The Neanderthal Man (1953)

Fresh and Exciting

Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

if their story seems completely bonkers, almost like a feverish work of fiction, you ain't heard nothing yet.

True to its essence, the characters remain on the same line and manage to entertain the viewer, each highlighting their own distinctive qualities or touches.

Aside from one Glaring Flaw, this is an Underrated Horror Film that came Early in the 1950's Cycle. Robert Shayne gives a Thoughtful, Intense, and Realistic Performance.There are some Unsettling Visuals like the Deaf and Dumb Maid's Photographs, the Creepy and very Well Done Makeup for the Titular Monster, and the Murder Mutilations are done with Verve.Along with Shayne as the Mad Scientist, Beverly Garland Proves why She is a Scream Queen of Note. The Central "Skeptical Scientist" is by Richard Crane, and makes for a rather Stiff, but Acceptable Turn.There is an Atmosphere of Dread as the Tale Unfolds, mostly because of Shayne's Descent into Madness and the Brutal Murders of the Townies.The Aforementioned "Glaring Flaw" is Obvious. The Sabre Tooth Tiger. Much is made of this "Can't be Real" Beast, but when Shown Prowling for Prey the Fangs are Missing, but otherwise Close-Ups Reveal Huge Foot Long Teeth.It is a Distraction that is Intolerable and Unfitting this Underrated B-Movie that Otherwise makes its Low-Budget Scientific and Philosophical Points with Stylish Flourishes and Entertains for its 78 Minutes.

A hunter in the High Sierras spots a huge tiger with tusks, and when he tells his tale at the Webb Café in town, he is laughed at, including by the local game warden Oakes. That is, until he drives home that night and the big cat lands on his windshield intentionally. Armed only with the car's blaring horn Oakes scares the big cat away. Oakes makes a clay impression of the cat's paw and goes to see Dr. Harkness, state university zoologist, in Los Angeles. Harkness at first shoos Oakes away as some kind of crackpot, but then suddenly changes his mind and comes back with him. This time, finding a freshly killed deer, they wait for the big cat to return when he gets hungry. They shoot him and go get local academic Prof. Clifford Groves to show him the big cat - a saber tooth tiger that has been extinct since ancient times. The body is gone and Groves asks them to please stop wasting his time.Meanwhile Groves has gone to a committee of academics with his theories of how Neanderthal man had a much larger brain than current man, and Groves talks about how if somehow man could go back to the Neanderthal state, he would be capable of solving problems he cannot with his current smaller brain. The committee is unreceptive, in part because Groves insults them because they are not jumping up and down with enthusiasm.There are lots of obvious tip-offs in this film. Groves mood growing worse with time, being rude to everybody, including any guests, his own fiancée, and him calling the committee of academics he is presenting before stupid doesn't do his cause any good either. There is a cat caged in Groves' lab that seems agitated at the sight of Groves syringes. Groves' own fiancée tells him he has changed from the nice guy she fell in love with into a grouchy mean guy and is leaving. And the presence of a passive deaf mute servant girl is always a big red flag for potential victimization.There really isn't any mystery in this film since the audience sees what is going on most of the time. It is Oakes and Harkness trying to solve the mystery that takes time, although you can see the Jekyll and Hyde ending coming a mile away. Dr. Groves has conveniently forgotten that Neanderthal man had a bigger everything - brain, strength, temper, bloodlust, etc., and that killing picnickers and carrying away their women is not smiled upon in 1950's California. The acting is not wooden here, but motivations jump around a lot with no real reasons given.I'd say it's a take it or leave it proposition as even the title gives away the plot, but it is by no means boring. Just don't expect to be blinded with science in this one.

For those viewers who are wondering if actor Robert Shayne ever incarnated another role besides that of Inspector Henderson on TV's "Adventures of Superman," a quick skim of his IMDb credits will reveal the answer to be a most definitive "yes." Besides playing the part of the tough-talking best friend of Clark Kent with ever-increasing frequency on that show, which ran from 1952 - '58, Shayne, it seems, has dozens upon dozens of film and TV appearances to his credit. But those fans who would like to see Shayne as the top-billed, leading-man star of a theatrically exhibited motion picture should be made aware of "The Neanderthal Man," which was released by United Artists in June 1953. Despite its DVD availability today via an outfit known as Cheezy Flicks, the picture--minor entertainment though it might be--is yet intelligently scripted, well shot, and finely acted by its largely "no name" cast.In the film, Shayne (here, for some unfathomable reason, listed in the cast credits as "Robert Shane," and sporting a moustache that makes him initially unrecognizable, although that wonderful voice cannot be missed) plays the part of Prof. Clifford Groves, who, soon after we first encounter him, is being scoffed at by his fellow members of The Naturalists Club. Groves has just put forth his pet theory that primitive man had a brain just as advanced as our own, and with complex emotions to match. In an attempt to prove his theory that the mind of Java or Neanderthal man was just as capable of mentation as that of modern-day Homo sapiens, Groves attempts a "reactivation of the dormant cells of the mind of Man." He later injects himself with his new serum, and the viewer has little doubt as to the outcome...especially since a supposedly extinct saber-toothed tiger has lately been spotted around the professor's isolated home in the Sierras! And indeed, Groves does soon turn into a vaguely apelike creature, with an enormous noggin and with decidedly homicidal tendencies! Can visiting naturalist Dr. Ross Harkness (Richard Crane, who some may recall from 1959's "The Alligator People") and Groves' daughter Jan (pretty Joyce Terry) put an end to the slayings before the sheriff, game warden and understandably frightened townspeople shoot the prehistoric marauder down?"The Neanderthal Man" has at least three sequences that make it worthy of commendation, despite the "Maltin's Classic Movie Guide"'s assertion that the film is "colorless and cheap." In the first, that saber-tooth jumps atop the windshield of the game warden's car, and the close-up shot of its snarling mug is fairly startling. In the second, Harkness discovers a series of photos of Cella--Groves' mute, Mexican housekeeper--in the professor's lab. Cella had been given an early, experimental version of the good doctor's serum, and her increasingly hideous visage in the snapshots really is something to see. In the third memorable scene, the Neanderthal Man carries of sexy waitress Nola, here played by cult actress Beverly Garland, who gets to scream her head off in this, her first appearance in a horror film. (Beverly would also go on to star in "The Alligator People" six years later.) But the film has several other fine points to offer. Its transformation scenes are reasonably well done, and the FX by Jack Rabin and David Commons are pleasing. The B&W cinematography here by Stanley Cortez is at times most impressive, too (Cortez also lent his skills to such classic pictures as "Smash-up: The Story of a Woman," "The Three Faces of Eve" and "The Angry Red Planet"). Director E. A. Dupont has brought his film in in a no-nonsense manner (the compact affair clocks in at a mere 78 minutes), while the musical background by Albert Glasser really does keep things atmospheric. Glasser's "psychotronic" credits, by the way, are MOST impressive, including contributions to such wonderful '50s sci-fi fare as "Monster From Green Hell," "Beginning of the End," "The Cyclops," "The Amazing Colossal Man" (all from 1957!), "Giant From the Unknown," "Attack of the Puppet People," "War of the Colossal Beast" AND "Earth vs. the Spider" (all from 1958!). Finally, the film's script, by co-writers/co-producers Aubrey Wisberg and Jack Pollexfen, is a bright one, and never insults the viewer's intelligence. But ultimately, the film does belong to Shayne, who makes the most of his leading role here; unsympathetic as Groves may be--he insults his peers and houseguest Harkness, is terse with his daughter and dismissive of his fiancée Ruth (gorgeous Doris Merrick)--Shayne yet makes us feel for the poor, misguided genius. Bottom line: Although the theatrical poster for this film engaged in some typical hyperbole for the era ("What primitive passions...what mad desires drove him on? He held them all in the grip of deadly terror...nothing could keep him from this woman he claimed as his own!"), the film itself remains a modestly satisfactory achievement, and is of course required viewing for all fans of Robert Shayne....

****SPOILERS**** In the "Neanderthal Man" Robert Shayne, Prof. Clifford Groves, plays a somewhat whacked-out scientist who's obsessed in proving his theory of "Devolution". In that man has actually devolved not evolved from pre-historic times to today where his brain is about a quarter the size of the brain of the Java Cro-Magnon or Neanderthal Man. At the Naturalist Club Prof. Groves is almost laughed off the platform by his colleagues for saying that and in a fit of anger and indignation he tells them that their nothing but a bunch of ingrates and mental midgets and that a man of his brilliance is too good to have anything to do with them. Back at his home in the High Sierra Mountains Prof. Groves goes to work in his lab to prove that he's right and make those anthropologists at the Naturalist Club who made a monkey out of him and his theories pay for what they did by showing those fools just how right he was and is. Making a cave women out of his housemaid Celia, Tandra Quinn, with a serum that he developed he next turns his house cat into a large and vicious saber-tooth tiger who breaks out of his lab and causes havoc in the countryside by killing the local farmers livestock. All this attracts Dr. Harkness, Richard Crane, a L.A paleontologist who with the insistence of local game warden George Oakes, Robert Long, goes up to the High Sierra and hunts down and kills the big cat. Getting Prof. Groves to go with them to identify the tiger it somehow disappeared. Obviously Prof. Groves found the dead saber-tooth tiger earlier that morning and hid it in order not to have his secret experiments exposed.Prof. Groves is so obsessed with his experiments that he completely ignores his bride-to-be Ruth, Doris Merrick, who came to visit him as he buries himself in his work in the study on the size of the human and pre-human brain.Later Prof. Groves injects himself with his serum and turns into a Neanderthal Man but instead of getting smarter he gets more wilder and goes out in the range and kills a number of campers and hunters. Prof. Groves doesn't even look like a Neanderthal Man he looks more like an extra from the movie "Planet of the Apes".Robert Shayne really overdid the mad scientist act and was so off the wall and unstable in many scenes in the movie that it made you wonder why nobody in the film noticed just how insane he was and didn't call the police or park rangers to have him taken away and locked up in a hospital room before he hurt himself or anyone else. Later Dr. Harkness enters Prof. Groves lab and sees a number of cats in cages and vials of serum and injects one of the cats with it that it later turns also into a saber-tooth tiger. Prof. Groves is hunted down and shot by a sheriff's posse in the hills but escapes only to be attacked by the tiger who ends up killing him. After Prof. Groves dies he turns back into a modern day civilized human being from the pre-historic brute that he was. It's a shame that Prof. Groves had to learn the hard way about his theory of brain size that bigger doesn't always mean smarter.