ATOM AGE VAMPIRE (1960)

ATOM AGE VAMPIRE (1960)

Tagline: You'll gasp with Horror . . . a spine-tingling motion picture only the atom age could produce!

(Sci-Fi, Horror, I Know…There’s a Problem with Your Face) [PG]

Note: This movie never got an MPAA rating, but it most likely would have been a PG for the subject matter. In other places in the world, the original title which is “The Heir of Satan” in Italian was translated to stuff like “In The Clutches of the Werewolf” and other things. 

Yes, yes, I know it’s madness, but I am willing to take any risk for her. 

In this one an adult dancer named Jeanette Moreneau gets her face jacked up in a car accident. Naturally, a mad scientist finds out about it and is determined to fix her face. Because as you know, scientists can’t stand it if your face is all messed up and they weren’t the cause. Of course, it doesn’t take long before the scientist starts to think she is way hotter than his dedicated attractive assistant whose face isn’t messed up. As it turns out our mad scientist also has a radiation-based machine that turns him into a ghoul at will. He then can go out at night to kill people to get their glands for Jeanette’s treatment. Yep, all that stuff is going on here. 

This story is pretty nuts and actually reminds me more of SHE DEMONS than anything else. Just because both films have scientists that are doing experiments that they know are messing with people’s faces and minds up, but they don’t care. It’s kind of like putting orange juice in your cereal. You know it’s madness, but you can’t stop. When it comes to the first 30 minutes or so this thing is pretty intriguing and seems to move along at a solid pace introducing characters and giving us at least a bit of background. However, in the middle section after Professor Alberto Levin and Monique get into an argument and sort of makeup, then one quick event is revealed and bam…we hit slow town where this film devolves into just a bunch of cops we don’t care about talking and other dumb stuff. The final act gets better, but it's not mind-blowing. 

Acting wise the lead Susanne Loret plays Jeanette. She is not really that great in this at all. She ended up in only 7 movies, but 3 were interesting including this one UNCLE WAS A VAMPIRE and THE MINOTAUR, THE WILD BEAST OF CRETE. Alberto Lupo who plays Professor Alberto Levin is basically a perfect mad scientist from the ’60s so I really don’t have any complaints about him. Lupo was also in THE MINOTAUR, THE WILD BEAST OF CRETE. Franca Parisi doesn’t get a ton of screen time as Monique, but she might have been at least the emotional catalyst for the movie if she did. She was in a lot of other stuff I’ve never seen so it’s a bit difficult to say if she was better or worse in other films. I thought she was perfect for what they were asking her to do in this one.

We do get a few scenes of a ghoul running from the cops and killing a few women, but overall there is nothing really that special about this film aside from maybe the advertising.  The original trailer audio makes this thing sound like the greatest movie of all time. The poster is way off from what the actual film is. Even the taglines are wildly misleading. Needless to say, the movie doesn’t seem to have anything to do with satan, werewolves, or vampires. There is a line in the movie where they are talking about the mind of a man who had been poisoned by atomic radiation, and says that person would be like “a vampire of the atom age”. The context doesn’t make any sense, but I can only imagine this is where the title was lifted from. It would be kind of like saying we are all vampires of the “internet age” just because we are exposed to it. It’s basically nonsense even if you are trying to let the movie’s title slide. 

The editing is horrendous and the soundtrack is pretty much non-existent in scenes that should definitely have a score. Having said that, overall this is a pretty interesting flick that doesn’t end on a downer, which I always like. This obscure outlandish nonsensical, poorly filmed, low-budget flick squeezes out a 4 out of 7 rating. It is in black and white though and might not be for movie fans not used to this genre. 

GRAPHICS ARE THE PROPERTY OF LION’S FILMS AND ARE USED FOR REVIEW PURPOSES ONLY.