What do you get when you combine the acting talents of legendary horror icon Vincent Price with Frankie ‘king of the beach' Avalon? Well, that'd be the oddball 1965 kinda-sorta sci-fi but mostly comedy film Dr. Goldfoot And The Bikini Machine.

As you'd probably have guessed, Price plays one Dr. Goldfoot, a mad scientist with a penchant for wacky dress and shiny clothes. In his infinite wisdom, he and his assistant Igor (Jack Mullaney) invent a machine that is able to create beautiful women basically out of nothing. These ‘bikini machines' are then sent off to coerce various rich dudes into handing over their cash, which is then in turn handed over to Goldfoot making him quite wealthy. It's a pretty good racket he's got going, until Craig Gamble (Avalon), an agent for the Special Intelligence Committee, run by his uncle D.J. Pevney (Fred Clark). How did he get wise to this? Well, one of the girls, Diane (Susan Hart), went after him instead of her intended target, a billionaire named Todd Armstrong (Dwayne Hickman).

Igor fixes the problem and sends Diane after the right target, but soon enough he's fallen for the foxy Diane. When Gamble realizes what's really going on, he and Armstrong decide to bring down Goldfoot and put a stop to his conniving ways, and the chase is on…

This one isn't meant to be taken in the least bit seriously, so don't go into this expecting typical Vincent Price movie horror highjinks. Rather, this is just a goofy mix of mildly sexy comedy and genuinely funny horror/sci-fi movie spoofing complete with leftover props and sets from various Price led AIP horror pictures. As such, the tone is light and at times almost whimsical, with plenty of pretty bikini-clad ladies on display throughout the movie to keep the audience interested and enough effective gags to work as intended.

A big part of what makes this as watchable as it is? Price. He's obviously having a whole lot of fun playing Dr. Goldfoot. Constantly surrounded by his curvy creations and probably relishing the opportunity to just go for it in his depiction of his character, you can't help but appreciate the actor's enthusiasm for the role. Avalon more or less plays the same sort of good natured, fairly wholesome type you'd expect him to play but he does it well, while Dwayne Hickman as the wealthy Armstrong is amusing in his occasional lunkheadedness. Susan Hart fills out her bikini in all the right ways and plays the female robot part really well (as do the other actresses who play the robots: Patti Chandler, Mary Hughes, China Lee, Sue Hamilton and quite a few others). The cast is solid here, they all do fine work. Avalon's frequent co-star and seasoned bikini filler Annette Funicello also has a brief but amusing cameo here.

If that weren't enough, the movie also makes good use of an effectively bouncy score courtesy of American International Pictures' go-to movie score guy, Les Baxter, and on top of that Art Clokey, the creator of Gumby And Pokey handles the fantastic Claymation sequence that opens the movie. The comedy here is pretty hokey, there's no way around that, and it sends up the horror pictures AIP was known for and the then very trendy James Bond films in wildly uneven dollops (which does result in some flat out bizarre shifts in tone, atmosphere and pace) but even when it does make some pretty big missteps, it's such an odd film that it's always plenty watchable. And just try to get that theme song (courtesy of The Supremes!) out of your head once you've heard it!

Video:

Kino gives Doctor Goldfoot And The Bikini Machines its Blu-ray debut in a nice AVC encoded 1080p high definition transfer framed at 2.35.1 widescreen. For the most part, the picture here is pretty clean. There is some min or print damage but it's small stuff (though the end credits show a bit more wear and tear than the rest of the movie), little white specks and the like as opposed to big nasty scratches. Detail does vary a bit in certain scenes (the opening run down the hills of San Francisco are shot all loosey-goosey style and are not as crisp as the material shot under more rigid conditions for example) but it easily surpasses what DVD was able to provide in the past. Grain looks nice and natural here, never blotchy nor overpowering, while color reproduction is quite nice (given the amount of colorful sets and clothes on display here, that's a definite plus). There's no evidence of any noise reduction or edge enhancement and the picture is free of compression artifacts. The image, however, is stretched a bit horizontally so everything looks a bit taller and thinner than it should. This undoes what is otherwise quite a nice presentation.