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Absolutely brilliant

A lot of fun.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

It's April, 2013, an age of scientific advance Mr. Carlson surely would have loved to have seen, and TCM just had a Richard Carlson tribute evening. All his best. These movies have lost nothing of their fascination from the time I first watched them as a young child through now as I'm just a tinch shy of my "golden years". Those of us who fall into this age category have the wonderful advantage of having seen science fiction be translated into science fact. We were the dreamers who saw the beginnings of the space age through these incredible films of the 50's of which Richard Carlson's were among the best. This movie, along with Riders to the Stars, were his first attempts to try to provide more science "fact" than "fiction" and they still to this day provide excellent film watching. They also are from a period where films still relied mainly on actually telling a story, as opposed to whip fast computer generated graphics to provide all the entertainment. The Magnetic Monster delves into the relatively unknown to the average person, but terrifying world of nuclear material, and a batch of it that seems to actually be alive and with a voracious appetite. I found it more like watching a documentary than a film and this one stuck with me, even after all these years. It's well worth a watch and if you have young children, especially age 8-11, try to get them to take a watch with you. I'm sure many a scientist today got their initial thirst for science from some of Carlson's wonderful films. ENJOY!!

What a nice walk down memory lane! No saggy drawers or F bombs. If you like your sci-fi a little cheesy with some belly laughs, this film is perfect! The only thing that comes to mind that would have made this better would have been a cameo by Ed Wood and Bela Lugosi! This is NOT Oscar stuff here but it is enjoyable!!! There's lots of lightning and scientific jargon that makes you go Huh????? You also have the pretty young lady and all the crazy Doc Brown like scientists running around. This almost has a Frankenstein feeling to it. I watched this on TCM. It's nice there are still opportunities to see these movies made during the atomic/radiation scare days of the 50's. Pop the popcorn and sit back and relax and enjoy the corny special effects!

***SPOILERS*** Complicated and confusing movie with so much scientific jargon in it that you need a degree in nuclear physics to understand what it or those n it the film are talking about. The movie has to do with this growing piece of nuclear energy or matter that if not stopped will consume the entire earth and after that the universe along with it.It was nutty professor Denker, Leonard Mudie, who created this thing while experimenting with nuclear material in his laboratory upstairs of a local electrical appliance store in L.A. that had his assistant die from nuclear fallout with a scared to death Denker then taking off for L.A Airport for a flight out of the country together with the dangerous nuclear element, which he dubbed Serranium, along with him. It's hot shot nuclear physicist Prof.Jeffery Stewart, Richard Carlson, and his equally hot shot assistant Prof. Dan Forbes, King Donovan, who get the lowdown on what Prof. Danker was up too and found out, with their geiger-counters, what plane he was on to get him and the Serranium in a safe place where they can study it and at the same time save his life from dying form radiation exposer. As things tuned out it was too late for Prof. Danker but not for the earth that's if that both Stewart & Forbes can find a way from keeping it the Serranium from growing by feeding on all the matter around it. A fantastic growth that doubles every 11 hours until there's nothing left for it to feed on by consuming all the matter on the entire planet earth!***SPOILERS*** Despite all the action on screen it's almost impossible to know exactly what's happening with all the over your head talk about nuclear physics by Stewart & Co that it would have been much better if there were sub-titles added so you could be able to under what everyone, all men and women with degrees and doctorates in nuclear mechanics, in the film are talking about. The ending is anything but exciting in that all you get to know what happened is what Stewart and his fellow nuclear physic professors are telling you which is like trying to understand what their saying in ancient Greek or Latin! We do get a number of earth shaking underwater explosions, the result of bombarding the Serranium with a billion volts of electricity, that we can't quite figure out what exactly they had to do with the movie's plot but at least they keep us awake and from falling asleep during the great and exciting climatic sequence in the film.P.S The shots of the inside of what I think is a super Canadian nuclear reactor were in fact taken from the 1934 German futuristic film "Gold" which the US & UK Government thought at the time was about Nazi Germany's nuclear program. In fact the movie "Gold" was about as confusing and mind boggling as it's imitator "The Magnatic Monster" in that we now know that there wasn't a German nuclear program back in 1934 or any other time during Hitler's 12 year Nazi regime.

Most science fiction from the 1950s are very artistic, well directed, and entertaining.This one flails a bit more, but it does so in an effort to be low key. They don't look to use a big budget for effects, but still manage to show their story reasonably well.The story is the problem here, however. It never really is clear just what the scientists are talking about. They seem to want to make some very deep philosophical point, but that is where the flailing comes in. Each time they begin to try to explain what the microscopic magnetic atomic monster is doing, they digress into a confusing ideology that no one understands.The idea of the microscopic monster, the unseen force left to the imagination, works well enough. The characters do, too. It just fails on the story level enough to make merely a mediocre film, not nearly as good as most monster films from the fifties.