Go Retire Psychiatrist

Svengoolie Intro: “Calling all stations! Clear the air lanes! Clear all air lanes for the big broadcast!

The 1941 movie “Man Made Monster” starred Lon Chaney Jr. (as Big Dan, Dan McCormick) who later starred in “The Wolf Man”) as the monster; Lionel Atwill as Dr. Paul Rigas, the mad scientist who created the monster.

As a retired psychiatrist, I’d like to get another credit out of the way, which Svengoolie pointed out by mentioning the “2^nd Alienist” who didn’t actually appear in the movie. This prompted the question “who was the 1^st Alienist?” which is only part of the issue with the storyline.

So, to speed through the plot, Big Dan is a carnival sideshow performer who’s the only survivor of a bus accident in which all the other passengers except him are electrocuted (I’ll get back to that in a bit) who’s “immune” to electric shocks and who’s out of work but accepts being a lab rat in Dr. Rigas’s experiment with electricity, which results in Dan becoming a sort of electricity-addicted zombie who obeys Dr. Rigas’s commands, one of which is to kill Dr. Rigas’s colleague. This leads to a murder trial in which an Alienist (which, by the time this film was made, was an obsolete title given to psychiatrists who treated mental asylum patients and gave legal depositions regarding sanity to stand trial and the like) who delivers a misleading performance of a despicable pseudo-psychoanalytic psychobabble-littered formulation of Dan’s trauma-filled early childhood in an asylum, which ends up being explanatory but also yields the conclusion that he’s sane and able to move to the next step, which is the death sentence by (what else?) the electric chair.  

The opening scene is a hoot because when the bus full of passengers accidentally crashes into a high voltage power line during a thunderstorm, all of them except Dan get electrocuted. Watts up with that? You don’t need to be a college graduate; just watch the Weather Channel where you learn that if you’re inside a metal vehicle and a lightning bolt hits it, you’re far less likely to get hurt because the vehicle acts like a faraday cage. The bolts go around it into the ground. Pay no attention to the Weather Channel blue chew commercials—I dare you to try. I guess the competition for erectile dysfunction drugs is getting intense because the half-dressed ladies now are revealing more than usual about what’s in blue chew—like apomorphine (along with other stuff) which can sometimes make you do something revolting.

The film implies that you can get addicted to electricity (wrong!), which is what happens to Big Dan. It reminds me of the 1968 Steppenwolf song (originally written by Hoyt Axton, by the way) “The Pusher”. I had this album. The lyrics went something like this:

I said discharge, yeh, discharge the pusher man

I’d ground him if he stand; I’d zap him if he’d run

I’d splice him to a hot wire and

Attach him with my staple gun!

Discharge! Discharge the pusher man!

Sena saw bits and pieces of this movie, but it reminded her of Johnny, (an electrician I never met because I was always on duty at the hospital as a consulting psychiatrist) but who used to do electrical work around a house we owned many years ago. Johnny never turned off the circuit breakers when he was installing and wiring stuff in the house. One day he got bit and all the lights went out. He had to flip the circuit breakers then. He was not immune to the jolt.

That’s kind of how things go in this movie. Nobody pays any attention to the reality of electricity, which for some reason bugs me yet I never question movies like “Son of Frankenstein” (1939), which by the way, Lionel Atwill (as Inspector Krogh) was also in. Atwill could not save “Man Made Monster”.

OK, no spoilers and I think Corky the dog should have got an academy award. The electricity jokes were the best but the movie was a short circuit. I give it a Shrilling Chicken Rating of 1/5.