Ian’s review published on Letterboxd:
51/100
”Orders to shoot on sight... I thought he said the bloke was invisible?”
Feels very different from James Whale’s original film not only in terms of how it uses its main character in differing ways; here it’s used as something more like a murder mystery and it’s by all means to be invisible to do it; but also in terms of its genre. Where as the first film was more horror/science-fiction based, Joe May’s The Invisible Man Returns uses comedy to a pretty high extent and I think that’s where my disliking for the film comes from. Not that the comedy didn’t work the whole time, but it just didn’t seem to fit into the whole film honestly.
The Invisible Man himself is looking for the real culprit for who murdered his brother and he’ll go to any means to see who actually did it and this spin on the lore is good on paper but deep down the character is much more horror based and here it doesn’t really have that affect on me. I think it’s just something to use as a storytelling device, but itself doesn’t allow much to happen for it. Crazy to think that this is Vincent Price’s first horror role and he’s only actually seen in the last moments. He’s as big of an actor to fill Rains shoes, but what Rain did in the original I just don’t think can be topped. I think some of the ideas in the film are nice, but ultimately The Invisible Man Returns is lackluster in comparison to its predecessor.
