Review of The Magnetic Monster

In an interesting take on the movie monster genre, this one doesn't offer giant dinosaurs or mutated insects, but something as simple as a new Earth element gone astray. Not by it's own volition, but only after bombarding selenium with alpha particles for two hundred solid hours by the hapless Doctor Denker (Leonard Mudie) who you would have to wonder, what was he thinking? But I did like the pseudo-science that went into writing the screenplay here, which made use of jargon that actually sounded sensible in the way it was presented. Like the idea that the 'magnetic monster' doubled in size by converting energy into mass whenever it got hungry. Richard Carlson and King Donovan were staples for these kinds of films in the Fifties, so I had to wonder where John Agar was for this one. The American scientists had to reach out to their Canadian counterparts to handle this situation, and fortunately, Nova Scotia had a Deltatron capable of producing six hundred million volts of electricity to take out the magnetic fiend. They really needed nine hundred million, but somehow Drs. Jeffrey Stewart (Carlson) and Dan Forbes (Donovan) made it work with an impressive looking gadget straight out of the German science fiction thriller "Gold" from 1934. Which further added credence to the expression by Stewart - "In nuclear research, there's no place for lone wolves."