DR. CYCLOPS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 4, Issue 98, 9 May 1941, Page 17

DR. CYCLOPS

( Paramount)

Y classical dictionary says that the Cyclopes were described by Homer as a gigantic and lawless race of one-eyed Sicilian shepherds

who devoured human beings and cared nought for Zeus. The Dr. Cyclops of the film is a scientist with a German accent who discovers a huge radium deposit in a South American jungle, harnesses its radio active energy and uses it to reduce living organisms to a fraction of their normal size. Having produced a pigmy horse, he next experiments with a too inquisitive party of scientists, whom he reduces to 13inch midgets. The parallel with classic mythology comes when the angry giant, left with the vision of only one eye, wages war on the pigmies he has created. If Dr. Cyclops was a story in a pulp magazine one would say that it was the product of a fevered imagination. As it is, it is lifted slightly above the class of scientific shocker film only by the novelty of its theme and the fact that it is done in technicolour. If you are technically minded you will be interested in the trick photography which produces some startling effects-a pigmy struggling in the huge hands of the scientist before he is put to death by a few drops of chloroform on a dab of cotton wool; the pigmies cowering in terror before a giant hen, and sawing slices from a sausage as big as themselves. Albert Dekker is suitably sadistic as the crazed scientist; the rest of the cast are undistinguished,