With this film, I unceremoniously brought my Mario Bava retrospective – commemorating the 30th anniversary of his passing – to a rather undignified close due to personal familial difficulties. Incidentally, having watched – and been appalled by – it years ago on late-night Italian TV, I had actually added this title to the Bava mini-marathon at the eleventh hour (in fact, I only acquired it a couple of days before viewing!); with this in mind, I regret not keeping the VHS recording of that broadcast since I now have had to make do with a vertically stretched copy which boasts forced English subtitles to boot! The film is a genuine oddity in that a sequel is made not merely by hands other than the original's but by a different country altogether (though it still featured the same star and would be distributed, post-dubbing, by the company behind the first film anyway), considering that the titular figure is not a brand name a' la Tarzan, Zorro or, for that matter, Fu Manchu – where, for instance, the fourth and fifth entries in the Christopher Lee/Harry Alan Towers series of the 1960s eschewed British directorial involvement for that of notorious Spaniard Jess Franco (to the franchise's ultimate detriment, I might add)! To cut to the chase, I have to admit that I was not as intolerant towards the film as I had been on that preliminary viewing: ironically, I used to lap up vehicles by the comic duo of Ciccio (Ingrassia) & Franco (Franchi) as a kid but, somehow, I could not picture them in the same frame as horror icon Vincent Price or 'submitting' to the direction of a technician and master stylist like Bava (in any case, their work has not withstood the test of time all that well, pretty much in the way of the Abbott & Costello comedies – with the one most readily given to mugging, Franco, even supplying the rather noisy song over the opening credits)!; having perhaps checked out the just-as-campy original (called DR. GOLDFOOT AND THE BIKINI MACHINE [1965], by the way) in the interim may have softened my opinion of the sequel to a certain extent (though it is still a toss-up with the horrendous make-over job that became THE HOUSE OF EXORCISM [1975] in constituting the nadir of the Bava canon). The film sees Goldfoot (flanked by a Chinese acolyte named "Hardjob", in clear emulation of Harold Sakata's character from the James Bond extravaganza GOLDFINGER [1964]) upping the ante by being intent on world domination (with the female robots turning combustible, hence the U.S. title – since the Italian original is a parody of John Le Carre''s "The Spy Who Came In From The Cold", brought to the screen the previous year, and puts the emphasis on the movie's star comedians!) rather just misappropriation of funds as in the first entry. To be honest, one is still embarrassed to associate the picture with either Price (especially when disguising himself in a nun's habit!) or Bava (and it is particularly lamentable that the two only managed to collaborate on material clearly below their standards and talents!) but, taken on its own merits (if such a term can be applied here), there are certainly some mild pleasures to be derived from the ensuing concoction – with the most inspired ideas being Ciccio & Franco picking up artillery items from the F.B.I. arsenal as if they were on a supermarket spree, the fact that the voice artist assigned to dub their burly and flustered Chief (remember that Italian films at this time were generally shot M.O.S.) is the same one who does Oliver Hardy in the Laurel & Hardy vehicles (I wonder how it sounded in the English-dubbed version?), and a rather brief reprise of the classic mirror gag devised by Max Linder (albeit most famously adopted by The Marx Bros.' DUCK SOUP [1933]) involving Price and Ingrassia! In the same vein, the finale partly recreates the conclusion of DR. STRANGELOVE: OR, HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB (1963); for what it is worth, then, soon-to-be erotic diva Laura Antonelli plays the obligatory-but-insignificant damsel-in-distress here (alongside Fabian's straight-man hero, who fares somewhat better).
Review of Dr. Goldfoot and the Girl Bombs
