INDESTRUCTIBLE MAN

Told in a narrative noir style mostly on Los Angeles location, popularized by the television police series Dragnet, by police detective Dick Chasen, the story concerns a 72-hour period of horror for the city of Los Angeles. Charles "Butcher" Benton is a double-crossed convicted robber and murderer who was executed in the gas chamber. His body is unlawfully sold to a scientist who plans to move his experiments into the cause and cure of cancer to human subjects by rejuvenating damaged human tissue. Benton's corpse is subjected to chemical injection and massive jolts of high-voltage electricity in order to study the effect on human tissues. But Benton's heart is re-stimulated and he completely revives (though rendered mute due to electrical damage to his vocal cords), immensely strong by accelerated growth of cellular mass and with his skin virtually impervious to trauma, scalpels, police bullets, even to bazooka shells.

After killing the doctor and his assistant, Benton sets out in a psychotic rage to avenge himself on his two henchmen and his attorney, Paul Lowe who, in collusion with the henchmen, had betrayed Benton in order to steal his loot. Benton had left the location map of his stash to his stripper-girlfriend, who had since gone straight and begun dating the detective who brought Benton to justice, after she had rejected the lawyer's own advances.

The story then follows Benton's revenge on his enemies; the police who first learn of a wave of mysterious killings, then of Benton's reanimation; and the developing relationship between the detective and the stripper. The lawyer, Lowe, fearing for his life after the two henchmen are murdered, confesses the plot to the police, and reveals that Benton had always used the sewer system to evade detection; and to find a hiding place for the money, as it turns out.

Tracked down by the police, Benton takes a direct hit in the solar plexus from a bazooka, and is heavily burned by a flamethrower. Weakened, he flees to a power station, where he climbs atop a gantry, inadvertently setting it in motion. As he watches the actions of the police down below, he fails to notice that the gantry is moving toward the main transformer. A dangling hook comes too close to one of the terminals, and the other transformers erupt in sparks. as hundreds of thousands of volts surge throughout its metal frame, searing Benton to ashes. On a quiet night a few days later, Chasen successfully proposes to his girlfriend at a drive-in hamburger stand.

Benton is destroyed when he is electrocuted atop a power station gantry, and Detective Chasen proposes to his girlfriend afterward.

The climax sees the indestructible Benton finally undone not by bullets or brute force, but by the very electricity that reanimated him, symbolically closing the cycle of science gone awry. The police’s persistence pays off, restoring order and allowing Chasen’s personal life to move forward, reinforcing classic noir and sci-fi themes of crime, consequence, and hard-won normalcy.