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Thursday, January 12, 2017

The Invisible Boy (1957)

Starring Richard Eyer, Philip Abbott, Diane Brewster, Harold J. Stone, Robert H. Harris
Directed by Herman Hoffman
(actor & director credits courtesy IMDB.com)

The creator of a supercomputer for the government has difficulty educating his 10 year old son, so instructs the computer to teach him, not realizing the machine has an evil scheme in mind.

This odd concoction of a movie seems part comedy, part drama, part science fiction, part fantasy, and part satire, and would probably have been better off not trying to merge all those elements, although the film has good special effects and a nice assemblage of character actors in the cast.  It's notable for being a follow-up (of sorts) to Forbidden Planet, returning that film's Robby The Robot back in time from its future setting to the current day although with only a hastily worded explanation.  A bizarre part of the story has Eyer's remarkable reconstruction of Robby and then becoming invisible not being ever seriously questioned by his parents.  Whatever the aim there was, you can certainly say the film's not boring, although the deadly serious last half hour of the film seems a weird contrast to what had come before.  Eyer would play a much more likable character in the following year's The 7th Voyage Of Sinbad.

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