House of 1000 Dolls (1967) What a crushing disappointment.
For pure guilty pleasures, BQ loves diving into a sludgy pool of EuroTrash.....dumb Bond imitations, funky bloody horror romps, fillled to the brim with half-naked starlets, blood soaked Giallos, weird, creepy German Krimis, multinational capers with multinational casts, Spaghetti westerns, Spaghetti street cime bloodbaths, sex slave sleaze-fests, etc, etc, etc,.........
Basically, all the stuff that constitutes Grindhouse heaven.
Imagine our delight when we found this one underneath a rock......
So promising! Acres of nubile sex slaves! Vincent Price! Exotic Tangier! The nasty German guy from "Torn Curtain"! A German-Spanish co-production! And produced by the Maestro of EuroTrash Harry Alan Towers!
Oh joy unconfined! You had us at hello.
And then goodbye........
Price, incredibly subdued here and washed up Hollywood blonde Martha Hyer, respectively play an oily nightclub magician and his assistant.
But they bring in the big bucks by helping to run a sex-trafficked House of a 1000 Kidnapped Babes in Tangier. Neither of them profess to know 'The King Of Hearts', the outfit's mysterious, never seen owner.
Into the mix comes a tourist doctor, played by George Nader, another down-on-his-luck Hollywood B-lister who gravitated into EuroTrash for work. (And found plenty, as FBI guy Jerry Cotton in a bunch of West German thrillers)
When Price and Hyer start bumping off people who might expose their flesh factory, Nader pokes his nose and lacquered hair into investigating their Big Dollhouse. But that doesn't sit well with Tangier's Top Cop (played by Wolfgang Kieling, whom we all well remember as the creepy thug famously murdered by Paul Newman in "Torn Curtain").
We wish we could tell you that this turns out to be as much fun as it sounds.
Sorry.
By the time they get around to revealing 'The King Of Hearts', we'd gone way past giving a flying eff......
This junk stays in permanent low gear throughout its running time. Price looks like he's struggling to stay awake. Kieling, we're happy to report, comes off as vaguely threatening as ever, but neither he nor anybody else does much for this film.
Director Jeremy Summers, mostly a British TV hack, keeps this movie about alive as a low pulse coma patient on life support. He manages to make 95 minutes seem like a draggy 3 and a half hours.
We'll waste no more words.....
Even devoted fans of EuroJunk (like us) should give this a complete hard pass. A worthless mess. Zero stars (0)
No comments:
Post a Comment