Atom Age Vampire (1960)

When Two Face from Batman was a Franco-Italian Stripper.

Atom Age Vampire (AKA Seddok, AKA “l'erede di satana” [The Heir of Satan])
Directed by Anton Giulio Majano
Written by Piero Monviso (story), Gino De Santis (scenario) & Alberto Bevilacqua & Anton Giulio Majan (scenario)

As the multitude of titles suggests, there are several versions of this movie floating around, including the 87 minute US cut, the quick and extremely tempting 72 minute version released on DVD, and the full, 105 minute European cut, which I watched because I love you guys. And kind of hate myself.

I actually got excited when the credits unspooled, because at first glance it looked like Mario Bava was involved in this thing, but turns out it was actually Mario Fava (insert Sad Trombone music here). And while I can’t say I think much of his movie, at least his beans are tasty, and pair well with long pork.

This Italian production was released in the U.S. in 1963 under the title Atom Age Vampire, which irks me, as there is no vampire in Atom Age Vampire. At least in Playgirls and the Vampire (also Italian, and made the same year) there are playgirls and a vampire. Also nipples. It’s a whole package.

Anyway, let’s travel to fabulous Italy (although it’s supposed to be fabulous France) and join Pierre and Jeannette and their dysfunctional relationship, already in progress. Jeanette is a platinum blonde who strips in a nightclub; Pierre is in the Navy, or the merchant marine, or maybe he’s an airline pilot—I dunno, it’s a very vague uniform and the film’s in black and white—and we discover that while he’s done with Jeanette, the little tramp, he still comes to her show because it’s important to support live theater.

(Quick Tangent: For Mystery Science Theater 3000 fans, Pierre was in Hercules Unchained with Steve Reeves, and for Rifftrax fans, he was in Giant of Marathon with Steve Reeves.)

Pierre goes back to Jeanette’s dressing room to break up, having given her an ultimatum: either him or public nudity, three shows a night, and she chose stripping. But she replies that a girl’s gotta live, and he’s shipping out for two months (Ah ha! So he’s in the Navy! Or maybe the merchant marines. Or maybe he’s an Etsy vendor and drop-ships a lot of stuff.). Anyway, he’s breaking their engagement, so naturally he asks her to return the gun he gave her. It was his mother’s 9mm, and has a lot of sentimental value.

Pierre leaves, and a heartbroken Jeanette refuses to do another show. Instead she gets into her jaunty Italian sports car and drives at a moderate pace until some jerk fails to dim his brights, causing her to scream and burst into flames and drive straight down a cliff.

Three months later Jeannette is in a hospital, with nothing to keep her company but a picture of Pierre breaking up with her, and a helmet of head bandages. She’s hideously scarred, which is going to reduce her marketability as a stripper, but her doctor has a solution: Get a new job! Preferably something in the telemarketing field.

Meanwhile, an off-camera scientist conspires with a saucy brunette to hire Jeanette as a human guinea pig (can I say “guinea pig” when everyone in the film is Italian? That’s not a slur, right? Because it actually feels kinda like a double slur.). Meanwhile, Jeanette needs a revolutionary beauty treatment, because half her face is a mass of fugly scar tissue that makes her look like a Batman villain. She smashes her mirror in despair, then breaks her window, so maybe it’s not despair, maybe she just disapproves of glass.

She pulls a Beretta automatic from her purse and prepares to blow her brains out.¹ This shouldn’t come as a surprise, I suppose, since Italian hospitals are filled with nude, heavily armed patients, as we learned in

Anyway, the brunette, Monique, interrupts the suicide and entices Jeanette to sign away her life to a mad scientist she’s never met, in a scene that’s exactly how I imagine it feels to join Scientology.

The scientist, Dr. Levin, has a very nice laboratory, complete with blinky lights, deformed animals, and a mute assistant. We meet the doctor as he’s narrating his achievements into a tape recorder, but his resume seems a bit of a mixed bag. He’s cured cancer, which is nice, and invented a serum called Derma 28, which cures hideous disfigurements caused by his previous invention, Derma 25. But it’s never been tested on humans, so Monique injects herself with Derma 25, forcing the Doctor to try out Derma 28 on her before she turns into a monster.

It works! Dr. Levin’s anti-monster formula works on his monster-making formula, so…I guess it’s kind of a push, actually. But he seems happy, and Monique takes this opportunity to make her move on the clueless medico. The Doctor finally takes the hint and says, Oh sure, let’s go out and celebrate. But she purrs, “No. Let’s both stay home together…with our records!”²

Jeanette shows up at the Doctor’s mansion, wearing big Jackie Onassis sunglasses and a leopard-skin overcoat with the collar turned up. She meets the doctor, making me realize that in a certain light, he looks like Will Ferrell playing a mad scientist from an Italian horror movie in an SNL sketch. (Bit of trivia: Dr. Levin is played by Alberto Lupo, who was married to Lyla Rocco, the lead nipple supplier in Playgirls and the Vampire.)

Pierre’s ship docks and he suddenly has the exact opposite reaction from the guy in the song “Brandy”. Sure, his life, his love, and his lady is the sea, but he does want to marry Jeanette.

Meanwhile the Doctor is planning to experiment on Jeanette, but first, in the version I watched, there’s a long sequence where he wanders around with a flashlight like it’s one of those First Alert commercials. Then, in classic Bela Lugosi style, he beats up the mute assistant because he got drunk and forgot to turn on the generator, then the doctor discovers water damage in the basement and is naturally peeved. Shockingly, this scene was cut from the American release.

Back at the nightclub, Jeanette’s relief stripper is shaking her booty to a bootleg version of “Tequila” while Pierre is drowning his sorrows.

Cut to the lab, where the Doctor tries and fails to cure Jeanette, using up all his Derma 28 and even a little of his Formula 409. But then he hits on the idea of employing a series of dissolves to remove the scar make-up just like in The Wolfman, and bingo! Jeanette is restored to her former beauty, assuming you thought she was beautiful in the first place.

The Doctor certainly does, and instantly starts mooning over Jeanette and lightly pawing her, which makes Monique furious, because they’ve just made a miraculous scientific breakthrough, so she naturally assumed they’d spend the rest of the evening playing their 78s on the Hi-Fi.

Jeanette wakes up, finds that she’s cured, and immediately starts necking with the doctor. (Same thing happened to me when I had my tonsils out).

Time passes. Jeanette and Dr. Levin are dressed up and sharing a cocktail in the parlor. But the Doctor has to make it weird by trying to get her drunk and insisting that she loves him, adding, “You are nothing if not mine! You belong to me! I’m the one who restored your beauty!” Which, again, is an odd thing to say to a fellow who recently underwent a tonsillectomy and really just wants a dish of ice cream.

Right in the middle of a non-consensual kiss, he notices that her scars are coming back, and gets a thoughtful look on his face that seems to say, “Okay, so maybe I’m not getting laid tonight…!”

They’re all out of Derma 28 and Wolfman dissolves, so Dr. Levin decides to transplant neck glands from a young woman. It doesn’t make any sense, but that’s what John Carradine would do, so… Now, the Doctor’s scheme will require murder (because nobody goes down to the gland bank and sells their glands twice a month like plasma), but Monique, who realized a long time ago that she’s not getting laid either, will have no part of it and runs away.

Doctor Levin kills Monique and makes it look like “heart paralysis”, which I’m pretty sure he just made up. He gets away with it though, because the coroner starts fangirling over the doctor and says, “Oh we don’t need an autopsy. I know heart paralysis when I see it!” So in lieu of doing anything useful, the police inspector sits down in the Doctor’s study and they chat about Levin’s time in Japan studying radiation burns, and then we get to see photos of actual Hiroshima victims, who I’m sure weren’t compensated for their appearance in this piece of shit.

Cut to a SPINNING NEWSPAPER HEADLINE! “GORILLA ESCAPES FROM ZOO!” (Which is exactly the headline you’d see if this was a Bela Lugosi movie). Cut to the woods, where a sailor and his girlfriend find a dead, bloody young woman.

Jeanette starts to get the heartbreak of psoriasis again, but the Doctor has already used up all of Monique’s neck glands! He needs to kill again, but he’s too much of a pussy. Fortunately, his internal monologue gets a brilliant idea! If a gorilla can savagely kill a girl, then all he has to do is turn himself into a savage beast, and then killing will be a breeze! So Dr. Levin grabs the monster-making Derma 25, shoots up, and thanks to a series of dissolves, he gets head-to-toe Hiroshima-style radiation burns and a Conway Twitty wig.

The Doctor grabs a prostitute off the street, then goes back to the lab, climbs into an atomic wishing well, and thanks to the miracle of dry ice, he is restored to his normal creepy self.

He fixes Jeanette’s scars again, but then gets a little rapey. Fortunately, he takes “Ewww!” for an answer and backs off. Jeanette placates him by saying, Hey, no hard feelings, I’ll meet you in the garden later. She sneaks off and calls the shipping line and tells them she has to get an air mail letter to Pierre immediately. She convinces the Mute assistant to mail it for her, but he just takes it to the Doctor, who burns the letter, then tells him to turn off the phones (this scene wasn’t dubbed, so I assume it’s not in the English language version. Those poor dopes, they don’t know what they missed!)

The Doctor monsters it up and goes out to kill another girl, while bicycle cops ride around warning pedestrians to beware of the gorilla.

ITALIAN ONLY SUBPLOT:

A reporter and a middle aged lady come into the Inspector’s office for a long comic relief bit about how the gorilla hunt is going. The dialogue’s all in Italian, so I assume this was also cut from the American dub, but here is where we get the alternate title, as the lady declares, “It’s not a gorilla, it’s a SEDDOK”.

The reporter prints her story in the paper, and the Inspector reads it the next day and mutters, “People believe anything. We’ll go to the MOON next!”

But he gets word of more victims, and before he can decide what to do, we’re pelted with additional headlines. This time, “KILLED By the Gorilla Escaped From the Zoo”

The middle-aged woman gets a call from someone about the Seddok and invites him over. It’s the Monstered-Out Doctor of course, and he kills her with the world’s quickest strangulation. Three seconds flat! It’s like he murdered her, AND successfully pinned her in a WWE championship match.

The Inspector, the reporter, and some supporting characters whose names I didn’t bother to learn because they’re not in any of the English language scenes go to the morgue and identify the woman’s body. Everyone is shocked that Seddok might exist, at least in the Italian-speaking parts of fake France.

Back at the Doctor’s mansion, Jeanette steals a key from his coat, then steals another coat and a hat.

Cut to the nightclub, where Pierre has gotten over his heartache and is macking on a couple of the relief strippers. But then the band plays the song his girlfriend used to get nude to, and he becomes sad and pensive, staring into the distance and thinking of all the dollar bills she used to bring in.

Jeanette goes to Pierre’s ship and covers the waterfront until he just sort of shows up. The two estranged lovers are reunited, they hug, they kiss, then the Doctor and the Mute bash in Pierre’s skull and knock him into the water. They kidnap Jeanette and drag her back to the lab.

Pierre goes to the cops, who take him to Doctor Levin for some reason. The doctor’s whole scheme starts falling apart; the cops begin to suspect him, he tries to kill another woman but her dog bites him, and the police dig up Monique and realize she was murdered just like the others. He breaks the news to Jeanette that he can’t get any more glands, and she’s doomed to return to her gruesome, scar-faced state. But what do you know, the treatments have finally taken full effect, and the cure is now permanent! Unfortunately, the Doctor, like Henry Jekyll, can no longer control his own hideous metamorphosis, and he starts turning into the monster, Seddok, just when he’s about to put the moves on his patient.

In a rare moment of lucidity the Doctor gives Jeanette back her gun, but she refuses to use it, and you can almost hear Anton Chekhov grumbling in his grave.

Pierre shows up, wrestles Doctor Monster, and gets his ass kicked. But the cops arrive and corner our title character in the greenhouse. They also prove pretty ineffective, so it’s up to the abused deaf mute to stab his master in the back, a traditional twist ending which Bela Lugosi could’ve told you was coming. Doctor Levin dies, and his monster make-up dissolves, as is also traditional.

We now pan over to some flowers for no fucking reason. The end.

So what have we learned? Well, from a pure filmmaking perspective, it’s clear the Italians know how to depict jealousy. I mean the dubbing is pretty listless, but if you turn off the sound and treat it as a silent film, Monique’s slow-simmering sexual rage is surprisingly convincing. Also, even though it’s an Italian production and everyone involved, both behind the camera and in front, is Italian, it’s set in France. Why, I have no clue. Perhaps the Italians think the French are more likely to filch a lady’s glands.

Second, I believe this film, obscure and oddly titled though it may be, deserves to take its place in that early Sixties wave of Disfigured Women films which began with Les Yeux Sans Visage and continued with Jess Franco's The Awful Dr. Orloff, while proving alarmingly inferior to both.

Finally, Europeans are always going on about how superior their healthcare system is compared to the United States, and while I’ll stipulate to that, I’ll also note that every medical professional in this thing, from plastic surgeons to nurses to mad scientists, has the absolute worst bedside manner. They’re always telling Jeanette, “You’re grotesquely deformed! And it’s permanent! Don’t you see, you’ll always be a hideous freak! Anyway, would you like some Jello?” Yeah it’s free, but at least in U.S. hospitals when they charge you $350 for a Tylenol they don’t add a gratuitous insult about your bed head.

1. Presumably this is the gun given to her by Pierre, and which she refused to return, the little tramp. It’s a nice piece of continuity—it was referred to at the strip club, and we’re seeing it now, suggesting that while Jeanette’s face is being treated by a plastic surgeon, the plot is under the care of Dr. Anton Chekhov.

2. You may recognize this snippet of dialogue from the in-house ads that used to play before old Rhino Video presentations.