4D MAN (1959) **1/2 As close as you can get to a vampire movie without having actual vampires in it. Far ahead of its time in terms of presentation-Ralph Carmichael's excellent jaunty percussion & horns jazz themes, the vivid colours, the smart-aleck repartee...all would be more in tune with the zeitgeist ten or fifteen years down the road. We're talking scientists who say things like "speeded up" instead of "accelerated," we're talking mad scientists, we're talking Lee Meriwether....no wonder she morphed into Catwoman. For all that, the basis is firmly in '50s mad scientist syndrome. Strange experiments in a government lab create force fields and anti-force fields and enough gibberish that no one could ever figure it out...kind of like chaos theory. Several classic scenes including a scientist trying to pull his hand out of a block of metal, great lines like "A man in the fourth dimension is indestructible." The Blob was no fluke, Irvin S. Yeaworth Jr. was a master of the genre and therefore deserves a lifetime achievement award. Robert Strauss is closer to adequate than glorious but he's developing the Charlie Leach character that he'll present to great effect on "Bewitched."