The Alligator People (1959)
Directed by Roy Del Ruth
This here is wonderfully typical 50's monster movie. Beverly Garland plays a psychiatrist's nurse (Jane Marvin) who's helping him out with some hypnotism experiments he's working on. Imaging the doctors surprise when under hypnosis his nurse claims to have a different name (Joyce Webster), and goes on to tell a highly unlikely story of marriage breakup caused by Alligator People. The trouble is that she's hooked up to a lie detector as a part of the experiment, and everything she's saying is true.
The story she relates under hypnosis is the majority of the movie. It seems about a year or so previous, she was married to her sweetheart Paul. They were taking a honeymoon on the train, when he was about to tell something he should have told her long ago. She never gets to hear what he would have said, because at that moment they're interrupted by the delivery of a number of telegrams wishing them luck. One of the telegrams upsets her new husband, who promptly gets off the train "to use the phone" at the next stop, but then disappears.
Months pass as she looks for Paul. Eventually she happens on an old address that he had used when in collage. This leads her to Bayou Landing, Louisianan a small town in the Louisianan swamp. She finds the old address, actually a large plantation house, but the Old woman who lives there claims to have never heard of Paul. She's missed the last train, so The Old Lady grudgingly offers her a room for the night. Joyce suspects the Old Woman knows more than she's letting on, and that night when she frightens a mysterious stranger who's crept in to play the piano, she knows something fishy is going on.
The answer is Mad Science, Lon Chaney Jr. with a hook for a hand, and eventually a guy in a rubber monster suit. This movie never even tries to raise it self above it's genre trapping, but that's fine because it's a nice place to wallow.
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