I’ve been running a bit behind on posting reviews for both the Tubi Continued… and Franco February columns, so I figured I would kill two birds with one stone and check out a few of the Jess Franco movies Tubi has to offer. He only co-directed this one as he apparently quit before filming was complete. The producers brought in Andrea Bianchi, the madman who gave the world Burial Ground, and the results are a bit of a mess, but it is a fun, and sometimes surreal mess.
Fernando Rey and Jack Taylor are Nazi hunters looking for the vile Nazi Josef Mengele (Howard Vernon) in South America. Robert Foster’s girlfriend gets killed by the Nazis who patrol Mengele’s fortress, and he teams up with her best friend (Suzanne Andrews) to get revenge. The Nazi hunters accept them into their fold with the provision they gather evidence to bring Mengele to trial, but he decides to blow him the fuck up instead.
Here's the thing, though. Mengele isn’t exactly hiding. I mean his guards patrol his fortress wearing red armbands in broad daylight and fly around in helicopters with “4R” painted on the side of them. (You know, for “Fourth Reich”.) It’s shit like this that endears crappy movies like this to me.
Even if you didn’t know the behind the scenes drama, Commando Mengele: “Angel of Death” looks like a cut-and-paste affair. (I mean, the title has two titles for God’s sake.) There are scenes that are played silently while narration tries to explain what’s going on, the same random insert shots of Andrews’ shocked face are reused a couple of times, and some plot points (like Andrews being artificially inseminated by Mengele) are haphazardly (or never) resolved. However, when it’s Franco doing the cutting and Bianchi doing the pasting, the results are entertaining more often than not.
This movie has a lot of movie for your movie dollar. It has Chris Mitchum sleepwalking through his performance as Mengele’s top bodyguard who walks with a limp, but can still snap into action for slow-motion, echoey Kung Fu fights. Foster’s “Dirty Dozen” style team are also a lot of fun (even though there are only four of them). There’s a Bud Spencer looking guy who uses knives and crossbows, an acrobat, a computer geek, and a Kung Fu master who’s always exuberantly practicing his karate chops and kicks in the background (who also gets his share of slow-motion, echoey Kung Fu fights). Then, of course, there’s Howard Vernon chewing the scenery like only Howard Vernon can as Mengele. I think my favorite moment came when he shows Andrews his big experiment and it’s nothing but a room with a monkey lying in bed next to two half-human/half-monkey freaks. Most movies would make this a major plot point, but for Commando Mengele: “Angel of Death”, it’s just a random WTF throwaway scene.
Speaking of which, the final siege on Mengele’s fortress is a head-spinning onslaught of “…HUH?!?” There’s badly choreographed action (including more slow-motion, echoey Kung Fu fights), bizarre plot twists, and one of the worst model explosions of all time. I think I laughed six times and said, “Wait… WHAT?” at least twice in the last three minutes. A lot of the movie never comes close to matching the weirdness of the final reel. There are a few moments along the way though that flirt with being totally bonkers, but ultimately wind up being completely bananas. And I’m not saying that because of the scene where the monkey and its half-human brethren are liberated by the Nazi hunters.
It's kind of easy to tell what scenes Franco was responsible for thanks to the slow zooms and pans. Also, the flick is chockfull of his regular stock players like Taylor, Foster, Vernon (the De Niro to Franco’s Scorsese), and Mitchum. I’m not sure if he was responsible for the monkey business (pun sorta intended), or if that was Bianchi’s doing. All I know is that when the WTF is flying freely, Angel of Death is heavenly.
AKA: Angel of Death. AKA: Commando Mengele.
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