Some of your universe's critics are unkind to The Hideous Sun Demon. Reviewer 13Funbags writes, “No one should ever see this.” Reviewer planktonrules writes, “The script also is not particularly inspired or original.” And Reviewer Tera-Jones writes, “I don't know what is worse: the cinematography, dialogue, the story, the acting, the directing - it's all bad. Really bad.”
Read on for the truth about The Hideous Sun Demon...
An alarm rings at a facility called Atomic Research, Inc. Two men deposit a man on a stretcher into a station wagon ambulance and drive away. As we watch the ambulance drive through Los Angeles, we hear a voiceover explaining, to some extent, that we are watching: “Immediately after the launching of U.S. satellites number one and number three into outer space, newspaper headlines across the country told the world of a new radiation hazard from the sun far more deadly than cosmic rays. An obscure scientist, iconic Dr. Gilbert McKenna, had already discovered this danger from the sun. This is his story.”
The man in the ambulance is in fact Dr. McKenna. In a hospital waiting room, the doctor assigned to Dr. McKenna’s case, Dr. Stern, converses with the patient’s coworkers Miss Lansing and Dr. Buckell. Before he can tell them what is going on, he asks about what happened at Dr. McKenna’s work, so Dr. Buckell explains. “We’re doing some work on some newly developed radioactive isotopes. We use all the usual precautions—lead screens, remote control handling devices, you know what I mean. All radioactive material is kept in a lead vault, and when we want a particular isotope, we have a little electric train—a toy train, like you’d give a kid for Christmas—which we back into the vault. And we load on the isotope by means of remote control arms and run the train out of the vault again.” Unfortunately, there was an accident, and Dr. McKenna dropped the isotope on the floor, exposing him to radiation for five or six minutes. (Later, Dr. Buckell implies Dr. McKenna made the mistake because he was suffering from a hangover.) Of course, the alarm was sounded and an emergency crew sent in.
Dr. McKenna shows no radiation burns, or any negative effects, but Dr. Stern keeps him in the hospital for observation. He lies in his hospital bed and charms his nurse: “Until a moment ago, I felt strong enough to shake down the very walls of this hospital. But as soon as you entered the room, your beauty so overwhelmed me that I feel as weak as a day-old kitten.”
Charmed only a little, the nurse wheels Dr. McKenna in a wheelchair up to the roof of the hospital, a dingy flat area they call a “solarium.” The nurse leaves the doctor next to an elderly woman reading a magazine, and Dr. McKenna opens his shirt and takes a nap under the bright sun.
Shockingly, the sunlight affects the irradiated Dr. McKenna in an unexpected way. The old woman looks at him and gasps. He runs inside and looks at a mirror, where he realizes he has metamorphosed into a hideous sun demon!
The film cuts to a later meeting with Dr. Stern, Miss Lansing, and Dr. Buckell. Dr. Stern explains, taking them narratively back millions of years. “As you know, all life on Earth began with a one-celled animal. And biologists estimate that it took several million years to evolve a form as complex as the mammals—as man. But here’s something very interesting. During the nine-month period of conception to birth, the human being goes through the same evolutionary process in the womb. In other words, he first begins as a one-celled animal. Then he becomes a collection of cells. He starts to assume a definite form as the cells begin to take on specialized functions. He next passes through a state when he is similar in structure to a fish, and then from an amphibian to a reptile. Finally, he passes into the mammal state where he begins to take on more and more the appearance of a human being.” Dr. Stern says this process could be reversed.
Dr. Buckell understands completely. “You mean a human being could evolve backwards through time and become some sort of prehistoric creature? That’s fantastic.”
Dr. Stern has another audiovisual presentation prepared, so he has his guests close the blinds and he projects slides onto a screen. Interestingly, there are only four slides in the presentation, and they all show closeups of insects exposed to radiation. After the 30-second presentation, he has Dr. Buckell open the blinds again. Dr. Stern concludes, “His whole appearance has changed into something…scaly, almost lizard-like.” Sunlight acted as a catalyst in transforming him, so of course they reversed the transformation by keeping him in a dark room. Moreover, artificial light has no effect on him.
Dr. McKenna leaves the hospital and drives his (perhaps ill-chosen) convertible at night to his remote house in the forest. There he gets drunk drinking from a stainless steel cocktail mixer. The next night, he drives to a bar, where he watches a woman playing piano and singing. Then he returns home to fret about his situation. He goes outside to a cliff above the ocean, ready to jump, but his thoughts of suicide are interrupted when he sees a group of teenagers frolicking on the beach below.
The next night, he returns to the bar so he can talk to the singer, Trudy. They are interrupted by her thuggish boyfriend George. The two men get into a fight, which Dr. McKenna wins, so he drags Trudy to his car and they drive wildly down the Pacific Coast Highway. They share a drink in his convertible, parked in a beach parking lot. “You’re a strange guy,” she tells him.
“I am?”
“Yeah. I can’t figure out just why.”
They take a walk on the beach and he kisses her. She struggles to get away from him and he pushes her violently into the surf. Then, inexplicably, they walk off arm in arm, giggling.
Later, he builds a fire and she wears only a towel. Obviously, she can’t go home and must wait for her clothes (which are sitting in the sand a few inches from the surf) to dry. They embrace as the image dissolves to sunrise, the two of them lying in the sand.
Of course, when the sun comes up, Dr. McKenna runs away down the beach, gets in his car, and drives off, abandoning Trudy on the sand. He drives home as fast as he can, encountering Miss Lansing at his house—of course, he is in the hideous form of the sun demon. He hides in his garage and, for no known reason, graphically squeezes an innocent mouse to death.
Suspensefully, Miss Lansing walks through the house, finally finding Dr. McKenna in a closet—he has returned to his normal self. She tells him that a man named Dr. Hoffman, the nation’s foremost expert on radiation poisoning, is coming to help Dr. McKenna. “I’m beyond helping,” he says. “This thing I’ve got is different.”
Later, the expert consults with Dr. McKenna and Dr. Buckell. Dr. Hoffman thinks he can help, but Dr. McKenna must not leave his house, even at night, until he is transferred to a hospital in Bakersfield. At night, however, Dr. McKenna cannot sleep, as he is bothered by visions of Trudy. He wakes up and rushes to the bar to meet her. He tries to apologize to her but her thug friends drag him outside and beat him up. She stops them and says she will take him to a hospital, but she takes him to her house. Perhaps oddly, she has forgiven him for stranding her at the beach.
Unfortunately for all concerned, the thuggish George drops by Trudy’s house and sees Dr. McKenna, so naturally he pulls out a gun and forces Dr. McKenna to go outside in the daylight. He transforms quickly and strangles George as Trudy watches, horrified.
Trudy screams and the hideous sun demon rushes into the hills. In the film’s most disturbing scene, he stumbles upon a group of children playing in their backyard and, after running from their collie, he kills the innocent dog. Then he runs back to his own house, where his doctor friends and Miss Lansing have been waiting for him.
After some complications, Dr. McKenna runs away again, taking his car and running into a policeman chasing him. We are told he has run away from his car after an accident. We also see a newsboy selling an extra edition of the newspaper with the headline WEIRD KILLER STILL AT LARGE. Dr. McKenna hides among the oil drills that pepper coastal Los Angeles, but he is discovered in the daytime by a little girl who forces him to have a tea party in a shack housing oil drill motors with her dolls. When the girl tries to smuggle cookies to feed Dr. McKenna, she tells her mother she is hiding a man in the shack.
“The shack!” Her mother calls the police but the girl runs out of her suburban home and across the street to the oil field where Dr. McKenna is hiding.
He grabs the girl and runs through the oil field, pursued by the police. After a few moments, he begins his transformation into the hideous sun demon. To make matters worse, he loses his shirt while crawling under a train. After attacking one policeman with a two-by-four, he climbs up the outside of an oil tank. A policeman pursues him and shoots him once, then throws his gun at the monster. Then he recovers the gun and chases the sun demon (whose pants are inexplicably soaked) to the top of the structure, where he shoots the monster through the chest.
Dr. McKenna falls off the tank. Miss Lansing, who has arrived with McKenna’s other friends, dreams. “Perhaps you should cry,” Dr. Buckell tells her. “The rest of us can only hope that his life was…not wasted.”
The End
Robert Clarke, who had appeared in the somewhat similar The Astounding She-Monster (1957) in the previous year, wrote and directed The Hideous Sun Demon to showcase his performing range, as well as his bare chest. But he also buries, whether intentionally or unintentionally, an anti-alcoholism message in the film. Dr. McKenna's illness is the direct result of his alcoholic hangover, and his fateful encounters with Trudy begin in a bar. If the tragic doctor could have resisted the lure of alcohol, several people would still be alive today, including McKenna himself. Additionally, the film includes a useful lesson about the famous (and scientifically proven) theory that "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny," and that we should all be careful about exposure to radiation because of the high probability that it will result in evolving backward into lizard people. Just ask Dr. Gil McKenna.