Simply Perfect

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

Overcome by emotion, due to being dumped by her boyfriend, Pierre (Sergio Fantoni), beautiful model, Jeanette Moreneau (Susanne Loret) gets into a car accident. She scars her face in the process, looking like she fell asleep on a waffle iron. We know she was distraught at the time, because she kept screeching, "Pierre! Pierre!" a lot. Luckily, a certain Prof. Levin (Alberto Lupo) wants to use his latest formula on her, and dispatches his crony, Monique (Franca Parisi) to fetch Jeanette. Levin uses his serum on her, achieving amazing results. However, there is a cost. Levin will have to up the ante, and commit unspeakable crimes in order to keep Jeanette's face unscathed. He even decides to try a new formula -involving r-a-d-i-a-t-i-o-n- on himself, causing a fairly predictable outcome. Meanwhile, Pierre searches for Jeanette in every belly-dancing jazz club he can visit. Can he find her before Levin sinks even deeper into madness? ATOM AGE VAMPIRE is a nice slab of sci-fi hyper-schlock, culminating in a wonderful monster-runs-amok finale! EXTRA POINTS: For Levin's stop-motion transformation scene! "

A mad scientist working in a lab in his house thinks he can cure all diseases, if only he can find a young female donor and...wait...didn't I just watch this one under the title of The Head? Ah, no - this is an Italian production of a similar story, but as this one is Italian there's a lot more here that doesn't make much sense, and is all the more entertaining for it. What plays out like a bog-standard mad scientist film branches off into madness as the scientist for no clear reason turns into a bloodthirsty monster halfway into the film, completely out of nowhere.That's enough to raise this one a couple of notches above The Head right away, but let's add in all the stuff that doesn't make any sense whatsoever. Fair enough, the scientist turns into a monster of some kind, but that's kind of explained by his visit to Hiroshima post blast (just...eh...leave it at that and don't think too much). There's also the pointless scene where the scientist knocks down a wall in his basement where water is seeping through the bricks (shades of the Beyond there!)....that leads nowhere. Or the belly dancing scene where the dancer breaks the fourth wall. All that kind of crap.Once again, and early Italian trash film, but the trademarks are starting to crop up again, and are more welcome for it. What starts out as yet another mad scientist film is made better by the bad guy turning into a monster for no reason.And a dog kicks his arse, just like in Island Monster!

There are no vampires in this cheapo Italian B-movie, atom age or otherwise. Instead, we get an obsessed scientist, Professor Alberto Levin (Alberto Lupo), who turns himself into a hideous monster in order to kill women for the gland needed to restore the looks of once-beautiful blonde stripper Jeanette Moreneau (Susanne Loret), whose face was horribly disfigured in a terrible automobile accident.Clearly influenced by French horror classic Les Yeux Sans Visage (1960) and Dr. Jeckyll and Mr Hyde, the plot for Atom Age Vampire is uninspired drivel, which might not be such a problem had the film been brilliantly paced, incredibly sleazy, wonderfully acted, or directed with flair, or if there had simply been some decent special effects to enjoy. But there aren't.Anton Giulio Majano's direction is flat, the movie seriously drags its heels with far too much talk and not enough action (I watched the heavily cut 86 minute edit—God only knows how dull the fully uncut version is), the cast are wooden, Loret offers a glimpse of cleavage, but that's all, and the transformation effects are of the crap time-lapse kind used several decades earlier to turn Lon Chaney Jr. into a wolf-man.For a really fun film that explores very similar territory, check out Corruption (1968)—it's everything that Atom Age Vampire should have been.

Atom Age Vampire is an Italian movie that is not, in fact, about a vampire. Tricky, huh?It deals with people who have been disfigured due to cliff-side car accidents, the detonation of nuclear warheads, and other such everyday occurrences. Our antagonist is a mad scientist—I'll bet you didn't see that one coming—sends one of his aids to a local hospital to persuade the survivor of aforementioned car wreck to visit his estate so that he can test his cell-regenerating serum on her. The woman's face resembles ground beef, and it seems that this "doctor" is well aware of the fact that this is completely unacceptable. Actually, she'd rather commit suicide than survive as an outcast.I mean, sure, society puts a lot of pressure on people to "fit in" and "look normal"; but the degree to which this theme is overblown in Atom Age Vampire is…well…almost comical. I say "almost" because it's so heavy-handed that even the actors don't seem to buy it as a viable subtext. Because of this, they neither take it seriously or approach it as hamminess. Quite simply, there's a whole lot of "dull" going on.Did you notice the word I used in the previous paragraph? "Actors." Hmpf. They're mostly cardboard cutouts who sputter lines like "Oh, no! We should go to the police!" or "Let me go! I said 'let me go!' Let me go! I said 'let me go!'" I suppose that the intended tone for the dialogue could have been lost in translation—the dubbing here is atrocious to say the least—but there's no getting around the fact that the story is so moronic that had it been portrayed by any venerable stage performer of the past century it would have been regarded as the most high class display of deceptively simple gobbledygook ever created.It really is that scatter-shot and downright confusing. Here are some highlights: the doctor who's developed the serum in question appears to also have been disfigured, though he inexplicably transitions between being a hamburger face to a scowling physician whenever the mood should strike him (maybe they were trying to rip-off Jekyll & Hyde?); he falls in love with his patient (and, it seems, a myriad of other women) and goes about terrorizing them in the middle of the night; he's assisted by a man-servant named Sasha who does little more than mime his thoughts and occasionally appear frantic; at one point the woman being treated is infuriated and closes (notice I said "closes"—she doesn't really "slam" it) a window shut only to have every square inch of the glass in the pane shatter; etc., etc., etc.One could probably say that some sort of clever commentary is just begging to be identified; you know, something to do with the horrors of war; how "ugly" we all really are—that kind of thing.But, in case I haven't spelled it out in enough detail, here's what I think: Atom Age Vampire just plain sucks.