The Girl from S.I.N.

Something Weird Video released The Girl From S.I.N. along with Henry's Night In as a double feature DVD. Both movies deal with invisibility and as with most Something Weird releases half the fun is seeing the 60's in a different light than Leave it to Beaver. Both moves deal with invisibility and the extras include a Chevrolet training film where a salesman deals with Mister X, an invisible customer(this extra was the only feature on the disk worth watching). These movies can be fun, on the other hand, they can be terrible. They were skin flicks shown in movie houses run by seedy characters in bad neighborhoods. Sometimes these can be done well, considering their budgets and other times they were just for the money without any creativity. The Girl From S.I.N. has no dialogs, a narrator is the only voice in the film, and is boring from start to finish, I found myself falling asleep a few times. There is NO plot and the Pace is slow, slow slow. this could have been a ten minute short but was stretched out with lots of non-nude dancing and uncomfortable silences. I love Something Weird and, like I said, the Chevy commercial extra was cool but otherwise this is a disk to skip.

MASTER PLAN: get naked and invisible! This is one of those no-budget nudie sex pics from the sixties, with this one also attempting to spoof & capitalize on the James Bond spy thrills of that decade. It looks like it was all filmed in the same apartment building, redressing a couple of the apartments to give an illusion of variety. The first sequence depicts a lady stripping slowly (very slowly) in preparation for seducing a 'client' and this drags on for 8 minutes(!) until she finally assassinates him. Then the credits begin! The filmmakers just left the camera on, focusing on shots of the guy's toes, for example - it's quite awful - but if you can sit through this first sequence (or just fast forward thru), you'll see some amusing bits later. There was no budget, even, for an audio track/a soundtrack - all you get is a narration to explain what is happening. This gives it a strange documentary feel in the beginning, but soon the narrator begins to make lewd and suggestive comments, so you know you're watching some sex spoof.

The plot, such at is, involves a mafia hood arriving at the master villain's lair - an apartment. The villain demonstrates his power by having his femme fatale, PoonTang, do a belly dance and then show her other skills by defeating a much larger opponent using some kind of karate (sound FX would have helped here). Then we switch to a scientist-type in another apartment who has invented an invisibility formula - we see this when a mouse disappears, using a clumsy jump-cut. His secretary panics when the mouse escapes and makes herself invisible to avoid the mouse - makes sense, right? The best scenes, and the ones you've been waiting for, are later, with the secretary stripping before making herself invisible, to then attack the intruding henchmen of the villain. I've always thought later movies involving invisibility always wasted an opportunity to show scenes such as this - strip the female before she becomes invisible - and that's why this gets a 2nd star from me. Such a premise continues to this day (as in the "Fantastic Four" films with the Invisible Woman). Other than that, the lack of a budget and the incredibly slow pace of some scenes make this barely watchable. Beware, for example, of a photo shoot scene with the nominal hero which also drags on for 5 or 6 minutes. Hero:2 Villain:3 Femme Fatales:3 Henchmen:3 Fights:2 Stunts/Chases:1 Gadgets:1 Auto:1 Locations:2 Pace:2 overall:2