“Sometimes I suspect that you forget you’re a member of Secret Intelligence Command. You’re a SIC man.”

Flinthart’s review: Where to start? Oh, I know: let’s talk about “slapstick,” shall we?

The term apparently was first brought into the English language in the 1890s, and it comes from a device made of two light slats of wood which smack together and make a loud noise when they hit something but don’t actually do a lot of damage to the thing they hit. Commonly used in the commedia dell’ arte where it was known as a bataccio, the slapstick let performers beat the snot out of each other on stage with tremendous sound and fury, signifying nothing except that the writers had run out of interesting lines.

The English got right into the slapstick, and a guy called Fred Karno (a music hall player) put together a kind of sketch comedy without dialogue during the 1890s which took advantage of the slapstick (and a bunch of other cheap-ass stage violence.) If you’re like me, you’ve never heard of Karno before (thanks Wikipedia!) but I bet you’ve heard of Stan Laurel and Charles Chaplin – just two of the gents that Karno trained in his (ahem) hilarious comedic techniques.

So far, so good, because in music hall and vaudeville there’s only so much damage you can do. But over in America, the brains trust in Hollywood realised that if you FILMED your cream-pie in the face gag, you only had to buy ONE pie and you could show it several times a day in hundreds, even thousands of cinemas… which probably made cream pie bakers quite angry, what with not getting residuals and royalties and the like.

By now, you’re probably wondering why I’m not yet reviewing the title film. Hold on. I’m getting there. See, early slapstick cinema was largely harmless, and occasionally even quite good. Buster Keaton? Genius. Harold Lloyd? Brilliant. The Marx Brothers? Awesome. Love their stuff for sure. The Three Stooges?

(RECORD SCRATCH NOISE!!!!)

Yeah. Them. And let’s chuck Abbott and Costello in there too, eh? Those lads looked at the rich slapstick tradition and said to themselves: What we need is even more goddam stupidity. We need the characters to be dumber than buckets of dental scrapings, and they need to be permanently angry at each other because stupid guys being violently angry at each other and everyone around them is hilarious, right? Right? RIGHT?

Apparently there were people who wanted that schtick… so there you are.

But then along comes Jerry. Effing. Lewis.

Look, I know nothing about the man. I don’t want to impugn his character or anything else about him, except to say that I hate his so-called comedy with the nuclear rage of a thousand supernovae (Yes, that’s the correct plural. Educated. That’s me.) and if I had a time machine and the choice between eliminating Hitler or all Jerry Lewis’ movies I’d probably just die from sheer agony of indecision.

Lewis took anything and everything that was still funny about slapstick comedy and smushed it into a turgid mess of adult diaper rash. Lewis didn’t trust you to realise his characters were stupid, oh no. When Lewis took a pie to the face, he didn’t stand there with a little dignity, allowing the goopy cream to undermine him in an amusing way: no, he staggered about the screen grunting like a walrus in heat, knocking his knees together, crossing his eyes, and hanging his tongue out prior to the delivery of the kind of cretinous pratfall that made even the pie-wielder embarrassed for Lewis’ family, yea, unto the ninth generation. (Furthermore, I think the famous French fondness for Lewis springs from the same place as the well-known Russian support for certain aspects of current US politics that I can’t name because I’ll get my ass censored. Basically, I think the French were pissed at the success of Hollywood as a culture machine, and they encouraged Jerry Lewis because they realised it was the easiest way to get Hollywood to butcher its own influence)

And no. Jerry Lewis is not in Doctor Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine. BUT HE MIGHT AS WELL BE.

So. Doctor Goldfoot (Vincent Price — the poor devil) is a Mad Scientist™ who built a machine that makes lifelike robots in the image of young and attractive women. Goldfoot is sending these robots out in nifty trench coats and fedoras wearing nothing but gold bikinis underneath with the object of marrying rich men, screwing them out of their money, and sending it back to Goldfoot. (Yes. That’s the ‘plot’.)

But a very early bungle courtesy of Goldfoot’s servant Igor sends Robot Number 11 after young Craig Gamble (Frankie Avalon, fresh from a bunch of ‘beach movies’ and popular with The Young Crowd at the time) who coincidentally works for the Secret Intelligence Commission and then…

Yeah. You know what? I stopped watching about a third of the way in. I just couldn’t handle the sheer, bland, imbecilic stupidity of it. I was expecting a parody of the then-popular Bond movies – and you know, I quite enjoyed the first Austin Powers film, yeah. I didn’t even mind Our Man Flint (1966, James Coburn in the lead). But watching Frankie Avalon mug his way around the screen pulling a bunch of sad, shabby, second-hand Jerry Lewis-type gags was just too damned brain-numbing for me. I’ve sat through a lot of merde in my time (tip of the beret to the French!) and I’ve reviewed some sphincter-loosening disasters as a Proud Mutant… but this film beat me. Far as I’m concerned, if it’s a choice between herpes and DGATBM, I’ll take herpes every damned time. At least catching herpes is fun.

What I saw of the film reminded me of the contemporaneous Batman TV series, but not in any good way. The makers of that Batman had the sense to contrast the campiness of their costuming and dialogue with gorgeously deadpan performances from Adam West and Burt Ward. That shit worked! But DGATBM doesn’t work. It has similar production values, and the lighting and direction and the staging are all eerily similar to those old Batman shows. Even the music – my daughter remarked on how very “sixties” the backing orchestra sounded.

But where the Batman stuff had enough going for it that I still get a kick out of those old episodes, DGATBM is just a gigantic, oozing, burbling pile of bubonic failure. I mean… they even resorted to the Frankie-Avalon-Stands-On-A-Rake-And-It-Smacks-Him-In-The-Ass gag. But there was nobody else in the scene to react to it, and it did nothing to affect the narrative in any way – and that, right there: that’s the Jerry Lewis Kiss of Death. Lewis just loved his bumbling moron routines. He didn’t care if they didn’t actually do anything to advance the film, or build character, or even get a reaction from other characters on scene: nope, he just figured that if he drooled, staggered, crossed his eyes, knocked his knees together and mussed up his hair that audience out there would scream and wet themselves with laughter and the money would just keep rolling in…

It was crap when Lewis did it. Watching Frankie Avalon and others pull the same lame, painful kind of stuff… it’s like being force-fed a cold crap sandwich. They didn’t even bother to reheat it, you know?

Don’t watch this movie. There are far better ways to kill off any brain cells you don’t want any more.

Intermission!

• Hey. They made a sequel. No. Really. It’s called Dr. Goldfoot and the Girl Bombs. Do with that what you will.
• Oh, and heartfelt sympathies to Susan Hart, who plays Robot Number Eleven (Diane) with attractive energy, comedic timing, and a nice touch of allure. Sorry, Susan. You were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.