THE MANSTER (1959)

A big shaggy beast breaks into a house and kills a woman, her blood spattering across the window, and we see he's gone on a rampage outside with dead women littering a pond. The beast is Kenji; his brother, research scientist Dr. Suzuki, has been experimenting with drugs he thinks can alter the course of evolution but all his subjects become violent brutes, including Kenji and Suzuki's wife who is now a bestial woman he keeps in a cage. Suzuki kills Kenji and looks for another subject, which he finds in Larry, an American reporter who has come to interview Suzuki at his isolated house and lab in the mountains near a volcano (maybe that's Chekhov's volcano?). The doctor gives Larry a knockout drug, injects him with the experimental serum, and Larry wakes none the wiser. Though the reporter is supposed to head back to the States to see his wife, he winds up being shown a good time in Tokyo by Suzuki and his lovely assistant Tara; rationalizing his behavior to Tara, Suzuki proclaims that in the name of scientific progress, what happens to any one man makes no difference. Larry starts to feel pains in his shoulder and hands, and is kept drunk and decadent by Tara and Suzuki. When his wife Linda shows up, catching him dallying with Tara, Larry finds his hands transforming into hairy paws and he heads out into the nighttime streets where he blacks out and goes on a rampage, eventually entering a temple and killing a priest. More blackouts and deaths follow until Larry discovers an eyeball growing on his shoulder, which eventually mutates into a second head. Soon, with the cops on his trail, Larry heads back to Suzuki’s lab where the doctor has an attack of conscience and gives Larry a serum that might enable Larry's monster half to split apart. The fairly exciting climax occurs on the edge of the volcano. Though filmed in Japan with several Japanese actors, this horror/sci-fi film is primarily a Hollywood production, with British actor Peter Dyneley and his wife Jane Hylton playing Larry and Linda, and the dialogue is mostly delivered in English. Despite a reputation as a bargain basement Z-film, it's not bad. It does have a low budget, but the monster outfits are effective, and the two-headed effect is done very well and used sparingly. We’re meant to have a good deal of sympathy for Larry, but because we see little of him before he's driven to bad behavior by Suzuki, it was hard for me to really care much about his fate. [Spoiler!] The fact that Larry's monster half does split off and good Larry survives was a bit surprising, and the effect is done well. Performances are adequate, though Satoshi Nakamura never quite gets as crazed as most mad doctors of the era do. I’d seen this years ago in a murky, splicy print, but the version currently on YouTube is in very nice shape, taken, I assume, from a recent Blu-ray disc.