Oh, how the mighty have diminished themselves. For reasons unknown to man, Vincent Price — the iconic star of such horror classics as House of Wax — decided to appear in Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine (1965) and its sequel, Dr. Goldfoot and the Girl Bombs (1966). The pair of true disaster movies attempts to blend a spoof of the 007 genre with the dumb Frankie-and-Annette beach party flicks together with Price’s own Edgar Allen Poe films. Want to see Price get socked in the face by a spring-loaded boxing glove? These are the movies for you.
In Bikini Machine, Dr. Goldfoot (Price), named after the golden elf slippers he wears, has created a bevy of beautiful robots for the purpose of swindling rich men out of their hard-earned cash. His bumbling assistant (Jack Mullaney) — called Igor, of course — accidentally sends Unit No. 11, aka Diane (Susan Hart), after the wrong target.
“I regret bringing you back to life, Igor,” Goldfoot muses.
“Why?” Igor asks.
“Because you are inept and uncouth.”
The dialogue never rises above this level.
The erroneous recipient of the android’s charms is none other than Frankie Avalon, playing the part of Secret Agent 00½ (at one point he gets demoted to 00¼). After Diane is redirected to her real target, a drunken millionaire played by Dwayne “Dobie Gillis” Hickman, Frankie informs the latter of the plot against him and together they set out to put an end to Price’s nefarious plan.
Along the way they pass through a torture chamber where they discover Annette Funicello being held prisoner (alas, they leave her there) then embark on a very slow trolley-car chase through the streets of San Francisco. (I must confess, I nodded off during this excitement; when I awoke, it was still plodding on.)
Does Goldfoot escape? Apparently so, since Price returns in the sequel, Dr. Goldfoot and the Girl Bombs, where he’s now engaged in creating bodacious life-size robots that explode when embraced — part of a mad scheme to take over the world by killing off its major military leaders.
Even weirder than the first film, the second was produced by Italian International Pictures, who envisioned it as a sequel both to Bikini Machine and to the studio’s own 007 spoof, Two Mafiosi Against Goldfinger (“Due mafiosi contro Goldginger”).
Here Frankie is replaced by the wooden Fabian, who is joined by the hilariously unfunny Italian comedy duo known as Franco and Ciccio. Direction by the gifted Mario Bava is of no avail in the face of a script that calls for a chase on a merry-go-round done in the style of the Keystone Cops and dialogue along the lines of, “We must beat him to the punch!” “Why? is he thirsty?”
To his credit, Price later came clean and called the film “the most dreadful movie I’ve ever been in.”
