Reviews & Ratings for
Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine More at IMDbPro »

0 out of 2 people found the following review useful:
This movie transcends merely 'bad', 17 June 2009

Author: teledyn from Canada

There is something going on here. It isn't that the acting is bad and contrived, it is way beyond that, it is actors (who are B-picture actors) acting as bad actors, spoofing themselves, their genre and the whole Hollywood-Disney comedy industry that was so big at the time. Remember "Herbie the Love Bug" with Dean Jones? It is that caliber of forced performance turned up a notch, mixed with three six-packs of 4th-wall gags, Three Stooges shticks like tiny offices with low-hanging bookshelves and multiple entrances. It's Looney Tunes with Frankie Avalon as Daffy Duck.

Plot-wise this is ... well, hey, you have bikini FemBots way ahead of Woody Allen's Casino Royale, you have Vincent Price with a Disney-style dunderhead for his Igor, you have a spy agency and the lamest Secret Agent Car you've ever seen, there's just no room for a plot! It is, however, a film. By that I mean it doesn't fall apart half way and end in a psychedelic chaos rush like, say, the Monkees movie 'Head'. The film states a reality (a very strange reality) and sticks to it until the tale is told. It is formulaic to the extreme, with one of the most surreal Peter-Sellers-style farce car-chase scenes in cinematic history.

I figure there has to be more to this movie, some secret society undercurrent or something, and that's why I gave it a 7. Certainly it wasn't so bad I couldn't watch; I had to see it through just to see it through. It is set in San Francisco, which in itself is a significant hipness-clue factor for those times (Herbie was also SF, no?).

The Bikini Machine has got that Beach Party Bingo feel to it complete with Dobie Gillis but without Maynard G. Krebbs, and that alone makes me want to include this film in some sort of hip cannon and shoot it.

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