British science fiction/horror movie that is played more for laughs than it is for scares. Two reporters, a Brit called Howard (Leslie Phillips) and an American Mike (Paul Douglas) are travelling by train across 19th Century Central/Eastern Europe when they find themselves stuck in the strange fictional state of Gudavia. The local police chief at fist is very hostile, not surprising as he is in cohorts with a mad scientist who is conducting human experiments using a gamma ray. Mike and Howard do bounce off each other to quite amusing effect but Phillips's English stiff upper lip is a bit overdone. The cast is a mix of mainly British and German speaking actors resulting in an odd mixture of accents, amazingly everyone in this tiny Alpine town speaks perfect English, indeed most of the signs are in English too. For a secretive European state this is a bit hard to swallow. To its credit the Austrian mountain scenery looks stunning, the lead female character (played by Eva Bartok) isn't bad looking either! As a result of these experiments with have highly intelligent kids, who like like they could be members of the Hitler Youth, on the other hand there are adult failures, zombie like servants referred to as "goons". Both groups do produce some unsettling moments, thankfully there are a few scares. Like so many European horror movies the fiery finale has a group of angry villagers storming the castle. Director John Gilling went on to make a number of films for Hammer, they were far far better than this. Gamma People is well shot and does have a few merits but sadly it is too silly for me to give this a positive score.
Review of The Gamma People
