User reviews

Wheeler (Frank Gerstle), a tourist-hunter in the California High Sierras, is not believed by the patrons of Webb's Cafe when he claims to have run across a live tiger with tusks. Among the scoffers is game-warden George Oakes -- until he is driving home later that night and the critter hops on the hood of his car.

The general idea of this film is pretty standard -- you have a mad scientist who wants to turn people into Neanderthals and cats into saber-toothed tigers. There are plenty of scientific arguments that can be made against this being possible, but let us just ignore that...

He gets especially upset when his theories are presented to the local natural history society and they scoff at him. Interestingly, he includes Piltdown Man as part of the evolutionary chain of man -- a fossil that was determined to be a hoax in November 1953, around the same time as this film came out...

What could be considered really sad about this film is that it comes from director E. A. Dupont, who used to be somebody. Once upon a time, he was a big name in the world of German silent cinema, writing and directing "Variete" starring Emil Jannings and with Karl Freund operating the camera. A classic film. And now, at this point, he is directing cheesy science fiction with cheesy makeup and no real directorial flair. This is your average science fiction film of the 1950s, with almost no notable names (besides Dupont). He could have done better...

The one possibly notable name is Beverly Garland, who played the waitress. Although not A-list, she did go on to appear in multiple Roger Corman films and continued acting up through the 2000s on shows such as "7th Heaven". Some could say Robert Shayne was notable, but aside from bit parts in "North By Northwest" and "Invaders From Mars" he hardly left his mark.

Although perhaps talking this movie down, I am not saying you should avoid this film, but just be prepared for the average 1950s flick, probably not something you will tell your friends about. For those who really must see it, Scream Factory has released a nice blu-ray of the film, with a fairly decent transfer (though no special features).

A haughty Professor becomes intent on proving that mankind's gradual evolution did not necessarily affect his quotient of intelligence. Despite the distinguished directorial credit, this is a thoroughly routine horror programmer of the 'mad scientist' variety, with more than its fair share of unintended hilarity amid the general tackiness. In fact, I would go so far as to say that, as played by Robert Shayne, the doctor here is the rudest in film history and watching him let rip with insults at his staid, disapproving colleagues was a hoot! Typically for this sort of fare, the all-important serum is first tested on animals or 'lesser' humans – in this case, a perennially terrified domestic cat is turned into a saber-toothed tiger and a mute servant girl into a bushy-eyebrowed ape woman (albeit, apparently, just long enough for her to sit for some photographic evidence of the veracity of his claims) – before applying it to himself. The proverbial redneck hostility to a marauding tiger preying on their livestock and later a simian kidnapper of women is present and accounted for; what is more surprising is that the middle-aged professor has a good-looking and much younger fiancée who still relishes hopes of dragging him from his laboratory off to a church altar and, naturally, once the young urban expert hero comes along, he falls for the charms of the professor's clueless daughter. The TNT-culled print I watched left an awful lot to desire so, in spite of my reservations, I acquired a superior copy of the film the minute it was over!

Professor Groves theories about the brain capacity of Neanderthal man is viewed as heresy by his fellow scientists. To prove his theories, professor Groves experiments with a de-evolution serum. His early experiments on cats results in one turning into a sabre tooth tiger. He then tries the serum on himself where he is transformed into a Neanderthal man and goes on a killing rampage.

THE NEANDERTHAL MAN is a rather blah horror film with indifferent performances, grainy black and white photography, and scant thrills. The film was directed by E.A. Dupont, the same man who directed VARIETY, one of the greatest films of the silent period. Apparently, by the time THE NEANDERTHAL MAN was made, E.A. Dupont had slipped down to just another hack director, as which this film is evidence of. Even some much less experienced directors working under flimsy circumstances like this showed more inventiveness than Dupont shows here. The best scenes in the film are those with the sabre tooth cat and the one where the hero finds the photographs of an early experiment Groves had conducted on his deaf mute house maid. Overall, THE NEANDERTHAL MAN looks and plays more like a poverty row horror film from 1943 than a low budget horror/sci fi film from 1953.

Of interest to fifties horror/science fiction movie fans is the presence of a very young Beverly Garland as Nola. Unlike her later films where she played a tough fiesty heroine, she plays the standard frightened female who screams and faints.

"The Neanderthal Man" is a very, very bad film. But it's also very campy and kitschy...and is fun to watch, albeit very, very stupid! It's a variation on "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde"...but a very badly made one.

A very strange and enormous cat-like creature has been spotted in the Sierras in California. It's mostly strange because for most of the shots, you see a normal everyday tiger...but in closeups it's got a silly fake head with enormous Sabre-tooth Tiger-like fangs. But it's hilarious that in many scenes you don't see the fangs at all and in others they are there. This special effect must have cost at least $4!

Eventually, it's difficult to deny that something is out there...but despite more and more evidence, Professor Groves acts angrier and angrier. He's also fond of telling everyone (particularly the other professors) how stupid and short-sighted they are for not agreeing 100% with him and his wacky theories--though he's offered zero proof! Could this nutty professor (and not of the Jerry Lewis variety) have something to do with the strange sightings as well as a murderous caveman that soon appears as well?

The Sabre-tooth Tiger is hilariously bad...as is the getup the Neanderthal guy sports. But, despite being really, really stupid the film is fun to watch because Robert Shayne is wonderfully silly as Professor Groves. He is obviously imbalanced...and hilariously so. Heck, he makes Dr. Strangelove look totally normal by comparison!

By the way, fans of 1950s TV will likely recognize Shayne as the Inspector from "The Adventures of Superman". Also, while the sign language they use in the film isn't perfect, it's not too bad...better than most you see in films. And, I should know as we use sign language regularly in my home.

Robert Shayne plays a scientist who in order to prove his theory about neanderthals being equal to humans because of brain size, develops a formula that regresses his cat to a sabertooth tiger and then also regresses his housekeeper and himself into dangerous neanderthals. Near Ed Wood levels of bad acting, writing, and direction ensure. Only watch this film for camp value, and it does certainly have that.

While Superman was on hiatus Robert Shayne who played Inspector Henderson got roped into doing this combination ripoff from Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde and The Invisible Man. Shayne's out doing some nasty experiments on cats among other things including himself. He's developed a serum that has the subjects revert to the primeval. Little house cats turn into sabre tooth tigers and pretty lame ones at that. And Shayne when he injects himself goes all Hyde.

What was Shayne thinking when he signed on for this? Or players like Richard Crane, Beverly Garland, William Fawcett and others. Shayne overacts outrageously to cover up how bad this is.

The SPCA should have gone after this film for cruelty to animals as well as the critics. One stinkerooney with an ending totally ripped off from Claude Rains and The Invisible Man.

An ultra-cheesy '50s monster flick in which we get to see Robert Shayne (Inspector Henderson from TV's ''Adventures of Superman'') shamelessly recite hilarious dialogue and feverishly overact, as a dedicated mad scientist who's found a way to reverse the evolutionary process! It's the treat of the film to watch him rant and rave about his idiotic theories without applying the brakes. First he turns a common house cat into a fierce saber-toothed tiger, accomplished by the effects team utilizing close-ups of a fake model; later, he jabs himself with a serum that transforms him into the title character. You've got to get a load of this ape-man's face; it's one of the most ridiculous-looking of all film monsters, obviously an over-the-head mask you'd buy in any Halloween shop, and completely expressionless with a rubber muzzle and painted set eyes that don't move. For his creature, the filmmaker should have chosen to stay with the crude third or fourth stage appliances during the chintzy transformation sequence.

A real hoot, and a good deal of fun if you go for these types of silly yet entertaining creature features. We also get to see a young Beverly Garland in the cast, although a double for her is blatantly used in a sequence where she dons a bathing suit and models for a photographer. **1/2 out of ****

I recall growing up in my school years in America with the many science teachers making their evolution claims based on the so'called Piltdown Symdrom's man as the 'Proof'. As many reviewers have said it was exposed as a hoax in the same year as this came out,1953! Its only 2 stars in my books because of the foolish looks from the 'Science community' to Robert Shayne's mad ravings! I've only caught this in the last year or so and its got some of the best laughable bits I have run across. One I will say is when Dr. Harkess is in his room and he hears sounds from outside his window. They sounded to me like the call of animals in 'darkest Africa' or a prerecorded sound track from stock movies. Perhaps the deaf maid had to run from his room because her 'Animal instincts' were stirred and she didn't want to throw herself at Dr. Harkess! Its only over an hour, the old Nash/ Ramblers are fun to look at, and its to bad the stuffed animal put on the windscreen wasn't just hanging from the state game warden's rear view mirror and he got a fright from that, not the Big Cat in the footage! So be entertained by the foolishness of the evolution of man, I always feel bad for the animals in the cages who are the brunt of experiments.

****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.

A scientist unintentionally turns himself into a prehistoric man by exposure to the blood of a prehistoric creature. It's just a typical mad-scientist Dr. Jeckyl and Mr. Hyde plot. The acting is average and the script is passable. He goes on a murdeous rampage as does his housecat who is turned into a sabertooth tiger the same way.

A most interesting and weakly executed Sci-Fi diversion, where we have a somewhat unbalanced scientist proposing a theory that brain size is indicative of intelligence. A theory laughed at by fellow scientists in this film, but now recognized as accurate.

Of course, in the film, the scientist promotes as fact that brain size of the neanderthal is perhaps even larger than modern man, when it was not. That's the flaw here, but still we get to see him revert himself back to a neanderthal with violent tendencies, probably also pretty far-fetched. I'd expect a neanderthal in today's world to be more bewildered and frightened than overtly violent for no reason.

Also of notable fun is the "reversion" of house cats to sabre-tooth tigers. Pretty unlikely as they're not really evolutionarily that closely related in any line. But still fun and in one case, ironically deadly.

This is mild low-budget 1950s science fiction, short enough to not be tedious, although the excessively prose dialog is annoying. It's almost like writing in a period stage-drama style of the 1900s, and applying it to a 50s B-movie.

While merely okay, this film could have been so much better in the hands of Jack Arnold and the sci-fi effects wizards at 1950s Universal-International. Oh, wait, I just remembered they did it as Monster on the Campus.

The cheapest sets this side of an Ed Wood film. That cafe! The worst camera work this side of, well, an Ed Wood film. Favorite part of the transformation : only the head and hands change. Favorite piece of dialogue : "He was more animal than man...the spittle running down. .." But, for all that, it's very watchable.

It's the details that bother me. Professor Groves is wearing a wedding ring. Unless I missed it, there was no mention of a wife or earlier marriage. Who threw the ether bottle through his lab window in the opening scene and why? The beer poured straight into a glass at the bar should have had a head. He says the transformation took 20 or 25 minutes (I don't remember which). How would a Neanderthal know how to tell time? The woman posing for the photographer during their picnic was so obviously not Beverly Garland. Harkness mispronounces "zoological". You'd think a scientist wouldn't make that mistake.

Acting was par for the course.

I love 1959s science fiction. I do. There are great movies; the day the earth stood still, war of the worlds, forbidden planet and then, there are low budget losers like this. Honestly, if it hadn't been for Beverly Garland, one of my favorite actresses, I might have passed on this loser. Slow, with bad effects-especially the close up of the sabre toothed tiger-are laughable. The science, as in many of these, is laughable. Robert Shayne as the mad scientist, who loses his temper at the drop of a hat, would go on to greater fame in TVs the adventures of Superman as inspector William 'Bill' Henderson. This film is pretty forgettable. But it does have Beverly Garland who graced many a B film and starred in the first police drama, decoy which is totally worth seeing.

An awful lot of people don't like this film but it has some wonderful things in it and some off the wall things too. Robert Shayne plays the mad scientist with the ever-adoring fiancee in a truly over the top fashion. In one sequence while he is ranting about being left alone (a sequence straight out of the original Frankenstein), she tousles his hair so that it goes in all directions at once and seems a total send-up of the would-be dramatic moment at hand. In addition, every time the scene shifts to the mountains and countryside an incredibly lush theme is played that seems like something out of an old Lowell Thomas documentary travelogue! In the beginning of the film there is an inexplicably jazzy score playing while a man is attacked in his car by a sabre-toothed tiger. At times we glimpse the tiger who has ordinary teeth and yet when we see it in extreme close-up after being killed or in a kind of freeze frame as it attacks a car it has its sabre teeth. In another sequence we are to believe that an ordinary cat can be turned into a sabre-toothed tiger through use of a regressive serum that takes it back to its ancestors-- at least I think that's what's going on! Despite all of these oddities the film has a clear narrative and is lively enough to hold one's interest, if just in watching out for the next oddity. One is left wondering why the neanderthal man's teeth are so bad for example when in fact ancient peoples had fine teeth when we find them usually because of their ability to chew and tear with them and keep them well honed. But this fellow seems to have set on by demented dentists. Then there is the whole theory of regression into our ancestors using an argument that brain SIZE is what is most significant, not considering that development of smaller, more effective portions of the brain might evolve over time. Instead, we get here an anti-evolution theory that is so bad it is scoffed at even by the semi-literate faculty in this film. And then Mr. Shayne tells us that in "regressing" to the neanderthal state he will be going back "one million years" when in fact neanderthalers flourished 100,000 years ago, not a million, and it is never explained why he is regressing to the neanderthal state and not some other pathway of human evolution. I had a lot of fun attempting to find what I thought were staggering gaps in the overall presentation of this film BUT I enjoyed the various goofy characters, the narrative clarity and the ability of director Dupont to keep the low-budget proceedings moving about briskly. I think if you are not too demanding, have a puff of anthropology in your background and enjoy movies made solely to entertain you'll enjoy this one. By the way, the movie was HEAVILY influenced by the Bridey Murphy phase the whole country was going through at the time this movie was made!!! An American housewife named Virginia Tighe, through hypnosis, claimed to have regressed to becoming a 19th century woman named Bridey Murphy. The whole country was taken up with the belief that we could all regress to earlier lives...and that formed the inspiration for the screenplay and the outrageous theories presented in this film.

Cranky scientist experimenting on transforming animals and people into their prehistoric selves (sorta), tries it out on himself and becomes a Mr. Hyde-type Neanderthal. Robert Shayne (Inspector Henderson from The Adventures of Superman) plays the would-be Jekyll and he's great fun. His character gets upset with everyone and insults them at the slightest provocation. He's a real bitch and I love it! The rest of the cast is solid, with some interesting character actors like Robert Long and Dick Rich helping to keep things moving. The script doesn't give them a lot to work with but they bring their lines to life with conviction. Richard Crane is a bit annoying as the stiff protagonist and just about every woman in the movie is insufferable, save for the great Beverly Garland in a minor role. Working with an obviously limited budget, director E.A. Dupont and cinematographer Stanley Cortez craft a pretty polished-looking B picture. Of course only so much can be done special effects-wise on a small budget but there is some nice camera-work and a decent level of atmosphere in some of the night scenes. Better than some of the other reviewers are giving it credit for but nowhere near a classic. Worth a look for fans of '50s B horror and sci-fi.

Ewald André Dupont, an absolutely unknown name in the film business. However, Dupont was a very prolific filmmaker, working in Germany, United Kingdom, Hollywood. As a director, Ewald André Dupont worked also with big names like Charles Laughton, Ronald Reagan, etc. Here are some unknown but very good, very convincing actors. The story is ridiculous, but the quality of the direction and the actors make the movie worthy of being seen. Beverly Garland and Richard Crane they worked together in a much better Horror, Sci-Fi, "The Alligator People" (1959).

Neanderthal Man, The (1953)

* 1/2 (out of 4)

Poor horror film about a mad scientist (Robert Shayne) trying to bring man back to the stone age. He turns his pet kitten into a saber-toothed tiger, he then injects himself with his magical serum and turns into the title character. This film only runs 78-minutes but it felt like three hours considering not too much ever happens. The neanderthal man looks silly but the makeup is certainly memorable. The only problem is that he's not on screen enough. Some of the close ups of the tiger gets a few laughs since you can tell it's just a toy. It's also interesting that most horror films from this period try to play the scientist in a sympathetic view point but that's not the case here. The scientist here has got to be the biggest jerk ever to grace a horror film.

Before watching this on YouTube, I saw a video of Hotlegs' single "Neanderthal Man" which had some members of a later group called 10cc and also some scantily clad young women dancing. This horror film is pretty talky and the makeup to turn someone into the title character is pretty dreary to the modern viewer but if you're familiar with the way transformation was done in these old movies, it's quite a hoot to watch as is the way a normal tiger is suddenly made to look huge and have saber teeth in one hilarious insert! There's also some pretty women like frequent B-movie starlet Beverly Garland who looks quite gorgeous here, I must say! Overall, this was both a little cheezy and dramatically entertaining. Next, I'll watch a more modern take on caveman-in-present-time movie called Iceman...