Director: Robert Hartford-Davis
Year: 1968
Country: United Kingdom
Alternate Titles: Carnage; Laser Killer
Genre: Mad Doctor
Plot:
After being severely scarred in an accident, a model forces her surgeon boyfriend to make her youthful again and tries to use experimental skin-grafts to do so, only for the gruesome means of doing so to force more attempts to fix the issues facing both of them.
Review:
This was a pretty nice surprise of a film. One of the biggest factors is that it stays watchable throughout due to its constant series of action scenes, mainly centered on the circumstances relating to the necessary procedures. These are spread throughout the film as a whole pretty nicely, which is a great feat on its own, but to also put the kind of gore and mutilation in here as it does makes for quite a nice time here, which is a strong plus. Beyond these, though, there are some really great scenes otherwise, as the train murder is quite brutal, which builds up nicely from the opening moments to the final crescendo of violence during the attack.
Even better is the final chase from the laboratory, mixing together a series of brawling, some laser randomly destroying everything in the vicinity, out of the house through an open field down a cliff, and covering most of the beach, concluding a long stalking sequence among rocks in the crashing waves. This is an incredibly long and exhilarating chase, which is the highlight of the film. As well, the film's quite brutal surgery and continued usage of showing off the victims' scarred, deformed faces also gives the film some small gore effects here and there, and it becomes all the better for it.
These here really help the film since there isn't a whole lot wrong with this one. One of the main flaws is that there's a little too much non-activity spent on dialog spouting the necessity of surgery or the morality of what's going on in the middle of the film. There's too much time here on these segments, and the repetitiveness of all these arguments really starts to get aggravating after a while, and they really make the middle seem longer than it really is. The other real flaw is that the ending feels a little out of place. The majority of the movie deals with completely unrelated people coming into contact with their lives, and the fact that it concentrates a huge chunk of time on something that spends so much time with the same people throws off the rhythm slightly. These, though, are the only things wrong with the film since the good points are much more impressive.
Overview: ****/5
An interesting and overall entertaining mad doctor film, there are plenty of worthwhile aspects here that make this one quite enjoyable and able to hold this one up against the few drawbacks with this one. Those with an appreciation for this era or style of genre fare or who are fans of the creative crew will have a lot to like here, while most others out there should heed caution.
Comments
Post a Comment