fact, this movie received an Oscar nomination for the effects. It’s not a scary film, but it’s a reasonably told story. And the special effects really were cutting edge for 1940. Probably somewhat scandalous for the time, Radcliffe has to undress in front of his fiancée at one point, leading the men who discovered her fainted to suppose that seeing a naked, if invisible, man could do it. There is a subtle humor here. Other films followed but they veered into the comedy realm. Until the recent remake. I guess I’ll need to add that one to my ever-growing list of must-see movies.
