2. DOCTORS WITHOUT BORDERS: Mad scientists never seem to follow the rules…

Jane Marvin used to be Joyce Webster and they’re both played by Beverly Garland. She has amnesia because of something that happened in her past, something that scientists plan on getting to the bottom of.

She used to be married to Paul Webster (Richard Crane), a man who disappeared on their train honeymoon and ran back to the Cypresses Plantation in Bayou Landing, Louisiana. She follows him there and gets treated horribly by Lavinia Hawthorne (Frieda Inescort), who runs the home. There’s no train until the morning, so she stays in a room that she must not leave. That night, Joyce watches a shadowed man play piano before running out of the house.

Dr. Mark Sinclair (George Macready) wants to tell her the truth before Lavinia reveals that she is Paul’s mother. He had been torn apart in a plane crash and Dr. Mark had used a special formula to regenerate his body parts. That medical miracle has since turned Paul into, well, an alligator person.

There’s also a swamp man named Manon (Lon Chaney Jr.) who has already rescued Joyce from a snake before trying to assault her. He busts into the doctor’s lab just as they blast Mark with cobalt radiation. As the two fight, the lab is decimated and explodes. Mark is now a straight up alligator with an actual reptile head and he looks amazing, like the Gorn but way cheaper. He runs hard into the swamp and, yes, dies in quicksand while his wife watches.

The scientists decide not to tell Jane that she was Joyce. I mean, how would you?

Directed by Roy Del Ruth and written by Orville H. Hampton Charles O’Neal and Robert M. Fresco, this has a great look thanks to cinematographer Karl Struss, who won four Oscars for his work over his career. This was the other feature for Return of the Fly, which was in CinemaScope and needed another horror movie in that format. It was an independent movie purchased by 20th Century Fox.

What’s really wild is that there was almost an Atari 2600 game for this movie. 20th Century Fox had commissioned it and when collectors found the ROMs, for years they thought they had the actual game. Instead, in 2002, the real Alligator People game was discovered and it was learned that the other game was Planet of the Apes.

The game is similar to Pac-Man, with Jane being a syringe. You must save her friends who have become Alligator People before they eat you.

You can watch this on YouTube.