MONSTER ON THE CAMPUS

   Film (1958). Universal. Dir Jack ARNOLD, starring Arthur Franz, Joanna Moore, Judson Pratt, Troy Donahue. Screenplay David DUNCAN. 77 mins. B/w.

   This is one of Jack Arnold's last and poorest sf films, a variation on the Jekyll and Hyde theme: blood from a specimen coelacanth causes living creatures to devolve (DEVOLUTION); a SCIENTIST (Franz) temporarily but repeatedly becomes an apeman. The film is, foolishly, structured as a mystery which everybody is too unobservant to solve, and the science is absurd. As critic Bill WARREN has pointed out, the main interest is noting the variety of ways in which the unfortunate scientist (whose noble quasi-suicide is the film's climax), along with a dog and a dragonfly, contrive to contaminate themselves.

   JB/PN