Plant-asaurus! Plant-enstein!
In the opening credits of The Revenge of Dr. X the audience is promised John Ashley and Angelique Pettyjohn but as this incredible mess unfolds there's no sight of them. [Ed. Note: According to IMDb.com, the titles for this film were inadvertently replaced with those of THE MAD DOCTOR OF BLOOD ISLAND, and are completely incorrect for this movie.]
Dr. X (James Craig) works for NASA (this is verified by a matte painting outside his office window and some stock footage of a space craft lifting off) who has a nervous break-down (and with his constant over-acting, it seems as if he has one every five minutes) and is ordered to take a vacation. He decides to go to Japan to study botany. With him, he takes a Venus flytrap he finds on the road to the airport. (Ed Wood listed this under the title of The Venus Flytrap on his resume but it is also known as Double Garden; it is widely a
ssumed that it was supposed to be Devil's Garden but something went awry in the translation of the title card. Feel free to file that info under "who cares".)In Japan, he meets his assistant, a female who isn't even listed in the credits. So, I'll call her Mary for the sake of clarity. Telling Dr. X that her father owns a mountain retreat that is closed due to an active volcano near-by, they take off...Dr. X oozing creepy charm. At the mountain retreat, they are met by a hunchback caretaker, who I'll call Egor. Other than Dr. X's constant hysterics and his secretiveness about the Venus flytrap, nothing much happens for the next 45 minutes.
Mary takes Dr. X to the sea shore so they can find some elusive aquatic plant that he wants to graft to his Venus flytrap to make a plant-human. There, they ask a group of bare-breasted female pearl-divers to help them and they find the elusive plant. Taking the plant back to their laboratory, he works himself up to a Dr. Frankenstein fever pitch, screaming "The Earth is your mother! The lightning is your father! Rain is your blood!" as he raises the new creation on a platform up through an opening in the greenhouse. The creature lives! And, with it's rubber suit, flytraps on hands and knees and some strange sea-weed growing out the top of his head, it looks sillier than The Giant Claw! Huzzah! (For some reason, this pleased me im
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mensely!)But, like most Frankenstein rip-off movies, this ends badly for the Dr. as the plant kills him by toppling them both in to the active volcano. The end.
Could this be worse than Plan 9 from Outer Space? YES! With its terrible acting, silly plot, bad photography, clumsy stock footage and the most nonsensical musical score I've ever heard, I guarantee it is! Penned By Ed Wood and directed by Kenneth G. Crane (who also directed Monster from Green Hell and The Manster) it plays out like a Larry Buchanan fever-dream! A must-see for all fans of truly painful cinema!
MSTJunkie
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