Product Description

"Butcher" Benton goes to his death in the state prison, cursing the three men who double-crossed him following an armored-car hold-up; "Squeamy" Ellis, Joe Marcelli and Paul Lowe, his attorney and leader of the gang. He vows to return and kill them and dies without revealing the location of the stolen money. Detective Chasen is determined to keep working on the case until the stolen loot is recovered. Benton's body is taken to Professor Bradshaw and his assistant for experimentation, and they manage to restore him to life, making him practically indestructible in the process. He takes off after the three men, getting rid of everybody who stands in his way. He is impervious to police bullets. He kills Ellis and Marcelli, while Lowe seeks police protection. Benton takes to the sewers to recover the hidden loot and the police are powerless to stop him. Written by Les Adams {longhorn3708@windstream.net}

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #109201 in DVD
• Published on: 2005
• Released on: 2005-03-22
• Rating: PG (Parental Guidance Suggested)
• Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
• Formats: Color, DVD, Full Screen, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 76 minutes

Review
Lt. Dick Chasen (Casey Adams) narrates the strange story of Charles "Butcher" Benton (Lon Chaney, Jr.), a condemned man who came back for revenge. In prison, Butcher refuses to reveal to his crooked lawyer Lowe (Ross Elliott) where he hid $600,000 from a bank robbery. Even though he's due to be executed, Butcher vows revenge on Lowe and his partners, Squeamy (Marvin Ellis) and Joe (Ken Terrell). Lowe visits stripper Eva (Marion Carr), to whom Butcher has sent a map of the spot in the Los Angeles sewer system where he hid the loot, but Lowe opens the letter first, and secretly takes the map. After the execution, Butcher's body is taken to San Francisco scientist Prof. Bradshaw (Robert Shayne) who's trying for a cure for cancer, but instead his experiments bring Butcher back to life. His cellular structure has been increased to the point where he's nearly indestructible, and he is incredibly strong. He kills the scientist and his assistant, and heads for Los Angeles. When stripper Eva turns out to be very different from the person he was expecting, Dick becomes attracted to her. Butcher, who can no longer speak, arrives and learns she doesn't have the map. Aware of Butcher's vow, he tries to inform Squeamy, but Butcher kills both Squeamy and Joe. The panic-stricken Lowe punches a cop and gets tossed in jail as a way of hiding from Butcher; when the cops threaten to release him, he talks and reveals the map. Butcher overhears Dick and the others planning to take care of him with flamethrowers, but just as he finds the loot, he's hit with a bazooka and blasted with the flamethrowers. Hideously burned, he leaves the sewers and climbs to the top of a big crane, which runs into high tension wires, and Butcher is disintegrated. And in the end, Dick and Eva get together. --Bill Warren, All Movie Guide

From the Studio
Director Jack Pollexfen began his professional life in the newspaper business, working his way up from copyboy at the 'Los Angeles Express’ to reporter on several other dailies. After four years in the Air Force writing training films and manuals during World War II, he got back on track with a series of screenplays for adventure pictures like 'Treasure of Monte Cristo’ and 'The Desert Hawk’. With ‘Indestructible Man A2ZCDS brings you the third movie Pollexfen produced and the second he directed.. A2ZCDS have brought this old Hollywood Classic feature films on DVD.

THE PLOT: Charles ‘Butcher’ Benton (Lon Chaney Jr.), a convict who is executed in the gas chamber, is given a second lease on life when a scientist inadvertently brings him back to life. The resurrected Butcher leaves a trail of corpses behind him as he heads for Los Angeles in search of his old mates who had double-crossed him. Lieutenant Richard Chasen (Max Showalter) of the Los Angeles Police Department deduces that Paul Lowe (Ross Elliot), the Butcher’s lawyer, is the next on the hit list. The Butcher has to be stopped before he claims another life!

About the Actor
American character actor whose career was influenced (and often overshadowed) by that of his father, silent film star Lon Chaney. The younger Chaney was born while his parents were on a theatrical tour, and he joined them onstage for the first time at the age of six months. However, as a young man, even during the time of his father's growing fame, Creighton Chaney worked menial jobs to support himself without calling upon his father. He was at various times a plumber, a meatcutter's apprentice, a metal worker, and a farm worker. Always, however, there was the desire to follow in his father's footsteps. He studied makeup at his father's side, learning many of the techniques that had made his father famous. And he took stage roles in stock companies. It was not until after his father's death in 1930 that Chaney went to work in films. His first appearances were under his real name (he had been named for his mother, singer Cleva Creighton). He played number of supporting parts before a producer in 1935 insisted on changing his name to Lon Chaney Jr. as a marketing ploy. Chaney was uncomfortable with the ploy and always hated the "Jr". addendum. But he was also aware that the famous name could help his career, and so he kept it. Most of the parts he played were unmemorable, often bits, until 1939 when he was given the role of the simple-minded Lennie in the film adaptation of John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men (1939). Chaney's performance was spectacularly touching; indeed, it became one of the two roles for which he would always be best remembered. The other came within the next year, when Universal, in hopes of reviving their horror film franchise as well as memories of their great silent star, Chaney Sr., cast Chaney as the tortured Lawrence Talbot in The Wolf Man (1941). With this film and the slew of horror films that followed it, Chaney achieved a kind of stardom, though he was never able to achieve his goal of surpassing his father. By the 1950s, he was established as a star in low-budget horror films and as a reliable character actor in more prestigious, big-budget films such as High Noon (1952). Never as versatile as his father, he fell more and more into cheap and mundane productions which traded primarily on his name and those of other fading horror stars. His later years were bedeviled by illness and problems with alcohol. When he died from a variety of causes in 1973, it was as an actor who had spent his life chasing the fame of his father, but who was much beloved by a generation of filmgoers who had never seen his father. IMDb Mini Biography By: Jim Beaver

Customer Reviews

The Lon Chaney mill churns out a dud......
Not a badly made film, but very unengaging to say the least. Chaney opens up the film with a nice and fairly extensive dialouge exchange vowing revenge on those who sent him up the river giving promise to another film in alignment with his more sucessful Man Made Monster.

From that point on it was clear this was a paint by numbers job that only uses Chaney in what might be called an 'extensive cameo' role. A haggerty Chaney lumbers his way thru the film, no line of dialouge save for the opening exchange, doing his monster on the rampage thing. I never really bought the 'he was too drunk to remember his lines so they wrote him as a mute in all his films' theory, especially considering the fantastic job he does on the opening dialouge exchange here, but the remainder of this film makes me think there may have been some inkling of truth to it. or maybe there just wasn't enough of a paycheck in it to make alot of work remembering lines worth his while.

There are other members of the cast with much more dialouge and screen time than Chaney and when Chaney is not onscreen, you may easily mistake this flick for a Z grade cop thriller fro mthe 50's.

Overall, I'd say skip this one unless you're a Lon Chaney jr completeist. For a good lesser known Chaney monster film, see Man Made Monster. For a hammy later years B effort from a haggerty and weather beaten Lon Chaney jr, see The Alligator People or The Cyclops first.

Snoozy Film-Noir Frankenstein-Shocker
Jack Pollexfen's second and last directorial effort, The Indestructible Man, is an unfortunate, snooze-inducing mess. The basic ideas are very promising. It combines a funky film-noir with a modern (for 1956) update on the Frankenstein story, with one of my favorite actors, Lon Chaney, Jr. as the "monster", and it's the first film I know of to use the basic plot later employed for Wes Craven's Shocker (1989). Yet, despite this only being about 70 minutes long, I started watching about two hours before my normal bedtime and I could barely stay awake until the end. I know I zoned out a couple times but hardly felt compelled to rewind the disc and make sure I didn't miss anything.

What really kills the film is the writing, which is surprising, because Pollexfen's principal vocation throughout his career was as a writer. But for some reason, he didn't write this. Two people I've never heard of did the job instead--Vy Russell and Sue Bradford. At times, the writing resembles Ed Wood, especially in the narration, which was a bad idea. Not that the direction is much to speak of, but aside from letting some bad, out of focus cinematography slide by, it's pretty competent in a poverty-row sort of way (I happen to like many of the poverty row pictures a lot).

Chaney doesn't get to do enough here, and the plot demands that he cannot speak for most of the film. Max Showalter, the detective/narrator, and to a lesser extent Marian Carr are the stars. Showalter's okay, and Carr is attractive and decent enough, but I would have rather had more Chaney. In the bad directorial decision department, there are a few times that Pollexfen has Chaney make Lugosi-Dracula-like googly eyes while he moves towards the camera. It's a bad idea both because it's very cheesy in a bad way and it's responsible for a lot of the out of focus stuff. I don't know if they didn't have a focus puller or if he had already fallen asleep.

In the middle, I also started to lose track of the various victims. They all kinda looked the same, there wasn't much character development, and the scenes leading up to their demises were drawn out and bland. Once the victim entered the scene, they weren't in it for very long. On the other hand, I did mention that I zoned out a few times.

However, there are some interesting features besides the good core ideas. One is that there is some structural resemblance, especially during the end, to Orson Welles' Touch of Evil, believe it or not, and that came out in 1958--two years after this. There is also a bit of structural resemblance in the end of Blacula (1972). Not that this film was influential. The resemblance was probably coincidental, and for all I know, Indestructible Man stole some of this stuff from other sources, but just maybe . . . and it's still interesting to witness, anyway.

I'm mostly complaining in this review, but it's not that this is a completely awful film. It's certainly worth seeing if you're a Chaney fan, a film-noir fan or a Frankenstein film fan. Just don't expect too much, and preferably watch it when you're wide awake.

Ponderous B movie
The title character is one Butcher Benton (Lon Chaney) who we first encounter on Death Row where he is awaiting execution for murder following an armoured car robbery ,the proceeds of which have not been recovered .He rails aginst his lawyer and his two accomplices in the robbery and vows revenge .
His body does not reach the morgue .It is taken to a laboratory where it is revived by high voltage jolts of electricity .He sets out to wreak revenge on those he feels have betrayed him .Hot on his trail are a detective and a friend of his from his former life the burlesque dancer Jane .Things build to a climax in the LA sewer system -rather like the classic monster movie Them but with much less impact .

Cahney looks ill and strained throughout and the somewhat muddy soundtrack and grainy colour is no help .Direction is routine and uninspired and the voice over narration slows things down even more

This is all pretty routine and the sight of an ill and uninspired Chaney going through the motions is sad

Avoid please-unless dull B movies are your bag