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1953 American film starring Richard Carlson, King Donovan, Jean Byron, Byron Foulger, and directed by Curt Siodmak.

This is an interesting little movie that has a mix of good and bad qualities. The story begins with a short narration explaining the "Office of Scientific Investigation" for whom the main character works. This government organization is chartered to investigate unusual scientific phenomena. These investigators have been nicknamed "A-Men" patterned after the "G-Men" of Eliot Ness fame.

Their case begins when a hardware and appliance store owner reports to the authorities that all his wares have been magnetized. Upon arriving they quickly deduce that all the metal objects are in fact magnetic and there is, that most dreaded of dread, radioactivity emanating from one of the apartments above the store. Calling the home office and donning protective suits they climb the stairs in search of the radiation source. Once in the apartment they discover a well equipped make shift laboratory. Inside they find a dead scientist and a small empty container used for storing highly radioactive materials. They deduce that the contents have been removed from the apartment by someone unknown for an equally unknown reason.

Surprisingly a public announcement is made to be on the lookout for the radioactive materials and any strange magnetic happenings. After filtering through many false alarms they get one that seems authentic. A taxi driver reports his automobile stopped running because the engine was magnetized after delivering a fare to the airport. With some detective work using a Geiger counter they establish the unknown fares flight and notify the pilot. The airline experiences engine difficulty immediately after being warned of such possibility by the control tower.

Upon returning and landing our team boards the plane and has a last few minutes to talk with the elderly researcher dying of radiation poisoning. In his brief case is the cause of all the trouble, and more yet to come. The dying researcher describes how he somehow created a radioactive isotope that behaves like a living organism and attains nourishment by reaching out with an intense magnetic field that is powerful enough to magnetize and move metal objects and cause disruption to motors and engines.

The dilemma becomes apparent when they determine that after each 11 hour period this organism goes through a feeding cycle where it doubles in power and also hunger. During one of these magnetic feeding frenzies it actually collapses a building killing some of the researchers. One feeding frenzy is averted when the hero decides to try flowing all the electricity they have available into the little metal cylinder thus satisfying its hunger before it reaches with its "magnetic claws", as one scientist puts it. The investigators realize they must find some way of "killing" the monster in the next few cycles before it is too powerful to be stopped and caused large scale destruction.

Although this story is slow moving and somewhat confusing, in its voice over narrative style and low budget special effects (some of which were borrowed, buy the way), the story itself has some great science fiction merit. First of all the nature of the monster does not involve any anthropomorphic "guy in a rubber suit", or even tentacled crawling blob, to which so many other films resort. In fact the appearance of the monster is simply that of a small solid metal cylinder. It does not even have any moving parts, except for its invisible magnetic "claws". The film at least tries to attain some accurate use of scientific terminology such as erg, watts and "unipole magnetism" (what we now call magnetic monopoles).

For example there is also the use the phrase "grows like a bacteria" when they describe its doubling in strength, which is correct, whereas modern filmmakers would likely use reference to the more presently popular "virus" terminology, which would not be correct. The concept of something doubling at a certain rate is also very mathematical. However, as in other natural phenomenon , there are practical limits to just such growth that quickly come into account.

With the present state of the art in special effects a serious remake of this movie could be quite entertaining and down right scary. Providing, of course, they avoided the clichés that so many of today’s filmmakers make the mistake of employing.

In fact I can imagine a scene where in the lab the little harmless cylinder begins one of its feeding frenzies. First a small nearby metal object would be dragged a short distance across a table. Then more distant light objects would start sliding its direction. Then heavier and heavier objects begin to be dragged and rain in from all directions. Lab personnel would be forced to dodge and evade flying objects as equipment is torn from its anchors. Finally the structural metal supports would begin to bend and twist toward the hungry beast. After a tense moment of near structural collapse everything would stop and the massed collection of metal objects would just fall into a pile at the base of the little harmless cylinder. Even other rooms and offices would have walls piled with metal objects. A few more cycles like that and it would be able to implode buildings, pull cars off the street, yank planes down out of the sky, and uproot iron ore deposits right out of the ground. Not to mention the theoretical ability to pull the iron right out of human hemoglobin. Yuck, quite a mess, eh? Now I ask you, wouldn’t that make a cool movie scene?

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