Atom Age Vampire (1963)

Pierre (Sergio Fantoni) is a Navy Lieutenant by his bars, a Chief Petty Officer by his collar insignia. He breaks up with his stripper girlfriend Jeanette (Susanne Loret) who immediately explodes her car going down an embankment. WOW! Do sailors really date strippers?She is in a hospital with a slightly disfigured face, one that skin grafts could cure, or her long hair could cover...which it does for most of the movie. She believes her face will always be this way as she contemplates suicide with the gun she is packing in her purse while smoking cigarettes in her hospital room. My how things have changed.Never fear, a woman with stereotypical sunglasses and a trench coat (Franca Parisi) shows up and offers her help through Professor Alberto Levin (Alberto Lupo) who has a machine that goes ping, an oscilloscope, a centrifuge, and a "radiation chamber" that could be an early microwave oven. His new product Derma 28 he wants to use on a human guinea pig, hence the stripper with the deformed face, one that he instantly falls in love with to the dismay of his assistant.The professor uses the substance and it turns him into more of a hideous Mr. Hyde, than a vampire. I think "Atom Age Mr. Hyde at Times" wouldn't sell as well as the vampire thing. They could of at least gave him a long teeth. The make-up was pretty bad. It must have been stuff left over from our Lend-Lease program.Not much in character build-up. Acting and script were pretty sad. Might have some film history interest as a vampire film worse than anything with Kristen Stewart in it. Just kidding Kristen, I really did like how you played a dead chick in that Snow White thing you otherwise ruined.

Mess with the secrets of the unknown, and you may live to regret it, if you manage to live. An exotic dancer is badly burned in a car accident, and on the verge of killing herself, ends up as part of an experiment by a scientist who promises he can give her back her beauty. Obsessed with looking as good as she did before (and trust me, she really was no looker), there are repercussions that affect everybody involved in this case. He has an assistant who brought her to him in the first place; she had a boyfriend who had just dumped her because of what she did for a living. With everybody supposedly happy, it's no surprise that looking exactly as she did before doesn't go very well for any of them. Unfortunately, what sounds intriguing in a plot synopsis ends up being boringly presented when put on film. This doesn't have the Gothic atmosphere of the films from the creator of the cult classic "Black Sunday", and lacks the exotic leading lady of someone like Barbara Steele. Even the attacks by the alleged vampire aren't really suspenseful, and when dead bodies are discovered, the reaction seemed almost comical. This was incredibly cheaply made, not acted with much passion and ultimately rather dull considering the plot line. There were dozens of horror films released each year, with American International leading the way with some variations of Edgar Allan Poe's stories, and Hammer getting on the bandwagon with its remake of Dracula, Frankenstein and the mummy. Even the silly science fiction movies which had dumb looking creatures were more fun then the bulk of these low budget drive in style film that especially those coming from Italy look even worse when dubbed.

Many of us grew up seeing this Italian horror flick on TV under its alternate American title, ATOM AGE VAMPIRE. The most readily available copies are truncated and badly dubbed into English, and ran anywhere from 60 to 80-ish minutes, despite it originally being something like 105 minutes. My review is based on rediscovering the movie through a recently released Italian DVD in its original running time and true title - SEDDOK, L'ETEREDE SATANA. The results are definitely better, as there is a new striptease scene added in addition to more dialogue (all of it in Italian) and extra scenes with the monster featured in the film ... but this is still only a so-so time killer for dedicated horror hounds only.A gorgeous blonde stripper (Susanne Loret) has half her face scarred up after a bad car wreck, and so an older doctor (Alberto Lupo) who's been experimenting with glandular treatments manages to restore her beauty. But he ends up falling in love with her, and when the cure proves only to be temporary, the doctor must go out and kill other women in order to keep the restoration process going. Since he can't bring himself to murder, he willingly transforms into a horrible monster to give him the guts to carry out his diabolical intent.If the bulk of that synopsis does not sound familiar, well it should ... this is not by any means a fresh idea, and most recently had been dabbled with in a superior French film, LES YEUX SANS VISAGE (1959). The film in its original length does seem somewhat overlong and padded, though in all fairness the Italian DVD is only partly in English, as the new scenes were never dubbed. And since it's not English subtitled either, we are still away from the "perfect" release to evaluate the movie in the U.S. **1/2 out of ****

Starting to notice the robot acting thing was very common in old movies. It's similar to the kind of acting you see in plays. I don't like it but I'm slowly getting used to it. The movie itself was entertaining enough to get me through the whole thing. The plot reminded me of a cross between Dr.Jekell/Mr. Hyde, and Ted Bundy. It was like Jekell/Hyde because the leading guy injects himself with one of his experiments and it turns him into a psycho. When becoming this his face changes and looks a cross between a gargoyle, and a distorted toad. He then gets the urge to kill women in the middle of the night with what looks like a scalpel. The part where he kills only women but has one girl in his life who he would never hurt and is in love with, reminds me of Ted Bundy. The killings were not as brutal and there wasn't rape.Although I know the acting in these old movies are expected to be bad/over the top, there was this one scene where when the psycho guy lures this woman in the streets to come up to him for a favor. Once the woman got a closer look at his face she gave out the most unbelievable scream I have ever heard. It was terrible. You would have thought the woman was parodying a horror film, in stead of actually being in a real horror movie. Worse acting ever.Other than that I somewhat enjoyed the movie, but I wouldn't see it again