Demon

The Hideous Sun Demon is almost too wonderful to be believed. Scientist Dr. Gilbert McKenna drops his sample--oops!--of "a new isotope that has never existed in nature before" and consequently receives a massive dose of radiation. As so often happens in these cases, the results are gruesome and tragic--whenever he is exposed to sunlight Gil turns into a lizard man, driven to kill. "You mean a human being could evolve backwards through time?" asks the plucky Miss Lansing. Alas, her question can only be answered with a yes. Well, a yes and some hilarious "scientific" proof. Even though he becomes a murderous reptile at the pull of a curtain, some obscure legal statute says that Gil can't be kept in the hospital against his will. Full of whiskey and self-pity, he heads out on his own, a time bomb ready to go off the minute he runs out of zinc oxide. The pleasures of The Hideous Sun Demon are many: rubber lizard suits, headlines reading "Weird Killer Still at Large," a lounge singer named Trudy with an unusually lopsided piano playing style, and day-for-night sequences in which the night is so bright that one cannot see the actors' faces. Truly, a movie that must be experienced in DVD. --Ali Davis