LSD - Inferno per pochi dollari (1967)

User Rating:

7.4/10   

Director:

Massimo Mida

Writers:

Bruno Baratti (writer)
Tiziano Cortini (story)

Release Date:

2 February 1967 (Italy)

Genre:

Crime

Tagline:

Five Dollars Trip to the "Moon"

Plot Keywords:

LSD

Cast

Guy Madison	...	Rex Miller
Franca Polesello	...	Virginia
Mario Valgoi	...	Korba
Lucio De Santis	...	Jimmy Gioglu
Adriano Micantoni	...	Mister X
Karin Skarreso
Luciano Rossi	...	Stanis - Gioglu's man
Pier Annibale Danovi
Isarco Ravaioli	...	Alex Corey
Virgilio Gazzolo	...	Lucas
Enrico Ribulsi	...	Rex Miller's Principal
Emilio Marchesini	...	Marc - Korba's Assistant
Mimmo Darni
Mariella Zanetti
Ruggero Salvadori

Also Known As:

LSD - La droga del secolo (Italy) (alternative title)
LSD Flesh of Devil (USA)

Country:

Italy

Language:

Italian

Color:

Color

Company:

Bema Film

Soundtrack:

Il fiore rosso

Cheap thrills for spy enthusiasts

The film opens with a nasty scene: a young boy uses his toy car to blow up two men and a blowgun to murder a third. This killer kid is none other than Rex Miller who professes to want to grow up to become a secret agent. And indeed he grows up to be Guy Madison, a spaghetti western star who has the distinction of being in two of the strangest spy flicks of the era; this one and The Devil's Man (67). Here, Madison, as Rex, is a secret agent working for an undisclosed country when a bizarre plot is uncovered to take over the world by dosing important `nerve centers' with potent LSD.

The film postures itself as being anti-drug of course. The LSD trips represented are only somewhat hallucinatory using minor tricks of lighting or superimposition to portray the wild effects of the drug. There isn't much imagination (or money) spent on convincing us of the horrors of LSD so these sequences are unfortunately rather dull and repetitive which in turn makes the drug seem like a boring way to amuse oneself.

The best line in the film is spoken by the villain, Mister X, as he describes his international crime syndicate: `We're a secret organization with a strange name: ECHO.' Finally, the film boasts an excellent sound track by Egisto Macchi. There's plenty of catchy tunes and thrilling motifs for spy music fans that easily outclass the visuals.