ATTACK OF THE ROBOTS (1966) Blu-ray
Director: Jess Franco
Redemption Films/Kino Lorber

Jess Franco and Lemmy Caution take on spies and robotic assassins in ATTACK OF THE ROBOTS, on Blu-ray from Kino Lorber.

An ambassador is assassinated at a gala in Buenos Aires, an archbishop is killed on the tarmac in Amsterdam, and an entire cabinet of ministers and six journalists are shot in Helsingfords, all by dark-skinned men wearing thick glasses. The last one (Ramón Centenero, THE DRACULA SAGA) is wounded and apprehended by the police but he seems either unwilling or incapable of giving up any information. When he is shot trying to escape, his skin changes color upon death and Interpol’s Baxter (Alfredo Mayo, THE BELL FROM HELL) discovers that he was an American auto mechanic who went missing a year ago. Discovering that his blood had an Rh factor of zero (or "rhesus zero"), Baxter looks into other disappearances and learns of the body of a German tourist with rhesus zero blood discovered in Penyal d'Ifac, Alicante where a missing world famous concert pianist (also with rhesus zero blood) had been spotted. Determined that the rhesus zero blood is the common link, Baxter decides to recruit former agent Al Peterson (Eddie Constantine, ALPHAVILLE) – or "Al Pereira" in the French and Spanish version – as bait since he also has rhesus zero blood, offering him fifty thousand dollars to go to Alicante posing as a fight promoter to look into vaguely defined strange events. Peterson is naturally suspicious even of his former superiors, especially when Chinese gangster Lee Wee (Vicente Roca, LUCKY THE INSCRUTABLE) offers him a hundred thousand dollars for the same assignment. He arrives in Alicante and immediately makes the acquaintance of nightclub performer Cynthia Lewis (Sophie Hardy, THREE HATS FOR LISA) who has a habit of turning up at the worst possible moments, such as when he discovers the body of another dark-skinned automaton in his hotel room or a dead Chinese henchman in his closet. Cynthia is not the only suspicious character in Peterson's midst, there is also hotel porter Olsen (Marcelo Arroita-Jáuregui, DR. ORLOFF'S MONSTER), Lady Cecilia Addington Courtney (Françoise Brion, Alain Robbe-Grillet's L'IMMORTELLE), and Sir Percy (Fernando Rey, THE LADY WITH RED BOOTS), and more of Lee Wee's agents lurking in the shadows.

One of Jess Franco's more healthily-budgeted and crewed early monochrome thrillers, ATTACK OF THE ROBOTS shares with THE DIABOLICAL DR. Z producers Henri Baum (THE EARRINGS OF MADAME DE...) and Serge Silberman (DIVA), as well as co-writer Jean-Claude Carrière (THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING), all of whom would collaborate on several of Luis Bunuel's French films. If the photography of Antonio Macasoli (THE BLACK DUKE) is not quite as sleek as that of Alejandro Ulloa (HORROR EXPRESS) on the latter film, and the jazz score of Paul Misraki (LE DOULOS) is more conventional than Daniel White's work with Franco, there is still much here for the Franco-phile to savor from a film the director's more erotically-oriented fans might have dismissed as a Lemmy Caution cash-in. The film introduces the character of Al Pereira who would frequent Franco's filmography as a private detective played variously by Howard Vernon in VIBRATING GIRLS, Oliver Mathot in MIDNIGHT PARTY, Franco himself in DOWNOWN, Lina Romay in PAULA-PAULA, and Antonio Mayans in eighties films like THE NIGHT OF SEXUAL ABBERATIONS and Franco's final film AL PEREIRA VS. THE ALLIGATOR LADIES (Mayans would play himself playing Pereira in REVENGE OF THE ALLIGATOR LADIES which Franco started and he finished). There is another avant-garde stage performance, although not as outré as one expects from a Franco film, and the appearances of the stalking automatons are sometimes as creepy as that of Morpho in THE AWFUL DR. ORLOF. Constantine – who would also appear in Franco's subsequent RESIDENCIA PARA ESPIAS – is engaging as the caddish hero but the rest of the cast has little to do – Brion is just a face and Rey does not show up until the climax – while Roca's "oriental" seems more retrograde than Christopher Lee's Fu Manchu (or even Franco himself mocking the "yellow peril" stereotypes in his DTV film THE VIRTUAL HELL OF DR. WONG). Ricardo Palacios, who played a bandito in Franco's THE BLOOD OF FU MANCHU, has a comic relief role here as a Mexican tourist.

Released directly to television stateside by American International Pictures in a version running roughly eighty-seven minutes (versus the ~ninety-two minute original), it was this version that appeared on VHS from Video Yesteryear in the 1980s and then from grey market companies like Sinister Cinema and Something Weird Video in the 1990s. Gaumont's restoration of the film appeared on DVD in France from their budget line last year and makes its Blu-ray debut stateside with Kino Lorber's 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.66:1 widescreen encode. The restoration itself is lustrous and comparable to that of Kino's DIABOLICAL DR. Z (also a Gaumont restoration), however the darkest areas of the screen can become occasionally blocky, which seems to have been an encoding issue rather than a compression one since the bitrate is not significantly lower than that of some of Kino's other BD25 discs. The film can be watched with either English or French LPCM 2.0 mono tracks, with the former sounding louder but a little noisier than the former. The English track only reverts to French for roughly twenty seconds, so it is likely that most of the cuts to the U.S. version consisted of non-dialogue scenes or the tops and tails of scenes for pacing as well as fitting in an allocated block of broadcast time. Optional English subtitles are included. The English dub fumbles some of the dialogue in that after showing us the assassination of the ambassador in Buenos Aires and the Archbishop in Amsterdam, Baxter then reports to his superior that the "cardinal" was assassinated in Buenos Aires and the ambassador in Amsterdam (the English subtitles suggest that the French dialogue did not get this wrong).

The film is accompanied by an audio commentary by film historian Tim Lucas – co-author of the Franco tome "Obsession: The Films of Jess Franco" – who suggests that only was the film possibly intended to be shot in color but also reveals that the French track states that the change in skin color has the assassins mistaken as Mulatos (understandably not apparent in the subtitle translation). He also provides background on Constantine and the Lemmy Caution character as well as the strain of comic spy movies in Franco's filmography as well as some of the recurring elements and players in the film. The disc also includes the film's French theatrical trailer (3:23). (Eric Cotenas)

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