Doctor of Doom. 1963. Directed by René Cardona. Written by Alfredo Salazar (and dubbed anonymously by someone in K. Gordon Murray's employ). Released by American International Television.
I have to confess: This is the first time I've watched a K. Gordon Murray movie when I wasn't either drunk or younger than 12*. I'm not sure if I like it better this way or not. But I found this DVD just sitting on the shelf at the Watertown Library, and I had to check it out.
For those of you not familiar with Murray, let me explain: He was a madman. And a genius. He had the brilliant idea of taking cheap films from Mexico and redubbing them. Really bad films, with really, really bad dubbing. He took everything from fairy tale movies to holiday films** to horror movies featuring wrestlers.
Doctor of Doom (which is not the advanced degree held by the guy who used to be friends with Reed Richards until a terrible accident occurred) falls into the last category.
We start with a woman walking down an alleyway. All of a sudden, she's given the Vulcan Nerve Pinch. By the caveman from those Geico commercials! A full twenty seconds into the movie, we get our first scene change, as we're now watching a tag-team wrestling match with four lovely ladies. Wrestling wasn't much different forty years ago -- we get cheating, too many arm drags, and an eventual win by a submission move (an inverted crucifix variation).
We now cut to the locker room, where the winning wrester and her sister make plans to head out to dinner. Meanwhile, at the local Mad Scientist's lair, the woman who was attacked in the opening scene has just died of massive plot failure on the operating table. We learn that the doctor and his assistant are trying to perform brain transplants, but that the extremely stupid people on whom they've been experimenting might be the source of the problem. They resolve to get smarter victims.
They then go to take a peek at Gomar. Gomar is the ape-men from the opening scene. He's the result of the most successful experiment ever performed by the doctor: transplanting a gorilla's brain into a human body. We can assume that the gorilla had an IQ of 189. That, or their theory about needing smarter victims is somewhat off. Gomar is under the hypnotic control of the mad scientist, and is also in the process of transforming back into a gorilla, which is why he's got patches of hair glued to him. We get one more piece of information in this scene: For an unnamed "variety of biological reasons," females make more sense to use as subjects. Which doesn't explain Gomar. Or the dead females sitting in their operating room. Then again, there's a reason they don't call them "sane scientists."
Okay, I just realized that there's no way I can recap every single scene of this movie in under 10,000 words. This movie is just too ludicrous. The basic plotline is that Alice, the sister of the wrestler, is a medical student, is therefore smarter than the typical woman who walks down alleyways, and therefore is kidnapped by the mad scientist's henchmen. The cops actually almost stop them, but Gomar -- wearing special bullet-proof armor and what appears to be a silver Aztec mask, attacks the cops with body slams and other wrestling moves. Back at the lab, Alice's brain is not successfully transplanted, and she dies. The scientists now realize that they need a woman who's in peak physical shape if they want to complete a transplant. Naturally, they go after wrestlers.
We get lots of scenes of Alice's sister, Gloria, wrestling. Lots of them. A couple of entire matches actually, running nearly ten minutes in length. If you thought the alley fight in
They Live went on for too long, you do not want to see these fights.
We also get a pair of cops who provide Alice and her tag-team partner Rubi with GPS locator watches and two-way wrist radios. Yes, we now know where Dick Tracy got his marvelous toys: Mexico!
We get one doozy of a scene 2/3 of the way through the movie, in which there's a deathtrap in which one side of a room has Gomar in a jail cell, and the other side has a spiked wall closing in on the two cops. While Alice and Rubi attempt to save them (having to beat up lots of henchmen en route), the cops stop the world's slowest moving wall by having one of them climb to the ceiling (out of reach of Gomar) and use himself as a beam to slow the wall's progress. Luke Skywalker should try that next time he's in a trash compactor. This technique slows things long enough for the girls to free them.
The film finally ends when the mad scientist (who, to the surprise of no one, turns out to be Alice's old med school professor) successfully transplants Gomar's brain into the body of a female wrestler, puts her in a mask (because we can assume that her gorillafication has begun), and names her Vendetta. Vendetta secures a match with Gloria, and appears to know four or five real wrestling moves*** along with the classic chokehold. Before Vendetta can finish off Gloria, the cops and Rubi figure out the truth, and chase the mad scientist and Vendetta to a water tower, where both are shot by police snipers and fall to the ground.
Gloria can rest east now, knowing that her sister has been avenged.
I cannot begin to describe the experience of watching this film. It makes
The Toxic Avenger look like the slickest production out there. The alternate title of this movie is
Rock 'N Roll Wrestling Women vs. the Aztec Ape, which is really enough for anyone to know if they want to see it. Murray's bizarre imports (dubbed over the works of Mexican directors like Alfredo Salazar) are classic MST3K fodder (and also served as a clear inspiration for some of the zanier stuff in
Love and Rockets). Everyone needs to see at least one Murray movie, and
Doctor of Doom is as good a specimen as any.
That said, it's still probably more enjoyable to watch if you're drunk. Or twelve. Or both.
*Never both at the same time. That wouldn't happen until I was fourteen. Let's hear it for sleepaway camps that hire frat boys from Missouri as counselors. They not only had no problem buying beer for us, but also introduced an entire generation of Jewish kids from New York to the joys of chewing tobacco.
**I believe that his Santa Claus still the only Murray film to get the MST3K treatment. Although it's still better than The Santa Clause.
***Placing Vendetta the Brain-transplanted Gorilla one step above Hulk Hogan on the "wrestling talent" scale. ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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