The Lucifer Complex

1978 "The most terrifying plot ever imagined… takeover by clones!"
2.4| 1h31m| NA| en| More Info
Released: 01 January 1978 Released
Producted By: James Flocker Enterprises
Country: United States of America
Budget: 0
Revenue: 0
Official Website:
Info

An intelligence agent discovers a Nazi plot to revive the Third Reich by using clones.

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Director

Kenneth Hartford, David L. Hewitt

Production Companies

James Flocker Enterprises

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The Lucifer Complex Audience Reviews

Steineded How sad is this?
TaryBiggBall It was OK. I don't see why everyone loves it so much. It wasn't very smart or deep or well-directed.
Quiet Muffin This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.
Juana what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.
lemon_magic First of all, the only reason this gets more than one star is that I like Robert Vaughn as an actor (even in dreck like "Superman III") and he did his best with a flabby premise and a limp-wristed execution of a stale script that Sean Connery himself couldn't have rescued.There's a pretty nice opening credit scene with some swooping aerial footage that gave me some hope that this might have some good qualities to it...that hope was quickly dashed as an impassive scientist wandered into a computer cave and proceeded to watch 20 minutes of stock footage on a monitor. All this was obviously padding spliced together to extend the footage of some unfinished Vaughn movie (or one that was unwatchable or unreleasable on its own terms, possibly because it was too short.) The screenplay then jumped between the feature film and unmoving shots of the impassive scientist watching the feature film for about 20 more minutes until the film editor ran out of bourbon and said the hell with it, and let us watch the rest of the "real" movie until just before the end. Then the padding took over and changed the entire premise and ending of the first movie with some clumsy narrative hand-waving.SOmething of note: at one point, the film tries to go into a subplot about women prisoners in Nazi prison camps, complete with a butch dyke Elsa wanna be and the women breaking out and helping Vaughn by killing their captors. Sorry, just as poorly executed as the rest of the film, didn't help. Als of note: at one point, Vaughn supposedly climbs into a tank and wreaks destruction on the Nazi camp. This is all done with exterior shots of the tank firing at things and blowing them up unconvincingly. At no point during the entire tank sequence do we ever see a closeup or reaction shot of Vaughn. (He was probably in his trailer downing double Jack and Cokes). That's the kind of movie this is, folks. Even the putative star could barely stand to be in it. And then the movie just stopped (actually froze in mid-frame) and the credits rolled, and the audience (if there ever was one) burned down the theater and hunted down the producers and directors like dogs....Sorry, a little fantasy there. I can't imagine this concoction ever being released to an actual theater, except as the 3rd item on a dusk-to-dawn drive-in triple feature.Seriously, if your goal is to make a spy thriller, and you have Robert Vaughn and Aldo Ray and Keenan Wynn to work with, and you can't even make something as good as a lesser episode of "Man From Uncle"...and then you wrap the "feature" in a clumsy 25 minute collage of voice-over, exposition and unrelated stock footage that makes the movie even LESS watchable...well, suffice it to say that the producers and directors may have made the wrong career choice.If they'd just put two related episodes of "Man From Uncle" together and released THAT as a movie, the results would have been light years better.I saw this as part of a public domain DVD collection, one of those "50 Movies for $15.00" deals, which means I paid less than 50 cents to see this, and I felt cheated. And I felt bad for the actors - even the lesser spear-carriers in this thing must have been dying inside as they tried to make the dialog and the action work.
Jonathon Dabell Make no mistake about it, The Lucifer Complex is a genuine contender for the title of worst movie ever made. The most remarkable thing is that recognised actors have been persuaded to appear in this dismal offering – it's quite depressing to see the likes of Robert Vaughn, Keenan Wynn and Aldo Ray appearing in such cheap, inept, amateurish rubbish. The Lucifer Complex bears all the hallmarks of a film that hasn't been fully completed, with irrelevant stock footage and additional scenes crudely inserted into the existing material in a desperate bid to cobble together a releasable film. Alas, everything is so clumsily done and so achingly inept that one is left wishing that the film hadn't been released at all.In the near future, an explorer on an island discovers a hidden cave containing computers full of old archives. After watching some war footage, he stumbles upon a film showing the adventures of a secret agent on a top secret mission. The agent Glenn Manning (Robert Vaughn) is sent to investigate something called the "Lucifer Problem". Manning crash lands on a remote island and discovers a camp emblazoned with Nazi swastikas, run by a gang of neo-Nazis. The island natives are kept as slaves, and a group of women are held prisoner there too. Manning soon discovers that the women's bodies are being used to give birth to genetically cloned foetuses of various world leaders. He befriends April (Merrie Lynn Ross), one of the women held in the camp, and together they try to stop the sinister plot. Their quest doesn't become any easier when they learn that their Nazi enemies have succeeded in cloning Adolf Hitler himself! Very little of The Lucifer Complex makes sense. For one thing, if our explorer is watching all this as if it is actual archived footage of a spy mission, then who the hell do we suppose filmed it all?? In fact, the whole explorer subplot seems suspiciously unrelated to the film and one is left convinced that it has been included as an afterthought to stretch the film's running time a little, and perhaps as an attempt to provide a way of linking the rather choppy main narrative. Vaughn tries to give a professional performance in the midst of all this, but his efforts are continually shot down by the very non-professional work behind the cameras. The characters are completely uninvolving, the audio poor, the camera work hopelessly wobbly, and the action sequences incompetently edited. Sometimes this sort of film becomes a cult favourite amongst collectors of bad movies (Plan 9 From Outer Space, Robot Monster, etc.) but this one slumps way below the level of "so-bad-it's-good". It is abysmal, pure and simple. It would receive a minus rating if this were possible, and even that would be generous!
fedor8 The only fan of "The Lucifer Complex" watches the movie, while we get to watch him watch it. That's certainly one way of giving the viewer the middle finger.If you've always wanted to watch a B-movie through the eyes of an unkempt, bored moron from the future, then you won't be disappointed. But if you thought the narrators from "The Astounding She-Monster" could not be matched in sheer, unbridled, shameless stupidity, think again. The hairy imbecile sits around in a cave, apparently having nothing better to do with his time than guide us through history by playing us shoddy stock footage. Evidently, padding was the only "cure" LC's "filmmaker" could up with to solve the missing-footage dilemma. "Damn, how do I fill up the time… I think I'll just get someone to comment wisely on the current political thingamabobs. He should have a beard, coz people with beards look wise – and rebellious - I guess." The narrator is the anti-Gandalf, though…He goes through WWII footage, making comments that would make an 8 year-old kid with straight Fs in History bury his head in shame. "War is bad". That's what you get when a filmmaker with zero education – and a strong will to be accepted as a "valid (left-wing) social commentator" – tries to inject wisdom into a friggin' C-movie. "Maybe if I turned this crap into a message movie, they might overlook the flick's 935 flaws…"After war, the thing he hates most is technology. "Technology was always a way for the rich to control and weaken the poor", says this narrating D-movie buffoon. Nevermind that penicillin saved countless poor, along with a plethora of other scientific advances. As long as a bearded man is saying things about how bad war is, and how evil the rich are, that suffices. Next up is the Vietnam War, which the inept narrator describes as "the longest war". His original intention might have been to describe it as "the baddest" of all wars, but he stopped short of saying it; not because the word doesn't exist, but because it was simply too long for him to say it without tying his tongue in knots.But just as we are about to start taking this intellectual giant seriously, he throws in some Woodstock footage. His food-encrusted mouth forms into a knowing grin, and grinning like the ape that he is he starts ogling the drugged-up hippie gals for a while, afterwards adding what a "noble idea" the hippy movement was based upon. "Noble" being the female hippies' willingness to spread their legs for anyone – especially a smelly, like-minded, bearded moron from the future. Eventually, finally (well, not really) this E-movie's "director" tires of his unique padding style, and the hairy narrator finally gets to show his precious gem, his baby… Yes, it's the "Lucifer Complex": Robert Vaughn saving the world from second-generation Nazis, while being assisted by some rather daft blondes all of whom prepared for their roles by taking anti-acting classes."When you make an F-movie, you might as well go for broke, and feature a cheesy version of Hitler", this G-movie's film-stitcher probably thought. Just a second later he must have had his umpteenth Eureka moment when he decided that Vaughn was too dull on his own (something that should have been obvious from the get-go) but were two Vaughns really the answer? It would have been, if one had been matter and the other anti-matter, but sadly no matter, anti-matter or brain-matter (for that matter) was involved, hence the fight resulted in one Vaughn remaining alive, and that is clearly one Vaughn too many.
cdleseurs1 I was one of the clones! The curly haired guy in a few scenes behind Robert Vaughn. He didn't say much, just smiled and did what he was told. Many of us were acting students from the Lee Strasberg Drama Institute - so much for method acting. It was filmed across the street from Paramount at a small sound stage we entered through a back alley. They feed us from MacDonalds! I never got paid for it, so I guess I might as well not hold my breath anymore. You'll notice there is a strip across where our private parts would be, so you couldn't see our bathing suits or underwear, and we just grabbed the feeding tubes and stuck them in our navels.