**SPOILERS** One of the great Boris Karloff's most sympathetic and touching roles as a mad scientist who's obsessed in his mission to conquer paralysis but at the same time goes a bit too far and over the line, in murdering a number of people, in doing it. After a polio epidemic hit the quite little town of Red Creek dozens of townspeople ended up dying from it including the towns doctor Bernard Adrian's, Boris Karloff, wife and young daughter. Determined to find a cure for this, at the time, incurable disease Dr. Adrian started to fiddle around in his lab with spinal fluid feeling that it's the key in curing that illness but the spinal fluids that Dr. Adrian needed was from humans beings that if extracted from them would eventually kill them.
While treating a patient, what seems like the only one in Red Creek who's willing to put up with him, the pretty but wheelchair-bound Frances Clifford, Maris Wrixon,Dr. Adrian is called upon to do an emergency operation on gorilla trainer J. Standford Jolley who was mauled by the big ape, Nabu, when he began abusing the, what he thought was, helpless animal. Seeing his chance to get the valuable spinal fluids from the near-dead Jolley Dr. Adrian extracted it from his spine thus killing him.
Injecting the spinal fluids into the unaware Frances she suddenly began to get some feeling in her legs that were totally paralyzed for ten years but the bumbling old fool, in a fit of exhilaration, dropped the test tube containing the fluid causing it to smash to pieces and become worthless. Meanwhile Nabu the escaped gorilla makes his way to Dr. Adrian's place and in a wild and pitched struggle the elderly and frail Dr. Adrian ends up killing the 400 pound gorilla and using it, or it's hide, to go out in the countryside looking for new victims to both kill and extract their spinal fluids.
Even though Dr. Adrain is undoubtedly a homicidal maniac you have to say that his heart is in the right place in him using his talents as a man of medicine to help rather then hurt those he's treating. Blinded by his attempt to cure those who are suffering from crippling diseases like polio the kindly but at the same time foolish old man just overlooked the fact that he had no right to play God with peoples lives like he did in the film.
Tracked down by a posse of townspeople Dr. Adrian, dressed in a gorilla suit, is shot and stabbed a number of times as he tries to find, and kill, new victims for his experiments and the big reward that he gets at the end of the film, as he's about to expire, is that Frances whom he was so determined to cure got up off her wheelchair and walked towards the dying doctor showing him, and the people of Red Creek, that he wasn't all that bad. Whether they were good bad or indifferent I seriously doubt that the medical community would continue the late Dr. Adrian mad and murderous experiments anytime in the near future or for that matter anytime at all.
While treating a patient, what seems like the only one in Red Creek who's willing to put up with him, the pretty but wheelchair-bound Frances Clifford, Maris Wrixon,Dr. Adrian is called upon to do an emergency operation on gorilla trainer J. Standford Jolley who was mauled by the big ape, Nabu, when he began abusing the, what he thought was, helpless animal. Seeing his chance to get the valuable spinal fluids from the near-dead Jolley Dr. Adrian extracted it from his spine thus killing him.
Injecting the spinal fluids into the unaware Frances she suddenly began to get some feeling in her legs that were totally paralyzed for ten years but the bumbling old fool, in a fit of exhilaration, dropped the test tube containing the fluid causing it to smash to pieces and become worthless. Meanwhile Nabu the escaped gorilla makes his way to Dr. Adrian's place and in a wild and pitched struggle the elderly and frail Dr. Adrian ends up killing the 400 pound gorilla and using it, or it's hide, to go out in the countryside looking for new victims to both kill and extract their spinal fluids.
Even though Dr. Adrain is undoubtedly a homicidal maniac you have to say that his heart is in the right place in him using his talents as a man of medicine to help rather then hurt those he's treating. Blinded by his attempt to cure those who are suffering from crippling diseases like polio the kindly but at the same time foolish old man just overlooked the fact that he had no right to play God with peoples lives like he did in the film.
Tracked down by a posse of townspeople Dr. Adrian, dressed in a gorilla suit, is shot and stabbed a number of times as he tries to find, and kill, new victims for his experiments and the big reward that he gets at the end of the film, as he's about to expire, is that Frances whom he was so determined to cure got up off her wheelchair and walked towards the dying doctor showing him, and the people of Red Creek, that he wasn't all that bad. Whether they were good bad or indifferent I seriously doubt that the medical community would continue the late Dr. Adrian mad and murderous experiments anytime in the near future or for that matter anytime at all.