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 A guy in a car wreck is disfigured and invents "Operation X" so that he will be
invisible and won't frighten his "girlfriend." Dr. Mabuse wants "Operation X"
for himself so he kidnaps the woman to try and get it. A New York Detective,
played by Lex Barker stops Dr. Mabuse and "his band of invisible thugs as they
try to achieve world domination." Mabuse is shipped back off to the asylum.
They claim that The Return of Dr. Mabuse is the sequel, but I think this is the sequel to it and not vice versa. 1962, 89 minutes, VHS
Dr. Mabuse, the nefarious supercriminal who regularly confounds German law
enforcement with his ill-conceived and far-fetched world domination schemes,
straps on the Mission Impossible-style mask yet another time to do battle with
the forces of good. This time famed also-ran Tarzan Lex Barker is his nemesis.
If that name sounds familiar (aside from it sounding like the name of all-male
adult film star), it's because this is the very same Lex Barker that portrayed
FBI agent Joe Como in The Return of Dr. Mabuse, released a year earlier. For those of you rusty on your Mabuse mythology,
Como teamed up with a German inspector to defeat Dr. Mabuse when the good doc
had gotten hold of a mad-scientist's formula for controlling the minds of
people. In that adventure, Como also pretended to be a mobster named Nick and
went undercover in a prison under a third identity. Alas, this time Como
doesn't have such a colorful bag of tricks, but the adventure is a little more
focused than the previous one, though it's still stuck strictly in the Grade Z
Spy Flick genre. This time, the action begins like the previous entry, with a
little prologue detailing the death of someone that Como is going to have
investigate. In this film, the murder takes place at a theatre where a show is
being put on about someone who I guessed was supposed to be Marie Antoinette.
At least she was wearing a really big powdered wig and was getting beheaded.
Of course, these are Germans we're talking about so who knows what passes for
entertainment over there. Lest you get the idea, that you are going to watch a
movie along the lines of the great French masterpiece about love and life in
the theatre district, The Children of Paradise, you quickly realize that this
is a Mabuse film when a person dressed as a clown, pulls some levers and causes
a guy to drop through a trap door. He is accosted by a group of people led by
the shadowy presence of Dr. Mabuse. Mabuse wants to know what this guy knows
about Operation X. He don't nothing so they kill him and put him in a trunk.  After Mabuse gets done playing Ira Einhorn, Joe Como is summoned by the German
cops. It seems that the guy who was killed was an FBI agent who was looking
into this Operation X. The German cop doesn't know what it is and neither does
Como. You know, for movies that are made in Germany about events in Germany,
they sure do seem to need a lot of outside assistance to solve their cases.
What was the FBI doing over there investigating Operation X anyway? Well, Como
goes out to check the body to make sure it is the FBI guy and he runs into this
woman who is also there to look at the body. Her name is Liane and she also
just happens to be the chick getting her head lopped off at 1:00, 4:00, 7:00,
and 10:00 daily. Why is she there? That's a good question and now that I
think about it, I don't recall if the movie ever explained why she would be
there. In fact, how in the world could she ever had known that a guy was
murdered at the theatre, dumped in a trunk, discovered on the docks, and
shipped to the morgue? Well, logic aside, it does serve to get Como and Liane
together and that's what we all want isn't it? Como leaves the morgue and the
girl does as well. Como gets busted by a German policeman who is a bit of
pipsqueak, and thus is what passes for as comic relief in this picture. The
girl disappears and Como is delivered back to his old buddy who runs the German
cops that he visited at the beginning of the movie. He has a good laugh on the
pipsqueak and does some judo on him to show there's no hard feelings. The dead
guy was an FBI guy and so Como decides he needs to go to the theatre to catch a
few shows and maybe solve a crime. Sometime along the way he gets a note from
Mabuse saying something like, "Hi Lex, glad you got another role in my series
of movies. Looking forward to being defeated by you in about 50 minutes. Love
Mabuse." Lex makes a face (he comes from the "make a face school of acting")
and later tries to show his note off to his German police buddies but Mabuse
had written it all in disappearing ink! How tricky! How utterly pointless!  Back at the theatre, Mabuse is pretty p.o.ed that the body of the FBI agent was
found. Apparently, the dock workers were on strike so the trunk with the body
wasn't loaded promptly or was loaded by scabs or something and this somehow
resulted in the body falling out of the trunk or something. I think that you
and I could both agree that Mabuse had a right to be exasperated with his help
after that explanation. Around this time, Como buys season tickets to the
show and spends a good deal of the movie just kind of hanging out in the
audience ogling Liane and periodically looking up at one of those expensive
boxes where a pair of opera glasses mysteriously float in the air and the
playbill
mysteriously opens and closes by itself. There's an explanation for this and
it is a pretty stupid one. See, there's this guy and he is a scientist and was
in a car accident. He was horribly disfigured and so he went on to invent an
invisibility gizmo that can be worn so no one could see how ugly he was. He
hangs out at the play and has to be invisible so that Liane won't be frightened
of him. Of course he's never actually met Liane and has no relationship other
than the one represented by all the pictures plastered all over the basement
room he rents from his mother, but he just knows that if she gets to know him
she'll love him (except for the whole "horribly-disfigured mad-scientist part").
Before we know all this, Como has to go through some convoluted spy stuff
where he sits in a planetarium and gets secret instructions over an ear piece
and then visits the mad-scientist's secret lab where his assistant gives him a
tour and explains in painful detail the scientific basis of the invisibility
gadget (it involves synchronizing light vibrations - duh!). Immediately Como
says that while hard to believe that yes it all makes sense which only confirms
the viewer's suspicion that he probably topped out when he was a Tarzan
fill-in. Having an invisible stalker takes its toll on Liane and she kind of suffers a
breakdown. A doctor who happens to be hanging out at the theatre prescribes
some R&R for her at the very swanky and exclusive Dr. Mabuse Residence Inn
which is somewhere out in the Black Forest. She goes out there and Como
follows. While there, the invisible guy shows up (so to speak) and kind of
loiters around her room. Como closes the door and turns on the bathtub water
which must have been pouring out dry ice what with all the steam that magically
filled the room in mere seconds. He gets hold of the invisible man and the guy
turns off his gizmo and we see that his face is pretty much straight out of
Lucio Fulci movie (as were the gaping plot holes). He explains that he just
wants to protect Liane and make sure nothing bad happens to her while she takes
a bath. He's afraid that Mabuse is going to try and kidnap her to make him
give Mabuse the secret formula. While this is going on, Mabuse's henchmen
kidnap Liane and they take her back to the theatre and hold her hostage in an
attempt to make the scientist give Mabuse the secret formula. Like all great
Mabuse movies, this one is fraught with impossible coincidences, bizarre leaps
in logic and downright bad plotting. It turns out that the physician that told
Liane to go out to this remote inn is the same one that operated on the
scientist after his car wreck. It also turns out that the doctor works for
Mabuse (or maybe he was Mabuse - I lost my scorecard). Now if you could
explain to me how the doctor and/or Mabuse knew about the secret obsession he
had over Liane that would be great. And if you could explain how anyone knew
that there was a secret invisibility formula that would be even better. And if
you could further explain how if the scientist knew that Mabuse was after the
formula and the scientist was invisible, then why didn't the scientist use that
advantage to locate Mabuse and stop his evil ways. Or better yet, why didn't
he just break off his imaginary relationship with Liane and move to a place
that is more accepting of horribly disfigured people, like Arkansas or
something, then that would be just super. But since none of that is
explainable, I guess we're headed to a final showdown with Mabuse and Como. Or
are we?  See, Como does of course get himself captured and knocked on the head several
times. This leads to some extraordinarily bad fight scenes in the bowels of
the theatre where Mabuse has built a series of secret escape-proof dungeons
that Como busts out of a couple of times. Something happens to the mad
scientist, I think he dies doing something heroic, but I was so worried that
all those bumps on the head to Como would wipe off that perpetually dumbfounded
look off his face, I don't really remember much else. In the end, Mabuse is
not done in by the hero of the movie, but by his own man. Kind of. See he
has a gun battle with someone in the lab with the secret formula and the lab
gets set on fire. Mabuse runs around screaming his fool head off and
periodically stops to pose in front of the camera so that we can get a good
shot of his mask melting off. Somehow Como and the German cops find their way
there and watch through a window for awhile as Mabuse melts. They get bored
and decide to blow the door and rescue Mabuse. They haul Mabuse away to an
insane asylum where he will stay until he is paroled for his next movie. An
awful movie that is only saved by the fact that it is just a smidgeon less
awful than The Return of Dr. Mabuse. As noted above, this one is so full of plot holes, one is tempted to call
the holes canyons, but at least you didn't have to see Gert Frobe's doughy
face, so some of it can be forgiven. In fact, this one probably makes less
sense from a logical standpoint than the other one (as noted in the above
paragraphs), but the fact that they
focus on a single protagonist at least keeps things moving unlike the other
film where we jumped back and forth between Goldfinger and Tarzan until Tarzan
goes undercover in prison and we forget all about Goldfinger until the very
end. It's all very disorientating. Here we are able to concentrate on the lack
of plot since everything revolves around Lex Barker. Overall this is an
exceedingly dumb movie that doesn't interest the viewer and only serves to
reinforce the question on everyone's mind: why do the Germans think that Dr.
Mabuse is such a great movie villain? Karen Dor, who played Liane, was married
to director Harald Reinl, but surprisingly enough was not the wife that stabbed
him to death in 1986.
Reviews © 2004
MonsterHunter
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