Vintage movie horror - postcard

The Electronic Monster is a potentially interesting film written by Charles Eric Maine who was a minor British science-fiction author and screenwriter. Maine wrote and had had a number of other works adapted to film during this era � the Hammer film Spaceways (1953), Timeslip/The Atomic Man (1955) with the most well known being The Mind of Mr Soames (1969). The prermise of The Electronic Monster � that of people viewing/entering into others dreams � is similar to ideas that were handled more adventurously by Dreamscape (1984) and in subsequent films like The Cell (2000), Paprika (2006) and Inception (2010). However, as it transpires, the way the idea is handled here goes nowhere. The script is very talky. And it is directed in a doggedly literal fashion by Montgomery Tully, a British thriller director who made two other mediocre ventures into science-fiction � Battle Beneath the Earth (1967) and The Terrornauts (1967). There is little action � most of the film takes place in drearily ordinary offices and the two punch-ups we get are so unconvincing that one spends more time laughing. The dream sequences are the most promising part about the film but the dull Greek ballets we are presented with seem to hold the most unexciting possibilities imaginable. Most disappointing is that we hardly get to see any but the briefest of these sequences, least of all anything of the horror sequences. The film offers up stolid carved-in-granite Rod Cameron as the hero of the piece and he moves through the film like the proverbial brick shithouse in both build and locution. Thrown into the bargain comes a bevy of incredibly unconvincing French accents. One of the small pluses of the film is the nicely megalomaniac performance from Peter Illing as Zakon. The soundtrack wails with the blips and bonks of early experimental electronics.