Psychotronic Movie of the Week: The Manster (1959)

The Manster (aka The Split) 

1959, Shaw-Breakston Enterprises

D/P George P. Breakston D: Kenneth B. Krane S: Walter J. Sheldon 

Starring: Peter Dyneley, Jayne Hylton, Satoshi Nakamura, Terri Zimmern

Michael J. Weldon's review in Psychotronic Video #4: 

Originally released in America by Loppert on an incredible double bill with THE HORROR CHAMBER OF DR. FAUSTUS in 1962, this is the ultimate split personality movie. A man in a skinny gorilla suit kills some women in a bath. Blood splatters on the wall. Up in the mountains in a remote cave full of giant mushrooms and plants, we discover he's a mutant. Dr. Suzuki (Satoshi Nakumura) says, "You were my brother. You were an experiment that didn't work out. I'm sorry!," and shoots him. An ugly bug-eyed mutant screeching in a cage is his wife. Meanwhile Larry Stanford, an American journalist, shows up, is drugged and jabbed in the shoulder with a hypo. Star Peter Dyneley, who acts a lot like Lon Chaney, Jr., later provided the voice of Jeff Tracy for British THUNDERBIRDS movies. Back in Tokyo he gets drunk on sake and goes behind closed doors with with four gieshas. He misses his flight home. Suzuki sends his beautiful, obedient assistant Tera (Terri Zimmern) to further corrupt him in a mineral bath. Unshaven and hung over, the reporter ignores his worried, pleading wife, who arrives from New York. A priest is killed at a temple by a werewolf type hand . Two women are murdered on the street. At his room, Stanford sees an eyeball on his shoulder!!! - (a high point of screen surrealism). Soon a scary small extra head grows there. Both of his heads become uglier with big teeth and bugged out eyes. He kills a psychiatrist. The big climax takes place near a volcano. Behind a tree the Manster painfully splits into Stanford and a skinny ape man. They fight and both fall into a volcano!