The Lucifer Complex

I was one of the clones! The curly haired guy in a few scenes behind Robert Vaughn. He didn't say much, just smiled and did what he was told. Many of us were acting students from the Lee Strasberg Drama Institute - so much for method acting. It was filmed across the street from Paramount at a small sound stage we entered through a back alley. They feed us from MacDonalds! I never got paid for it, so I guess I might as well not hold my breath anymore. You'll notice there is a strip across where our private parts would be, so you couldn't see our bathing suits or underwear, and we just grabbed the feeding tubes and stuck them in our navels.

A reviewer here on the IMDb said this is what THE BOYS FROM BRAZIL would look like if directed by Ed Wood and I have to say that assessment is pretty dead on. A young guy wanders around an island before heading into a cave with computers that have history on laserdisc. After checking out WWII and Vietnam, he heads to the "big war" of 1986 and the movie begins proper. Government guy Glen Manning (Robert Vaughn) catches wind of the Fourth Reich when his plane crashes on a small island off the coast of Florida and he finds Nazis working on a clone of Hitler. With the help of April Adams (Merrie Lynn Ross), Manning manages to escape and blows lots of stuff up with a tank and stop the bad guys. The end. Cut back to the guy in the cave who says something like, "Will man ever learn? I've got to explore this island more." Vaughn has a filmography that extends to over 200+ movies and TV series, but I'm going to boldly claim this was the worst thing he has ever been it. It was a production rife with problems and I'd say the Vaughn material amounts for maybe 65 minutes of the 90 minute running time. The wrap around screams of padding and doesn't make a lick of sense (man had the ability to record every single moment on laserdisc?). Keenan Wynn and Aldo Ray show up for a few scenes.

This is a horrible movie. But it is also quite charming in the best bad movie way. What does it have. It has a man living in some mountainous (Scandanavian?) country with the entire knowledge of the earth on crystalline rocks, reviewing the decline of the human race. Interestingly, most of the history is in black and white with projection streaks running through them. The main story, however, involves the rise of the Fourth Reich. It is a convoluted story that really makes no sense. People are being captured and turned into zombie like clones. They then do the bidding of a Herman Goering type leader who sits back and yells out orders. There are women with machine guns that can fire up to 50,000 bullets without loading. The Nazi's are utterly incompetent. They leave a fully loaded tank around that can easily be commandeered by anyone who knows how to run it. What happens is apparently what causes the downfall of civilized society, but I'm not sure why. Keenan Wynn plays an old guy with a Santa Claus beard who rants and raves. We can't tell the clones from the real people and what, exactly, happens at the end. It's just the silliest piece of junk, but those women, running around in their gray prison uniforms, firing machine guns, is quite remarkable.

This movie could have been so much better if they would have had the lone survivor discovering that the video he is watching is really the Lucifer Complex and he was in it. Like he was discovering that he was a clone. But as the movie is, it makes little sense of anything.

The trivia says this movie was never released to theaters, and I believe it. It's pretty bad.

It doesn't help that there's some sort of frame story involving a guy sitting inexpressively in front of a bank of TV monitors, watching a library of all the videos ever recorded (or something like that). He muses to himself in voice-over how there is more about wars than anything else. Most of the movie is something he's watching about a war in 1986 (or 96?). That story doesn't start until about twenty minutes in; probably once you realize how long the opening drags, you'll fast forward judiciously like I did.

A bunch of important people are killed on a bus. Robert Vaughn's character investigates, after he watches a belly dancer in a bar. He finds a camp of Nazis and is captured, and they try to convince him he never saw the Nazis. It turns out they're cloning world leaders, and the women in the camp help Vaughn fight the Nazis. That might sound sort of exciting, but it's not terribly engrossing at all, and it doesn't help that they keep cutting back to the guy watching all of this on video.

Not recommended at all. This is the sort of movie that would be helped by some special features explaining what they were going for with the movie, the trouble with releasing it, etc. I saw it on video, though, an old big box from a closing video store.