Woof, this is a brutal one. Joey Faust (great character name), a renowned safecracker is sprung out of prison by a criminal named Major Krenner. For his own weird purposes (and frankly, it's never explained) he wants Faust to steal some uranium ore for him. Naturally, since we're in this series, he has a way of making Faust invisible.
_1.jpg){kind=spacer}
Enter Dr. Ulof, a German refugee scientist who has developed an invisibility ray (of course). Ivan Triesault, an Estonian actor, is the real highlight of this movie, talking about how he escaped Germany with his daughter at the end of WWII and how he was forced to perform experiments in concentration camps. Including on his wife. It's a weird shift in the movie that kind of works. Krenner is keeping the daughter captive to force Ulof to work with him. We do get to meet the daughter at one point; do you think she gets any lines? Of course not.
Of course, the ray doesn't quite work as it should and Faust starts fading in and out as he tries to complete his crimes. Then there's a whole, weird, subplot where he and Krenner's floozy flunky, Laura Matson, are falling for each other with absolutely no justification for it in chemistry and writing.
Look, it's pretty obvious this was filmed in a week at most in Texas. It's not even an hour, custom-made for a drive-in double feature; it's not the greatest thing ever but it's a pretty good little B-movie. No one's doing their best work (well, maybe Triesault, who's really good) but it's a fun little movie that you can find on Amazon Prime as well as other places with ads like Pluto and Freevee and Shout Factory.
_______________________________________
In two weeks, if I can track it down, The Invisible Kid (1988)! This looks like a real stinker, the kind that I kind of love.
Thanks to our own Friday Mike, who noted it's been uploaded to the Archive! (With embedded Spanish subtitles, but that's fine.)
Comments
Post a Comment