A man-made element grows and grows - and grows some more - in this 1953 Ivan Tors technothriller. On the downside, this film is overloaded with incomprehensible technobabble ("It's unipolar! Antigravitic!"), badly matched stock footage (an F-80 Shooting Star is shown taking off, but somehow magically transforms into a swept-wing F-86, and without the wingtip tanks of the F-80!), and hilariously, if painfully, obvious cheap effects (the scene, early in the film, of the hardware supposedly tossed up to the ceiling of the hardware store). There are also little problems like the close-up of what is supposed to be an engine on a Super Constellation, but is, in reality, an engine on a B-25 medium bomber. On the plus side, it does star Richard Carlsen, King Donovan, a very young Strother Martin, and John Zaremba. A must-see: the Canadian Deltatron going into overload. What a light show! All things said and done, at least the premise is somewhat original, and the film does manage to hold your interest. To the best of our knowledge, this movie has never been released on any format, which is kind of a shame; it's really not that bad. Honest.
Review of The Magnetic Monster
