La gente gamma

A mad professor takes over a castle in a country no one knows and creates weird kids and goons like something out of Village of the Damned, only this movie came out before the book. If you are up for watching a B grade horror / Sci-fi from yesteryear, it might be worth trying. Incredibly silly.

A train-passage car carrying 2 reporters--one who resembles Prof. Quatermass a bit too much--accidently winds up breaking off from the rest of the train leaving the 2 men stranded in a strange little European country named Gudavia. Once there, they find they cannot leave as those running the country have other plans. They investigate and uncover a mad scientist's conspiracy to control the people by turning them all into slaves of the state with the help of a gamma ray machine. This movie is pretty outrageous and displays some serious leaps of logic. It also features a most unlikely change of heart in one of the main characters. Still the lead actors are likable and the film is silly fun.

Wow- I saw this movie on TV when I was about 6 or 7 and it has remained with me for 55 years- I didn't know the title but I remember the carriage of the train that the two guys were in at the beginning of the film being detached from the rest of the train and then being redirected to a remote village where a mad scientist was experimenting on people and turning them into goons- I thought I would never find it and it drove me mad so many times- watched so many old horror movies over the years hoping this could be that elusive one- finally found it on the UK Talking Pictures channel - was it as great as I remember as a kid? Of course not, but very entertaining and I can now have a peaceful retirement!

Gamme People, The (1956)

** (out of 4)

Extremely bizarre science-fiction film from Columbia has Paul Douglas and Leslie Phillips playing American and British journalists who accidentally wind up in a small European town, which seems to be ran by a strange scientist. After a slow start the journalist soon learn that the scientist is doing experiments with a gamma ray, which he's using to try and create geniuses. Of course, whenever the experiments fail he ends up with ghouls who will do all his evil deeds. I don't think anyone in their right mind would put THE GAMMA PEOPLE on any sort of "Best of.." list but you could possibly find it on several "WTF" lists. This is without question one of the strangest films to come from the 1950s because not only does it try to capture the horror/sci-fi genre but it also mixes in some very strange comedy as well as some political undertones. All of this stuff thrown into one screenplay just leaves the viewer scratching his head because it's impossible to really figure out what's going on or what the filmmakers were trying to do. The screenplay itself is a mess as it's all over the map and what's worse is the horrid bits of comedy that are thrown in. At times it almost seems like you're watching a spoof of a horror movie but then you get more ghoulish activity that reminds you that this is supposed to be a horror film. Speaking of ghouls, the monsters here are downright silly and it's doubtful the youngest viewers in the world would be remotely scared of them. Not for a single second are any of them scary and that silly walk they do makes one want to laugh more than anything else. With this strange blend of genres you're almost looking at a horrid movie but what saves it from the "so bad it's horrible" file are the strong performances and the fact that it's rather well-made. When I say well-made I do mean on a technical level because the direction holds the material about as well as one could hope and the cinematography is also quite nice. I'm not sure how much they had to pay Douglas to appear in this film but he does a very good job in the lead and plays it straight throughout. Phillips is also very good in his role as is Eva Bartok who plays an assistant who finally gets some courage to fight back. THE GAMMA PEOPLE has pretty much been forgotten over the years but it's certainly an interesting little experiment. It certainly doesn't work but fans of the genre will want to check it out just to see how strange it actually is.

This one will leave your head spinning like an Ed Wood film. It is a surreal stew of so many styles and symbolism that a reference point is reticent.

Ten years after WWII the fascist fear was forever present. Here we have science-fiction mind control based on factual events that instill a real life horror and remembrance of a not too long ago plague of pathology.

Hitler youth, enslavement encampment, and a mad scientist are at work here along with foreign journalists and feather headed throwbacks in this offbeat and mind-boggling concoction that almost but doesn't quite work.

The movie also, for some reason, throws in a bit of slapstick humor and coy dialog that got lost on its way to some other film and found its way into this sometimes sombre scenario of tortured children and monstrous and zombified men who were victims of the villains.

The result is a jigsaw made up of pieces from different puzzles. Interesting and never dull, but occasionally so twisted and ill fitting that one is left with a jaw dropping experience that will have you shaking your head, and that just might be the effect of that mind-melting gamma ray gun.