Rainey Dawn Mr. Franz is a deranged doll maker & "mad scientist" who's biggest fear is being alone. He creates a machine and shrinks a group of people to keep for himself. In a roundabout way, Mr. Franz reminds me of Dr. Pretorius (Bride of Frankenstein) with his tiny people and mannerism and I liked that a lot with this film.Do not expect a physical attack from the tiny people that is not their form of attack, it's another form of attacking by trying to find away to grow large again and report what has happened to the police.Talk about some great filming and special effects... it really looks as if they have been shrunk down into doll sized people. The story is good but tragic in a way - Mr. Franz severe fear of being alone.Overall, this is a very fun 1950s sci-fi horror. I recommend it to fans of the classic sci-fi horror shows.8/10

mark.waltz The attack doesn't come from puppets, but from shrunken humans, a la Dr. Cyclops. This isn't Technicolor big budget 1940 Paramount, but cheap, low- budget black and white American International, the pride of late 1950's drive in double features. In fact, this film salutes their reputation by showing two of the soon to be dolls watching "The Amazing Colossal Man" at the drive-in, giving audiences a thrill by being at the drive-in watching characters in a movie at the drive-in.Better than professional critical reviews lead me to believe it to be, this is best described as a hoot. It all surrounds the lonely old doll maker John Hoyt who keeps the people he likes as companions by shrinking them to doll size and plans to do them all in when he is on the verge of being discovered so they can be together forever. Campy and fun, this is just delightful in every respect. It gets really funny when the doll-sized humans end up in a little party with champagne and music, jitterbugging as the pathetic Hoyt watches.There really aren't any surprises, but the comic element keeps things moving at a rapid pace and the acting really isn't all that bad. John Agar and June Kenny are fine as the main two living dolls who put the plot together to get themselves back to life-sized humans. It gets more intense as his crazy plans are revealed, but the comic element remains, having Hoyt intermingle his dolls with the puppets he sometimes does show off on stage. Reversing the Colossal man and the 50' Woman, thus isn't as ground-breaking as "The Incredible Shrinking Man", but it isn't all wretched either. My only question is what became of the others left behind in the theater, as well as what ultimately happened to Hoyt after the final shot.

Robert J. Maxwell John Hoyt is a doll maker in Los Angeles. He's an elderly man and is lonely. So when he finds himself liking someone, he shrinks them until they're about a foot tall and keeps them encase in glass tubes. They're still alive but unconscious unless he shakes them out into the fresh air, chats with them, and lets them play with each other.When she threatens to leave his employ, he shrinks his pretty new secretary, June Kenney. And when John Agar becomes a little suspicious, he joins the merry group that consists of a mailman, a Marine sergeant, two teeny boppers, and another somewhat sleazy ex secretary. It's an understandable notion. After all, Hoyt has created a model universe in which he is the absolute (and mostly benign) dictator.That's about it. You could almost write the rest of the screenplay yourself. During one of their R&R periods, the living dolls escape and use Hoyt's Extracurricular Anatomic Circumcisional Epenthetic Molecular Extractor (or EACEME, for short) to restore themselves to original size. Or at least Agar and Kenney do. The other twerps disappear without explanation. Hoyt is off to a jaunt in prison where he'll have plenty of company and they're all life sized, whether he likes them or not.But the plot isn't really worth discussing. It's character development that counts. Unfortunately there is no character development either. The whole point of the movie is to put on display some special effects -- eerie noises, matte shots, giant sets that sometimes don't match each other. Nobody involved in a particularly memorable actor with the exception of John Hoyt, whose picture this is. His character is the most complex -- gentle, needy, and careless of others' fortunes. He was the Martian with the third arm in a "Twilight Zone" episode. He was also Decius Brutus in MGM's "Julius Caesar." As a matter of fact this would have made a decent episode of "The Twilight Zone," resembling the touching story of Robert Duvall who falls in love with an animated doll who plays Mozart's pretty Sonata in A Major. Other sources, too numerous to list, include the physiologically oriented "Fantastic Voyage," "The Incredible Shrinking Man" which had metaphysical overtones, and "Dr. Cyclops," which didn't. Of course Dr. Praetorius in "The Bride of Frankenstein" had lots of fun with his miniaturized horny king and screeching queen, and not to mention the Lilliputians Gulliver ran into. Alice Liddel shrinks too but doesn't get nearly run over by a 1955 Ford.I didn't find this too much fun. Kids might, but I'm not even sure of that because they've been bombarded over the past couple of decades by such elaborate CGIs.

MARIO GAUCI Typically, director Gordon here puts his mark on a popular horror theme – in this case, the shrinking of human beings (displayed in glass receptacles very similar to the ones in which Dr. Praetorius showed off his own 'little people' in James Whale's BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN [1935]!), that had seen service during the genre's heyday in both THE DEVIL-DOLL (1936) and DR. CYCLOPS (1940), and which was just reworked in Sci-Fi terms for the nuclear age in THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN (1957); incidentally, the film under review made for an inverse scenario to its director's two "Colossal Man" efforts (which I will be checking out presently). Though the end result is certainly harmless and not unentertaining, I cannot say to have been very enthused with it either. The main reason for this, apart from the obvious lack of surprise within the narrative, is the fact that, much as the film wanted to render the villain (an excellent John Hoyt) sympathetic by emphasizing the consuming loneliness that caused him to take drastic action to overcome this, I simply could not buy it – both as a believable ploy (how did he ever expect his subjects to take their 'affliction' sitting down?!) and as a fantasy element (so the size of an object caught on camera is proportional to the projector's distance from the screen…but what exact bearing does this have on the re-assembling of atoms from one place to the other?!). Another unfortunate aspect to the movie is the apparently obligatory inclusion of 'hip' teenagers…who literally dance to the tune supplied by the puppet-master, that is, until the more level-headed arrival in their fold of star and genre regular John Agar! A subplot involving Hoyt's inconveniently enthusiastic old pal Michael Mark, a more traditional manager of marionettes, and his equally insufferable theatre caretaker does not help matters. For the record, the director's daughter (Susan) makes her acting debut in this one.