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A lot of fun.

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.

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

This film was made by Universal Pictures as a part of their horror library. Universal refused to release it and then sold it to PRC. When I first started collecting movies in the 1980's this was a very difficult movie to find. I was always interested in the Universal horror catalogue and I desperately wanted to locate it. It certainly never aired on TV here and the video traders I was associated with had never seen it. Then Admit One, a small Canadian Company, issued it on VHS. I purchased it and it is still the copy I own today.The Creeper (Rondo Hatton) is a horribly disfigured man who is being hunted by the police. He lives in the shadows away from all curious eyes. His tale is then told in flashback that the Creeper was once a successful college student. During a science experiment, an explosion caused his disfigurement. Now he wishes to gain revenge against those he feels are responsible for his sorry state. His misery is abraded away by a chance meeting with a blind musician (Jane Adams). He allows himself this brief friendship, while at the same time, his inevitable demise is close at hand.The current IMDb rating (in the 3's) is very harsh. I suspect because this has played on MST3K and those films tend to get rated lower by their viewers. I remind MST3K viewers not to rate the actual movie. BECAUSE YOU HAVEN'T VIEWED THE ACTUAL MOVIE. There is a place on IMDb where MST3K episodes can be rated. PLEASE GO THERE.

Jean Yarbrough's The Brute Man. remembered as the final film to star horror icon and all-round tragic figure Rondo Hatton, has a backstory infinitely more interesting than the movie itself. With Universal Pictures adopting a new policy against releasing any more B-movies, The Brute Man was shipped off to PRC (Producers Releasing Corporation), one of the smaller production companies known as 'Poverty Row', which would release the film without any mention of Universal's involvement. Some say that Universal distanced themselves out of sheer embarrassment of their exploitation of Hatton, an actor suffering from acromegaly who died before the film was even released.Reprising his most famous role for the third and final time (after the Sherlock Holmes story The Pearl of Death and Yarbrough's House of Horrors), Hatton's The Creeper is back on the loose in an unnamed city (probably New York), and seeking revenge on those who wronged him. Without giving too much away, the Creeper was once a handsome football star, much like Hatton himself, before an accident disfigures him, and the police are on high alert when bodies start turning up with their backs broken. In the film's attempt to inspire some sympathy for the killer, the Creeper falls in love with beautiful blind pianist Helen Paige (Jane Adams), the only person not be instantly repulsed by his appearance.As a slice of B-movie horror, The Brute Man is forgettable and formulaic, and with a run time of less than an hour, there's a remarkable lack of depth. The performances are blank and stagy, with the exception of the sweet Adams and 'King of the B-movies' Tom Neal, the latter of whom would go on to star in film noir classic Detour (1945) and get away with murdering his wife once his acting career stalled. However, the film's biggest crime is its treatment of Hatton. He is forced to act through incredibly uncomfortable scenes such as an entire restaurant full of patrons fleeing in horror from the sight of him through a window, and play a character who is as morally disfigured as he is physically, despite those half-arsed attempts to show a gentler side. Shame on you, Universal.

Following a silhouette of Hatton (or someone made to look like him) walking stiffly, like the blind Frankenstein's monster, an alarm is sent out to police cars to catch The Creeper, who has killed a professor. The Creeper then kills a woman who doesn't recognize him, and a delivery boy who is none too bright. On the run, he chances upon a blind woman who treats him kindly, and whom he feels inclined to be kind to as well (shades of both the blind man from Frankenstein and perhaps City Lights).A flashback reveals the Creeper's weak motivation for the murders, perhaps better explained by his presumed insanity/brain damage.Not a great movie, and definitely inferior to the two other Creeper movies, even though it had the same writer and director as House of Horrors. Yarborough directed several other horror movies, The Creeper (1948) (unrelated to this Creeper) The Devil Bat (1940) starring Bela Lugosi, Hillbillys in a Haunted House (1967), King of the Zombies (1941), the Bowery Bows horror/comedy Master Minds (1949), and She-Wolf of London (1946). He also directed several episodes of The Addams Family!It is sad the way Hatton's look was exploited, in a way even the cast of Freaks was not.

It is rare for any film to present so human a portrait of a villain and still succeed in warning the audience so effectively. See "The Brute Man" and you will beware the murderous psychopath who disarms his victims by preying on feelings of sympathy.Rondo Hatton, better known for his role as the "Creeper" in the Sherlock Holmes movie, "The Pearl of Death," also plays the Creeper here – this time without Sherlock Holmes – but with such a depth of feeling that audiences more accustomed to hating and fearing monster-murderers may feel pity for the vengeance minded killer instead.Only in the movie "Freaks" has any actor exploited his unusual appearance to such telling effect. Without makeup, Hatton plays very true to life as the hot tempered college football star Hal Moffett – maimed in a laboratory accident – who decides to take deadly revenge upon the friends he irrationally blames for his disfigurement.Even though the grotesque drifter's bloody scheme is terrifying, antihero Moffett never seems like a purely evil monster. He is like a misguided adolescent driven mad by his misfortune and his own unyielding character, obsessive in the drive to heal his injured vanity by acts of desperation.As masterfully lensed under the direction of Jean Yarbrough, Hatton's performance is outstanding, even by comparison to other horror movie legends; Hal Moffett/The Creeper may possibly have been his greatest role. Yet "The Brute Man" was conceived as a modest little shocker, was made on a low budget and is today not very well remembered even by nostalgia-minded critics. Perhaps that is because "The Brute Man" seems contrived to exploit the commercial successes of "The Pearl of Death," "City Lights" and "Phantom of the Opera," from which it derives some of its main story elements (including the sentimental scenes with the blind girl and the theme of disfigurement and revenge). There is, however, no cheating in the use of classic ideas; they are combined so craftily as to create a new legend of Gothic significance and intensity, one which is also true to historical accounts of murder and realistic in a frighteningly everyday way.