Carlos (Arturo de Córdova) finds the body of a murdered man in his
stepdad's (Jorge Mondragón) company, and the company's boss José
(Néstor de Barbosa) arrives on the scene suspiciously quickly and accuses
Carlos of the murder out of the blue. Carlos is then convicted to 99 years
in prison, and in jail, he loses all will to live, much to the despair of
his wife Beatriz (Ana Luisa Peluffo) and his brother Luis (Augusto
Benedico) - who just happens to be a scientist who works on an
invisibility serum. And once this is developed, he administers it to
Carlos, officially just to calm him down (he's also a respected physician
you know), but actually, to help him escape and find the real killer. Invisible
Carlos breaks into José's office and finds out he has used the company as
a front for some heavy drugrunning, and he witnesses José killing a night
watchman (José Munoz) who has found out about the drugrunning as well.
But the real shocker is that he then learns that José was actually
working for Beatriz's dad, and it was daddy who committed the murder
Carlos was convicted for. Since Carlos doesn't want to hurt Beatriz, he
claims he has lost interest in finding the real killer and just asks Luis
to make him visible again so he and Beatriz can leave the country. This
isn't as easy though, because Luis has not developed a visibility serum
yet. Meanwhile the police have come to the conclusion that they are after
an invisible man, so Carlos feels an urge to get both José and Beatriz's
dad to confess - which they do, via letter, then they kill each other in a
shoot-out that has developed out of the situation. With the confessions,
Carlos is acquitted of everything, and technically, he's a free man ...
but there's a new problem: the invisibility serum also makes him insane,
and now he wants to become a top terrorist, comparing himself to the wrath
of God - but when he wants to release bacteria into the water reservoir,
he, despite his invisibility, is gunned down by machine guns of the
police, and only in dying, he becomes visible once again. Basically,
this film is little more than a(n inofficial) remake of The
Invisible Man Returns from 1940, in itself a poor sequel to the
original Invisible Man. And
what goes for The Invisible
Man Returns also goes for The New Invisible Man of course:
It's a rather tired mix of murder mystery and science fiction, which at no
time really manages to captivate the audience, and which is not at all
helped by its finale in which the invisible man finally goes mad - because
this finale seems to come out of nowhere. That all said, the film still
has some nostalgic charm, and the rather basic effects certainly work in
the film's favour at least in my book, but in all, the film is far from a
genre classic or even a good movie.
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