The Man Who Turned to Stone (1957)

Victor Jory and Ann Doran were fine actors, although they both appeared in some pretty low-grade stuff over the years. However, when William Hudson and Tina Carver are in the cast, you can count on lots of unintentional laughs.Dr. Murdock (Jory) and Mrs. Ford (Doran) are among the creepy administrators of a girls' reformatory. There have been quite a few "suicides" at the institution lately, so heroic state psychologist Dr. Rogers (Hudson) is called in to investigate. What he uncovers is an ongoing cycle of rejuvenation of the old guys who run the place (most of them are around 200 years old), and of course the bodies of young women are needed for the process to continue. (Funny how no one ever needs young male bodies…but whatever.) The end of the movie has Dr. Rogers saving his new girlfriend Carol Adams (Charlotte Austin) while the evil reformatory staff perish in a fire.Hudson is actually pretty good, and it is unusual to see him as a good guy. Jory and Doran are rather restrained (maybe they're embarrassed) but they both deliver good performances. However, it's always fun to watch Tina Carver (here she plays a reformatory inmate), because…well, no one can scream quite like she does. The movie's premise isn't really that original, and the sets are pretty cheap (the inmates' life forces are sucked out while they're immersed in a stainless steel tank) but the film has a certain weird charm to it. It's not a standard 1950s horror flick by any measure. I rather liked it, and it's just offbeat enough to hold your attention.

Even though I don't often use the term, this 1950s B horror has become a favorite "guilty pleasure" of mine. It's has an enjoyably weird and sordid premise, even if it's loaded with plot holes and requires a heaping suspension of disbelief. A detention center for women is experiencing an unusually high rate of random heart attack deaths by healthy young female inmates. It turns out that the newest staff of eccentric middle-agers now running the prison are actually centuries-old people who kidnap the girls, and then drain their life forces in order to keep themselves from aging further. The problem is, if they miss their latest energy boosts, they start to turn into stone. A kindly social worker (Charlotte Austin, later in FRANKENSTEIN 1970) and psychiatrist William Hudson (the bad hubby of ATTACK OF THE FIFTY FT. WOMAN) investigate the strange occurrences. Victor Jory is suitably creepy as the head villain. This has some disturbing moments considering its era, and is just offbeat enough to remain consistently interesting. **1/2 out of ****

More of a horror movie set in a "girl's home" than a science fiction movie, with definite exploitation elements, "Man" seems to be built around the scenes where "Eric" grabs the young women and carries them off to the upstairs lab to be tied up, gagged, and drained of their "bioenergies".You'd think a movie with several scenes like that would be cheaply thrilling and maybe a guilty pleasure, but you'd be wrong. The movie is mostly too too dull to keep any interest. The "girls" all seem to be in their late 20's and 30s (I know, it's really hard to get teenagers to look and act believably for extended lengths of movie time) and a couple of them are OK, but none of them are there for any reason but to be kidnapped and victimized.There's one nicely underplayed scene where the scientist/torturers decide withhold the bioelectric treatments from one of their number for reasons that aren't completely clear. The actor playing the dying scientist manages a dignified and believable farewell and you can see how interesting the film might have been if the director and screenwriter had the wherewithal to explore the group dynamics and interplay of a group of 200+ year old bioelectric vampires.To top it off, the hero "wins" because one of the scientists accidentally drops a candle into a box of rags while changing the fuses or something and within seconds the whole building is engulfed. Stupidest. Villains. Ever.Victor Jory is decent in this - you can see even here why the man could continue to get work in films over the years.Not good, not all that bad, "Man Who Turned To Stone" is just...there. If you get a chance to see it, it'll be OK and you won't hate it. But I doubt you'll remember much of it the day after.

People running a reformatory are actually centuries old people draining the life out of their charges...if they miss a a treatment they turn to stone...a doctor and the daughter of the governor investigate.Okay but way too talky horror science fiction story. Its the sort of thing thats been done to death before and since---and it kind of works this time but the pacing is so slack any tension is washed out....Not bad- but more something to induce sleep...Watching the film I kept thinking that perhaps had the film been cut down by 15 minutes it might have played better. on the other hand commercials might have helped as well since it wouldn't have seemed like there was nothing going on.