His character is nicknamed “The Butcher” because he enjoys killing people and, perhaps, because he knows the difference between a sirloin and a rib-eye. The Butcher is imprisoned and awaiting execution, and possibly working on some choice filets, after the rest of his gang turned state’s evidence against him. The Butcher swears revenge, and considers making surf and turf for dinner, and is promptly executed by the California penal system. Eventually, his corpse winds up in the hands of a doctor in need of a freshly dead body to test a new potential cure for cancer on. No explanation why he would test a cancer cure on a dead man who didn’t have cancer, but it doesn’t matter because the damn thing doesn’t work anyway. Somehow this drug of his, mixed with a great deal of electricity, revives the dead Butcher. The “tremendous electrical voltage increased his cellular structure so he was no longer a man” giving The Butcher “almost inconceivable amounts of strength.” Inconceivable? I can conceive a lot of strength, doctor.

The now-mute Butcher (the electricity fried his vocal chords) heads to Los Angeles and carries out revenge on the men who sold him up the river. His story is narrated by the bland cop in charge of the case, played by Casey Adams. This is one of those movie narrations that tells you far more information than you want, or need, to hear. The guy just won’t shut up. When he’s on screen looking at a newspaper he feels the need to tell us, “I woke up the next morning and looked in the newspaper.” Well yes, officer, I can see that, it’s right there in your hands where a newspaper is generally placed in order to be read. When one of Butcher’s stooges begins to confess his crimes to the police and the scene dissolves into the next, the guy just has to say, “then Lowe continued his confession.” If what he said was so important, why did we dissolve away from him? Let’s hear what the man has to say! The movie’s only 70 minutes long, it’s not like we couldn’t have sat through another minute of him talking. In the film’s climax Chaney gets to rip-off the finale of the great gangster movie WHITE HEAT, and afterwards Narrator Man tells us that the electricity that explodes all around him brought him back to life and therefore killed him. The whole life/death dichotomy is not particularly hard and fast in this film.

The only time INDESTRUCTIBLE MAN flirts with ugly film territory is in a series of repeated close-ups of Lon Chaney’s sweaty, twitchy eyeballs. Since the filmmakers made the questionable choice to turn The Butcher into a mute once he’s brought back from the dead, he needs to communicate his emotions somehow, and to do so, director Jack Pollexfen frequently cuts in to extremely tight shots of Chaney’s face, where his eyeballs are wracked with tension and his face is covered in sweat. The man is supposed to be thinking about how to get to Los Angeles and he looks like he just ate a really spicy pepper. I looked all over the Internet to find a image of it but I couldn’t come up with one. I need to learn how to screengrab.

That’s funny, but it’s not so funny you should go out of your way to watch this otherwise drab and uninteresting film just to see it. So don’t bother with INDESTRUCTIBLE MAN. It’s bad, not ugly.