#874 The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957)

This is part of my TSPDT series where I review all movies from the 2018 list.

Before I get into this, let me just apologize to spiders everywhere for what I said in my last review. When I told you to bring it on, I was just joking… I didn’t really mean it, I swear. I’ve learned my lesson and from here on out, I know my place.

With that out of the way, let’s get into this interesting movie from the 50s. The Incredible Shrinking Man is about… a man who incredibly starts to shrink. Something about insecticide and radioactive material, but that doesn’t really matter. This movie is all about the effects. If you’ve read any other reviews of mine you might notice a trend of me heavily commenting on effects. You might be thinking to yourself, “Great, she’s about to destroy this movie because effects from the 50s can’t be very good by today’s standards”. Well, jokes on you cause I’m actually going to say the opposite. I was very surprised at just how well the effects held up. They really built giant objects and sets to make the man look small. I loved the scissors which earned the screenshot position for this review–they looked and sounded totally real. When he was trying to move them, I really believed it was a little man trying to move a normal sized pair of scissors. When he bent the pin into a little grappling hook, I was losing it. I loved all his ideas and how he re-purposed everyday items into tools. The most shocking thing for me was the giant wedge of cheese. It was definitely not a real giant wedge of cheese. It looked like it could be styrofoam but then the guy ate it so I don’t really know what to believe. Either the health and safety regulations were extremely relaxed 60 years ago and eating styrofoam was just a part of the job, or cheese in the 50s isn’t what it is today.

The one part of the movie, as you might have already guessed, I did not enjoy was the giant tarantula spider boss. First of all, I could have lived without seeing a close up of a spider’s face and its disgusting hairy legs through the entrance of the matchbox. Second of all, were tarantulas just common types of spiders to find in your basement in the 50s? That’s all I can bring myself to say about this part of the movie because even thinking about it to write this review is creeping me out. I’m just gonna go ahead and block this out of my memory.

Alright now where was I? Right… the ending. The ending was actually pretty interesting in that maybe a new race of tiny people is the future. Maybe he was just the first of his kind and the radioactive mist stuff will make more like him. This is one movie that I’d be interested in seeing a sequel of. They could do it like an epidemic where the mist got into the city and now everyone is shrinking. Dammit Hollywood, you better be reading this… I want to see that sequel. Just put some money into this instead of another foreign horror movie remake.

Anyways, this was a pretty cool movie and I definitely recommend giving it a watch. Not sure how horrifying this really is, to me it’s more of a sci-fi or thriller than a horror movie, but an interesting one all the same.

Verdict: 7.8/10 Another reason to never own a cat… dogs for life