The final Jack Arnold horror/sci-fi piece, Monster on the Campus, is the least memorable on his large resume. Arnold himself has been quoted as saying this was a failure, and it's not hard to tell why. There are flashes of the characters Arnold created so well, but the overall story, plot, and general lack of anything exciting on screen make this one to skip.
The initial concept nearly comes off as original. A college professor accidentally cuts his hand on a dead Coelacanth; he de-evolves into a prehistoric human form. What was supposedly just plasma from the fish turns out, of course, to be radioactive.
Problems are numerous here, almost saved by Arthur Franz's performance. He slowly becomes a madman when he realizes what's happened to him, and does so in compelling form. It's the steps that take him there that are beyond ridiculous.
It's utterly amazing how Franz's character, Donald Blake, can be so oblivious to the general problem. Within the first ten minutes, when the film has some momentum and seems to be building towards something memorable, the audience knows what's wrong. Police, college kids (one played wooden by a young Troy Donahue), other scientists, and Blake himself can't figure it out. It not only takes three murders, a friendly dog turned wolf, a dragonfly turned massive for it all to snap — there's no reason for Blake to forcefully transform himself.
Why he actually feels the need to perform experiments on himself when the answer is right in front of him kills the entire movie. It's a brain dead script, much like the characters. There's only one full reveal of the monster, and that doesn't happen until the final reel. Trademark Universal horror tricks like a creeping hand around a wall keep the creature off screen for as long as possible.
Bud Westmore handles the makeup here. He would work on nearly 500 movies as a makeup artist, and this is surely one he probably wanted to forget. Franz doesn't work inside the suit. That task is handed to Eddie Parker, and somewhere the sizing went wrong. The piece looks to be hanging off the face, jiggling about with the actor's face clearly visible in a few close-ups. With only three kills and one being memorable (an axe to the face which is surely a staggering amount of violence for 1958), the monster never feels like a threat.
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