transfeminine frankenstein’s review published on Letterboxd:
They really don't make them like they used to, huh? And by "them" I mean good old "mad scientist" stories. At a certain point we pivoted almost completely away from stories of a doctor driven to ruin by hubristic pursuits of catastrophic experiments, of seeing that which literally was not meant to be seen, and it's disappointing because for as much as the beats of such a story can be rote, the execution can always be its own fun, interesting thing. The Man With X-Ray Eyes utilizes an ultra-cheap but ultra-effective, in my opinion, gimmick called Spectravision in its execution to convey the point-of-view of its eponymous seer: kaleidoscopic, migraine-inducing, and littered with overlays and transparencies that simultaneously flatten and deepen each image. Xavier's vision of people is the best—the way they're reduced to flesh and skeletons beneath semi-solid viscera.
Milland and Rickles also turn in some utterly hallmark performances with an electric sort of anti-chemistry that intensifies every interaction between them. Each word brims with tension, each discrete moment of screen-time together beeping like a time bomb, that explodes spectacularly to herald the beginning of the end for Dr. James Xavier. Corman is most famously remembered as an extremely cheap director. That's indisputable. However, The Man With X-Ray Eyes is a dependable pick to demonstrate that he was far from a bad director.