by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
First on last night’s movie
menu was Atom Age Vampire, a 1960 horror/sci-fi thriller which turned out to be surprisingly good
despite some problems with the overall cheapness of the production and the
relative familiarity (to put it politely) of the plot. The print we were
watching was a U.S. edition with English dubbing, and when Charles saw the
separate credits for the American version — the original director was Anton
Giulio Majano but Richard McNamara got credit for directing the
English-language version — he groaned, thinking that McNamara had shot
additional footage the way Terry Morse did to turn the 1954 Japanese
masterpiece Gojira into the piece-of-schlock
Godzilla we got two years later —
but in this case all McNamara seems to have done was supervise the dubbing. The
running time of this film roams all over the map — imdb.com lists the original
as 107 minutes, with a 72-minute VHS version and DVD’s at 69 and 96 minutes,
while the version we watched, from an archive.org download, timed out at 84 minutes
— but the story seemed coherent enough and without any obvious lacunae.
The plot centers around beautiful blonde bimbo
Jeanette Moreneau (Susanne Loret), who hangs around at a local bar and whose
boyfriend is sailor Pierre Mornet (Sergio Fantoni). The imdb.com synopsis says
she’s a stripper but that’s nowhere apparent in the film itself — at least in
the cut we saw — though later on at the bar there’s a hot dance by a scantily
clad woman, and when Jeanette disappears Pierre at least transitorily transfers
his affections to two of the other girls who work there on the
love-the-one-you’re-with principle. Anyway, Jeanette’s life unravels when she’s
in a terrible car accident; she survives with no internal injuries but one of
her cheeks ends up looking like someone pressed a waffle iron against it. She’s
taken to a regular clinic but the doctors there say there’s nothing they can do
for her; the scars are too deep for normal plastic surgery and she’s going to
look like that for the rest of her life. (There are some problems with the
continuity here — no continuity person is credited and maybe director Majano
was on his own in that department — Jeanette’s horrible disfigurement looks
different between takes and sometimes it’s on her left cheek, sometimes on her
right.) Then she gets a visit from a rather chilly woman named Monique Riviere
(Franca Parisi), who tells Jeanette that her boss, Professor Alberto Levin
(Alberto Lupo), has a remarkable new treatment that will heal her scars
completely. So Monique takes her to Professor Levin’s house, where he’s got a
lab set up in his basement where he gives her a treatment called “Derma-28”
that he based on atomic energy, using discoveries he made when he was working
for the Japanese government as a consultant on the injuries to the original
atomic-bomb victims at Hiroshima. Alas, a previous version of this serum,
“Derma-25,” had the unfortunate side effect of turning people into monsters.
(One can readily imagine the direct-to-consumer TV ad for that drug!)
Levin keeps injecting Jeanette with
Derma-28 and he manages to get the scars on her face to disappear — but only
temporarily — and he soon runs out of supplies of his serum. What to do? A
hardened horror-film watcher might assume that at this point he would use Derma-25
and turn Jeanette into a monster, but no-o-o-o-o, instead of that old cliché writers Piero Monviso,
Giulio De Santis, Alberto Bevilacqua and Anton Giulio Mojano decide to use the
old cliché that the doctor injects himself with Derma-25 and becomes a Mr. Hyde-style creature, using his
monstrous super-power to kill “ladies of the night” and extract their glands or
something to transplant into Jeanette so he can make her cure permanent. His
first victim is Monique, who was in love with Levin and was getting jealous of
his growing attachment to, or at least lust for, Jeanette, so she made the
mistake of complaining to Levin about this — and instead of winning him back,
she got herself killed by him. While all this is going on — and while Jeanette
finds her attempts to escape from the doctor’s home and get word to Pierre
systematically frustrated by Pierre’s mute assistant, Sacha (Roberto Bertea) —
I guess it was obligatory in the horror-film contracts of the time that a mad
scientist had to have a mute assistant —
Pierre is working with the local police (considerably more competent than they
usually are in films of this genre) to find Jeanette and learn what has happened to her. Ultimately they
figure it out and there’s a climactic scene in which Pierre rescues Jeanette —
whose treatments have finally taken and restored her face to its natural beauty — while Sacha has a
hissy-fit and ultimately strangles Levin in the professor’s greenhouse.
The
most interesting credit on Atom Age Vampire is that of the producer, “Mario Fava,” which the
people who uploaded this film to archive.org concluded was a misprint for Mario
Bava, master Italian horror
director whose 1959 film Black Sunday, starring Barbara Steele as a reincarnated witch, was one of the most
successful films in Universal’s old Gothic horror style since Universal itself
stopped making them in the early 1950’s. Though Bava/“Fava” is credited only as
producer, not director, there are certainly quite a few scenes, especially the
ones taking place outdoors at night, that show his visual flair and make it
believable he was connected with this film. Atom Age Vampire — the title is a bit of a misnomer since Levin’s
procedures don’t involve actually consuming blood — is a quite good movie
within the limits of the genre and the era; it’s hardly a deathless classic but it avoids most of the
unwittingly risible elements of most horror (or would-be horror) films of the
time. It’s not clear what country produced this film originally; the English version contains a
fragment of the original soundtrack — a street singer briefly singing in French
— though imdb.com identifies the original language as Italian and the credits
are a mash-up of Italian-, Spanish- and French-sounding names, suggesting it
was filmed at a studio on the Riviera (maybe Rex Ingram’s old digs at Vittorine
in Nice?) near where southern France, Spain and northern Italy meet up on the
map.
