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Great Film overall

Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.

The storyline feels a little thin and moth-eaten in parts but this sequel is plenty of fun.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

Great fodder for late night horror hosts. A mad scientist is on the loose, performing miniaturizing experiments deep in the jungles of Peru. Some fellow scientists are invited to assist him in his mysterious work, and it's pretty obvious what's going to happen to them. This is one of the earlier science fiction movies, and the "special effects" are certainly primitive by today's standards, but it's a highly re-watchable movie for its novelty value, sparked mostly by a deliciously psycho-sinister characterization by Albert Dekker in the title role. He starts out a paranoid weirdo, jealously guarding his research, and gets more and more bizarre and homicidal as the story progresses.For its time, the giant sets/forced perspective were probably the main draw of the movie, but the maniacal rants and actions of Dr. Thorkell were what I liked best. After making his rejected guests his first human subjects of the "condenser," it becomes a cat-and-mouse game as the sight-impaired Thorkell decides to exterminate his "little friends." Lines such as "I will find you, and when I find you, I will destroy you!" are frequent.The story doesn't grow too much beyond that point, but the action scenes are nonetheless still interesting to watch. Worth a look if you can find a copy.

Brilliant, but deranged physicist Dr. Alexander Thorkel (splendidly played with deliciously wicked relish by Albert Dekker) shrinks his enemies down to miniature size after they take him to task for his unconventional experiments. Director Ernest Schoedsack, working from a taut and engrossing story by Tom Kilpatrick, relates the gripping story at a brisk pace, maintains a generally serious tone throughout, and builds a good deal of suspense and momentum. The bald, burly, and bespectacled Thorkel makes for a marvelously ruthless, haughty, and sinister mad scientist. While Dekker clearly dominates the movie with his sterling performance, his co-stars nonetheless do respectable work in their roles: Charles Halton registers strongly as Torkel's most gutsy and vehement opponent Dr. Rupert Bulfinch, Thomas Coley is likable enough as handsome layabout Bill Stockton, the lovely Janice Logan impresses as the feisty and resourceful Dr. Mary Robinson (and looks quite fetching in her purple toga), and Victor Kilian contributes a solid turn as gruff trail guide Steve Baker. The scenes with the tiny people fending off giant animals and fighting back against Thorkel are extremely tense and exciting. The nifty special effects hold up quite well. Henry Sharp's vivid Technicolor cinematography gives the picture a pleasingly vibrant look. The robust and rousing score by Gerard Carbonara, Ernst Toch, and Albert Hay hits the stirring spot. The tight 77 minute running time ensures that this movie never gets dull or overstays its welcome. An immensely fun film.

Albert Dekker is a reclusive mad scientist hiding away in a laboratory in the Peruvian jungle. Boy, are three scientists back in the states surprised to get an invitation from Dekker to join him. The three surprised scientists are Charles Holton, Janice Logan, and Thomas Coley. They make the arduous journey to Peru and are joined by a lowbrow miner, Victor Kilian, for reasons the script doesn't bother to deal with. At Dekker's laboratory they meet Pedro, Frank Yaconelli, a lovable and sometimes comic Peruvian peasant. I knew the minute I saw him that he was a tostada. That's the function of minorities in movies like this. Dekker, in a padded suit and thick spectacles, greets them and asks them to look through his microscope and tell him what they see. "Iron crystals." Thank you -- and good-bye. The visitors are aghast. They made this trip just so that they could spend 30 seconds looking through Dekker's microscope? Well -- yes. The scientists are offended and curious about what's going on. They discover that Dekker has built his lab next to a super-rich vein of radium ore, which he is using in experiments that shrink living organisms. When Dekker discovers that they have discovered the nature of his discovery, he shrinks them too. Alas, he finds that his now-shrunken five human beings are beginning to grow imperceptibly back to their normal size, so he asphyxiates one, blasts another with his shotgun, and pursues the remaining three until, with pluck and ingenuity, they send Dekker tumbling into a bottomless well. They grow back to normal size and return to civilization, vowing not to tell anyone because who would believe them? Who would believe them indeed? The set designer was obviously influenced by Universal's earlier monster movies because Dekker's lab is a crumbling stone affair like Frankenstein's castle. Most of the movie consists of the tiny humans running around, trying to escape. First they are dressed in white, toga-like strips of cloth, except for the Peruvian peasant who wears what appear to be diapers. Later, they appear in designer clothes of various colors, still modeled after the Romans, nicely tailored for Janice Logan, who looks awfully cute prancing around in her little ensemble.It's too bad she's not much of an actress, but then nobody in the story is particularly magnetic. Dekker huffs and puffs and does everything but cackle like a maniac. Thomas Coley, as the male lead, is a lankylooking galoot, to borrow a phrase, whose performance is actually embarrassing. To be fair, nobody could do much with the dialog. For some reason the main players don't use contractions when they speak, so that "can't" is always "can not", and "I'll" is always "I will." I don't know how important any of that is, though, or whether it was important at all to contemporary audiences. The special effects are the thing. And considering the period, they're not too bad: mattes, rear projection, over-sized sets -- sometimes a combination of effects. Not as good as "King Kong," but still an extravaganza for the 1930s. And it's in Technicolor too. (Supervised by the ubiquitous Natalie Kalmus, who never contributed anything to Technicolor except her name.) Winton Hoch, a real scientist, had a hand in the photography. He was later to win awards with films like John Ford's "She Wore a Yellow Ribbon." The runaways survive all kinds of threats or, in some cases, they don't. They're attacked by cats, alligators, a berserk blind man, and they're threatened by a chicken. Only Pedro's faithful dog plays it straight with them, man's best friend after all.One wonders if the people who made "The Incredible Shrinking Man" saw this film. It's difficult to believe they didn't. The improvised togas look familiar, and there's that pet cat, Satana, who tries to eat them in a frightening scene.An amusing diversion.

"Dr. Cyclops" is masterful science-fiction from the golden era of cinema, containing all the prime ingredients in order to be ranked amongst the genre's most timeless classics. The script is excellent, there are at least two highly memorable acting performances (Albert Dekker and Charles Halton), the use of (Techni)color still stands as groundbreaking and the special effects are – at least 'were' for that time – phenomenal and faultless to the smallest detail. Youthful horror and Sci-Fi fans, exclusively swearing by the use of computer-animated techniques, can't possibly imagine how much time, effort and sincere devotion it must have cost here to scale down the sets or to endlessly edit all the matte works together. The effects in "Dr. Cyclops" are so terrific and so ahead of times they actually form a worthy equivalent for the visual art in "The Incredible Shrinking Man", which got released more than 15 years later and had a larger budget to work with. Doctor Thorkel is a brilliant albeit slightly eccentric scientist investigating the possibilities of freshly exploited radium in the middle of the Amazonian jungle. He develops a way to miniaturize living tissue, but he requires the help of three fellow scientists because his declining eyesight causes miscalculations. The scientists naturally refuse to leave without knowing the essence of Thorkel's research and, paranoid over the idea they'll steal his lifework, he shrinks them to a mere twelve inches. With Thorkel going increasingly berserk, the group has the choice between either facing their mad opponent or flee into the immense and dangerous jungle. The script features a couple of slower parts but, generally speaking, "Dr. Cyclops" is a vastly compelling and intellectually challenging film. The references towards the Greek mythology in the title and, more elaborated, in the script are fantastic, and Albert Dekker's performance is a stellar tour-de-force. His diabolical role also compensates for the weak and hammy supportive players.