As I look forward to the upcoming Blumhouse reboot of Universal's THE INVISIBLE MAN, the movies on my mind are the invisible people movies Universal released back in the 1930s – '50s. THE INVISIBLE MAN 1933, THE INVISIBLE MAN RETURNS, THE INVISIBLE WOMAN, INVISIBLE AGENT, THE INVISIBLE MAN'S REVENGE, ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET THE INVISIBLE MAN. Even an invisible man's cameo in ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET FRANKENSTEIN. It completely slips my mind that an invisible person movie got a major release much more recently than all of those. Until someone brings it up, I forget that Columbia Pictures got in on the invisible man action when they turned Kevin Bacon into an invisible creeper for the 2000 film HOLLOW MAN.
Directed by Paul Verhoeven from a screenplay by Gary Scott Thompson and Andrew W. Marlowe, HOLLOW MAN has the following synopsis:
After years of experimentation, Dr. Sebastian Caine, a brilliant but arrogant and egotistical scientist working for the Defense Department, has successfully transformed mammals to an invisible state and brought them back to their original physical form. Determined to achieve the ultimate breakthrough, Caine instructs his team to move on to Phase III: human experimentation. Using himself as the first subject, the invisible Caine finds himself free to do the unthinkable. But Caine's experiment takes an unexpected turn when his team can't bring him back. As the days pass, he grows more and more out of control, doomed to a future without flesh as the HOLLOW MAN.
Bacon had a great supporting cast that included Elisabeth Shue, Josh Brolin, Kim Dickens, Rhona Mitra, and Greg Grunberg.
This movie is a black sheep to me because I forget it exists, but it's a black sheep in the career of Paul Verhoeven because the director has said it's the only movie he has made that he can't defend. His vision was compromised by the studio. Since Verhoeven won't defend it, Lance Vlcek has stepped up to do just that in the latest video in his The F*cking Black Sheep series.
Check out the video embedded above to find out why Lance feels the film deserves more attention.
He has me convinced; I'm going to have to revisit HOLLOW MAN before the new version of THE INVISIBLE MAN reaches theatres on February 28th. I might even watch the 2006 direct-to-video sequel for the first time.