ASSIGNMENT TERROR aka LOS MONSTRUOS DEL TERROR aka DRACULA VS. FRANKENSTEIN (Spain/West Germany/Italy - 1970; US release 1973) Directed by Tulio Demicheli. Written by Jacinto Molina. Cast: Michael Rennie, Karin Dor, Craig Hill, Patty Shepard, Angel del Pozo, Paul Naschy (Jacinto Molina), Ella Gessler, Manuel de Blas, Peter Damon, Diana Sorel, Ferdinando Murolo, Luciano Tacconi, Gene Reyes. (Unrated, 87 mins) The second film in Spanish horror star Paul Naschy's loosely-connected, long-running "El Hombre Lobo" werewolf series, ASSIGNMENT TERROR is largely an homage to the classic Universal horrors that Naschy loved, particularly the all-star monster mash-ups like 1944's HOUSE OF FRANKENSTEIN and 1945's HOUSE OF DRACULA. At least that was Naschy's intention when he wrote the script. The end result is an uneven hodgepodge of monster rally and sci-fi alien invasion in the style of a Eurospy 007 knockoff, the schizophrenic tone probably inevitable given the troubled and financially-strapped shoot. Money ran out and production shut down more than once, prompting the original director, Argentina-born Hugo Fregonese (who spent some time in Hollywood in the 1950s with MY SIX CONVICTS, MAN IN THE ATTIC, and BLACK TUESDAY before settling in Europe in the 1960s) to walk off the film with about 70% of it completed. Spanish-based Argentine director Tulio Demicheli (best known for the ludicrously over-the-top, acid-bathed 1973 gangster outing RICCO THE MEAN MACHINE) was brought in as a replacement, and Antonio Isasi (THEY CAME TO ROB LAS VEGAS) was also involved at some point near the end of the shoot and supervised the post-production, though only Demicheli receives directing credit (to add to the confusion, German prints name one Eberhard Meichsner as director, though he had nothing to do with any of it and was likely credited for German co-production quota purposes). Given its chaotic production with multiple directors cycled through, it's a wonder ASSIGNMENT TERROR was completed at all.
Unlike his other "El Hombre Lobo" vehicles as the tormented nobleman-turned-werewolf Waldemar Daninsky, Naschy relegates himself to a sixth-billed supporting role in ASSIGNMENT TERROR. The star is Michael Rennie, best known for his iconic turn as alien visitor Klaatu in the 1951 classic THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL. Naschy never relied on fading Hollywood stars for export value, so Rennie was an unusually big name for an "El Hombre Lobo" outing. The veteran British actor was in declining health and in a serious career slump by 1970, and like the 1966 sci-fi cheapie CYBORG 2087, his very presence here is a nod to his being in THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL in much better days. ASSIGNMENT TERROR proved to be Rennie's last film (he's dubbed by someone else), and in it, he plays Dr. Odo Varnoff, an alien from the planet Ummo. Varnoff has arrived on Earth with nefarious plans of Ummo domination, with the help of two other alien entities inhabiting the recently deceased bodies of Dr. Maleva Kerstein (German krimi fixture Karin Dor), a biochemist who was killed in a car accident, and Dr. Kerian Berner (Angel del Pozo), a surgeon killed in combat. Varnoff's diabolical plot includes abducting beautiful women to torture and brainwash to do his bidding, but the key to his plan is--for some reason--to find, reanimate, and assemble the world's most famous monsters, or the closest proximity of that which Naschy's apparent fear of copyright infringement will allow. First, in true HOUSE OF FRANKENSTEIN fashion, he finds the skeletal remains of vampire "Count Jaros" (Manuel de Blas) at a traveling circus and resurrects him by removing the stake from his rib cage. He exhumes the corpse of Daninsky and revives him by extracting a silver bullet lodged in his heart (cue graphic heart surgery stock footage). Next is a trip to Egypt where Varnoff finds and awakens "The Living Mummy" (Gene Reyes), and finally a journey to a long-vacant German monastery once owned by Dr. Ulrich von Farancksalan, where Varnoff revives the feared "Farancksalan Monster" (Ferdinando Murolo).
Those Universal monster rallies are remembered with great affection by fans, but they blundered badly in the way they very rarely had the monsters interacting with one another. For example, in HOUSE OF FRANKENSTEIN, John Carradine's Dracula is killed off before Lon Chaney's Wolf Man and Glenn Strange's Frankenstein Monster even appear, and both HOUSE OF FRANKENSTEIN and HOUSE OF DRACULA keep the Monster on the lab table until literally the last two minutes of the movie. Only ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET FRANKENSTEIN got it right by throwing them all together, something ASSIGNMENT TERROR, for the most part, doesn't do. Naschy's werewolf briefly throws down with "The Living Mummy" and the "Farancksalan Monster" but he never deals with "Count Jaros," who spends most of his screen time trying to cast a spell on Maleva. There's also some Austin Powers dance cutaways and a scene where Rennie attends a mod freakout, plus an inconsequential police investigation headed by Inspector Tobermann (American expat Craig Hill, who spent most of his career in Europe), who's trying to get to the bottom of all the disappearing blondes in the area. ASSIGNMENT TERROR's patchwork assembly allows time for romantic subplots for both Tobermann and the mayor's daughter (Patty Shepard, another American expat who married de Blas and spent her entire career working in the Spanish film industry), as well as Maleva and Dr. Berner, which incurs the wrath of the jealous Varnoff, who commands the "Farancksalan Monster" to kill Berner.
Just out on in a pristine Blu-ray edition from Scorpion and being sold exclusively through Ronin Flix (because physical media is dead), ASSIGNMENT TERROR is amusingly goofy and entertaining, usually for the wrong reasons. De Blas doesn't get much to do as "Count Jaros," Naschy has a couple of good transformations sequences but is sidelined or dispatched for Varnoff henchman duty for much of the film, and Reyes makes a peculiar but occasionally creepy "Living Mummy." Murolo's monster is hilariously bad, sporting the classic flat head but also with trendy sideburns, Groucho Marx eyebrows, and a squint that makes him look somewhere between near-sighted and high AF. According to film historian Troy Howarth on the Blu-ray commentary, Naschy later complained that ASSIGNMENT TERROR's makeup artist Francisco R. Ferrer was the worst he'd ever worked with, and after one look at Murolo, who resembles a younger Larry David going to a Halloween party in a hastily-assembled Frankenstein costume, you'll be inclined to agree. It's no fault of the actor, who also doesn't get any help from his initial appearances showing him walking around in regular shoes, and the guy is 5' 9" tops, which doesn't make for an imposing monster, regardless of whether it's created by Frankenstein or Farancksalan. Fortunately, someone found Murolo some large, heavy boots for later in the film, which also helps him with the lumbering, staggering gait associated with the monster. It was soon after ASSIGNMENT TERROR that Naschy would cement his place in horror history, eventually making at least another half dozen official "El Hombre Lobo" movies and going on to play his own versions of classic monsters in films like HUNCHBACK OF THE MORGUE, DR. JEKYLL AND THE WEREWOLF (where he was both El Hombre Lobo and Mr. Hyde, with Jack Taylor pulling half-duty as just Dr. Jekyll), and THE MUMMY'S REVENGE, with a standout being 1973's surreal and atmospheric COUNT DRACULA'S GREAT LOVE, one of the all-time great Spanish horror films.
Originally titled LOS MONSTRUOS DEL TERROR, ASSIGNMENT TERROR was shown in parts of Europe as DRACULA VS. FRANKENSTEIN and, in a face-off of sheer pointlessness the likes of which we wouldn't see again until Bonnie Tyler, Molly Hatchet, Kiss, Ace Frehley, and Robin Beck all recorded versions of "Hide Your Heart" over 1988-89 or Cannon and the ousted Menahem Golan squared off in the Great LAMBADA vs. THE FORBIDDEN DANCE War of 1990, it became one of three competing DRACULA VS. FRANKENSTEINs to be released at roughly the same time, along with Al Adamson's DRACULA VS. FRANKENSTEIN (1971) and Jess Franco's DRACULA CONTRA FRANKENSTEIN (1972). Adamson emerged victorious, as the Franco film became DRACULA, PRISONER OF FRANKENSTEIN, while the Naschy project was ultimately rechristened with its most widely-used title ASSIGNMENT TERROR. It skipped theaters stateside and made its belated American debut on late-night TV in 1973 as part of an AIP syndication package called "Ghoul-O-Rama," two years after star Rennie died in June 1971. His official cause of death was emphysema, though we shouldn't rule out embarrassment.
THEY CAME TO ROB LAS VEGAS (Spain/France/West Germany/Italy - 1968) Directed by Antonio Isasi. Written by Antonio Isasi, Lluis Josep Comeron, Jorge Illa and Jo Eisinger. Cast: Gary Lockwood, Elke Sommer, Lee J. Cobb, Jack Palance, Roger Hanin, Jean Servais, Georges Genet, Gustavo Re, Daniel Martin, Gerard Tichy, Maurizio Arena, Armand Mestral, Fabrizio Capucci, Enrique Avala, Ruben Rojo, George Rigaud, Fernando Hilbeck, Luis Barboo, Lorenzo Robledo. (R, 129 mins) "America's free-living and free-wheeling pleasure capital and the men who came to strip it raw!" One of the great hyperbolic tag lines of its era, and it's only fitting for one of the most memorable movie titles of its day. Even if you've never seen it, that tag line tells you almost all you need to know about THEY CAME TO ROB LAS VEGAS. A late-night TV staple well into the 1980s, the film fell into obscurity for a couple of decade before Warner Archive resurrected it for a widescreen DVD release in 2010, THEY CAME TO ROB LAS VEGAS is one of many international Europe-set capers of the 1960s (along with SEVEN THIEVES, TOPKAPI, GAMBIT, KALEIDOSCOPE, GRAND SLAM, THE BIGGEST BUNDLE OF THEM ALL, and THE ITALIAN JOB to name a few) but unique in that the Spanish-French-West German-Italian co-production is required to fool the audience into thinking it's taking place in Las Vegas and Los Angeles. Some great second unit Vegas location work helps, but all of the interiors and any scenes involving the actors were shot in Spain and other than the four English-speaking leads, the supporting cast is made up of a bewildering mix of actors from four different countries playing Americans but all speaking their own language and letting the dubbing team figure it out later. The effect is jarring at times, especially since the dubbing isn't all that great (if you watch enough Eurotrash movies, you'll recognize the familiar voices of dubbing fixtures like Ed Mannix and Nick Alexander), and the Euro-lounge score by Georges Garvarentz and the haunting, wordless, giallo-like vocals of the ubiquitous Edda dell'Orso almost immediately blow the movie's cover, eliminating any illusion that this is an American film, but Spanish director/co-writer Antonio Isasi (SUMMERTIME KILLER) busts his ass assembling it all together in the most seamless way possible.
Fresh off of his turn as doomed astronaut Frank Poole in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, Gary Lockwood stars as Tony Ferris, a San Francisco hippie who shaves his sideburns and gets a haircut to become a Vegas blackjack dealer after turning down an offer to go in on an armored car heist with his older brother Gino (RIFIFI's Jean Servais), a mobster who's just escaped from prison. It was a smart move, since Gino and all of his cohorts end up being gunned down by the cops. At the casino, Tony has a table scam going with girlfriend Ann Bennett (Elke Sommer), who's also the mistress of her married boss Steve Skorsky (Lee J. Cobb), the owner of the security company whose armored car Gino tried to jack. It isn't long before Ann is an accomplice in Tony's labyrinthine plot to avenge Gino's death by staging an elaborate heist of a Skorsky truck ostensibly filled with casino cash that's en route from Vegas to L.A. Complicating matters is Douglas (Jack Palance), a pissed-off Treasury agent who's working undercover as an insurance investigator in a sting on Skorsky, who's been using his trucks to transport gold for the west coast branch of the Cosa Nostra. Douglas knows what Skorsky's up to, but hasn't been able to prove it, and when a surveillance team follows a decoy truck employed by Tony, Skorsky is convinced his own employees are ripping him off. The distraction allows Tony and his crew to stash the real truck--which they don't know is filled with Mafia gold--in an underground bunker they've dug in the desert, with Skorsky's employees and one of Douglas' undercover agents (Ruben Rojo), barricading themselves inside, refusing to open the door as Tony and his increasingly mutinous crew try to find a way in.
Isasi juggles multiple storylines where all parties eventually converge for a shootout in the scorching desert, with additional conflicts stemming from two of Tony's men--Merino (Daniel Martin) and Cooper (Fabrizio Capucci)--actively revolting and trying to cut him out of his own plan, and an increasingly irritable Skorsky getting it from all sides, with his scheming mistress, an incredulous Douglas and an unhappy mob boss (Roger Hanin) all breathing down his neck. Cobb and Palance have some amusing back-and-forth ballbusting throughout, and while he never became a big star, Lockwood is more than capable of holding his own as a lead here. The film has some interesting subtext with its juxtapositioning of Tony's hippie, free love lifestyle clashing with the more old-school Gino, almost like Isasi has one foot in the counterculture and another in the more refined elegance of the classic caper film. The casting of Servais is no accident, with his starring in Jules Dassin's highly-revered 1954 heist classic RIFIFI, but the "young generation" point may be a little too oversold, as Servais, 27 years older than Lockwood and looking it, seems more like his disapproving father than his protective older brother. Tony warns Gino that he's out of touch and out of his element, and that he and his aging gangster pals aren't equipped to deal with today's computers and the technological know-how required to rob a high-tech armored truck (high-tech by 1968 standards--it even has a Skype-like video feed to stay in constant contact with Skorsky's headquarters, but looks like Isasi rented a huge RV and put some steel siding on it), and sure enough, they're immediately killed for their efforts.
Despite its counterculture elements in the early scenes, THEY CAME TO ROB LAS VEGAS didn't exactly become the EASY RIDER of Euroheist movies, but it was a moderate success for Warner Bros. in US theaters in 1969 and was cycled through the regional drive-in circuit for a number of years. It made its TV debut in prime-time on NBC on Saturday, July 16, 1977, going against THOROUGHLY MODERN MILLIE on ABC and the Bob Barker-hosted Miss Universe pageant on CBS, with the R-rated, 129-minute film hacked down by at least 30 minutes to fit in a two-hour time slot with commercials, which likely made an occasionally confusing film completely incoherent. Since its very welcome DVD release seven years ago, uncut and with Juan Gelpi's outstanding cinematography in the desert sequences restored to its widescreen glory (Isasi shot these scenes in the same stretch of desert in Almeria, Spain where Tuco sends Blondie on his agonizing march in THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY), THEY CAME TO ROB LAS VEGAS has been in semi-regular rotation on Turner Classic Movies and remains an instantly recognized cult item even by movie buffs who haven't seen it, and one of the best examples of the 1960s Euroheist caper thriller.
THEY CAME TO ROB LAS VEGAS opening in Toledo, OH on April 16, 1969
TV listing for THEY CAME TO ROB LAS VEGAS,
airing in prime time on NBC on Saturday, July 16, 1977
