Madman of Mandoras (1963)

Professor Coleman invents an antidote to the powerful nerve gas PAM.  PAM, of course is an acronym and don’t ask me for what.  It’s also a cooking spray so it’s clear ConAgra never saw this movie.  Anyway, bad guys want the formula so when they release PAM, no one gets out alive.  To lure the professor into their clutches, the criminals kidnap his Valley Girl (cerca 1960s) daughter and take her to the South American country of Mandoras.  The professor’s older, more sensible daughter and her husband hop a plane to Mandoras after a foreign guy holds them at gunpoint, and dies in their car.  Down in Mandoras, the couple are reunited with their dippy sister. After a weird gunfight in a nightclub where Carmen Miranda’s less talented cousin performs, some guy we don’t know takes a bullet and the local sheriff, portrayed by local sheriff portrayer Nestor Paiva rounds up our trio of nitwits and brings them to the hoosegow.  There we meet the president who resembles the Hispanic Colonel Sanders and find out the real power behind this incredibly contrived plot.  A band of Nazis holed up in the presidential palace plot to gather the rest of their evil gang, drop PAM, and take over.  Once they’ve laid waste to the world as we know it, they plan to put their own guy in power.  Since they’re Nazis, three guesses as to who they’ve chosen to lead them. Yup. The Big Kahuna himself, Adolph.  It seems scientists collected some cells in the fabled bunker and used them to…um, grow a new Fuhrer.  They didn’t exactly grow a whole Hitler, just a head.  So we get some hilarious scenes with a head under glass making odd expressions, looking around curiously, and barking orders.  There’s even a carrying case with handles for when the head has to ride in the back of a limo.  More stuff happens but who cares?  You watch this film to see Hitler’s head scream, “Mach schnell!” to his underlings from under a pastry cover.  According to imdb, Steve Bennet and Richard Miles wrote the screenplay for this and They Saved Hitler’s Brain and not much else.   Often hard to follow, the story meanders and the audience feels just as out of it as the cast.  Madmen of Mandoras has, as Joe Bob Briggs said, “too much plot getting in the way of the story.”  David Bradley directed Madmen of Mandoras as well as They Saved Hitler’s Brain and used some scenes for both films.  I guess with gold like that you want to get as much mileage as you can out of it.  I’d recommend this for the weirdness quotient alone.