702-The Brute Man

Film Year:  1946
Genre:  Horror
Director:  Jean Yarbrough
Starring:  Rondo Hatton, Jane Adams, Tom Neal, Jan Wiley, Donald MacBride, Peter Whitney
MST Season:  7
Featured Short:  "The Chicken of Tomorrow"

The Short

Which came first, the chicken or the egg?  WE MUST HAVE AN ANSWER!  Unfortunately this short doesn’t give us one, instead being a documentary about the chicken farming industry and its various branches, all the way to eggs and a delicious roasted dinner!  Celebrate the chicken by eating one tonight, whether unborn or with its head lopped off!

Like most industrial shorts, The Chicken of Tomorrow is a dry affair with repetitive footage of equipment being ran back and forth.  This one gets off easy because chickens are fun to look at.  But unless you have an interest in the subject they’re teaching you, it will still be quite a bore.

The Movie

The Brute Man is technically a Universal Horror film, though several elements led to it being sold off to poverty row studio PRC after completion.  The first was Universal’s change of management as it merged with International Pictures to become Universal International, which led to their patented horror output being drastically reduced until the sci-fi monster movie boom of the 1950’s led by Creature from the Black Lagoon (of which many were mocked in MST’s eighth season).  Rondo Hatton’s unfortunate succumbing to his disfiguring disease also gave his exploitation relationship with the studio a bit of a black mark that they wished to distance themselves from.

So The Brute Man became Universal Horror’s red headed step child, which is unfortunate because it’s a pretty solid B-movie.

The Brute Man is actually Universal’s third Creeper movie.  Hatton originated the character in the Sherlock Holmes feature The Pearl of Death and despite his demise in that film (like death has ever kept a movie monster down) he returned in House of Horrors.  The Brute Man followed that, and is the weakest of the series, telling something of a Creeper origin story.  Here we see the Creeper seeking revenge on a group of people he perceives as having resulted in his disfigurement, which lead him to be seen as a monster.  So he decides to prove naysayers right by murdering these people.  Along the way he falls in love with a blind woman because she can’t see his face (sort of a prototype for the Thomas Harris novel Red Dragon).

Yes, The Brute Man is exploitation.  But as I watch Rondo Hatton in this film I really have to believe he was smart enough to know why he was on set, and was pretty much using the situation to provide a comfortable financial situation for himself and his family.  This film may be tasteless on the surface, but for him it was a solid paycheck during a period that could have been rough on him.  For that, I can’t completely chastise the film.

As a film itself, it’s a bit shaky.  Acting is never strong, though the pacing is tight and is in constant motion.  The movie was produced during the mid-40’s, which wasn’t exactly a strong point for Universal’s horror line-up.  Movies were made fast and on the cheap and pumped out at an alarming rate, while the big dogs of Dracula, Frankenstein, and the Wolf Man had degraded into lackluster cross-franchise monster mashes with very little monster mashing.  That said, there’s a certain charm to even the weakest horror films of Universal’s good old days, because lots of atmosphere and shadow are used.  The script works well enough in giving the Creeper motive and make his victims tread the line between sympathetic and unlikable somewhat successfully (though why the Creeper goes after his female victim at the beginning is anybody’s guess, since she arguably didn’t do anything to him).

The Brute Man isn’t a horror classic, but it’s a decent movie on its own and it’s almost unjust the way it was swept under the run.  I have a fondness for it, even if very few people do.

For more of Rondo being featured in Universal productions, he also played supporting roles in The Jungle Captive (a sequel to Captive Wild Woman) and The Spider Woman Strikes Back (which, like The Brute Man, is a quasi-sequel to a Sherlock Holmes film, The Spider Woman).  His Creeper films are his best work at the studio however, in this B-movie fan’s opinion.

The Episode

I love old Universal monster flicks, and having one on MST is a dream come true.  Though The Brute Man most certainly isn’t the worst, one can’t say it doesn’t work well in the MST format.  Production values are probably the lowest Universal ever went, and the boys don’t hesitate to take advantage of its shortcomings, from acting to staging and blocking.  There’s a lot for the boys to play around with in this sandbox, and they never let down.

As an appetizer (chicken for an appetizer?), The Chicken of Tomorrow is just as wondrous.  Full of those wonderfully cuddly flightless birds, Mike and the bots have a blast at playing ventriloquist with them.  They don’t slouch with the industrial side either, having fun with the almost lustful fawning over the technical aspects of chicken farming of the short.  This short is just as classic as the main feature.

The host segments struggle to keep up as Pearl goes on a date and Tom Servo buys some real estate are the main highlights, and neither are brilliant, but mostly chuckle inducers.  Other than that we get the silliness of Tom inside of a giant egg, the randomness of Mike’s phone call for help, and a meta sketch about Tom Dewey that never takes off.

Universal monster movies are something we don’t see much of on the series, and when they do appear it’s was usually just a 50’s clunker like The Mole People or The Thing That Couldn’t Die.  The Brute Man is the earliest prodution they took to the mat, and I feel like they should have at least tried a few more.  Stuff like Man-Made Monster or Captive Wild Women would have been fun.  But The Brute Man alone is a fantastic episode with a solidly fun movie paired with great riffing, and the short aint no slouch either!

Classic

The DVD

The Brute Man was released in Shout Factory’s Volume XXII set, featuring great audio and slightly spotty but mostly solid video.  The special features open up with an introduction by Mary Jo Pehl, who seems to regret doing this movie.  This is followed up by Trail of the Creeper, a mini-biography of Rondo Hatton that’s full of historians who are very apologetic about Hatton’s film career.  Rounding up the disc is The Making of Mystery Science Theater 3000, a vintage documentary that aired on the Sci-Fi Channel about the series which is not as informative as Shout’s discs, but solid promotional material.