The Magnetic Monster (

1953

) ½

Normally, I don't have much of a problem with garish, exploitative titles. Hell, I have quite the admiration for Bert I. Gordan and his tendency to rework his titles using whatever other ridiculous titles AIP was releasing at the same time, regardless of whether or not they made any sense (Earth vs. the Spider (1958) from Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956), Attack of the Puppet People (1958) from Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957), and War of the Colossal Beast (1958) from War of the Satellites (1958)). However, in the case of today's film, I fear that the plan may have backfired, as when I first saw this movie I rolled my eyes, assumed that it was some boring rubber-suit monster picture about a sentient slab or iron slowly killing a group of scientists for 80 minutes and moved on with looking any further. I never suspected that it was a hard sci-fi story about a group of “police with science degrees” trying to neutralize the threat posed by an unstable isotope. Hell, the only reason I even returned to watch the film in the first place was because upon revisiting Gog (1954), I discovered that it was part of a thematically linked trilogy revolving around the exploits of the Office of Scientific Investigation (OSI).

Since The Magnetic Monster is the first in the trilogy, it opens up with a lengthy explanation about what the OSI is and what they do. In short, the A-men of the OSI (a deliberate attempt to invoke the Treasury's T-men of the prohibition era as well as the conclusion of Christian prayers), are a thin blue line to protect society from new technological dangers that regular police wouldn't be able to understand. As you might have guessed from the name, they are mostly focused on the potential dangers of atomic power. “The power man has unleashed but has not yet learned to control” the narrator explains to any audience members who have been in a cave for the last 8 years. It's for this reason that when we first join our OSI agents Dr. Jeffery Stewart and Dr. Dan Forbes, they are measuring the background radiation, and promptly discover that there's way more radiation floating around than usual. Not so much that they need to evacuate the city mind you, but certainly enough to suggest that something is off, so they put out feelers for any unexplained phenomenons in the surrounding area.

They don't have to wait long. Across town in a department store, the owner and his two employees arrive one morning to discover all the clocks have stopped and every metallic item in the shop has become highly magnetized. After an amusing scene where the store owner becomes increasingly flustered at the possibility that “someone is wrecking [his] store with magnetic power,” Stewart and Forbes arrive to investigate the situation. They discover that the office above the store was rented out by a local mad scientist, professor Howard Denker, one of the last “lone wolves” of atomic science. Denker has cooked up an extremely dangerous new isotope by bombarding serranium with alpha particles for 200 hours. Stewart and Forbes find the office empty aside from the dead body of Denker's assistant. Even the serranium is gone, meaning that the real thing must be atrociously strong if even its residual radiation is capable of this much carnage.

The hunt is on for Denker and his mysterious element, fortunately as was demonstrated by the carnage in the department store, he can't take his isotope very far without leaving a trail of chaos and destruction in his wake. So they put out an APB for any inexplicable mechanical malfunction or magnetic disturbance in the area. Naturally, this generates a lot of false leads, and for a time OSI is acting as handymen for the entire metropolitan area, but eventually, a promising lead turns up: A cabbie at the airport who broke down after dropping off an older man with a mysterious briefcase. Denker must be crazier than anyone expected because he's taking the serranium onto an airplane. Given how radioactive the element is it's only a matter of time before it causes the engines to seize and the plane to plummet to the ground!

Still, with a bit of old-fashioned detective work the A-Men figure out what flight Denker is on, and have it make an emergency landing. Denker is so irradiated that he's near death, and cannot offer much more than an apology for causing so much trouble. He warns the other scientists that the Magnetic Monster he has unwittingly created needs to be constantly fed electricity or else it will cause widespread destruction. In short order, he's proven absolutely right, as the element destroys (off-camera of course, this film cannot afford the necessary miniature work for such an elaborate scene) the facility in which it is initially confined. The only hope for stopping this monstrosity is to drown the magnetic monster in more energy than it can handle, and the only hope of doing that lies in the huge underwater power plant that the Canadian government has been building for the last few years.

The finale of The Magnetic Monster was mostly constructed from footage lifted from a pre-war German sci-fi film called Gold (1934). Normally this is a recipe for disaster like what happened with Monster from Green Hell (1957) where the old footage doesn't match the new movie in any way shape or form and feels like a bizarre distraction. However, with The Magnetic Monster, this old footage is woven seamlessly with new footage of the new characters. Sure, some of the costumes look a bit odd or anachronistic to more perceptive viewers but for the casual audience to whom 1950s America is as foreign an environment as 1930s Germany, it will almost certainly slip under the radar. Hell, even for somebody who watches as many of these films as I do I didn't notice anything at all out of the usual and I just assumed that producer Ivan Tors had just blown his whole budget on the climax. Editor Herbert L. Strock (who would go on to direct Gog (1954) for Tors as well) deserves high praise for piecing things together as perfectly as he did. 

Yet, as impressive as this bombastic conclusion is both in terms of editing prowess and sheer spectacle, for me, The Magnetic Monster succeeds more in the small moments of its first two acts. Here, we're treated to an unusual degree of attention to both the routines of police work and the nuances of scientific investigation. When the OSI knows they're looking for a radioactive isotope that can spread magnetism like a bad cold, they put out a news bulletin for anyone with sudden mechanical troubles, and start chasing down leads. Most are junk, but eventually, they get a call from a cabbie whose vehicle broke down almost immediately after he dropped off Dr. Denker at the airport. From there the OSI A-men identify the plane Denker took by scanning a flight insurance vending machine with Geiger counters and discovering which receipt the radioactive scientist touched. Each step of the mystery follows logically from the next, and the deductive steps the science cops use to reach each new conclusion are explained patiently to the audience.

There is a common sentiment among filmmakers and critics that argues that audiences don't want a logically sound story. Rather, what they desire is an emotional moment whether or not said emotional moment is at all supported by the objective facts of the film's plot. Seeing the massive success of such nonsensical movies as the latest Star Wars trilogy, and the way that certain segments of the audience (even self-professed critics) will defend and excuse them, I fear that these thinkers may be right. However, I for one still appreciate it when a movie makes sense and when the script puts in the work to establish its rules and ground itself in the mundane. Stakes are built on cause and effect, and when cause and effect are a mess even the most operatic moments, ultimately ring hollow.