So this is January, and that’s about the time the Oscar bait starts hitting my area. I had some plans to see one or two this past weekend, but then a winter storm basically rolled through my area. I could have gone to see one before the snow hit, but I opted not to in case I wasn’t back before the storm started. At the same time, I figured I should probably see something. That meant dropping into my various watchlists and seeing what was where. And for whatever reason, The Criterion Channel is doing a bunch of cat-related movies. As near as I can make out, that means pretty much any movie that prominently features a cat.
That led me to The Incredible Shrinking Man, a movie where the title character at one point has to dodge the family cat when he gets down to rodent-sized.
Average American man Robert “Scott” Carey (Grant Williams) is on vacation in the middle of the ocean with his wife Louise (Randy Stuart) when a strange cloud envelops him. The cloud turns out to be radioactive, and soon, Scott finds himself shrinking. Doctors and scientists eventually figure out why, but they aren’t quite sure how to halt or even reverse the process. All they know is he’s going to keep getting smaller and smaller. It isn’t long before Scott is something of a media sensation.
The thing is, Scott doesn’t want to be a media sensation. He wants to stop shrinking. The problem is, the more he shrinks, the more dangerous the world becomes. At first angry over his condition, he finds temporary solace when he befriends a little person performer (April Kent, who seems to be a full-sized actress), but that doesn’t last as he keeps shrinking, eventually forcing him to flee the family cat and finding himself trapped in the basement where a leaky water heater or a spider might be a deadly problem. Scott will need to use all his wits to survive this world if he’s going to get out of this movie alive.
Side note: I am normally against getting rid of a pet without a darn good reason, but after the cat attack, a news broadcast refers to the animal as a “former pet.” I would list “the cat ate my tiny husband” as a darn good reason to get rid of a cat even if Scott got away.
In many ways, The Incredible Shrinking Man plays like a lot of 50s American sci-fi. If anything, the big difference is usually those involve things growing larger. Shrinking is a new twist as near as I can make out, and the special effects aren’t exactly up to modern standards, but considering what they had to work with then, they look good. I would go so far as to say they thought everything through, mostly in the form of oversized sets for the Scott character as he got smaller and smaller while merging him into shots with other people when they needed to. The oversized sets worked better, but at least everything was thought through in a way that I can appreciate. When Scott and Louise say they’ll still be married as long as he wears his ring, only for the ring to then fall off his now smaller finger, it’s a nice touch. The fight with the cat and the spider are both well-done moments that show Scott’s biggest advantage is his brain.
That’s actually most of what this movie is. It starts off as a more psychological thing as Scott is too small to do things like go to work, but before too long, he’s fighting for survival. The movie does turn a little philosophical in its closing minutes, largely in ways that it didn’t before, but I suppose when Richard Matteson adapts his own novel, that’s going to happen. The movie is a nice adventure once Scott reaches the size where the cat thinks he looks delicious if nothing else, and I suspect it is better than most January releases. Maybe I didn’t get to see The Boys in the Boat again this weekend, but I wager The Incredible Shrinking Man is a hell of a lot better than Night Swim.
Grade: B
0 Comments