X: The man with Xray Eyes

My dear Doctor, I am closing in on the gods

(Spoilers!) 

The number of ways Rodger Corman flicks have been interpreted and analysed probably outnumbers the amount of films he directed and produced at this point. Film critics argue over their value using terms like “high camp” and “shlock”, academics try and figure out he was sexist, a lover of woman or both and everyone argues whether or not he was actually any good. Me personally? I think he's up there with Russ Meyer in terms of hokey popcorn flicks. A Corman film is not something you watch expecting to have your mind and soul moved, you watch it because they are simple movies with interesting premises and characters. The plot of X: The man with X-Ray eyes is given away by the very title itself, but the thing that really makes it watchable is how the man with X-ray eyes deals with having x-ray eyes and the various x-ray shenanigans he gets into.

X was released in September 1963, starring Ray Milland as Dr. James Xavier. James is a doctor of some unspecified medical field that qualifies him for surgery and research into advanced pharmaceuticals who hates that he can only see a paltry portion of the electromagnetic spectrum and sets about making a way to see that whole thing with just his eyes. Through unspecified chemical means (and a dead monkey) he invents eye drops that give him x-ray vision. After using this newfound power to see a load of Med students naked and save a young girl from dying in an unnecessary surgery, James gets driven mad by his power and by the blinding lights he is constantly bombarded with and pushes an optician out a window, runs off to become a carnie, then a street doctor before trying to fleece a Vegas casino out of enough money to fund a research lab somewhere in Mexico. He gets rumbled, crashes his car in the desert, stumbles into a travelling revivalist meeting and, after somehow seeing through all of space at once, plucks his own eyes out. All that in the space of 90-minutes.

The first shot of this movie is a lone eyeball starring into the camera for a disturbingly long time before being dropped into a Pyrex beaker with liquid nitrogen being bubbled through it. And that sets the whole, indescribable, tone for this whole movie. For something hammered out in 3 weeks for $300,000, it feels like a particularly high-end piece of classic pulp sci-fi. Mad scientist goes to far in an experiment and reaps what he has sown, a classic narrative arc but an effective one. And its reemarkebly well shot with some downright ingenious camera transitions and shot compositions. Although the only real plot hole I can think of is that his x-ray vision consists of chromatic aberration and occasionally seeing people as skeletons. And frankly that doesn't seem bad enough to yank your eyes out or push your friend out a window. But if I spent all day picking holes in Corman films, I wouldn't enjoy them as much as I do, and I don't want to live in a world without pulp sci-fi!