The Incredible Shrinking Man
by Jack Arnold
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: April Kent, Grant Williams, Paul Langton, Randy Stuart, Raymond BaileyDirector: Jack Arnold
Format: NTSC
Movie Reviews of The Incredible Shrinking Man
Movie Review: Excellent adaptation of a classic Richard Matheson story, sticks to the story unlike modern remakes of his books ie I am Legend
Summary: 5 Stars
Obviously any film is never going to be as good as your imagination when reading a really well written book but this movie comes pretty close. For those who don't know this is based on the classic tale The Shrinking Man by Richard Matheson. Incidentally if you add the word Incredible when looking for the book you will find an anthology collection with The Shrinking Man and other stories such as Duel in it.
A few things do date the movie a little such as the usual cheap sounding 50s thriller soundtrack and you can tell at times when there's a blue screen being used, but you rarely can. Whoever built the robot cat used in some scenes at the start of the film obviously didn't know the difference between cats and dogs as it wagged its tail canine style. You can understand why they had to make a cat when you see the really bad acting by the real cat in later scenes involving a dolls house (obviously shot first). This feline actor overuses a fair bit when a real life stalking prey cat is unlikely to do it even once. Haven't seen that cat in anything else so it obviously never got a call back for other films. The humans' acting though cannot be faulted.
For those who have read the book there are a few differences. The daughter from the book is not in the movie. The movie is set in chronological order as opposed to the book which has a lot of flashbacks and time wise starts in the basement with the encounter with the redback spider / black widow depending on where you're from, (it's a tarantula in the movie probably as they were scarier back then). In fact there's a lot less tension in the movie with the spider (and it's not missing a leg done by Scott when he was normal sized in the book) and his home in the basement didn't really look like it would keep out the spider but other than that, the massive props are really well done, you actually get the feeling he is that small. The movie still captures the what would you an average person do in this situation which is Matheson's specialty. It also captures Scott's mental breakdown but doesn't really touch on the what's the point of fighting to stay alive he often debated. In the book he also has worked out as he halves every certain number of days he will completely disappear in x amount, which again he uses to debate if he should just give up constantly in the book, however the movie makers didn't use this main book trait at all.
Basic plot of the film is after his boat floats through a strange mist, Scott Carey slowly begins to shrink. Doctors can't work out why and he soon becomes something to point at, a freak to ridicule, by the community. Life as he knows it is over, he feels more and more alienated the smaller he gets. As he gets smaller and smaller more things become dangerous to him. What would you do in this situation?
A few props aren't the right size (way too big) such as the salt and paper shakers, sugar shaker and coffee mug in the circus midget using them scenes. Other than that you can't really fault this film. A very well done film, I still rate it five stars even with the bad acting by the cat and other minor faults. Wish we could say this for the latest movie adaptation of Matheson's I am Legend. Another early film era movie done really well of a classic novel is The Invisible Man a good likeness to H G Wells' classic novel of the same name.
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