Wow! Such a good movie.

Very well executed

SERIOUSLY. This is what the crap Hollywood still puts out?

It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

If you've ever wanted to see a really, really bizarre film, then look no further...THE CURIOUS DR. HUMPP is here. This is a film that doesn't know what it wants to be; part sex film, part horror, part science fiction, it's a madcap combination of all three genres and a totally unique one at that. Of course, it's not a particularly good film - it's overlong and repetitive - but I can guarantee that you'll never see anything else quite like this.Made on the cheap, in black and white, and in Argentina of all places (!), most of the film is padded out with couples doing their business. These quickly get very dull and pointless, but it's worth sitting through them in order to take in some of the science fiction trappings which make up the plot.In what other film do you see lumpy-faced misshapen mutants standing in shadowy courtyards STRUMMING BANJOS while zombies wander around aimlessly!? Or what about the clichéd yet hilarious mad doctor dialogue - a prime example being "Sex dominates the world...now I dominate sex!"? It's a film where everyday occurrences like monsters walking into nightclubs and kidnapping strippers are taken for granted; talking brains are kept alive in fish tanks, and the bad guys have flashing light bulbs in the tops of their skulls! You heard it...now go see it.

This is the kind of film which is more entertaining to read about than to actually experience: while reviews I've read mention several irresistibly bad moments, the actual feature is a bit of a chore to sit through! Its endless scenes of experiments (of a sexual nature) performed on a variety of young people (of all persuasions - given that here we find junkies, lesbians, strippers and nymphomaniacs) reminded me of Jose' Mojica-Marins' (that's Coffin Joe to you!) equally delirious if slightly more earnest AWAKENING OF THE BEAST (1969). The film was originally much shorter, as the U.S. version was spiced up with 17 more minutes of nudity - though this only served to render the whole even more boring! The reviews had actually described it as being a well-made film, but I didn't see anything special about its look or the techniques used. As a matter of fact, it practically quashed what interest I had in Vieyra's (apparently equally goofy) vampire flick, BLOOD OF THE VIRGINS (1967), released on DVD by Mondo Macabro! That said, some of the film's more bizarre images - the perpetually irritated talking brain(!) of the titular doctor's mentor (which he keeps in a jar in his lab), his rubber-faced monster assistant turning up at a nightclub (with the intention of procuring yet another girl for his master's experiments) and at a pharmacy (carrying a prescription by the doctor) as if it were the most natural thing in the world and is later even seen strumming on an unusually-shaped guitar(!!) - not to mention the howlers found in the script (Dr. Humpp spouting his crackpot credo or the orgasmic moans of the drugged but impatient maidens) yield some undeniable pleasures...even if only of the guilty kind!

An extremely strange film in that it is ten times better than it had any right to be. The script and story is usual b-movie rubbish, and the acting is adequate at best (the dubbing is of course terrible), however some genuine talent behind the camera make this watchable throughout. Eschewing the usual b-movie tricks like ludicrous music, fast zooms and an indulgence of s**t acting to advance the story, the director concentrates instead on extended set pieces (in one case a strange lute playing sequence) which he stages extremely well. It reminded me of the French horror movies of Rollin, where extended scenes, slow, languid camera work and a healthy dollop of sex play a large part.Obviously this is still a b-movie, and when the plot has to kick in at the end it is predictably terrible. They do have a dig at their own crap effects with someone mistaking the monster for a man in a mask, but it's not clear if this was deliberate or just a case of bad scriptwriting. Not good by any stretch of the imagination, but significantly better than the average, usually unwatchable, exploitation film.

Quizzical and somewhat painful Argentinean softcore porn flick has the good quality of being one of the few competent unions of exploitation with mainstream genre film. In this case, sci-fi, and see _Flesh Gordon_ if you have any doubts about how difficult a genre fusion of this kind can be. The movie drags at times, but at others is fabulously bizarre, probably because of the tortured logic Vieyra has to use to establish the (relatively) intricate plot without compromising the explicit scenes. Humpp's legendary sequence -- a weird, mutated critter playing an unidentifiable lutish instrument while people mill about a foggy courtyard -- is strange beyond description.