The Indestructible Man [PG]

Just before his execution for the crime of an armoured car robbery, Charles “the Butcher’ Benton vows to kill the three men that betrayed him and sent him to his death. Whilst considered a hollow threat at first, it becomes all too real when a scientist experimenting with the repairing of cells intercepts Benton’s body on the way to the morgue and performs an experiment on it, bringing him back to life in a stronger and indestructible form. Now Benton is prowling the streets of LA, hunting down the three men who ratted on him. 

An interesting little mix of science fiction, thriller, and detective noir, The Indestructible Man stands as a solid fusion movie filled with nifty and effective cinematic techniques, good performances, and a solid central plotline. 

Primarily, I would describe this movie as a noir film very much in the vein of your classic detective thrillers of the 1940s like The Big Sleep or The Maltese Falcon just nowhere near as good. The heightened tones of black and white shadow that are used particularly when shooting scenes that take place at night really work in this vein, producing elongated shadows that heighten the suspense of the stalk or the chase and the voice-over narration of Max Showalter who stars as police lieutenant Dick Chasen really hammers home that feeling of the detective ruminating on a case. I actually quite liked that, cinematically, it was filmed in the detective noir style rather than say your cheap horror or science fiction way because it made the film stand out from others of its type just enough for it to be noticeable. The fusion of the cinematic style and the science fiction/horror story worked quite well to set this movie aside from others like it. 

Lon Chaney Jr. stars as our, for the most part, mute superhuman serial killer, The Butcher. Chaney is really good because he manages to convey a lot of emotion and confusion even though he has no dialogue for the majority of the film. His speaking scenes at the beginning work to just up the tension and excitement about what’s going to happen and then, after he’s technically pronounced ‘dead’, he spends the movie wandering the streets in a very heavy and thuggish manner. We can see the hatred and the bloodlust in his face, but there are scenes were we can also see his confusion at himself and his emotional frailty and even tenderness towards our leading lady. He’s very good Lon Chaney Jr. 

Something else that I really rather liked about this movie was its script and how it had just enough metaphors, poetic thinking and romanticism, and complexity to elevate the movie out of the realms of cheap noir or gothic. Whilst it’s not academy award type stuff, it’s still a solid screenplay that tells the story and, at the same time, holds just enough points on which viewers can latch and question; “I wonder just what he means by that”. It’s good when scripts do that because it’s not enough to just have a movie that tells a story; as a viewer you want to intellectually stimulated too. 

Starring Marian Carr, Ross Elliott, Stuart Randall, Ken Terrell, Robert Shayne, Marjorie Stapp, Peggy Maley, Robert Foulk, Reita Green, Roy Engel, and Madge Cleveland, The Indestructible Man is a fine and lightly entertaining movie that’s filled with action, science, drama, romance, and murder. It’s by no means a brilliant movie, but it’s relatively enjoyable at any rate.