Good , But It Is Overrated By Some

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

If you like to be scared, if you like to laugh, and if you like to learn a thing or two at the movies, this absolutely cannot be missed.

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

Spoilers abound: I've only seen Monster On the Campus a couple of times, find it entertaining and competently made. It's a nostalgic trip to the old Universal back lot of what's now a half-century ago, thus a lot of the sets are familiar to film buffs of the Hollywood of an earlier time.Arthur Franz plays the title character well and without a whiff of condescension. He's a better actor than the material requires, gives his all. Whit Bissell, like Franz, was also an old hand, a veteran of science fiction pictures of the period. Both actors had played professor-scientist types before, and both were good at it.The actors in the film consist of familiar faces and a few familiar names, most notably soon to be teen heartthrob Troy Donahue. Joanna Moore is the leading lady and, like Franz, does nicely with what she's given to do. Overall, the movie is a solid professional job, as director Jack Arnold had made a number of films like it before.My only complaint, and it's a minor one, is that the movie cues the viewer how it's going to end on the last leg of the journey, when the professor spends what's supposed to be down time in a mountain cabin. There are shades of earlier Universal films in Monster On the Campus, whose main character is not unlike the Invisible Man; and his fate is rather similar to that of the Wolf Man, with a needle instead of an autumn moon, but no matter.Those old, easy to guess plot twists,--it's pretty easy to guess who's going to "get it" next--were, to me, reassuring, and I think they would be for most viewers. The absence of much in the way of surprise in the story doesn't really hurt the movie, a road well traveled by those most likely to want to watch a film with a title that, well, says it all.

Minor as Monster on the Campus might be as an entry in the Universal horror series (it is evidently the last such Universal film to be produced in the USA), it offers the pleasures of a minor production done with thorough professionalism. There is little of the Jack Arnold atmosphere that made The Incredible Shrinking Man one of the great 1950s science fiction films, and that make Creature from the Black Lagoon and It Came from Outer Space worth watching today. It is as if Universal wanted the box office success of those films, only this time done fast and cheap. The science-fiction element—the blood of a deep-sea coelacanth, when ingested, induces short-term reversion to a "prehistoric" state (apparently "they," in the past, were much more bloodthirsty then than "we" are now) is tacky even by '50s sci-fi standards. The hapless scientist, Donald Blake played by Arthur Franz, falls victim to it by the sloppiest set of laboratory standards imaginable—he lifts the coelacanth carcass by its teeth, rinses his hand in the tank's meltwater … the poor goof even manages to get blood into his pipe tobacco. Next thing you, know, Blake suffers fainting spells during which he transforms into a hairy, muscular ape-man—primitive in every way except for a marvelous knack for hatchet-throwing. Worst of all, discovering that the mysterious killer terrorizing the (strangely-deserted) campus of Dunsfield University is none other than himself Blake, not to offer any more spoilers, takes actions that bring the film to a rapid conclusion. Fast and cheap. If the screenwriter, David Duncan, had been given the time to do a re-draft, who knows what Monster on the Campus could have offer us? Time for a remake—this time bringing out the submerged tensions of Blake having to work for his fiancé's father, of the nurse who makes no secret of her attraction to the handsome professor, of the bland teenage lovers who emerge from these horrors curiously unscathed. David Cronenberg, who once said (and demonstrated in The Fly) that it is bad films rather than good films that merit remakes, should chuck his current boring and talky art films and do what he does best by remaking Monster on the Campus!

The blood of a primitive fish exposed to gamma rays causes a benign research professor (Arthur Franz) to regress to an ape-like, bloodthirsty prehistoric hominid.I cannot believe how daft Professor Blake is. He does not realize that all the evidence points to one man for the murders, and he even knows how, but fails to recognize it. I am also sort of surprised how light this film is given the subject matter -- a deranged killer is loose on campus and no one seems too terribly upset.I liked the idea of the de-evolution blood. Even if it made a dog wear fake teeth. And even if the professor's name is Donald Blake, which means that he was also the Norse god Thor...

Monster on the Campus (1958) *** (out of 4) Entertaining Universal Sci-Fi about a college scientist who turns into a monster after his blood is mixed with that of a prehistoric fish. I've been wanting to see this for quite some time but never got around to buying the VHS since it was released just as I was jumping on the DVD format. The wait was certainly worth it even though the film isn't really anything other than your typical Jekyll and Hyde story. The film goes by at a very quick pace and the monster looks great, although it's a shame we only get to see him twice. I was somewhat shocked at the rather violent third death scene. The film also contains one of the dumbest girlfriends in sci-fi history.