A couple of reporters (Paul Douglas and Leslie Phillips) get stranded in Gudavia, a (fictional), backward Eastern European country (presumably on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain), only to find that someone is experimenting with people's minds. For what it is, the film is reasonably well done. Eva Bartok's Carpathian good-looks makes for an appealing, conflicted lab-assistant, Walter Rilla is not too over-the-top as the renegade scientist Boronski, and Michael Caridia is pretty good as miserable, supercilious Hitler-youthful Hugo. There is not much to the story and the opening, where the reporters' train car is conveniently uncoupled, and then seems to roll miles before coasting to a stop in the Gudavian train station, is ridiculous. The film bobs along by the numbers with the most interesting scenes being the attack by Boronski's 'goons', the vacuous-looking failures of his intelligence augmentation experiments, and the climax is pretty much exactly what one would expect when there is a secret lab in an old castle near a village of angry peasants. Although the setting might suggest 'anti-red' propaganda, it seems likely that the writer's simply needed a setting that could be conceivably 'cut off from the rest of civilisation' but that could still be easily accessed for filming. Boronski's all-purpose gamma ray emitter makes the film marginally science fiction, but for all intents and purposes, 'The Gamma People' is just an old-school mad-scientist-horror yarn. Watchable, barely, but really only for dedicated fans of the genre.
Review of The Gamma People
