Overrated

Awesome Movie

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

Close shines in drama with strong language, adult themes.

The notorious safecracker Joey Faust (Douglas Kennedy) escapes from the state prison and Laura Matson (Marguerite Chapman) drives the getaway car. They head to an isolated farm where the deranged Major Paul Krenner (James Griffith) has a laboratory. He has abducted the daughter of Dr. Peter Ulof (Ivan Triesault) to force the scientist to develop a technique to create an invisible army. Paul plans to sell the army for a large amount to any government and now he needs radium to proceed the research. Paul and his partners Laura and Julian (Red Morgan) force Joey to be submitted to the experimental treatment. Then he breaks in a facility and robs the radium. Joey convinces Laura to go with him to the city to heist the National Bank, but he is surprised by an unexpected side effect and becomes visible. What will happen to Joey Faust? "The Amazing Transparent Man" has an attractive art on the DVD cover. However the story is a cheesy rip-off "The Invisible Man". The characters are non-charismatic and the conclusion is awful. My vote is three,Title (Brazil): Not Available on DVD or Blu-Ray

Public enemy number one can't be seen to be believed. He gets out of prison through default (escaping!) and joins up with a gang of amoral scientists who want to use him as a part of a bank robbery ring. What could have been an update of the type of science fiction film that Boris Karloff had made twenty years before ends up being a mediocre crime drama with little excitement. A "B" cast includes 1940 starlet Marguerite Chapman playing. An aging femme fatale as if she was locked into the 1940 definition of a film noir bad girl. The only memorable element of this is an old man dying from uranium poisoning and the regret he has for the way his life turned out.

Being in the mood to watch a short,snappy ,fun film on this leap day I decided to take a look at some ultra cheap triple feature DVDs that I had watched parts of during Haloween.As I got to the last two DVD's,I noticed one which I had watched the first two features of, (Attack Of The Giant Leeches and Revolt Of The Zombies)but had never got round to taking a look at the final film on the disc.Finding out that the movie had a running time of 58 minutes,I decided to get myself set for what would hopefully be a film that featured everything that I was after for a days viewing.The plot: Getting broken out of jail by old flame Laura Matson,convict safe cracker Joey Faust starts to wonder where Laura is planning to take him.Soon after Laura has finished driving Joey away in a getaway car she takes him up to a strange looking lab.Desperate to find some sort of normality Joey looks round the lab until he catches a glimpse of a crazy looking scientist!.Trying to get a grip on the situation that's accruing around him,Joey meets a new individual at the lab called Paul Krenner,who due to having a grand military vision wants to perform some "tests" on Joey which will cause him to become invisible.View on the film: Since seeing the films extremely low IMDb rating,my first expectation was that the screenplay by Jack Lewis would be filled with an almost endless supply of "technobabble" which I have disappointingly often come into contact with when watching these types of movies.Happily Lewis actually spent almost the whole film (bar the ending-which hits the movies message down like a hammer!) leaving the plodding exposition behind and instead making a pretty fun gangster spin on The Invisible Man that moves at a really brisk pace.For his work on the film director Edgar G. Ulmer (who also directed the Film Noir/Horror classics Detour and the 1934 The Black Cat) gives what was to be his second to last American film (the other one being Beyond The Time Barrier) a wonderful feeling of everything but the kitchen sink,where if you are not keen on the moody gangster sections of the film,you only have to wait a few minutes before something new comes into view.Although most of the "Invisible" effects do look dated,Ulmer is cleverly able to include an effects scene that still looks pretty good now that involves the layers of a test rat being seen as it slowly starts to become invisible.Joining in on the films anything goes attitude is the very good cast with Marguerite Chapman (whose very last film was this one) giving Laura Matson a nice untrusting side whilst Ivan Triesault gives the normally stern scientist/doctor a wacky side as Dr Peter Ulof.

A crazed scientist (Ivan Trisault) invents an invisibility formula. An Army major (James Griffith) plans to use the formula to create an army of invisible zombies.Does this film rip off "The Invisible Man"? To some degree, of course. There is no possible way the creators did not know about that earlier film. But it goes its own way, too -- for one thing, the transparent man is not invisible from the beginning.The only person I know attached to this film is the makeup artist, Jack Pierce. That may explain why people have rated it so incredibly low. I am sure the cast was known in their day, but they are not known to me, and the fact this comes from a defunct movie studio suggests a lot. Director Edgar G. Ulmer is a legend in his own way, perhaps ironically.I appreciate that a guinea pig is used as a guinea pig, but beyond that, I do not know what to say. Even with its very short run time, it does not move quick enough in some scenes. The special effects -- which made "Invisible Man" a classic a few decades earlier -- are not nearly as good here. Perhaps author David Wingrove summed it up best when he said, "Its cheap-budget origins show throughout. Amazing claims too much for what is essentially a thriller involving an escaped criminal..."