Doctor of Doom (1963)

What a beautiful movie!

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

Close shines in drama with strong language, adult themes.

If you're interested in the topic at hand, you should just watch it and judge yourself because the reviews have gone very biased by people that didn't even watch it and just hate (or love) the creator. I liked it, it was well written, narrated, and directed and it was about a topic that interests me.

This film is a perfect entry in the 'So Bad it's almost Good' category.The movie is a Mexican film from 1963. How can I describe it. It's a story that combines a mysterious mad doctor, transplanting brains, and female wrestling. Two policemen, one rather shorter than usual, are hunting for a killer of women. The women's bodies are found minus their brains. I know it's said a woman's prerogative is to change her mind, but this guy takes it literally.After numerous failures, with average female brains, and then a highly intelligent female brain, the loco doc decides to try the brain of a strong athletic women. Big mistake, he picks Gloria Venus, champion wrestler and Liz Taylor look-a-like for his next victim. She and her partner, an Ann Margaret Look-a-like (at least in hair style) wrestler, proceed to systematically knock the snot out of the Mad Doc's henchmen. Finally the Doc decides the only way to get revenge on them is to take the brain of a gorilla he had previously placed in a large man. And relocate it into a masked caped female wrestler that can challenge Venus in the ring. Yes, just hours after the surgery the lady with the gorilla brain transplant is ready to do some body slams and back flips in the ring. Meanwhile the loco doc acts as her equally masked fight manager.During the course of the film our two detectives start a romance with the two wrestlers, the red headed Ann Margaret falls for the small policeman and has a lot of cute pet names for her little romeo.Look for the scene when the two policeman are trapped as a spiked wall starts closing in on them. The one cop uses his littler partner as a sort of wedge over his head to stop the walls from closing further while they wait to be rescued by the ladies. This little guy's spine is evidently made of titanium.Near the end it's revealed who the mysterious mad doctor really was, a surprise meant to shock the audience. Of course by about ten minutes into the film even my pet beagle had figured out his identity.Anyway I loved this film it was hilarious. The fact that my copy had the English dubbing slightly out of sync made it even better. Sometimes a female voice was coming out of a guys mouth and vice-versa.If you love bad films as much as I do this is a must see. You can even watch it for free off the web if you care to. With a little searching you can find it.

This film and WRESTLING WOMEN VERSUS THE AZTEC MUMMY (1964) are included on the same DVD. Interestingly, BOTH films share many of the same scenes as well as actors and it appears as if they basically created one movie and filmed a few extra scenes in order to make two movies! While cheap and crappy, it also made for many incomprehensible moments and a lot of repetition--particularly the wrestling scenes--which were identical.To many non-Mexicans, this film is about as weird and foreign as they get! Mexican wrestling films were immensely popular in the 1960s and 70s and they rarely, if ever, made any sense. However, in this film instead of a man wearing a 'lucha libre' mask everywhere they go (el Santo and many of the other good guys wore elaborate masks and guarded their identities), here we have a couple non-masked sexy ladies. While their wrestling skills are not always great, they were very curvaceous AND were crime fighters--just like Blue Demon, el Santo and the rest! As I said, I know that this seems very, very weird! In this installment, Lorena Velázquez and Elizabeth Campbell star as the lady wrestlers. They punch, flip and grapple their way to the bottom of a strange case--a crazy doctor who is trying to perform brain transplants on unsuspecting women!!! There is also a strange guy who is apparently part gorilla! Despite the strangeness of it all, I swear to you I am not making any of this up--it's all in the film and I am not on drugs nor have I had a severe head injury!! If you've seen any of the Mexican wrestling films, it's pretty much what you'd expect--no better nor worse. It's dumb, poorly acted, poorly written and stupid...but also rather funny in a kitschy sort of way. While you'd never assume this is a good film, it is fun for bad movie fans. All others beware!!!

I recently (and reluctantly) posted a somewhat negative review of the Mexican classic BRAINIAC. Last night I watched DOCTOR OF DOOM and my faith has been restored! This is the kind of goofy fun I expect from old south of the border exploitation films. A mad scientist kidnaps women for brain transplant experiments! His henchman is a hulking guy with a gorilla brain in his skull! The detectives are trapped in one of those rooms with spiked walls that close in on you! Wrestling women who look like Laura Petrie on steroids save the day! Oh man, it doesn't get better than this. I especially liked the detective captain's sidekick, a little guy one of the women refers to as a "five foot lightning bolt." He's actually funny and engaging. At one point he faces nearly certain doom and radios his girl friend for help. If she doesn't hurry, he says, they'll never walk down the aisle together. "Don't talk like that, small hero!" she responds, "I'll be there like white lightning!" I felt like I'd been drinking white lightning while I watched this. Check it out!

A mad doctor is running amok on the backlot of Azteca Studios. He has successfully transplanted the brain of a gorilla into the body a male human, who has developed an un-gorilla-like taste for raw meat and is sporting thick hunks of glued-on fur on his back and arms. Now the Mad Doctor seeks---for reasons naturally unexplained--to transplant a female human brain into the body of another female human. Along the way, the Mad Doc--accompanied by his evil henchmen and the ape-man--botches several transplant attempts, and earns the wrath of babe-a-licious luchadora champeen Gloria Venus (after he offs her chemist sister in a brain-swap-gone-bad) and her police detective boyfriend.So why's the Doc goin' to all this trouble? Perhaps he wants a companion for Gorilla Boy? Heck, we don't know, but it's the setup for the rest of the picture, which is one of the most humorous and high-spirited of the Mexican Wrestling genre. As with most K. Gordon Murray Mexi-horror fare, the dubbing is always awkward, and often hilarious, though the actors seem to be enjoying themselves (especially Mad Doc, who gets to chew major scenery for the last half hour), and the direction by Rene Cardona the Elder gets progressively tighter as the film progresses--this is one of the few Mexi-Horror flicks that actually gets better the longer you watch it. There are at least two "trick" endings, a wild plot twist in the last 15 minutes (an evil lady wrestler with a gorilla's brain? Nah), and a predictably ludicrous ending. The only caveat to offer is the tampering with the soundtrack, presumably by Johnny Legend. For a couple of fight scenes---maybe 10 minutes in all--the delightfully cheesy original score is dubbed out in favor of some tepid late-'80s Rockabilly Twang music. It's not too distracting, but you have to wonder the anyone even bothered in the first place. But if you're an aficionado of Mexi-Horror or Wrestling Pictures, you will want to check out this film. It was the first of the "Wrestling Women" series, and one of the most successful. Forty years later, it's easy to see why