The best and most suspenseful of the 1950s radioactive mutation movies. It’s also the peak of Hollywood’s fascination at the time with sci-fi films about people and animals that change size. Grant Williams plays a likable fella who starts to shrink after he’s dusted by a wandering radiation cloud while out lazing on a boat with his loving wife. Over the next several weeks he gets smaller and smaller until he’s eventually running for his life from the family cat and using a sewing needle as a sword to fight off spiders.
The great Jack Arnold directs in his usual no-nonsense style. Arnold’s so good that he keeps you fully engrossed when the film goes through a remarkable forty minutes or so of nearly no dialogue, just first-person narration, as Grant Williams shrinks to something so tiny that his cozy 1950s house becomes a jungle, or an alien planet practically, in which he has to silently fight for survival. It’s so exciting that you stop wondering whether or not he ever tried to fit his whole body into his wife’s pussy at some point.
Written by Richard Matheson adapting his own novel.