The Lucifer Complex (1979)

The sad truth is that most so-called 'bad' movies aren't the fun that bad movie cultists make them out to be, rather, they are excruciatingly dull.  Indeed, that surely is one of the criteria which makes a 'bad' film 'bad' - te fact that it fails to entertain on any level, that it is boring.  But, of course, the cultists like to cherry pick their examples, focusing on no-budget movies that are ineptly made, with Ed Wood Jr's Plan Nine From Outer Space as their poster boy.  You rarely, if ever, see The Lucifer Complex (1979) on any of their bad film lists, mainly because it is so stultifyingly dull that I doubt that their limited attention spans could endure it.  David L Hewitt, a contemporary of the likes of Al Adamson and Larry Buchanan in the latter day poverty row of the sixties and seventies, has a co-director credit on Lucifer Complex.  I have something of a love-hate relationship with Hewitt's films: while Lucifer Complex is dull as ditchwater, his anthology film Dr Terror's Gallery of Horrors frequently borders on the surreal with its anachronistic props and sets against black backgrounds, combined with John Carradine's hung-over looking narrator sitting in front of a bad back projection, makes for an agreeably bizarre viewing experience.  The film of his I most enjoyed - a neo-Nazi biker flick called The Tormentors - is one that Hewitt himself disliked and directed under a pseudonym.  

All of which brings us back to The Lucifer Complex which, on paper, looks to have the basis of an entertaining B-movie: Nazis in the jungle, a camp full of kidnapped women, a plot to clone Hitler and Robert Vaughn in the lead.  Unfortunately its execution is confused, to put it mildly, the script is terrible, the cast's performances flat as the direction and the whole thing is clearly cheaply made with some truly awful colour processing.  On top of all that, it quickly becomes obvious that the film has been pieced together from an incomplete original, with additional material added in order to pad it out.  Indeed, it is this padding which kills the film stone cold dead before it has even started, as the viewer is subjected to what seems like interminable footage of some guy wandering around a rocky landscape while a portentous but dull voice over rattles on and on, trying desperately to sound profound.  Finally, the wandering dude goes into a cave complex full of computer equipment where he starts watching a laser disc (remember those?) of the 'old times'.  What he watches, of course, is the main part of the film proper, which features Robert Vaughn as some kind of intelligence agent, although who he works for is never clear, although he is occasionally growled at by his boss, played by Keenan Wynn - but we're not really clear who he is, either.  Every so often we cut back to the dude in the cave for some more voice over in order to carry us over missing pieces of footage.

I suspect, though, that even with those pieces of apparently unfilmed footage, Lucifer Complex would still make little sense.  The whole business of the Fourth Reich guys plotting to clone Hitler is hopelessly confused.  Mainly because the script never makes absolutely clear who is being cloned, at points it is heavily implied it is Hitler, but why would you want a whole army of Hitlers?  For one thing, the real Hitler was no great shakes as a soldier, (his main achievements in his World War One military service were to be promoted to corporal and to be shot in the testicles), for another, which one of them would lead this army?  Surely they'd all want to be Fuhrer?  But then Hitler himself turns up, or is he a clone?  If not, how come he's still alive?  Why can he apparently teleport around his underground complex?  Leaving Hitler aside, how were the Nazis able to clone an adult Robert Vaughn so quickly when, judging by the fact that they've been kidnapping women to act as surrogates to bear the cloned Hitler foetuses, it takes nine months to gestate one, implying they age and develop at a normal rate?  Oh yes, Keenan Wynn pops up again, to tell Vaughn that he is the evil genius behind it all.  Not that we're any wiser as to exactly who he is or why he's doing this.  As the plot seems to reach a climax, we cut back to the guy in the cave and his voice over, which tells us that, ultimately, Vaughn's efforts were in vain and this is a post-apocalyptic world.  He then goes back to wandering around those hill sides.

The Lucifer Complex just goes to show that, in truth, bad movies are usually more fun to read about than they are to watch.  Despite only running around ninety minutes, Lucifer Complex is something of an endurance test to sit through.  While the framing footage prevents the main footage from building up any momentum and disrupts any narrative rhythm it might have had, that main footage is itself poorly paced and structured.  The biggest problem is that none of it has the occasional flashes of flair or touches of inspired lunacy that make the best films of, say, Jesus Franco, joyously demented entertainments.  In truth, the main interest Lucifer Complex presents lies in its journey to the screen - the way in which such films are cut and pasted together from various sources has always fascinated me.  According to Hewitt, the movie had its origins in another picture he shot in the early seventies, The Women of Stalag 13, which was never completed.  While the completed footage was eventually sold to someone else, (to eventually emerge as Hitler's Wild Women), Hewitt's contract meant that he retained the rights to use that footage that didn't include the main cast, (including mob scenes, camp exteriors, extras dressed as soldiers and tanks).  Around the same time, he acquired a number of German military uniforms from a theatrical costumier which was going out of business and a number of props and sets that had been used in Hogan's Heroes.  Around these components, he constructed the script for The Lucifer Complex.

Unfortunately, even before filming started, the budget was cut by producer James Flocker and thirty five pages of script had to be cut.  The original director, Ken Hartford, left after a few days, to be replaced by Hewitt, who claimed that shooting was then cut short when the producer ran out of money, with the opening and ending never filmed.  He put the blame for the new opening and closing footage firmly on whoever was brought in to salvage the footage.  Although, to be fair, Hewitt himself had form for this sort of thing: his 1969 lost world effort The Mighty Gorga (notorious for its glove puppet dinosaur and possibly the worst ape suit ever committed to celluloid), includes a significant amount of footage of Anthony Eisely getting on and off of planes and wandering around San Diego Zoo, shot by Hewitt to pad out the running time. Whoever was responsible, it didn't help Lucifer Complex, which never received a cinema release, being sold direct to television instead, after spending several years on the shelf.  Perhaps the saddest aspect of the film is seeing Robert Vaughn in what must represent a career nadir.  While, post Man From Uncle he found himself appearing a fair number of films of dubious quality, none were as bad, or as boring, as The Lucifer Complex.  Not surprisingly, he spends the film looking dispirited and disinterested.