2/10
Disconnected, incoherent screenplay keeps this one from building any momentum (or interest)
18 June 2009
Warning: Spoilers
Any time a movie feature a dwarf or a midget in a prominent role, the odds are 10-to-1 that the director threw him in because he didn't know what else to do to keep the movie interesting. In this case, the featured little guy isn't all that bad - he manages to keep his dignity for most of his scenes (except the part where he drags the leading man down the stairs of the dungeon), but the movie itself uses him like a doggie chew toy.

The problem here is a common one with low budget exploitation movies - there's a germ of a decent idea in here, but the director and the screenwriter don't know how to develop it. A good director would take the various story elements - brain transplants, mad doctors with secret labs and a dungeon, car chases, fist fights, dim-witted monstrous Frankenstein style assistant, mind control, betrayal and conspiracy, etc...and make an exciting, involving film full of cheap thrills and fun.

Instead, what we get here is a bunch of people stumbling around and arguing in the doctor's lab, then a cheesy operation where the patient bleeds tempura paint, followed by some of the same people stumbling around and arguing in the doctor's lab some more, followed by another subgroup of the initial group driving around and having an accident, followed by a dungeon escape scene that is mostly about a woman putting her shoes back on, followed by a rooftop chase (the actual high point of the movie), followed by a confusing series of events where everyone in the movie apparently escapes from everyone else, followed by a lovely stroll in the countryside where everyone either chases, bumps into, attacks or escapes from everyone else AGAIN, followed by, well, not much else.

Somewhere in here is a scary peroxide blonde dressed in white, a well meaning heroic type who is sort of blandly good looking, a three foot lab assistant, a big lunk with a mass of melted rubber pasted to one side of his face, a kid who wonders into the middle of the movie to provide more of the "frankenstein factor", a brunette who sort of falls in love with the hero for no apparent reason, and the mad doctor himself,who must be the luckiest man in the history of evil super-villains, because nothing goes according to his plan, but things work out for him anyway... and all because he remembered to stick an electrode into the transplanted brain at one point in the operation.

This was by no means the worst movie I've seen, or even the worst exploitation movie I've seen, or even the worst badly made exploitation movie I've seen, but it just lies there, oozing cheapness and inattention to detail at every point, and there is no real reason for even bad movie enthusiasts to watch it.
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