The only feature-length British movie to be based on the Eastern European legend of The Golem, It! is a peculiarly though unsuccessfully ambitious effort. Roddy McDowall plays Arthur Pimm, assistant curator at a musty, relic-filled museum, who discovers the ancient, 8-foot clay figure following a fire at a nearby warehouse – while Pimm’s attentions are elsewhere, the impressive, imposing Golem appears to murder his boss (Ernest Clark at his most dapper and urbane), and Arthur starts to get ideas. Before long, he’s controlling the gigantic stone man to do his bidding, corpses begin piling up, and the police start taking as much interest in Pimm as he does towards alluring museum employee Jill Haworth (paucity of budget allows for a modish hairdo for the female lead, but unfortunately very little in the way of trendy accompanying outfits). The addition of a would-be Norman Bates angle, with the nervous McDowall keeping his late mother’s decayed body around the house for conversation purposes, over-eggs the pudding somewhat since Roddy’s manic performance not only imitates that of Psycho’s Anthony Perkins but at times anticipates the twitchy sarcasm of Jeffrey Combs in the later Re-Animator. As the film lumbers, much in the manner of its title character, to a close, the Golem manages to demolish Hammersmith Bridge before eventually being nuked by the armed forces, but on an outlay of about one-and-ninepence I’ll leave it to you to rate just how spectacular the achieved effects of these mediocre ‘highlights’ really are. It probably all sounded great in the script.
