Director – Anthony M. Dawson [Antonio Margheriti], Screenplay – Mary Eller [Maria Laura Rocca] & Oscar Saul, Story – Mary Eller, Photography – Alejandro Ulloa, Music – Carlo Savina, Art Direction – Adolfo Cofino & Aurelio Grugnola. Production Company – Edo Cinematografica/Peter Carsten Prodution/Producciones Dia S.A..
Cast
Dean Jones (Dr Peter Denwell), Gastone Moschini (Harold), Ingeborg Schöner (Irene), Roberto Camardiel (Max Podgkey), Liana Del Balzo (Mama), Peter Carsten (Professor Pomerantz), Rafael Alonso (Inspector Flauvin), Alan Collins (Raimondo)
Plot
Peter Denwell is a biochemist working with the Geneva Research Institute. He and the institute’s head go to show the press the new deadly Virus D that Peter has developed to only to find the samples have been stolen. Peter faces dismissal where his only regret is that he has never been able to tell his assistant Irene his feelings for her. Dr Rangi, a colleague from Nepal, sends an invisibility formula to Peter for him to find an antidote. The lab chimp puts some of the formula in Peter’s coffee, causing him to turn invisible. With this newfound ability, Peter avoids the heavies who stole the virus who are seeking to abduct him to perfect it, all the while making fun of Harold, his pompous rival for Irene’s affections.
Antonio Margheriti (1930-2002) was one of the hacks of the Italian exploitation industry. Margheriti touched on numerous genres in his career the lasted between the 1960s and his death, ranging from action films to the Italian space opera, the giallo film, the peplum, the Spaghetti Western and the Continental Gothic. Throughout most of his films, Margheriti was credited as Anthony [M.] Dawson, as with the trend of the era for Italian filmmakers taking English-sounding names to sell the films in the US. (See below for Antonio Margheriti’s other genre films).
While Antonio Margheriti was prolific in Italian exploitation genres, Mister Superinvisible is one of only of about 2-3 of the films he made that is, as far as I can determine, an outright comedy. Mister Superinvisible was funded by Italian, West German and Spanish production companies and shot in Switzerland. For some reason, they were able to import Dean Jones, who has a reasonable name back then in Disney films like That Darn Cat (1965), Blackbeard’s Ghost (1968), The Love Bug (1969), The Million Dollar Duck (1971) and The Shaggy D.A. (1975). The production seems to have been able to inveigle Jones to come to Europe to play exactly the same role he did in his Disney films.
Dean Jones turns invisible
Unfortunately, Antonio Margheriti displays little aptitude for comedy and the film quickly collapses into slapstick inanity. It consists of nothing more than slapstick set-pieces. There are extended scenes with Dean Jones fooling a duo of inept goons who try to break into the lab. Gastone Moschini as Dean Jones’s rival for Ingeborg Schöner’s affections has no other purpose in the film than to be the butt of a series of invisibility pranks, including scenes where the invisible Jones sets his coat on fire with a Bunsen Burner or heats the handle of a door he is about to open causing him to burn his hand.
There are whole sequences set up around invisibility gags – Dean Jones turning up at a séance and thought to be a spirit; a scene where the patrons of a bar think that a dog is talking and ordering drinks; nonsense running around the streets of Geneva in a motorcycle sidecar; or around the mansion of the villain at the end. The biggest of these set-pieces is one with an invisible Jones humiliating Gastone Moschini in a restaurant while he is on a date with Ingeborg Schöner – a sequence that manages to involve a custard pie fight, a dwarf and an exploding fish tank that floods the restaurant.
Antonio Margheriti’s other genre films are:- the space opera Assignment Outer Space (1960), the space opera Battle of the Worlds (1961), the Gothic The Virgin of Nuremberg (1963), the Gothic Castle of Blood (1964), the peplumDevil Against the Son of Hercules (1964), the peplumHercules, Prisoner of Evil (1964), the Gothic The Long Hair of Death (1964), War of the Planets (1965), the space opera The Wild, Wild Planet (1965), the spy film Lightning Bolt (1966), the space opera War Between the Planets (1966), the space opera The Snow Devils (1967), the gialloThe Young, The Evil and the Savage (1968), the gialloThe Unnaturals (1969), the Gothic Web of the Spider (1971), the gialloSeven Dead in the Cat’s Eye (1973), the gonzo Western comedy Whiskey and Ghosts (1976), the cannibalistic Vietnam Vets film Cannibal Apocalypse/Cannibals in the Streets (1980), the adventure film Hunters of the Golden Cobra (1982), the post-holocaust barbarian film Yor, The Hunter from the Future (1983), the adventure film The Ark of the Sun God (1984), Treasure Island in Outer Space (mini-series, 1987), the alien nasty film Alien from the Deep (1989) and the sf/action film Virtual Weapon/Cyberflic (1997).
