Excellent, a Must See

It's not great by any means, but it's a pretty good movie that didn't leave me filled with regret for investing time in it.

Blending excellent reporting and strong storytelling, this is a disturbing film truly stranger than fiction

One of the best movies of the year! Incredible from the beginning to the end.

Pierre (Sergio Fantoni) is a Navy Lieutenant by his bars, a Chief Petty Officer by his collar insignia. He breaks up with his stripper girlfriend Jeanette (Susanne Loret) who immediately explodes her car going down an embankment. WOW! Do sailors really date strippers?She is in a hospital with a slightly disfigured face, one that skin grafts could cure, or her long hair could cover...which it does for most of the movie. She believes her face will always be this way as she contemplates suicide with the gun she is packing in her purse while smoking cigarettes in her hospital room. My how things have changed.Never fear, a woman with stereotypical sunglasses and a trench coat (Franca Parisi) shows up and offers her help through Professor Alberto Levin (Alberto Lupo) who has a machine that goes ping, an oscilloscope, a centrifuge, and a "radiation chamber" that could be an early microwave oven. His new product Derma 28 he wants to use on a human guinea pig, hence the stripper with the deformed face, one that he instantly falls in love with to the dismay of his assistant.The professor uses the substance and it turns him into more of a hideous Mr. Hyde, than a vampire. I think "Atom Age Mr. Hyde at Times" wouldn't sell as well as the vampire thing. They could of at least gave him a long teeth. The make-up was pretty bad. It must have been stuff left over from our Lend-Lease program.Not much in character build-up. Acting and script were pretty sad. Might have some film history interest as a vampire film worse than anything with Kristen Stewart in it. Just kidding Kristen, I really did like how you played a dead chick in that Snow White thing you otherwise ruined.

Atom Age Vampire is an Italian movie that is not, in fact, about a vampire. Tricky, huh?It deals with people who have been disfigured due to cliff-side car accidents, the detonation of nuclear warheads, and other such everyday occurrences. Our antagonist is a mad scientist—I'll bet you didn't see that one coming—sends one of his aids to a local hospital to persuade the survivor of aforementioned car wreck to visit his estate so that he can test his cell-regenerating serum on her. The woman's face resembles ground beef, and it seems that this "doctor" is well aware of the fact that this is completely unacceptable. Actually, she'd rather commit suicide than survive as an outcast.I mean, sure, society puts a lot of pressure on people to "fit in" and "look normal"; but the degree to which this theme is overblown in Atom Age Vampire is…well…almost comical. I say "almost" because it's so heavy-handed that even the actors don't seem to buy it as a viable subtext. Because of this, they neither take it seriously or approach it as hamminess. Quite simply, there's a whole lot of "dull" going on.Did you notice the word I used in the previous paragraph? "Actors." Hmpf. They're mostly cardboard cutouts who sputter lines like "Oh, no! We should go to the police!" or "Let me go! I said 'let me go!' Let me go! I said 'let me go!'" I suppose that the intended tone for the dialogue could have been lost in translation—the dubbing here is atrocious to say the least—but there's no getting around the fact that the story is so moronic that had it been portrayed by any venerable stage performer of the past century it would have been regarded as the most high class display of deceptively simple gobbledygook ever created.It really is that scatter-shot and downright confusing. Here are some highlights: the doctor who's developed the serum in question appears to also have been disfigured, though he inexplicably transitions between being a hamburger face to a scowling physician whenever the mood should strike him (maybe they were trying to rip-off Jekyll & Hyde?); he falls in love with his patient (and, it seems, a myriad of other women) and goes about terrorizing them in the middle of the night; he's assisted by a man-servant named Sasha who does little more than mime his thoughts and occasionally appear frantic; at one point the woman being treated is infuriated and closes (notice I said "closes"—she doesn't really "slam" it) a window shut only to have every square inch of the glass in the pane shatter; etc., etc., etc.One could probably say that some sort of clever commentary is just begging to be identified; you know, something to do with the horrors of war; how "ugly" we all really are—that kind of thing.But, in case I haven't spelled it out in enough detail, here's what I think: Atom Age Vampire just plain sucks.

This is a good example of how distributors can ruin a movie. I have watched the 103 min original Italian widescreen version on DVD, entitled "Seddok, l'erede di Satana" ("Seddok, the heir of Satan"), which is a nice old-fashioned b/w horror flick based on a Frankenstein variation, with dialogs explaining the characters very well. But the movie was cut by a quarter of an hour for the export cinema version, ridiculously retitled "Seddok, der Würger mit den Teufelskrallen" ("Seddok, the strangler with the devil's claws"), and then it was cut by another quarter of an hour for video release. The fragment of what is used to be ended up under the title "Atom Age Vampire", and everybody complains how poor it is - well, if you tried getting the complete picture (both referring to widescreen format and its running time), you probably would have a better impression, although it can't be denied it is rather slow moving, and they wouldn't get away with this 'scientific' explanation of skin restoration anymore.

Atom Age Vampire played for years and years in drive-ins across America, I really have no idea why the film seemed to be a perennial of the drive-in circuits but it was. Strangely the film never seemed to play in New York on TV and I never saw it until the advent of home video.The film is the well worn tale of a mad scientist seeking to restore the beauty of disfigured woman and turning into a monster in the process. Its the sort of thing you've seen both before and since both better and worse. Here the film is infused with European settings and moody black and white photography that seem to make the film better than the normal. Not a great film it is an entertaining one and the sort of thing best watched on a dark and stormy night with the lights out.