Watch The Amazing Transparent Man For Free

Very well executed

Memorable, crazy movie

Excellent adaptation.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

Edgar G. Ulmer certainly made some good movies in his career. Sadly, this isn't one of them. It's a dull B sci-fi low budgeter with very little style. The best thing it has going for it is that it's only an hour long. Honestly, it could have been trimmed down to thirty minutes. The story is pretty stupid. Krenner, a former army major, breaks a career criminal named Faust out of prison. Why? Well, Krenner has this scientist he's forcing to create an invisibility formula for him. So he decides to also force Faust into being the guinea pig for it. Well it never occurred to brainwave Krenner that Faust would have the upper hand once he becomes invisible. Which is exactly what happens. It's all pretty moronic and probably could have fit into a half-hour television episode. I could easily see this being an episode of Science Fiction Theatre or even reworked into an Adventures of Superman ep. The biggest problem is that the invisibility part doesn't really get started until over halfway through. Just a lot of talking up until that point. Even when Faust does become invisible, it's nothing impressive. It's actually less impressive than movies made 20 years before. I wouldn't watch it unless you're an Ulmer completist or you just have to see every sci-fi movie from this period, regardless of quality.

Public enemy number one can't be seen to be believed. He gets out of prison through default (escaping!) and joins up with a gang of amoral scientists who want to use him as a part of a bank robbery ring. What could have been an update of the type of science fiction film that Boris Karloff had made twenty years before ends up being a mediocre crime drama with little excitement. A "B" cast includes 1940 starlet Marguerite Chapman playing. An aging femme fatale as if she was locked into the 1940 definition of a film noir bad girl. The only memorable element of this is an old man dying from uranium poisoning and the regret he has for the way his life turned out.

Douglas Kennedy is the escaped convict who becomes The Amazing Transparent Man as the result of a laboratory experiment by Dr. Ivan Triesault under the direction of perennial movie villain James Griffith. In fact Kennedy was busted out of jail for just that purpose.Griffith is a guy who thinks big, create an army of these invisible men and you can really dictate to whomever you please. In fact the only problem then is to create invisible weapons for the army to use. But one step at a time. He busts Kennedy out of prison because Kennedy is a safe cracker and he needs his skills. But Kennedy dreams on a smaller scale just let him become invisible and look at all the bank jobs he'll pull. That in and of itself is a conflict.But invisibility has a price. What Kennedy has to steal is fissionable uranium because that's the key ingredient for Triesault. As we well know from life and from films radiation exposure carries a price. Do I have to draw you a picture?The Amazing Transparent Man was shot on a chump change budget and gets rather dull in spots. But the film is still one campy hoot reminder of those paranoid Cold War days.

A crazed scientist (Ivan Trisault) invents an invisibility formula. An Army major (James Griffith) plans to use the formula to create an army of invisible zombies.Does this film rip off "The Invisible Man"? To some degree, of course. There is no possible way the creators did not know about that earlier film. But it goes its own way, too -- for one thing, the transparent man is not invisible from the beginning.The only person I know attached to this film is the makeup artist, Jack Pierce. That may explain why people have rated it so incredibly low. I am sure the cast was known in their day, but they are not known to me, and the fact this comes from a defunct movie studio suggests a lot. Director Edgar G. Ulmer is a legend in his own way, perhaps ironically.I appreciate that a guinea pig is used as a guinea pig, but beyond that, I do not know what to say. Even with its very short run time, it does not move quick enough in some scenes. The special effects -- which made "Invisible Man" a classic a few decades earlier -- are not nearly as good here. Perhaps author David Wingrove summed it up best when he said, "Its cheap-budget origins show throughout. Amazing claims too much for what is essentially a thriller involving an escaped criminal..."