The Man and the Monster

In Brief: Long on atmosphere, short on logic, and generally a lot of fun — either despite or because of one of the dumbest werewolf makeup designs ever — The Man and the Monster (1959) is fairly typical of Mexican horror films of the late 1950s and early 1960s. These movies were given short shrift for years because they were mostly known in their truncated, badly dubbed versions shown on TV. In recent years, however, we’ve started to see decent prints in their original language. If they aren’t exactly a revelation, they’re a lot better than initially thought and, as far as I’m concerned, much better than most Euro-horror. The films started because actor-producer Abel Salazar decided he could cash in on the Universal horror pictures. (OK, so he came up with this notion pretty late in the day.) That’s what he aimed for — often, as is the case here, casting himself as the hero. If what he ended up with often had more in common with 1940s Monogram than Universal, it was still a game try, and certainly an entertaining one. Considering that his 1957 production, The Vampire (the film that started it all) lifted part of its plot from the 1942 Monogram film The Corpse Vanishes, it seems unlikely that Salazar was unaware of those movies.