Dr. Cyclops

Release Date: April 12, 1940
Starring: Albert Dekker as Dr. Alexander Throkel
Thomas Coley as Dr. Bill Stockton
Janice Logan as Dr. Mary Robinson
Director: Ernest B. Schodesack
Writer: Tom Kilpatrick
Distributor: Paramount Pictures
Time: color Technicolor 75 mins.

Purchase Dr. Cyclops (DVD) at the TCM store.

Interesting Tidbits

Dr. Cyclops is the very first US science fiction film to be made in Technicolor. Ernest B. Schoedsack who co-produced and co- directed the 1933 blockbuster King Kong.

Plot

Three scientists — mineralogist Dr. Bill Stockton (Thomas Coley) and biologists Dr. Mary Robinson (Janice Logan) and Dr. Bullfinch (Charles Halton) — are summoned by Dr. Alexander Thorkel (Albert Dekker) to his laboratory in the Peruvian jungle. They are accompanied by a local miner, Steve Baker (Victor Kilian) who suspects that Thorkel is secretly mining ore. When they arrive they find Thorkel has brought them all the way there only to identify some crystals under his microscope, since his eyesight is too poor for him to see them himself. Their job done, he now wants them to leave.

Insulted, they set up camp in Thorkel's stockade until he will tell them more about the experiments in which he is engaged. They discover that Thorkel is attempting to shrink living organisms using radiation. When he finds them snooping in his laboratory, he angrily locks them (along with his assistant Pedro (Frank Yaconelli)) inside his radiation chamber. When they emerge they find they have shrunk to twelve inches tall.

At first willing to play-act the role of benevolent despot with his miniaturized captives, Thorkel reveals the more sinister side of his personality by abruptly murdering Bullfinch in cold blood (easily the film's most frightening sequence) because the effects of the ray are wearing off. The rest of the picture details the escape efforts of the four pint-sized protagonists as they hack their way through a jungle of gigantic foliage and do battle with oversize wildlife. By morning, they attempt to cross a river via small boat but are interrupted by an alligator. Thorkel then comes in, killing Pedro and igniting the grass to kill the rest. The fugitives are able to hide in one of Thorkel’s specimen cases and are unknowingly brought back to his lab.
Source: Wikipedia.com.