HILFE ICH BIN UNSICHTBAR (1951)
aka Help, I’m Invisible
Article 4642 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 10-1-2014
Directed by E.W. Emo
Featuring Theo Lingen, Inge Landgut, Fita Benkhoff
Country: West Germany
What it is: Science fiction comedy

A businessman who dabbles in his own experiments finds his life falling apart when he accidentally becomes invisible.

For the second day in a row, I find myself covering a movie that had dropped off my hunt list into my “ones that got away” list, and the belief at that time was that the movie was indeed lost, as no archive had it listed in their holdings. Apparently, though, a collector must have had a copy, and it popped up on YouTube. Unfortunately, the copy has no English subtitles or dubbing, but then, I didn’t really expect it would. Still, that does mean I can’t really give a fair evaluation of the movie. I will say this much, though – the movie is nearly half over before the fantastic content comes into play. The additional comic twist to the invisibility is that the character can become visible again, but only when he is inebriated. To my sensibilities, this doesn’t bode well for the level of the humor. The humor is primarily verbal, and what visual humor there is didn’t impress me. There’s one impressive little special effects sequence where we get a close-up of the invisible man writing a note to someone; the rest of the special effects are standard fare for this sort of thing. Though I can’t really evaluate the movie, the impression I get from the few plot descriptions I’ve read is that it is painfully unfunny, so take that as a warning. Me, I’m still grateful it showed up.