Man-Made Monster (1941)

By this point in Universal’s history, Carl Laemmle and his faemmle had lost control of the studio and the new owners (including the legendary J. Arthur Rank, who was trying to expand his own business into the US) were slashing budgets. But, after the post-Production Code horror slump of the mid-30s, horror had come back onto the menu; for Man-Made Monster, the studio dusted off an old script originally intended for Lugosi and Karloff but which was deemed too similar to The Invisible Ray, and so it was handed over to one up and coming player of mostly lesser roles in lesser films (Creighton Chaney, better known as Lon Chaney Jr.) and one who was more experienced in horror and whose career was about to hit the legal skids (Lionel Atwill). What we have is a man who survives a fatal accident involving a bus colliding with an electrical pylon; Dan McCormick is a carnival performer who has somehow developed an “immunity” to electricity. This obviously attracts the interest of many people, particularly somewhat mad scientist Dr. Rigas, who suddenly has a test subject for his experiments with electricity and life. The end result is an almost ruthlessly efficient B film, costing less than $90,000 and running just a few seconds under an hour, but it generally feels pretty well-proportioned and paced; quite handsomely filmed and generally made with care, and Lionel Atwill makes the most of his part (particularly the climactic lab scene). The real beneficiaries of the film, though, were Chaney and director George Waggner; though the film wasn’t a mega hit, Universal brass were happy enough with the film to team them up again on The Wolf Man in 1941 (and give Waggner twice as much money to make it with). As the film’s Wiki page notes, though, perhaps the most fascinating outcome of the whole project was that it eventually helped lead to the formation of American International Pictures…