Reviewed by Colin Jacobson (February 17, 2025)
According to its poster art, 1959’s Terror Is a Man provides “a unique experience in motion picture terror”. How can I resist the urge to determine the truth of this claim?
After a shipwreck, William Fitzgerald (Richard Derr) lands on a largely deserted island. He meets Dr. Charles Girard (Francis Lederer), a scientist who explains the natives fled because his work frightened them.
As he gets to know Girard as well as a few others, Fitzgerald starts to learn about the doctor’s unusual plans. Girard wants to combine humans with animals, experiments that come with horrifying consequences.
Unmentioned in the prior paragraphs: the source behind Man. The film acts as an adaptation of HG Wells’ 1896 novel The Island of Doctor Moreau.
And that makes the aforementioned claims we’d find “a unique experience” a stretch given that Man didn’t offer the first version of Moreau. Indeed, 1932’s well-regarded Island of Lost Souls beat it to screens by decades.
In any case, just because Man may not be truly unique doesn’t mean it can’t offer a quality horror flick. Does this low-budget independent effort succeed?
To some degree, but not as well as one might hope. Although Man fares better than I anticipated from a “B”-level genre flick from 1959, it still sputters a bit too much.
On the positive side, the movie tends to lack the cheesiness I expected. Man treats its subject matter with a nice level of seriousness, and the actors follow suit.
No one here offers Oscar-caliber work, but the performers avoid a tendency to emote or camp up a storm. They play their roles in naturalistic ways that add believability to the proceedings.
Man also benefits from strong cinematography. Director of Photography Emmanuel I. Rojas casts the proceedings with surprisingly evocative photography that gives the movie an appealing moody and atmospheric vibe.
Beyond these strengths, however, it becomes more difficult to find obvious positives. Again, not that Man ever fizzles, but it suffers from issues that impact its effectiveness.
In particular, Man tends to seem slow and without much actual drama much of the time. The story progresses at a fairly glacial rate and it seems to go out of its way to avoid footage of the supposedly terrifying creature.
Which I suspect occurred due to budgetary restrictions. With a presumably small stash of cash available to the filmmakers, niceties like monster effects became expendable.
Of course, that doesn’t need to become a flaw per se. Plenty of movies such as Jaws and Alien worked better because they didn’t reveal their titular threats too often.
However, those films enjoyed Steven Spielberg and Ridley Scott as their directors, whereas Man featured Gerry de Leon. No offense to Mr. de Leon, but no one ever compared his talents favorably to those of the two legends I cited.
As such, de Leon fails to make all the scenes that dance around but don’t show the creature interesting. Instead, they just tend to plod and frustrate.
Even when the movie hits its climax, it still fails to manifest much terror. Man pops to life a little at the end but it remains less than scary.
I do appreciate the fact we find acting and cinematography that remain above average for a 1950s horror flick, and I also like the fairly serious manner in which Man treats the material. Nonetheless, it ends up as an erratic affair despite these positives.
