Really Surprised!

Excellent, Without a doubt!!

Clever, believable, and super fun to watch. It totally has replay value.

As somebody who had not heard any of this before, it became a curious phenomenon to sit and watch a film and slowly have the realities begin to click into place.

This is quite a bit better than it is given credit for. Roger Corman relies on Ray Milland, one of the best actors of his era, to be the title character. It's one of those movies where a scientist decides, through impatience, to test his substance on himself. The results are interesting at first and soon move toward things which begin to destroy his life. Soon he can't turn back; he's stuck with this "gift," and there seems to be no hope. Finally, he becomes responsible for a death and he goes on the lam, joining a circus. His love interest desperately looks for him. But what can he do. There are implications that are dealt with in "The Amazing Shrinking Man," another well crafted science fiction/horror movie. There seems to be some controversy over the last lines of the film. See previous reviewers for this information.

I love it when the Doc's (Milland) x-ray eyes peel through the fancy clothes at the party. Of course, the camera doesn't show more than bare backs and legs, but my imagination ran wild with the rest. Right away, I was wishing I had the see-through power, that is, until I thought about sleep. In fact, closing your eyes wouldn't help— you'd still be seeing what's above. Nothing it seems would work; you'd still literally see through it all. So, would sleep ever come. Anyway, I decided not to try any eye experiments, nude parties or no.Despite my half-facetious remarks, this is a serious sci-fi, several cuts above Corman's usual drive-in fare. Oscar-winner Milland delivers an ace performance that almost makes things believable. However, the psychedelic light shows almost gave me a headache. That along with the cheezy music didn't help. Still, the text amounts to a good little morality play. After all, consider the possibilities that open up to this heightened perception. That's the doc's dilemma. At first he wants to use it to help diagnose medical problems. That's understandable since he was a respected medical research doctor until funding ceased. But then slickster Crane (Rickles) talks him into charging fees for his x-ray diagnoses, most of which the promoter gets. Now on something of a confused moral slide, the Doc goes to Vegas where he stands to clean up, even though his x-ray vision is becoming unpredictable. In short, his former blessing is becoming a curse. That may account for the final part, which otherwise seems an odd and abrupt intrusion. Still, it was good seeing the craggy Old Testament figure, John Dierkes doing his thing, in blazing Technicolor.All in all, the movie's a fairly imaginative slice of sci-fi, with a fine central performance, and a comely Diana Van Der Vlis as the Doc's confidant.

In 1963, no one ever imagined a film which predicted the future the way this one did. Ray Milland's great performance here is way ahead of it's time. When you see him wearing the dark glasses he very much looks like a person today wearing Virtual Reality Glasses. No one making the film at the time could even imagine that. Roger Corman was on TCM recently saying that at almost $300,000 dollars this was one of his biggest budget films. I am not even sure that money would pay for the poor lab monkey who gets too much of an eye full early in this one now. This movie has a cult following today for some very good reasons. The old carnival scenes are a throwback to simpler times with the kind of carnival thrill rides that existed before the huge theme parks that came later.Don Rickles is a perfect example of the early 1960's as his 2 desires are lust of all women and money, and more money. A small amount of his stand-up humor getting into this script does not hurt the film either. To me, the iconic scene is the end one, which has rarely been duplicated in Sci-Fi. Milland wanders into an old fashioned religious tent revival (these still happen), and walks up to the fire and brimstone preacher. He tells the preacher what he sees as God due to his X-Ray eyes. The preacher tells him it is "because he has sinned." There are several ways to interpret this depending on your point of view, but it leaves one of the deepest closing messages ever put into a Sci-Fi film.

Roger Corman has opened more doors for more filmmakers than I can recall; here, he opens the doors of perception (metaphorically speaking). "I'm closing in on the gods," Xavier boasts early on in the movie. When a monkey given the "X" eyedrops dies (apparently of fright), X decides it's time to experiment on himself (of course). "It's like a splitting of the world," he marvels: "More light than I've ever seen..." There's a neat POV shot in which his eyes are BANDAGED while he looks at and talks to someone else. "I like the way you look," a young woman tells him... just before the party they're at becomes, for him, a peep show. When his x-ray vision becomes too acute to control, he says of one woman: "She appears a perfect, breathing dissection." It's a gruesome observation, but the fx of the time didn't really allow for a viewer's peek at same. The "X effect" throughout is relatively simple, visually (it looks like a 3D image does without the glasses), but the gold and, finally, black contact lenses ARE effective. Milland's performance here is as tight as in THE LOST WEEKEND. Kudos to Corman.