The uneven INDESTRUCTIBLE MAN (1956) attempts to mash up the gangster movie with the monster movie
#31DaysOfHorror: October 21
This October, I’ll be reviewing 31 horror movies in 31 days! You can see the ongoing list of what I’ve watched and reviewed here.
Lon Chaney, Jr. was an iconic Universal horror actor who gave a number of fantastic monster performances, playing all four of the main creatures — The Wolf Man, the Mummy, Frankenstein’s monster, and Dracula — at various points during his career. By 1956, though, the monsters were past their heyday (except the Creature from the Black Lagoon, which was just getting started), and Lon Chaney Jr.’s career had slowed down considerably.
That year, he starred in Indestructible Man, which, despite what the title suggests, is not about a superhero. Instead, it’s a weird mashup of a gangster/crime movie with a monster movie, sort of a film-noir-esque detective story about a really awful detective who utterly fails at capturing an indestructible killer. The killer (played by Chaney) is named Charles “The Butcher” Benton; after he’s executed for robbing an armored truck — which to me seems like a light crime for someone nicknamed “The Butcher” — a scientist buys his body to experiment on and accidentally electro-shocks him back to life. In the process, “his cells each multiply hundreds or thousands of times,” which apparently has the side-effect of making him indestructible, rather than a gigantic formless, cancerous blob of flesh and fluids. So, now that he can’t be killed, he gets down to the business of hunting the people who put him in jail and killing them by tossing them from great heights.
Seriously. That’s his M.O. — he lifts obvious dummy versions of his victims over his head and throws them and they die.
The scientist’s experiment also destroys his vocal chords, so aside from an expository scene at the beginning where The Butcher lays out a plan to get revenge on the people who put him in jail, Chaney spends most of the movie mute. His performance is quite good, considering how uneven and ridiculous the rest of the movie is; his large, lumbering body and his soft, expressive face make for a character that’s almost sympathetic, even as he goes around Los Angeles killing people. I like the old monster movies where you root for the killer, and that’s easy to do here, especially in the final sequence, which I’ll get to in a moment.
The rest of the film, on the other hand, is extremely uneven and doesn’t work in the slightest. It’s like the movie is split in two halves that barely ever cross paths or inform each other at all. First, there’s the revitalized Butcher going on his dummy-tossing spree. Second, there’s a plot narrated by the police detective who helped lock up The Butcher, ostensibly as he’s recording an audio-taped case history for the record, Dragnet style. Get this: The detective’s name is Dick Chasen.
Dick.
Chasen.
The detective is in love with a burlesque dancer who used to know the Butcher, and the two of them meet up several times for her to reassure him over and over that she doesn’t know anything else about where the stolen money might be hidden. The detective has heard of an indestructible man roaming California killing people, but he doesn’t believe it’s the Butcher and spends the majority of the movie looking for the money instead of Indestructible Man.
The burlesque girl, on the other hand, knows that the Butcher and the Indestructible Man are the same person, so she tries to get ahead of him and warn his next victims. One of the soon-to-be dead men is a gangster who sold him out during the robbery. The character’s name is Squeamy Ellis, which might be my favorite character name in all of fiction. Squeamy’s reunion with The Butcher provides the best reaction shot of the entire film, which I am totally going to start using regularly as a reaction gif:
Aside from the invention of the name “Squeamy Ellis,” the best part of Indestructible Man is the sequence where the burlesque dancer goes to warn another of the victims that the Butcher is coming for him. The sequence is shot on-location in Los Angeles, out in the streets, as the girl and the monster circle one another, hop streetcars, and try to use the geography of the city to their advantage to try to get to the gangster first. It’s a long, wordless sequence, and the staging is truly impressive.
One gets the sense that they blew most of their budget on this sequence, because the rest of the film is not nearly as impressive. In fact, whenever there’s a closeup of the Butcher, the film just uses the same shot of Lon Chaney Jr. coming into focus and then staring directly into the camera, eyes twitching… over, and over, and over. I counted at least six instances of the same exact shot being spliced into scenes again and again.
Toward the end of the movie, when the police finally have the Butcher in their sights, they blast him with a flamethrower to try to test just how “indestructible” he really is. He’s wounded by it, because of course he is; having cells that have multiplied many times doesn’t stop your flesh from melting.
That’s when he becomes truly “monstrous” in the traditional sense, and the images of him but it’s also when he becomes the most sympathetic. He’s a disfigured, mute, lumbering, teary-eyed lump of flesh on the run from corrupt, cynical, jaded, incompetent police officers. How could you not want him to escape?
With its uneven construction, unintentional laughs, and silly, scare-free murder scenes, it’s easy to see why Indestructible Man didn’t become an icon on the same level of Chaney’s other characters. There was no Son of Indestructible Man, and he didn’t meet Abbott and Costello. He may have been indestructible, but he sure was disposable.
Here, have another extremely useful reaction gif from this movie.
But where can I watch it? Indestructible Man is available on TCM.com.
