cult film freak: ERNEST SCHOEDSACK SHRINKS 'DR. CYCLOPS' WITH ALBERT DEKKER

Title: DR. CYCLOPS Director: Ernest B. Schoedsack Year: 1940 Rating: ***1/2

Merian C. Cooper, the executive producer and co-director of KING KONG, considered Ernest B. Schoedsack his "cameraman" when he was really not only co-director, but, while Cooper oversaw the special effects, much of the human element from performances to overall character-movement is all his own...

Deliberately slowing things down for the first science-fiction/horror in color, DR. CYCLOPS, that also begins a jungle-traipsing, matte-painted adventure including a gorgeous woman, her handsome boyfriend, a comic relief, a curious doctor, and an eccentric old-timer, all winding up in the compound of Albert Dekker's titular mad scientist...

Albert Dekker feeling a little horse in DR. CYCLOPS

Who seems normal at first, even helpful: before shrinking people... a device later copied in a myriad of future films ranging from Bert I. Gordon to Rick Moranis... tiny humans stuck within a world where even a house cat is immensely formidable (while Dekker's like a gigantic body-carrying gorilla)... all terrific-looking in green-hued technicolor with contraptions straight out of pulp magazine reveries...

As the first half sets the expository groundwork while the second has the most action, liken to the best later-inspiration THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN... but Schoedsack's camera's more plainly pointed at the awe-inspired effects than (like KONG) being equally partnered along the traipsing adventure: yet what here's still a terrific programmer where fearful vulnerability's the key to all the frantically suspenseful survival.