Best movie of this year hands down!

Fresh and Exciting

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

The acting in this movie is really good.

I've always said that I'd watch Vincent Price read a phone book. I should emend that statement after watching this movie: I'd watch Vincent Price read a phone book IF he was nowhere near a pair of Italian idiots...I saw Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine, so I knew what to expect; but, any camp enjoyment one could derive from this film was nullified by the idiot doormen/spies who mug their way through every scene like a horrible Jim Carey.Price plays the role light and talks to the camera through some of the movie. He seems like he's having fun. Fabian's talents might better be used in another movie. His performance made Frankie Avalon look like Lawrence Olivier.The girls are pretty, fleshy Italian types. There's a lot of them. They explode.This movie should be seen if you've seen every other movie ever made and you want closure...

My wife will be happy to tell you that I watch a lot of bad movies, but usually in the genre of "so bad that they're good." The first movie in this series fell into that category, but this sequel moved the "bad" needle way past the "camp" point to the point of no return.The plot is paper-thin, the dubbing is awful, the sets, rear projections, models, and special effects are grade-school level, and most of the actors are unbearable. The "funny" Italian duo (who I guess were big Italian stars...the short one reminds me vaguely of Larry Storch) never even APPROACH funny, especially with their dubbed voices. (Why do bad movies like this always use voice actors who use cartoon voices rather than normal speech?) You know the movie is in trouble when the director calls for sped-up action (a la Benny Hill).Vincent Price, who would do anything for money, floats above the cesspool to some degree, especially when he's hamming it up straight to the camera. The other saving feature is Les Baxter's generic 60s score, with whiffs of the Tijuana Brass. If you survive to the end, you'll hear one of the worst closing themes since "The Green Slime."

With this film, I unceremoniously brought my Mario Bava retrospective – commemorating the 30th anniversary of his passing – to a rather undignified close due to personal familial difficulties. Incidentally, having watched – and been appalled by – it years ago on late-night Italian TV, I had actually added this title to the Bava mini-marathon at the eleventh hour (in fact, I only acquired it a couple of days before viewing!); with this in mind, I regret not keeping the VHS recording of that broadcast since I now have had to make do with a vertically stretched copy which boasts forced English subtitles to boot! The film is a genuine oddity in that a sequel is made not merely by hands other than the original's but by a different country altogether (though it still featured the same star and would be distributed, post-dubbing, by the company behind the first film anyway), considering that the titular figure is not a brand name a' la Tarzan, Zorro or, for that matter, Fu Manchu – where, for instance, the fourth and fifth entries in the Christopher Lee/Harry Alan Towers series of the 1960s eschewed British directorial involvement for that of notorious Spaniard Jess Franco (to the franchise's ultimate detriment, I might add)! To cut to the chase, I have to admit that I was not as intolerant towards the film as I had been on that preliminary viewing: ironically, I used to lap up vehicles by the comic duo of Ciccio (Ingrassia) & Franco (Franchi) as a kid but, somehow, I could not picture them in the same frame as horror icon Vincent Price or 'submitting' to the direction of a technician and master stylist like Bava (in any case, their work has not withstood the test of time all that well, pretty much in the way of the Abbott & Costello comedies – with the one most readily given to mugging, Franco, even supplying the rather noisy song over the opening credits)!; having perhaps checked out the just-as-campy original (called DR. GOLDFOOT AND THE BIKINI MACHINE [1965], by the way) in the interim may have softened my opinion of the sequel to a certain extent (though it is still a toss-up with the horrendous make-over job that became THE HOUSE OF EXORCISM [1975] in constituting the nadir of the Bava canon). The film sees Goldfoot (flanked by a Chinese acolyte named "Hardjob", in clear emulation of Harold Sakata's character from the James Bond extravaganza GOLDFINGER [1964]) upping the ante by being intent on world domination (with the female robots turning combustible, hence the U.S. title – since the Italian original is a parody of John Le Carre''s "The Spy Who Came In From The Cold", brought to the screen the previous year, and puts the emphasis on the movie's star comedians!) rather just misappropriation of funds as in the first entry. To be honest, one is still embarrassed to associate the picture with either Price (especially when disguising himself in a nun's habit!) or Bava (and it is particularly lamentable that the two only managed to collaborate on material clearly below their standards and talents!) but, taken on its own merits (if such a term can be applied here), there are certainly some mild pleasures to be derived from the ensuing concoction – with the most inspired ideas being Ciccio & Franco picking up artillery items from the F.B.I. arsenal as if they were on a supermarket spree, the fact that the voice artist assigned to dub their burly and flustered Chief (remember that Italian films at this time were generally shot M.O.S.) is the same one who does Oliver Hardy in the Laurel & Hardy vehicles (I wonder how it sounded in the English-dubbed version?), and a rather brief reprise of the classic mirror gag devised by Max Linder (albeit most famously adopted by The Marx Bros.' DUCK SOUP [1933]) involving Price and Ingrassia! In the same vein, the finale partly recreates the conclusion of DR. STRANGELOVE: OR, HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB (1963); for what it is worth, then, soon-to-be erotic diva Laura Antonelli plays the obligatory-but-insignificant damsel-in-distress here (alongside Fabian's straight-man hero, who fares somewhat better).

The 1960's produced a lot of silly movies. This is one of the farces that centers around girls in bikinis. It has its moments that are just plain silly, like its segment that resembles the silent movies. But I consider it a nice little piece of cheese.