Matialth Good concept, poorly executed.

Gurlyndrobb While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

Calum Hutton It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

Staci Frederick Blistering performances.

Hitchcoc This was included in a boxed set of "The Adventures of Superman." If one is not perceptive, he might think it was part of the series. It is not but it fits nicely into the whole thing. Some miners have invaded an underground society where "mole people" live. They are odd looking little guys who really mean no harm. They are merely trying to survive and have been threatened. They could be obliterated because the miners decide to kill any of these creatures that make an appearance. This is a job for Superman as we hear so many times later. He steps forward and challenges anyone who threatens the little guys. If this was an audition for the series, George Reeves did a good job as the benevolent Man of Steel.

Michael_Elliott Superman and the Mole Men (1951)*** (out of 4) Reporters Clark Kent (George Reeves) and Lois Lane (Phyllis Coates) are sent to Texas to do a story on an oil rig that has dug six feet into the ground but soon the big story becomes the mole men that have crawled out of the hole. I really wasn't expecting too much at of this film but it turned out to be pretty entertaining in the same form that a lot of science fiction "B" movies are from this period. The most shocking thing is how good the story is. Sure, it only runs 58-minutes but there's really no dry spells in the film, although I wish the mole men had more to do in the story besides be chased around. Superman also doesn't get too much screen time but when he's on he really shines especially one scene where he must disarm a group of men who want to kill the creature. Reeves is excellent in the roles of Kent and Superman and I loved his no nonsense way of handling everything. Coates was also very good in her role as is Jeff Corey as the nutty local who wants the creatures dead. He makes for a great villain and really delivers in each scene he's in. The special effects are quite campy but they just add to the entertainment value of the film.

flapdoodle64 'Superman & the Mole Men,' was filmed immediately prior to 'The Adventures of Superman' TAS) weekly TV series. This film was then released into theaters so as to insure that the producers recouped at least some of their investment in the TV show: at the time season 1 was filmed, there wasn't a sponsor yet, and in fact it took 2 years before Kellogs Cereal Co. took on the role and the show was finally broadcast.'Mole Men' was filmed just 1 year after the movie serial 'Atom Man Vs. Superman,' but 'Atom Man' is so primitive by comparison that it could have been made 30 years prior.Besides being enjoyable as an atmospheric and suspenseful B/W cold war scifi/horror pic (a la the original 'The Thing'), this little film is interesting since it engages in a little social commentary. Almost without exception, TAS never touched any of the burning social issues (bigotry, war, pollution, etc.), but 'Superman & the Mole Men' is, very obviously an allegory about prejudice. This makes 'Mole Men' a kind of bridge between the Superman radio show, which, starting after WWII, did a long series of award-winning social message programs, directly addressing issues such as race prejudice, war-mongering, and social welfare, and TAS, which stayed completely clear of social relevancy. (The Superman radio show, which ended in 1950, was produced by Bob Maxwell, who also produced the 1st season of TAS. I've never read anything that explained why TAS dropped the social relevancy of the radio show, but one could speculate it had something to do with the impact of various 'witch hunts' on the political and media spheres...) 'Superman & the Mole Men,' is the story of about some funny-looking little men who emerge into view after the world's deepest oil well is dug. The funny-looking men, who are not evil and whose world has been invaded by oil exploration, become victims of prejudice and eventually a mob forms with the intent of killing the funny-looking men. If you think about it, this might remind you of a contemporary real-life situation.

Neil Welch I just got the UK 4-disc special edition of Superman 1 for about $5. The additional stuff includes the 1951 feature Superman and the Mole-Men. So I slapped it into the DVD player last night, and here are my findings.Some initial disappointment - I hadn't checked, and I think I had it mentally tagged as one of the Kirk Alyn serials. I'm not a huge fan of George Reeves as Superman, and I hadn't seen anything other than the odd clip of Kirk Alyn - but hey ho, never mind.This black and white production runs for less than an hour. It has the feel of a couple of episodes of one of Reeves' early TV series, a two-parter, put together for cinema release, although IMDb says it was filmed as a cinema release in advance of the first TV series. In any event, it's an odd choice for reasons I'll get to later. I'm of an age where I recall TV and movie productions which are limited to one or two locations and sets, so there were no major surprises here. Even so, for a low budget movie, this one is REALLY low budget.The story concerns the small town of Silsby - population 1,430 - which, puzzlingly, is also home to the world's deepest oil well (6 miles). The story opens with the well's foreman hurriedly taking steps to close the well down. This conflicts with the arrival of Metropolis reporters Kent and Lane to report on the well, at the behest of the oil company. As Clark is sniffing out the fact that the drill has emerged into a radioactive cavern 6 miles down, a couple of odd little guys (small in stature, big in head, black in jumpsuit, and bushy in eyebrow) emerge from the capped-off drillshaft, and start mooching round town with puzzled expressions on their faces.A deep breath now, here is the remaining plot of the picture. The little guys scare some kids, so Jeff Corey (playing the town's rampant xenophobe) incites some pals to kill these "creatures". Superman steps in (moderately ineffectually) and catches one of the little guys who has been shot and takes him to the local hospital. Corey's pals burn down the shack the other little fellow has hidden in and assume he is killed, but he escapes and legs it down the shaft. Corey incites a lynch mob (despite the sheriff arresting him) to hang the hospitalised Mole-Man. Superman stops them entering the hospital and takes the injured chappie to the shaft to return him to his fellows. A total of 4 Mole-Men emerge with a weapon of some sort which they fire at Jeff Corey (I call this an Aargh! gun because its sole effect seems to be to make Corey go "Aargh!") and Superman saves him. He immediately changes his ways because of amazement at Superman saving him after the way he has behaved, the Mole-men go back down the shaft. The end.Despite the film only being an hour long, there is an inordinate amount of creeping around, bewareing and pursuing - I have left out all the "Mole-Man 1 creeps from A to B, looking out to make sure no-one is following him" stuff. The Mole-Men are never engaged in any way whatsoever - they have no dialogue - they just turn up, get persecuted, and go back. They do look a little creepy, but they are hardly the bug-eyed monsters that the town's reaction implies.Reeves is quite a good Clark Kent - very much a hard-nosed reporter, much more so than Phyllis Coates' rather indifferent Lois Lane. But he is a terrible, terrible Superman. Not only does he not look the part (at least his hair is dyed black in this, which is an improvement from the rather light hair he sported in some of the TV episodes), the way he plays it is all wrong in my book. I'm sure he was told to "strike the pose" (which Superman does constantly), but someone should have told him that it should be fists on hips, not fists on ribs. And he plays Superman as a rather strict and touchy schoolteacher - he doesn't actually wag his finger in remonstration, but he may as well have done.And Superman does a huge amount of walking around (I say a huge amount - he isn't actually in it all that much), and a bit of running. He takes off and lands a couple of times, but isn't seen in flight at any point. Oh, some bullets bounce off him, and he uses telescopic vision as Clark, but with no accompanying visual effect. In fact, visual effects are conspicuous by their absence, and the few which are present aren't very good.I've tried to consider this effort by reference to the standards of the time: but even by those standards I think it's a pretty threadbare effort. Thankfully, production standards on the TV series were higher, and at least they took the trouble to come up with stories which had a bit more to them.Something of a disappointment - I shan't be watching it again.