cult film freak: DIRECTOR JACK ARNOLD'S 'THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN'

Title: THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN Year: 1957 Rating: ***1/2

Director Jack Arnold had a way of taking the most fantastical stories and making them seem completely grounded, even normal... from aliens landing in IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE, a giant arachnid attack for TARANTULA, or in this case, a grown man shrinking as THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN...

In the first act, when Grant Williams goes from doctor to doctor, trying to figure out why his work-clothes keep outgrowing him, it's like a separate movie... a kind of intentionally uncomfortable melodrama told in a slow-burn, semi-nightmarish, page-turning fashion... much different than the suspenseful action-packed survival-tale involving a comparably gigantic cat and spider the movie's most famous for...

Small girl girlfriend April Kent in THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN

And those scenes are fantastic, as Grant becomes a miniature Robinson Crusoe inside a basement crowded with makeshift weapons and random nibbles of food... but it's also a bit exhausting...

If only the middle half was more expanded, fleshed-out, like when Grant meets the perfect tiny carnival girl in an adorable April Kent, who makes a far more attractive and worthwhile ingenue than sulking miscast wife Randy Stuart, seeming a decade older than the youthful Williams...

Grant Williams in THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN

An underrated b-actor who steals his own show: as effectively timid by the rudimentary SHRINKING process as he's bravely intense and adventurous in a role he never surpassed...

Meanwhile, CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON director Jack Arnold would eventually semi-retire into mostly television so, overall, both actor and auteur deserved a much longer science-fiction-cinema run.