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The Electronic Monster (1957 England)

 
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Bud Brewster
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PostPosted: Wed Apr 01, 2015 7:34 pm    Post subject: The Electronic Monster (1957 England) Reply with quote



The title is misleading. This is not a nuts-and-bolts story about a rampaging robot or an evil computer. It's a strange, surrealistic tale in which Rod Cameron plays an insurance investigator who goes to a mental institution to look into the death of an actress. He learns that the patients are being subjected to bizarre experiments: electronically induced hallucinaions that range from dancing women to scenes of torture.

The clinic is being run by a Nazi-like mad doctor who hypnotizes his patients and "records" their dreams. Then he reshapes the dreams into strange sexual nightmares and murder-inducing hallucinations which he feeds back into the patients' brains, forcing them to act out the fantasies.

The original concept is ambitious, but the screenplay is too timid to make much use of it. The electronic props are fairly impressive. The original story, called "Escapement", is by Charles Eric Maine. The score includes weird electronic music by Soundrama. Directed by Montgomery Tully.

[Original title: "Escapement". Also released as: "Zex"]

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Last edited by Bud Brewster on Sat Jan 20, 2024 12:28 pm; edited 3 times in total
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Custer
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PostPosted: Sun May 08, 2016 9:51 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

The novel Escapement came out in hardback in Britain in 1956; in 1958 America got it as The Man Who Couldn't Sleep. I've just looked out the review in the October 1956 issue of New Worlds, by Leslie Flood:

Quote:
A British author who has improved considerably with his fourth published novel - logically enough for one whose talents in the field bear the hallmarks of perseverance and hard work rather than natural brilliance - is Charles Eric Maine.

The novel is Escapement (Hodder & Stoughton, 12/6d) and it is heavily disguised science fiction for popular consumption - a good idea and it almost succeeds as good science fiction.

As usual I found Maine's style to be an exasperating mixture of good, bad and indifferent, but with an indefinable attraction that holds the reader to find out how it all ends - something like experimenting with hashish. Lacking the wit of Shepherd Mead's Big Ball of Wax, he takes a similar idea - an extension of the electroencephalograph for playing back to audiences recordings of emotions - and by Chapter Six gets down to the basic plot gimmick which has been painfully obvious since the first few pages.

In the meantime the story is being garnished with the old familiar stock thriller characters and outrageous cat-and-mouse situations. Unpleasant things happen to a hero who is already suffering from incurable insomnia (the results of this are ingeniously used for the story) and then, insidiously, interest takes hold and some novel ideas creep in - the Hollywood mogul's "unlife" philosophy, world domination via the "dream-palaces," the nine-year sleep - and the writing shows flashes of brilliance, the action improves and moves to an exciting climax.

Maine is becoming increasingly skilled at his own type of writing, which I can only liken to Edgar Wallace with a flavour of science fiction, and, with one eye always on possible film rights, could go a long way to keeping Hollywood in full production with substandard epics right up to the time when they eventually do change over to canned dreams.


They don't write reviews like that any more! I get the impression that the film was a bit less ambitious than the book...
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Bogmeister
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PostPosted: Tue May 11, 2021 12:49 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

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Slow-moving thriller that comes across like a dry insurance investigation in the first act.

In the first scene, a movie star dies in an auto accident on the French Riviera and the audience is shown that he was hallucinating or his vision was blurring just before the crash.

The insurance company sends their best man (big Rod Cameron) to France to determine if the accident was a suicide or something that may make them avoid paying the $250,000 claim, since the actor had just begun shooting a film and costs for non-completion are steadily rising.

Cute Mary Murphy plays an ex-flame of the insurance guy who happens to be at the clinic which seems to have the answers that the investigator is looking for.

The plot eventually reveals a sinister clinic which is involved in brainwashing its clients or patients. There are a trio of culprits and one of them is naturally an ex-Nazi. There are signs of advanced techniques and hardware, such as containment capsules for patients, though all of it looks outdated and cheap now.

The film does have some ahead-of-its-time surrealistic imagery, more common in the sixties, but it is very slow until the final minutes, when there's finally some action, including well-staged fisticuffs with star Cameron.

BoG's Score: 4 out of 10



BoG
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