Nobody seems to have noticed that the "big climax" to the movie consists of approximately ten minutes of footage from the 1934 German sci-fi film, GOLD, supposedly representing a subterranean laboratory in Nova Scotia. That's why Richard Carlson and King Donovan change into such strange outfits to deal with the huge machine--as the actors had to approximately match the dated clothing used in the original footage.
True, but having watched both, I'd say Magnetic Monster is a lot more entertaining and I appreciate the German electron tube making prowess contributing to a US sci-fi pic.
This has always been one of my favorites. Just as Richard Carlson (1912-1977) was always one of my favorite B movie actors, (The Maze 1953, It Came From Outer Space 1953, and Creature From the Black Lagoon 1956 being some of the reasons why). King Donovan (who plays his sidekick in this film) was a well known and very talented character actor much beloved by fans.
You've been making these reviews for EIGHT YEARS now? That is awesome! Laughing at these reviews, enjoying your humor, wit and these movies is helping me deal with my physical pains. Watching some of these movies in their entirety and laughing would probably take the place of a dose of pain pills :) Laughter is the best medicine. All of these reviews have a great editing of well chosen dialog lines. That must take a lot of patience and long hours.It's all very much appreciated and the clips always play smoothly with your comments. Y E S u r right, this would have made a good drama piece for a TV episode of The Twilight Zone or one of the live TV dramas back then in the 50's.
I haven't watch this movie before but I bet some people who went to go watch it at the theater back then were disappointed. They were probably thinking that the Magnetic Monster was an actual monster and not some element. It was also like this with the Monolith Monsters..
At least the film had Richard Carlson, who always added a touch of class to any B-movie he was in. As for other "serious science plots" films, I would say The Monolith Monsters (1957), Forbidden Planet (1956) and the Hammer Studios Quatermass trilogy (1955-1967).
@krelfurnace I remember 'Destination Moon', it was taken from a Science fiction story by Ray Bradbury I believe or a similar Science Fiction writer of the same time. Both book and movie were quite good.
@krelfurnace Thank you, I tend to forget Robert Heinlein, he was a great writer and wrote many great books, Stranger in a Strange Land - Which has never been made into a movie for some reason - and Starship Troopers. Great book, not so great movie, and many other books. Thank you for clearing up the mistake.
@@KRhetor not a particle accelerator, it just discharges static electricity like an electric eel. The gamma rays are carried on the electrons of this discharge.
Oddly enough, MANIAC is actually the name of the computer on which much of the early work on hydrogen bomb simulation was done. (This machine was the origin of the so-called Von Neumann architecture by which almost all modern computers are organized, & spawned many clones called 'JOHNNIACs'. A few years ago George Dyson wrote a good book about the project called Turing's Cathedral.) Odds are that the creators of this film heard the actual computer mentioned by name in a newsreel or newspaper article & worked it in.
Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970) with a pre-Skynet worldwide supercomputer (but with less killer robots) leans more heavily on the “science” than the “fiction”, similar in feel to “The Andromeda Strain” IIRC 🤔
This was Richard Carlson's first sci-fi film, and the first of producer Ivan Tors' OSI trilogy, the others being Riders to the Stars (starring and first-time directed by Carlson) and Gog, both in color, the latter in 3D.
Gog is pretty good in spite of its awful title, Riders to the Stars not as good in spite of its great title (and it gets the physics of cosmic rays totally wrong) but watchable nonetheless.
Knock or not, this was one of my favorite, sci-fi/horror (someone dies, right🤔??) pictures, when I was a kid. Still love, the originality of it, though.
Actually what they did get right is the computer "singing". Many early computers had loudspeakers hooked up to internal signal lines. This was used to be able to "hear" what the computer was doing. For example if you use one of the address lines or processor flags the pitch will represent the speed at which a loop is executed. Since different loops in your program likely take differing amounts of time, you get a sort of "tune" which tells you where the program is at. If you run the same program regularly, that process will come to you intuitively.
I saw this film when I was little. I found it an interesting story, with a riveting ending. It's a good cheesy "B" sci-fi of the era. I have it in my collection. Every once in awhile, I rewatch it. It's good fun. Who cares if the science isn't perfect? It's a lot better than contemporary sci-fi's with a too many special effects and not enough story or humanity.
Love B grade sci-fi and horror movies... Corny as but still, I enjoyed Magnetic Monster... 3 other favorites Kronos 1957 and X the unknown 1956 The Monolith Monsters 1957 to name a few
I would like to nominate "The Revenge of Doctor X"--also known as "Body of the Prey" (???) and "Venus Flytrap" (1970); about a scientist with a brain aneurysm trying to experiment on (apparently) a Frankenstein's monster made of bok choy. Based on a 20 year old screenplay by Ed Wood.
Thé casting is great, particularly Richard Calson, King Donovan and Jean Byron. All three had long careers. The Los Alamos MANIAC computer was real and used in the film to give it scientific credentials.
To answer your question from 2018 at around 2:35 - Yes, those transport vehicles did indeed have lead lined windows. Lead glass was a real thing, and the windows were pretty thick.
Not even a lead-lined truck can contain the comedic power of Dark Corners Reviews! The Tippy Tippy Top Of The Pop! I got "Maximum Overdrive" vibes when that push mower started moving on its own. And I do not like M.O. vibes. They hurt my soul. I don't know if there's even been a better turn of phrase than "Weird Moral Coda About Recreational Sex."
Interestingly enough, long after this movie was made some 1990 physicists went looking for "islands of stability" at the higher atomic number elements - created only in particle accelerators. Such elements would have interesting and unusual properties. It is now thought that the higher elements - like metals ect ect - originated in the interior of super novas, but if they had found the island it's not too big of a sci-fi stretch that such an element might actually be involved in the creation of higher elements instead. In any case this was a fun campy movie and a less ridiculous than giant bugs being created by the atomic bomb.
I actually saw this one on Turner Classic Movies one summer, during the last years of legendary host and film historian Robert Osborne, as part of a run of movies following the theme of "Things that Come Out of Holes" which also happened to include the original Howard Hawks version of THE THING, X- THE UNKNOWN and the original THE BLOB. One of those Things is not like the others...
+Dark Corners Reviews For future consideration for reviews how about the movies: "Mama Dracula" with Louise Fletcher, "The Boy Who Cried Werewolf", and "Nocturna: Granddaughter of Dracula from 1978 with John Carradine and Yvonne DeCarlo ??Did you already review Robert Quarry's 3rd vampire movie where he was a Hippie Guru vampire with a minion of lost Hippies "Deathmaster" from 1972
I don't know how true the stories shown in "I Led 3 Lives" were, but, they sure did a good job of ramping up the suspense in their scripts. The show made me a Carlson fan and I started noticing him in B-movies after that, such as "The Valley of Gwangi".
@@varanid9 Back in the late '70s, I Led 3 LIves aired at 5:35am on Friday mornings on an indy station in South Florida. (The other days of the week were other ZIV shows.) I got up extra early for high school to catch those shows.
Another name for this movie might've been: 'X: The Unknown' (element), as released here in the US? If not, then it is a very similar film I am thinking of. 1:08 Computers back then typically made noises like that - - ever watch that episode of SECRET LIFE OF MACHINES with Rex Garrod from the late 1980's? 2:35 Those windows could be composed of leaded glass! 3:00 There was no science behind the China Syndrome, just fearmongering of Nuclear Power lead by Hanoi Jane Fonda
X The Unknown is a different movie, and it's also pretty great, with some startling scenes. It's historically important in that it was Jimmy Sangster's first script for Hammer, and led directly to his being hired for their Frankenstein and Dracula reboots. It's also one of John Carpenter's favorite movies, and is one of the many classics he quoted in The Thing (compare Dean Jagger's lab in this film to Wilford Brimley's cabin).
I like this movie and let's face it, the whole Sci-Fi genre is silly if you choose to see it that way. But "Magnetic Monster" tried to be different, as a Dragnet-style police drama with science. Add it to "Kronos" and "The Lost Missile" as a film that used inorganic threats, plenty of stock footage and strong leading men to offset a tiny budget.
btw sum old computers really did have audio output like that for debugging purposes a typical use was to output the current memory address to it, so you could tell what parts of your program were running based on the sound
I hate to have a 70th comment and ruin the number, but the "singing maniac" is actually not an unrealistic portrayal of the computer (the obvious radio equipment prop is, but anyhow) it wasn't unheard of for computers back then to have audio output that reflected the program. I believe the TX-0 had a 1bit square wave driven by a particular bit inside the CPU's memory. It was also possible to just put an AM radio next to the CPU of about any of em, and the huge amount of radio interference wud generate tones Skilled operators could actually use this to figure out which parts of their program were running at a given time, and that cud aid in debugging
Jeez it's a hokey B movie. Let's pick it apart with a critical eye. Why? I just watched it and it was fun! It had romance, aviation, science, drama. Two throttles for a four engine airplane flown by a captain with two stripes, T-33 jet that turns into an F-86 as soon as it leaves the ground, one bed bedroom before the two bed censors. C'Mon!! Two thumbs up!
I hate to be the nerd (but I guess I am) you can make lead lined glass. I've seen it. It doesn't look any different & they may have lied to me but they said it was lead lined.
As far as wannabe hard science movies that screwed their science up big time: Silent Running (tree-hugging hippie crap that has no knowledge of basic ecology or biology), Mission the Mars (everything except Gary Sinise sucks, the physics are especially awful but I really wanted to throw something HARD at the screen when I saw the creationist cop-out at the end) and Moon (totally gets the science of cloning wrong and the premise makes less sense the more you think about it, even though they made a big deal about the accuracy of the helium-mining machinery).
FOOTNOTE: this movie during the climax padded out some of the action by using clips from the1920s fantasy movie GOLD ! Also ,ivan tors studios had this movie start out as a TV series pilot , about two science detectives investigating science based crimes! Apparently someone thought this movie would be better!!
Well "Earthquake" (1974) had me until 52 yr old Ava Gardner called 59 yr old Lorne Greene "Dad". ....he would have been seven yrs old the year she was born
With some of the more jaw-dropping movies you review, I have to pause it and go check AllHorror to see if we have this one... We don't! Check IMDB - it's listed as "scifi" not "horror"! Oh thank God! Still, what a masterpiece of 1950s cheese.
Dark Corners Reviews In this particular case I was thinking more of the BBC serialised dramas of the 1950s and early 1960s. Although the title sounds like something from the 5th season of "The Avengers"!
An astute thought: This film was actually to serve as a pilot for a potential tv series dealing with scientists investigating strange and dangerous phenomena. Kind of "documentary"-like in tone, similar to the currently popular series, DRAGNET. Serious in tone and without the usual old monsters and mad scientists. It was probably too "intellectual" for tv audiences who---much like today---preferred vulgar humor, violent crime and soap opera melodramatics.
the Brtish film X the Unkown is in some ways a similar plot to Magnetic Monster but it handled better . Not scientifically accurate but it a better film to watch
You seem to always come up with well crafted, witty reviews. Your reviews are like a siren, leading a person to watch the same "B" movies you sat through.
My favorite hackneyed special effect in this film is early on in the department store when Richard Carlson throws the metal washers up at the ceiling in an attempt to locate the source of the magnetism. Obviously, they dropped a handful of washers on a textured surface and simply turned the footage upside down. The effect is hilariously ruined by the couple of washers that roll around a bit before finally coming to rest.
Honestly I think this is the first review of yours where I don't think you got it at all. The Atom and Radiation was referred to as an entity of sorts by those of us in the USA. We even had mascots of sorts for things like Uranium promoted by the AEC to make people LIKE nuclear energy and to defend atomic testing and the bomb. This movie is a perfect reflection of personalizing an inanimate active source of power which presents a constant threat of danger and death to the world. The movie is horribly out of place in today's world, but if you time traveled back to the 50s and lived a decade under that fear and in that climate of atomic energy being a living breathing thing, I think you'd understand the narrative choice a bit more. Now, if you excuse me, I need to refuel my Mr Fusion with a few banana peels and get back to place a bet on the 57 world series.
This review gets this film completely wrong. He really has to try hard and use those "clever" clip bites to make something, uh, entertaining (ish) out of some of his reviews.
This is one of my favorite movies of the decade, one of the few genuine hard-science fiction films. If you like your sci-fi smart, you'll like this one.
Nobody seems to have noticed that the "big climax" to the movie consists of approximately ten minutes of footage from the 1934 German sci-fi film, GOLD, supposedly representing a subterranean laboratory in Nova Scotia. That's why Richard Carlson and King Donovan change into such strange outfits to deal with the huge machine--as the actors had to approximately match the dated clothing used in the original footage.
thank you..was going to mention GOLD scenes..
Every article on the movie mentions the GOLD footage, so it seemed redundant.
@@KRhetor Well, this review didn't, so, it wasn't.
True, but having watched both, I'd say Magnetic Monster is a lot more entertaining and I appreciate the German electron tube making prowess contributing to a US sci-fi pic.
This has always been one of my favorites. Just as Richard Carlson (1912-1977) was always one of my favorite B movie actors, (The Maze 1953, It Came From Outer Space 1953, and Creature From the Black Lagoon 1956 being some of the reasons why). King Donovan (who plays his sidekick in this film) was a well known and very talented character actor much beloved by fans.
I saw this as a little kid, and it had a big effect on me. It continues to be one of my very favorite movies.
Same here ! 😊
You've been making these reviews for EIGHT YEARS now?
That is awesome! Laughing at these reviews, enjoying your humor, wit and these movies is helping me deal with my physical pains. Watching some of these movies in their entirety and laughing would probably take the place of a dose of pain pills :) Laughter is the best medicine. All of these reviews have a great editing of well chosen dialog lines. That must take a lot of patience and long hours.It's all very much appreciated and the clips always play smoothly with your comments. Y E S u r right, this would have made a good drama piece for a TV episode of The Twilight Zone or one of the live TV dramas back then in the 50's.
Hello. Here we are in 2023 !
@@christopherlawley1842 And still at it and better than ever!!!
I haven't watch this movie before but I bet some people who went to go watch it at the theater back then were disappointed. They were probably thinking that the Magnetic Monster was an actual monster and not some element. It was also like this with the Monolith Monsters..
It's actually been double-billed with The Monolith Monsters (another movie I like a lot) on TCM.
At least the film had Richard Carlson, who always added a touch of class to any B-movie he was in. As for other "serious science plots" films, I would say The Monolith Monsters (1957), Forbidden Planet (1956) and the Hammer Studios Quatermass trilogy (1955-1967).
@krelfurnace I remember 'Destination Moon', it was taken from a Science fiction story by Ray Bradbury I believe or a similar Science Fiction writer of the same time. Both book and movie were quite good.
@krelfurnace Thank you, I tend to forget Robert Heinlein, he was a great writer and wrote many great books, Stranger in a Strange Land - Which has never been made into a movie for some reason - and Starship Troopers. Great book, not so great movie, and many other books. Thank you for clearing up the mistake.
THE GIANT BEHEMOTH (1959) has real environmental science in it.
I also like the fact that the dinosaur is a giant particle accelerator. Paleontology and physics are two of my favorite subjects. :)
@@KRhetor Hmmmm, now I'm going to have to watch it.
@@KRhetor not a particle accelerator, it just discharges static electricity like an electric eel. The gamma rays are carried on the electrons of this discharge.
Redundant title. As compared to....uh...a tiny behemoth? Really insults the audience.
Oddly enough, MANIAC is actually the name of the computer on which much of the early work on hydrogen bomb simulation was done. (This machine was the origin of the so-called Von Neumann architecture by which almost all modern computers are organized, & spawned many clones called 'JOHNNIACs'. A few years ago George Dyson wrote a good book about the project called Turing's Cathedral.) Odds are that the creators of this film heard the actual computer mentioned by name in a newsreel or newspaper article & worked it in.
Correct and that's one of the things in this movie that I found fascinating !
the -acs were all great early supercomputers that he didn’t get the connection with
Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970) with a pre-Skynet worldwide supercomputer (but with less killer robots) leans more heavily on the “science” than the “fiction”, similar in feel to “The Andromeda Strain” IIRC 🤔
This was Richard Carlson's first sci-fi film, and the first of producer Ivan Tors' OSI trilogy, the others being Riders to the Stars (starring and first-time directed by Carlson) and Gog, both in color, the latter in 3D.
Gog is pretty good in spite of its awful title, Riders to the Stars not as good in spite of its great title (and it gets the physics of cosmic rays totally wrong) but watchable nonetheless.
I agree!
Nice dance moves from the blonde dodging the lawn mower.
I think she invented the jitterbug
Knock or not, this was one of my favorite, sci-fi/horror (someone dies, right🤔??) pictures, when I was a kid. Still love, the originality of it, though.
Actually what they did get right is the computer "singing". Many early computers had loudspeakers hooked up to internal signal lines. This was used to be able to "hear" what the computer was doing. For example if you use one of the address lines or processor flags the pitch will represent the speed at which a loop is executed. Since different loops in your program likely take differing amounts of time, you get a sort of "tune" which tells you where the program is at. If you run the same program regularly, that process will come to you intuitively.
I saw this film when I was little. I found it an interesting story, with a riveting ending. It's a good cheesy "B" sci-fi of the era. I have it in my collection. Every once in awhile, I rewatch it. It's good fun. Who cares if the science isn't perfect? It's a lot better than contemporary sci-fi's with a too many special effects and not enough story or humanity.
Love B grade sci-fi and horror movies... Corny as but still, I enjoyed Magnetic Monster... 3 other favorites Kronos 1957 and X the unknown 1956 The Monolith Monsters 1957 to name a few
I would like to nominate "The Revenge of Doctor X"--also known as "Body of the Prey" (???) and "Venus Flytrap" (1970); about a scientist with a brain aneurysm trying to experiment on (apparently) a Frankenstein's monster made of bok choy. Based on a 20 year old screenplay by Ed Wood.
Ivan Tors was also responsible for Science Fiction Theater TV series.
Thé casting is great, particularly Richard Calson, King Donovan and Jean Byron. All three had long careers. The Los Alamos MANIAC computer was real and used in the film to give it scientific credentials.
To answer your question from 2018 at around 2:35 - Yes, those transport vehicles did indeed have lead lined windows. Lead glass was a real thing, and the windows were pretty thick.
At 2:05 I thought the guy said, "I kept on barding it without the party goods." Had to run it back like six times.
Not even a lead-lined truck can contain the comedic power of Dark Corners Reviews! The Tippy Tippy Top Of The Pop!
I got "Maximum Overdrive" vibes when that push mower started moving on its own. And I do not like M.O. vibes. They hurt my soul.
I don't know if there's even been a better turn of phrase than "Weird Moral Coda About Recreational Sex."
This movie is much, MUCH better than Maximum Overdrive!
2:47 “pretty soon, this element is going to make the Earth eccentric”
Gia (booming voice from no/everywhere): _”Nooo Moore WireHANGERRRSSSS!!!!”_
Interestingly enough, long after this movie was made some 1990 physicists went looking for "islands of stability" at the higher atomic number elements - created only in particle accelerators. Such elements would have interesting and unusual properties. It is now thought that the higher elements - like metals ect ect - originated in the interior of super novas, but if they had found the island it's not too big of a sci-fi stretch that such an element might actually be involved in the creation of higher elements instead. In any case this was a fun campy movie and a less ridiculous than giant bugs being created by the atomic bomb.
I actually saw this one on Turner Classic Movies one summer, during the last years of legendary host and film historian Robert Osborne, as part of a run of movies following the theme of "Things that Come Out of Holes" which also happened to include the original Howard Hawks version of THE THING, X- THE UNKNOWN and the original THE BLOB. One of those Things is not like the others...
With long hair, Robin looks like the rock singer Roger Daltrey from The Who band.
Lead glass? Why yes mother had a huge collection of leaded glass - but she called it "crystal".
+Dark Corners Reviews For future consideration for reviews how about the movies:
"Mama Dracula" with Louise Fletcher,
"The Boy Who Cried Werewolf", and
"Nocturna: Granddaughter of Dracula from 1978 with John Carradine and Yvonne DeCarlo
??Did you already review Robert Quarry's 3rd vampire movie where he was a Hippie Guru vampire with a minion of lost Hippies "Deathmaster" from 1972
Nocturna definitely: horrible acting, horrible disco music, and horrible flared pants!
Los Alamos did have early computers called MANIAC but not with quite the same words for the acronym.
At least it has Richard Carlson, star of one of my favorite TV shows, I Led 3 Lives and guest starred on one of my favorite eps of The Fugitive.
I don't know how true the stories shown in "I Led 3 Lives" were, but, they sure did a good job of ramping up the suspense in their scripts. The show made me a Carlson fan and I started noticing him in B-movies after that, such as "The Valley of Gwangi".
@@varanid9 Back in the late '70s, I Led 3 LIves aired at 5:35am on Friday mornings on an indy station in South Florida. (The other days of the week were other ZIV shows.) I got up extra early for high school to catch those shows.
Another name for this movie might've been: 'X: The Unknown' (element), as released here in the US? If not, then it is a very similar film I am thinking of.
1:08 Computers back then typically made noises like that - - ever watch that episode of SECRET LIFE OF MACHINES with Rex Garrod from the late 1980's?
2:35 Those windows could be composed of leaded glass!
3:00 There was no science behind the China Syndrome, just fearmongering of Nuclear Power lead by Hanoi Jane Fonda
X The Unknown is a different movie, and it's also pretty great, with some startling scenes. It's historically important in that it was Jimmy Sangster's first script for Hammer, and led directly to his being hired for their Frankenstein and Dracula reboots. It's also one of John Carpenter's favorite movies, and is one of the many classics he quoted in The Thing (compare Dean Jagger's lab in this film to Wilford Brimley's cabin).
It’s a ripoff of X the Unknown
Was that a row of foosball tables dressed as computers in the numbers crunching scene?
I have a soft spot for 50’s b movie ; so entertaining and so inventive, especially the giant monster movies
So my take on this is it seems to be an RKO Studio style riff on The Andromeda Strain.
Ivan Tors was responsible for "Flipper" and "Doctari" for TV.
You really need to review one of my favorite B-Movies, The 4D Man.
I like this movie and let's face it, the whole Sci-Fi genre is silly if you choose to see it that way. But "Magnetic Monster" tried to be different, as a Dragnet-style police drama with science. Add it to "Kronos" and "The Lost Missile" as a film that used inorganic threats, plenty of stock footage and strong leading men to offset a tiny budget.
btw sum old computers really did have audio output like that for debugging purposes a typical use was to output the current memory address to it, so you could tell what parts of your program were running based on the sound
I loved this as a kid, but ‘knowing stuff’ has totally ruined it for me. Never go back! Or Never change! Those seem to be the choices.
This movie is reminiscent of The Atomic Kid (1954) with Mickey Rooney.
I hate to have a 70th comment and ruin the number, but the "singing maniac" is actually not an unrealistic portrayal of the computer (the obvious radio equipment prop is, but anyhow) it wasn't unheard of for computers back then to have audio output that reflected the program. I believe the TX-0 had a 1bit square wave driven by a particular bit inside the CPU's memory. It was also possible to just put an AM radio next to the CPU of about any of em, and the huge amount of radio interference wud generate tones
Skilled operators could actually use this to figure out which parts of their program were running at a given time, and that cud aid in debugging
That singing sounds like devil bagpipes.
1:48 Jeff the scientist, eh? He’s not a geologist is he?! 🤨
I love Monster magnet !!! 🎶SPACE LORD MOTHER MOTHER🎶
Jeez it's a hokey B movie. Let's pick it apart with a critical eye. Why? I just watched it and it was fun! It had romance, aviation, science, drama. Two throttles for a four engine airplane flown by a captain with two stripes, T-33 jet that turns into an F-86 as soon as it leaves the ground, one bed bedroom before the two bed censors. C'Mon!! Two thumbs up!
I hate to be the nerd (but I guess I am) you can make lead lined glass. I've seen it. It doesn't look any different & they may have lied to me but they said it was lead lined.
As far as wannabe hard science movies that screwed their science up big time: Silent Running (tree-hugging hippie crap that has no knowledge of basic ecology or biology), Mission the Mars (everything except Gary Sinise sucks, the physics are especially awful but I really wanted to throw something HARD at the screen when I saw the creationist cop-out at the end) and Moon (totally gets the science of cloning wrong and the premise makes less sense the more you think about it, even though they made a big deal about the accuracy of the helium-mining machinery).
FOOTNOTE: this movie during the climax padded out some of the action by using clips from the1920s fantasy movie GOLD ! Also ,ivan tors studios had this movie start out as a TV series pilot , about two science detectives investigating science based crimes! Apparently someone thought this movie would be better!!
never mess with jeff, he has less than 10 nuclear bombs
No one is willing to discuss the Element in the room.
Well "Earthquake" (1974) had me until 52 yr old Ava Gardner called 59 yr old Lorne Greene "Dad". ....he would have been seven yrs old the year she was born
Hey, it worked just fine on "Bonanza." :)
It speaks in bagpipe!
Thank you
I thought the movie was very entertaining and fun to watch. I have it on DVD and watch it occasionally.
"Serious science"? Well, the movie, and the whole OSI series, was the clear predecessor for The X Files.
@5:20 Is that Germany's Iron Cross? What is it doing here?
With some of the more jaw-dropping movies you review, I have to pause it and go check AllHorror to see if we have this one... We don't! Check IMDB - it's listed as "scifi" not "horror"! Oh thank God! Still, what a masterpiece of 1950s cheese.
Can you look at a dinosaur movie called Baby Secret Of The Lost legend PS what is the biggest alien rip-off that has ever been made ?
This film intrigues me! Seems like it might've worked better if it had been made for television?
Quite often with these films we think they would have made good Twilight Zone episodes.
Dark Corners Reviews In this particular case I was thinking more of the BBC serialised dramas of the 1950s and early 1960s. Although the title sounds like something from the 5th season of "The Avengers"!
I think I saw this movie on TV years ago under another title.
It does have a Quatermass vibe to it.
An astute thought: This film was actually to serve as a pilot for a potential tv series dealing with scientists investigating strange and dangerous phenomena. Kind of "documentary"-like in tone, similar to the currently popular series, DRAGNET. Serious in tone and without the usual old monsters and mad scientists. It was probably too "intellectual" for tv audiences who---much like today---preferred vulgar humor, violent crime and soap opera melodramatics.
Can you please review Invasion USA
the Brtish film X the Unkown is in some ways a similar plot to Magnetic Monster but it handled better . Not scientifically accurate but it a better film to watch
MANIAC was lost on you, it was a parody of UNIVAC and ENIAC, the first supercomputers
They needed to consult your dad.
so you're saying it's ready for a remake?
Interesting.
This movie deserves a smarter commentary, one that has context in mind, and isn't trying to be so "cute".
I don't know but I kind of liked this flick 👌
You seem to always come up with well crafted, witty reviews. Your reviews are like a siren, leading a person to watch the same "B" movies you sat through.
Thankful the sailors have tied me to the mast. For those who don't know their Odyssey, this reference is pure and innocent
Beg to differ, I have always liked this movie.
Do be honest they should of called this film "The Magnetic Element" or something.
I like this movie
My favorite hackneyed special effect in this film is early on in the department store when Richard Carlson throws the metal washers up at the ceiling in an attempt to locate the source of the magnetism. Obviously, they dropped a handful of washers on a textured surface and simply turned the footage upside down. The effect is hilariously ruined by the couple of washers that roll around a bit before finally coming to rest.
Again I watch
Honestly I think this is the first review of yours where I don't think you got it at all. The Atom and Radiation was referred to as an entity of sorts by those of us in the USA. We even had mascots of sorts for things like Uranium promoted by the AEC to make people LIKE nuclear energy and to defend atomic testing and the bomb. This movie is a perfect reflection of personalizing an inanimate active source of power which presents a constant threat of danger and death to the world. The movie is horribly out of place in today's world, but if you time traveled back to the 50s and lived a decade under that fear and in that climate of atomic energy being a living breathing thing, I think you'd understand the narrative choice a bit more.
Now, if you excuse me, I need to refuel my Mr Fusion with a few banana peels and get back to place a bet on the 57 world series.
There is another, better film about a force of nature treated as a monster. Twister.
Please pay attention to your sound levels. High, low, high, low is just hard to tolerate.
Most definitely a b science fiction classic. Great movie with perhaps Carlson's finest performance. King donovan is also very good. Top acting.
This review gets this film completely wrong. He really has to try hard and use those "clever" clip bites to make something, uh, entertaining (ish) out of some of his reviews.
This is one of my favorite movies of the decade, one of the few genuine hard-science fiction films. If you like your sci-fi smart, you'll like this one.
Big ripoff of X the Unknown, which is a great B movie.
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I think your review is over-thinking this movie way too much. It's not a documentary, it's fiction.
888th like.
First to comment. This movie looked truly decrepit. Like "Andromeda Strain" for idiots.
I wonder how much influence this had on Doomwatch: Mutant 59: The Plastic Eaters.