Director: Freddie Francis
Year: 1973
Country: United Kingdom
Alternate Titles: N/A
Genre: Creature Feature
Plot:
Recovering a skeleton from New Guinea, a London doctor finds that the creature might be a possible missing link in human evolution, only for the discovery of water to reanimate the body, and he tries to keep his friends and family safe from the news.
Review:
This one turned out to be quite the fun effort. What really gives this one quite a lot to like is the fact that there's a great deal of fine backstory generated by the presence of the skeleton and what it really means, which is rather intriguing. By allowing for the unique location in New Guinea, there's a believability granted here to the attempted course of action of having the skeleton get reanimated with their knowledge of studying it, and that's a rather nice achievement here, made all the more possible with the film's insistence on spending the vast majority of the time studying the creature. Coming up with the manner of study, which brings the fun scenes of him reviving the beast and the discovery of the creature's blood that leads into the attempt to inject it into her, which is what really drives the film along here.
As well, this one features some solid work in the later half, trying to find her as she ventures out into the world for the first time, as the lead-in comes off very nicely, getting it out of their laboratory. The resulting scene in the pub, where she nearly gets assaulted and runs away, leading to the chase through the streets and into the warehouse, leads to some nice action scenes here as well. There's also the rather frantic finale here is even more fun, with the abduction of the creature and the eventual reanimation of the skeleton inside while they're all completely unaware of the incident, really makes for a much livelier and engaging effort than it really should be, as the full-on Gothic sensibilities are brought about in full force during this section, which is what makes it so fun.
Although these here make this one enjoyable enough, there's still some problems here in the fact that there's just not a whole lot of action to be had within this as a vast majority of the time this one doesn't really do much other than really helping to build the boredom of just watching the two fumble around their equipment spouting off tons of inane scientific babble that doesn't really focus on anything interesting. Though the film moves along at a decent-enough pace, these are just overall bland and dull, which just don't have any kind of interest throughout here, with the film really generating the kind of endless monotony of just staring at these scenes of nothing going on, which just goes on quite a long time.
Spiced within these scenes is another rather lame angle, with the film focusing on nothing but truly lame sub-plots to pad out the running time as there's little need for the scenes of the doctor wandering around the grounds complaining about his charges or focusing on the escaped mental patient that really has no place in the film and should've been taken out as it has no place in the film. Alongside the weak effects for the creature, which looks like a mass of jelly walking around, these are the film's weak points that lower it overall.
Overview: ***.5/5
A rather creepy if slow-going supernatural force in the genre, this one manages to get enough positive aspects overall that it comes together well enough to hold it off against the flaws present. Those with an appreciation for this era of genre fare, who are hardcore aficionados of Eurohorror in this style, or who are big fans of the creative crew will have a lot to like, while most others out there should heed caution.
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