Boris Petroff's The Unearthly may be the most unironically decent film that Ed Wood Jr. ever worked on. It's an admittedly cheesy mad scientist film about a doctor who runs a psychiatric institute and uses his patients as guinea pigs in his experiments to unlock the secret of immortality through gland transplants. The film is carried by John Carradine's convincing, if somewhat odd (even by John Carradine standards) performance as the sinister Dr. Charles Conway. When some of his patients begin to suspect that the good doctor may be up to something suspicious, he does an excellent job manipulating them against each other. Tor Johnson also stars as Lobo, Dr. Conway's lumbering oaf of an assistant/lackey. And somehow, I'm not entirely sure how, Johnson manages to come across as a genuinely sympathetic figure instead of as another one of the inept monstrosities that dominated his acting career. But that could just be me. It also helps that the film keeps the special effects to a bare minimum, relying on only brief shots of fake glands and full-body costumes. The ending revelation about the status of Dr. Conway's past experiments was also satisfyingly macabre. So in the end, the best compliment I can give The Unearthly is that at the very least it doesn't do anything glaringly wrong. In fact, some parts aren't half bad.
5/10
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