Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine (1965)

Boring

Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

If a little madcap is funny, then a whole lot more is going to be even funnier-- right? Not necessarily, as this movie demonstrates. The gags never let up, whether sight ones or the verbal kind. As expected, some are amusing, some aren't, but the unrelieved cascade does get tiresome. Unfortunately, there's little time in between to savor the better gags. They're simply overridden by the next splurge. At least there's plenty of eye candy, whether robots or not. If Susan Hart (Diane) is one, then I say "wire me up".Forget what plot there is, something about a mad scientist taking over the world with sexy robots as enticement. Overall, the movie's a sloppy spoof of the James Bond craze then in fashion. At least the power mad idea gives the hammy Price a chance to let it all out, which he does. Too bad baldy Fred Clark doesn't get more screen time, as adept at comedy as he was at villainy. Meanwhile, Avalon and Hickman get to mug it up, relentlessly. And catch the clever credit crawl at the opening. Up to this period, production credits were done in predictably mechanical fashion. But not here.Anyway, if you don't like this gag, another will quickly follow. Too bad the writers or whoever didn't pick up on the wisdom of more not necessarily being better.

Dr. Goldfoot (Vincent Price) has devised a plan that's either genius or completely stupid. He has an army of robot women, beautiful as can be, that he will send off to marry rich men and have the men sign over their fortunes. Soon, if all works out, Goldfoot will be the richest man alive! Let it be said that to enjoy this film, you need to like camp, 1960s sensibilities (go go dancing for no reason) and Vincent Price. If you like those things, this will be a treat for you. Made around the same time as his Corman-directed Poe stories (and for the same production company) here Price gets to be a little bit sillier...Although Price does a great job, and Frankie Avalon plays a good spy, the real credit should go to Susan Hart, who played Robot #11 (Diane). She wasn't just beautiful, but acted professionally and comically and delivered her lines as if she meant them (which may have been hard to do). None of the other robots get as much screen time ,and that's alright: Hart really has the performance nailed.I think this film has somewhat disappeared. Not being technically "horror", Price fans may overlook it. And they may be the key audience -- the spoof of the spy genre is evident, but there are better spy spoofs to be had. Having spawned two sequels (one directed by Mario Bava), this film has an important place in film history. I loved it and I suspect you will, too.

There is something going on here. It isn't that the acting is bad and contrived, it is way beyond that, it is actors (who are B-picture actors) acting as bad actors, spoofing themselves, their genre and the whole Hollywood-Disney comedy industry that was so big at the time. Remember "Herbie the Love Bug" with Dean Jones? It is that caliber of forced performance turned up a notch, mixed with three six-packs of 4th-wall gags, Three Stooges shticks like tiny offices with low-hanging bookshelves and multiple entrances. It's Looney Tunes with Frankie Avalon as Daffy Duck.Plot-wise this is ... well, hey, you have bikini FemBots way ahead of Woody Allen's Casino Royale, you have Vincent Price with a Disney-style dunderhead for his Igor, you have a spy agency and the lamest Secret Agent Car you've ever seen, there's just no room for a plot! It is, however, a film. By that I mean it doesn't fall apart half way and end in a psychedelic chaos rush like, say, the Monkees movie 'Head'. The film states a reality (a very strange reality) and sticks to it until the tale is told. It is formulaic to the extreme, with one of the most surreal Peter-Sellers-style farce car-chase scenes in cinematic history.I figure there has to be more to this movie, some secret society undercurrent or something, and that's why I gave it a 7. Certainly it wasn't so bad I couldn't watch; I had to see it through just to see it through. It is set in San Francisco, which in itself is a significant hipness-clue factor for those times (Herbie was also SF, no?).The Bikini Machine has got that Beach Party Bingo feel to it complete with Dobie Gillis but without Maynard G. Krebbs, and that alone makes me want to include this film in some sort of hip cannon and shoot it.

I had watched this maligned film's even more notorious sequel, DR. GOLDFOOT AND THE GIRL BOMBS (1966) – a most incongruous assignment for Italian genre stylist Mario Bava! – on late-night TV…so, whatever its quality, I was obviously interested in the original. Unfortunately, the edition I acquired is panned–and-scanned and, just now, I realized that both films, along with the TV special THE WILD, WEIRD WORLD OF DR. GOLDFOOT (1965), are available as a package on DivX! Oh, well… Vincent Price was a fine actor but, whenever he turned to comedy, the horror icon was known to resort to ham – which he certainly does in this sci-fi comedy, mugging his way through the silly (if not entirely unamusing) proceedings. Of course, he's the mad scientist of the title – complete with Arabian-style golden shoes – who dispatches a number of female robots to lure wealthy bachelors into marriage so that they can eventually turn their assets over to them/him. Dwayne Hickman is one such target though, when a robot (engagingly played by luscious Susan Hart, who was actually the wife of top AIP executive James H. Nicholson) is sent out to find him, she actually bumps into Frankie Avalon first who, smitten with the girl, is determined to get to know her.Soon, he and Hickman join forces and land in Dr. Goldfoot's mansion; the latter is hindered, more often than helped, by an inept assistant but nevertheless manages to imprison Hickman in his dungeon. Frankie's partner and nemesis (respectively) from his "Beach Party" series of films, Annette Funicello and Harvey Lembeck, unexpectedly turn up here in cameos as an in-joke! – but we also get copious (albeit deliberate) use of footage from Roger Corman's Edgar Allan Poe adaptation of PIT AND THE PENDULUM (1961), which had starred Price himself. Similarly, the portraits of Dr. Goldfoot's ancestors bear the looks of the actor in a number of his earlier horror pictures for AIP! Fred Clark as Avalon's flustered uncle is typically good value: he's involved in a running gag which has him being hit by the door of his office and thrown clear across the room every time it's opened! For the record, the score (and title song) is very much of its time. The film, then, culminates in an elaborate car chase along the sloping streets of San Francisco (three years before the celebrated sequence in BULLITT [1968]) – before heralding an upcoming sequel which was to have been called THE GIRL IN THE GLASS BIKINI; actually, the craze for such cliff-hanging 'appetizers' begun by the James Bond films, was also adopted by the Matt Helm spy spoofs and even the "Beach Party" series itself!