Most Dangerous Man Alive (1961)

(On TV, November 2021) Low-budget science fiction films are nothing new, and neither are far-fetched premises. Case in point: The very 1950s-style (shot in 1958, released three years later) Most Dangerous Man Alive, in which a semi-hoodlum wanders through an atomic testing field and gets the power of having his skin turn invulnerable, like metal. Obviously a quick and cheap exploitation film, it’s a shoddy production built on top of a nonsensical script that doesn’t really care about how to get there, as long as a wild premise is up on the screen. If you’re feeling generous, you can point at Most Dangerous Man Alive as a precursor to superhero films, to cyberpunk body modification, to more elaborate genre dramas in which the burden of extraordinary abilities is examined. But you have to be quite indulgent to see the thematic roots of a film in which a chaotic script (yeah, let’s have the hero murder someone in the first ten minutes…) is coupled with bare-bones execution. It is, trivially, the last of chameleonic director Alan Dwan’s filmography — not much of a capstone to a storied career but, on the other hand, it does lend a bit more interest to an otherwise fairly dull film that’s most charitably called an exemplar of Atomic Age filmed Science Fiction.