by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Alas, the second and last film in
the Dr. Goldfoot cycle, Dr.
Goldfoot and the Girl Bombs, was exactly
the sort of insipid, downright annoying time-waster I had feared Bikini
Machine would be! It seems (from several imdb.com
“Trivia” posters) that Bikini Machine had been only a modest success in the U.S. but a smash hit in Italy,
so AIP cut a deal for a sequel to be co-produced by an Italian company, Italian
International — remember what I’ve always said about especially bad movies
coming from studios with the word “International” in their names? This one
comes from two studios with
“International” in their names! In the end there were two scripts, two crews,
and largely two casts. The two co-producing studios simply mashed together
their projects: the American sequel to Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini
Machine and the Italians something called
Le spie vengono dal semifreddo, which
literally translates as “The Spy Who Came In from the Semi-Cold” (so the
Italians were parodying John le Carré as well as James Bond here), though
“semifreddo” is also apparently an Italian custard dessert. The Italian script
was a sequel to something called Goldginger (and you don’t need two guesses to figure out what
popular mid-1960’s spy thriller they were making fun of!) starring two of the
lamest so-called “comedians” ever
to appear on film, Franco Franchi and Ciccio Ingrassia. Of course Franco and
Ciccio (they play their own first names on screen) are selected by a computer
screw-up at the Rome headquarters of the Security Intelligence Command (SIC) to
go after the mysterious assailant who is blowing up all the commanders of NATO
by sending them “girl bombs,” robots with explosives wired to proximity fuses
inside them so as soon as the generals they’ve seduced try to embrace them,
they blow up and take the generals out with them. Of course Dr. Goldfoot is the
secret villain in charge of this campaign, and in a prologue sequence that
includes clips from Bikini Machine
he’s described as a sinister super-maniac who’s trying for the second time to
conquer the world — a glitch in the continuity between the two films since in Bikini
Machine he was not trying to conquer the world. He was simply trying to
rip off a bunch of rich men and add to his own fortune, so it was simple greed
instead of megalomania that was motivating him.
U.S. SIC agent — actually
ex-agent since he’s been cashiered from the service — Bill Dexter (Fabian)
comes to Europe to go after Dr. Goldfoot and has an uncertain collaboration with
those two relentlessly unfunny Italian “comedians” in doing so. Dr. Goldfoot
himself is saddled with an all too serious, all too competent Chinese
assistant, Hard Job (Moa Tahi) — the name an obvious pun on “Odd Job” in Goldfinger — and Vincent Price, who in the previous film got
into the campy spirit of things, in this one just seems bored, as if AIP had
gone to the well with stupid scripts like this for him once too often. (One
person at the screening said he’d read an interview with Price in which he’d
called Dr. Goldfoot and the Girl Bombs the worst movie he’d ever made, which given the sheer amount of crap
he got cast in is a pretty extreme critique.) The film just drones on and on
and on, stacking relentlessly
unfunny scene on top of relentlessly unterrifying and unsuspenseful scene until
it reaches the end of its 82-minute running time. There’s a chase scene at the
end in which the good guys try to track down the bad guys by flying a balloon,
with a little battery-powered house fan they’ve brought on board to give
themselves some thrust, and it’s even intercut with a few silent-film style
titles even though the people who made this movie had an idea that all you had
to do to re-create silent comedy was speed up the film so that people ran
around unnaturally quickly. (When one of Dr. Goldfoot’s non-bomb equipped robots dies in this film, they run
around the room in fast-motion and disintegrate into pieces, leaving Fabian to
utter one of the few genuinely witty lines in the film: “That’s not Rosanna. That’s
a jigsaw puzzle.”)
If my suspicions are right that Buster Keaton worked out the
big physical-comedy scenes in Bikini Machine, the difference between the two films is the
difference between someone who was one of the two great geniuses of silent comedy
and a bunch of incompetents who knew nothing about it, and that’s not the only
difference between the two films. In Bikini Machine the male lead is Frankie Avalon; in Girl
Bombs it’s Fabian, who’s marginally better
looking but even more totally incompetent as an actor. In Bikini
Machine the stupid theme song is at least
sung by a great group, the Supremes; in Girl Bombs it’s sung by something called “The Sloopy’s,” who
shouldn’t have hung on. In Bikini Machine Vincent Price at least appeared to be having fun; in Girl
Bombs there’s only one scene in which he comes to life: when he confronts
the last surviving NATO general, who bears such a remarkable resemblance to him
that he’s also played by Vincent Price. (Goldfoot wants to impersonate the
general so he can commandeer a U.S. bomber and drop a “super-hydrogen bomb” on
Moscow so the U.S. and the Soviet Union will annihilate each other in World War
III and Goldfoot and his backers, the Chinese, will be left to rule the rest of
the world that’s left.) I feel sorry for Vincent Price’s reputation not only
because he was a great actor who kept getting cast in crap, but because his
very best performance — his one-man 1977 show Diversions and
Delights, in which he played Oscar Wilde —
was apparently never recorded or filmed, so it exists only in the memories of
people like me who were fortunate enough to see it live.
And Price wasn’t the
only person involved with Dr. Goldfoot and the Girl Bombs who had far greater talents than this putrid waste
of celluloid tapped: the film’s director was Mario Bava, who’d established a
reputation as a major horror director with his 1960 film Black Sunday — probably the best-ever black-and-white re-creation
of the atmospherics of the great Universal horror films of the 1930’s — and his
1964 horror anthology Black Sabbath,
in which Boris Karloff narrated all three stories and starred in the last as a Wurdalak, an Eastern European vampire who preys on the
members of his own family. (Despite Karloff’s long association with horror
films, this is the only time he played a vampire — and I’ve long wanted to see
this film double-billed with Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, in which Bela Lugosi played Frankenstein’s monster:
the two greatest horror actors of the early sound era each playing the role
that made the other a star.) After the screening, the proprietor said of Bava,
“He must have done it for the money,” and I said, “You have to wonder what had
happened to his career that he needed to do it for the money.” There are items on the “Trivia” section of Girl
Bombs’ imdb.com page that claim Bava tried
to get out of the job of making this movie but was forced by his contract to
make it, and he only worked on the Italian version and had nothing to do with
editing or post-production on the one we got, but that still doesn’t explain
why the movie is directed incredibly flatly, with none of the cinematic
atmosphere Bava was noted for in his “serious” horror films. Taken together,
the two Dr. Goldfoot movies were
a cinematic roller-coaster: Bikini Machine turned out to be surprisingly entertaining despite a silly script and
an exploitation title, while Girl Bombs was every bit as bad as I’d expected Bikini Machine to be — in fact, probably worse.
