REPTILICUS (1962) **1/2 This fine film is carried by its ludicrously emphatic dialogue and universally putrid acting. The best is the janitor who does things like stick his arm in the electric eel tank to see what happens. There's this tail that got dug up you see, and it turns out to regenerate a super-skinny dragon. The janitor looks through a microscope as they play this hideous flute music. Just as this plot line begins to wear just a little bit thin, Sidney Pink veers radically into a 15 minute travel promo for Copenhagen, centering on Tivoli Gardens where a Germanic singer sings a song including the immortal lines, "all dressed up with a smile on your face/you look as gay as can be" as the military brass looks on appreciatively. Previously the American one had been pretty bored since he'd been a hero in the Battle of the Bulge. From there it quickly becomes a land and sea militaristic genre film replete with stock footage of jeeps, howitzers, sinking freighters, and a lot of guys running around wearing olive drab and carrying pointy things. Throughout the special effects are spectacularly ambitious, particularly in light of the severely limited available technology. Perhaps the best is when the dragon eats a family of Danes, themselves just sat down to dinner, and there's a shot of the father going down the monster's gullet. Maybe the film is poor quality, who knows, but for whatever reason the hapless hors d'oeuvre flashes and appears radioactive. The green stuff that the dragon regularly emits throughout the film remains unidentifiable as either fire or goo, even after the fortieth discharge. Towards the end they turn the university into a giant drug lab so that they can make a gallon of smack and shoot up the dragon through its mouth.
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