I'll tell you why so serious

Admirable film.

Unshakable, witty and deeply felt, the film will be paying emotional dividends for a long, long time.

Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.

This movie starts with a man hiding in the woods.A car pulls up and he gets in it.We later learn he's a safe cracker that just broke out of prison but not before they go through a road block.The cops just stand on the side of the road waving flashlights and people stop.The escapee pretends to be sleeping and the cops say they don't want to bother him.That's when you should know to shut the movie off but I didn't.It turns out that he was broken out by people he didn't know and that's not the weird part.He's wearing a tuxedo and carrying a gun!How can anything after that even matter?The plot involves a guy forcing a not so evil scientist to invent a machine to make people invisible.And he does just that,yet the movie is called The Amazing Transparent Man.I don't understand why they always lied in old b-movie titles.Today if a movie is called Big Ass Spider, there's a big ass spider in it not a fairly large spider. Did I mention there was scuba diving? There's always scuba diving.

Fans of the cult director Edgar G. Ulmer may consider this routine, forgettable, but adequately entertaining sci-fi feature to be one of his lesser efforts. Still, one could do worse. It's decently acted, features very amusing visual effects, and is thin enough on story to clock in at a very short 58 minutes. It also leads to a pretty entertaining resolution; as one would say, things end with a bang.Tough guy actor Douglas Kennedy stars as Joey Faust (!), a criminal busted out of jail by nefarious Major Krenner (James Griffith) and his associates. Krenner has forced unhappy scientist Peter Ulof (Ivan Triesault) to perfect a method of turning a man invisible, and Krenner wants to use this method on Faust so that the hood can commit acts of espionage for him. Faust, not surprisingly, has other ideas: he'd rather rob banks.The scenes with the invisible Faust are the most entertaining in this thing, such as when Griffith has to mime being strangled, or the development late in the tale when Fausts' body begins to appear and disappear. The music by Darrell Calker is good, maybe too good for something like this. Kennedy is a hoot as the swaggering Faust, and Griffith is an okay villain. Triesault is pitiable as Ulof, who's had a very hard life. Marguerite Chapman ("Flight to Mars"), in her last feature film, is reasonably engaging as Laura, who finds Fausts' offer of proceeds from potential bank robberies to be too hard to resist. Buffs may be interested to note that veteran character actor Patrick Cranshaw, who achieved fame late in his life and career as Blue in "Old School", plays a security guard here.Certainly the denouement is priceless, as Triesault ends up addressing us directly, hoping that we find the idea of an "invisible army" as appalling as some of the characters in this thing do.Five out of 10.

Extremely compact (57 minutes) yet entertaining story of ruthless safe-cracker (Kennedy), sprung from gaol by a demented former military agent (Griffith) and his cheap-wine associate (Chapman), forced to endure radiation experiments that make him invisible in order to steal guarded uranium deposits so Griffith can build an invisible army to take-over the world. Street-wise Kennedy decides to turn his transparency into an opportunity to pull a bank heist, but things go awry when the invisibility wears off mid-way through the crime.Griffith is an impeccably dressed, meek-looking but sadistic villain, keeping his associates subservient via various forms of duress, Chapman plays the life-of-crime broad, mistreated by Griffith (there's a great scene in which Griffith slaps her twice the second he calls "the dot on the i") seeing an opportunity to make it big with Kennedy's safe-cracking skills. Kennedy is the cornerstone, delivering an economical performance of a career criminal with no pride or patriotism, only a loyalty to his young daughter from whom he's forcibly estranged.You won't get much in your special effects on this budget, nevertheless it's not a bad variation on the "invisible man" theme like an "Outer Limits" or "Twilight Zone" episode with real exteriors and a capable and reasonably distinguished cast. Look out for craggy-faced Pat Cranshaw ("Old School") as an inept security guard in an early film role.

Douglas Kennedy is the escaped convict who becomes The Amazing Transparent Man as the result of a laboratory experiment by Dr. Ivan Triesault under the direction of perennial movie villain James Griffith. In fact Kennedy was busted out of jail for just that purpose.Griffith is a guy who thinks big, create an army of these invisible men and you can really dictate to whomever you please. In fact the only problem then is to create invisible weapons for the army to use. But one step at a time. He busts Kennedy out of prison because Kennedy is a safe cracker and he needs his skills. But Kennedy dreams on a smaller scale just let him become invisible and look at all the bank jobs he'll pull. That in and of itself is a conflict.But invisibility has a price. What Kennedy has to steal is fissionable uranium because that's the key ingredient for Triesault. As we well know from life and from films radiation exposure carries a price. Do I have to draw you a picture?The Amazing Transparent Man was shot on a chump change budget and gets rather dull in spots. But the film is still one campy hoot reminder of those paranoid Cold War days.