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Friday, July 11, 2008Kill, Panther, Kill! Release Year: 1968Countries: Italy, West Germany Starring: Tony Kendall, Brad Harris, Erika Blanc, Franco Fantasia, Corny Collins, Hannelore Auer, Siegfried Rauch, Erwin Strahl, Gainfranco Parolini, Frank Valentin, Laci von Ronay, Carlos de Castro, Werner Hauff, Jens Herold Writers: Paul Alfred Muller, Gainfranco Parolini, Gunter Rudorf, Giovanni Simonelli Director: Gianfranco Parolini (as Frank Kramer) Cinematographers: Francesco Izzarelli, Rolf Kastel Music: Marcello Giombini Producer: Theo Maria Werner In the opening moments of Kill, Panther, Kill! we see the daring escape, during a prison transfer, of master criminal Arthur Tracy (Franco Fantasia). Tracy has been in stir for four years after thieving a fortune in jewels worth three million dollars. Now his loyal henchmen, Anthony and Smokey, lie in wait beside a desolate hillside road that's apparently intended to be overlooking Malibu -- but is actually some anonymous European location -- as the LAPD van baring Arthur approaches. After dispensing with Arthur's guards in a hail of machinegun fire, the three pile into a getaway car, at which point Anthony (Siegfried Rauch) says he knows of an ideal place for them to hold up. "They're holding a rodeo this week in Calgary", he says. "Nobody will look for us there." And truer words were never spoken. The only thing that I'd be looking for at a rodeo in Calgary would be a thorough ass-kicking. And so the fifth entry in the Kommissar X series finds our heroes Tom Rowland and Jo Walker heading off to Calgary -- and me shouting "No, don't go there!" at the screen. It's not that I have anything against North America, mind you; I live there, after all. It's just that there are places within thirty miles of where I live where I could see burly white people in cowboy hats, and the exotic Eastern locations of the previous four films had accustomed me to a more adventurous breed of vicarious tourism. Still, despite my protests, go they do, and soon we're treated to the spectacle of Tom Rowland riding a bucking bronco and Jo Walker, for reasons known only to himself, wandering around in a sombrero.     With Kill, Panther, Kill!, director Gianfranco Parolini -- working under the name Frank Kramer -- returns to the Kommissar X franchise after handing over the reins to Rudolf Zehetgruber for the previous two entries. And with his return the truce between Walker and Rowland that we saw in the preceding film Death Trip is lifted, and we again see the constant sparring that characterized the earlier efforts, with Walker referring to Rowland variously as "Cheese Brain", "Idiot Head" and "Imbecile", as well as other choice bits of verbal abuse directed at Brad Harris's admittedly odd-shaped head, and Rowland cleaning Walker's clock on more than one occasion. In fact, the two work at cross purposes for much of the film, each withholding information from the other and even seeking at times to actively undermine the other's efforts. Other changes since the last installment include the fact that Rowland is now identified as a captain with the Los Angeles -- rather than New York -- police department, and Walker, for once, is supplied with a clear and reasonably plausible explanation for being in the same place and working on the same case as Rowland. He's been hired by the company that insured the stolen jewels -- which have never been recovered -- and is on Tracy's trail in hopes of finding where they have been hidden. This time Walker also comes with a shapely secretary, played by Hannelore Auer, whose job is to provide plot points while wearing a succession of silly outfits (milk maid, Indian maiden, etc.).     As is usual for the series, Kill, Panther, Kill! hits the ground running, with Walker and Rowland already on the case by the time the credits finish rolling. In fact, despite what I said, it seems that what Anthony said at the film's opening couldn't be less true, because everybody seems to be looking for Arthur Tracy in Calgary -- from Rowland, to a whole squad of Canadian police detectives, to the typically self-interested Walker. Made wise to this, Arthur and his men decide to head on to their real destination, Montreal, where Arthur's twin brother Robert, a wealthy invalid, resides. Arthur had sent a package containing the jewels to his mild-mannered and law-abiding brother prior to his arrest, and now it's time to collect them. Of course, before they can make that exit, we're treated to a lot of travelogue footage of the rodeo, then the aforementioned sequence in which Rowland, tricked by one of Tracy's men, rides the bucking bronco with ego-bruising results, and then an unsuccessful attempt by Tracy to throw the law off his track by having a double killed in his place. Walker, through some sombrero-clad detective work, manages to divine Tracy's destination, however, and, under pressure, shares the information reluctantly with Rowland, after which the two are on to Montreal. And with this switch of location, we're hipped to the real reason for Kommissar X's journey Canada-ward: Expo 67, the world's fair held that year in Montreal. A massive undertaking, consisting of numerous space-age-themed concourses built upon two huge man-made islands in the St. Lawrence river -- with a mass transit rail system built exclusively to service it -- the fair serves as an impressive backdrop for the film's action, and is made ample use of. In fact, even though the site of the fair is the location of one of the film's pivotal events, it does begin to seem like Rowland and Walker spend an awful lot of time hanging around there. There's even a scene where Rowland chases Walker across the entire grounds, passing all of the International concourses on his way, which affords G. Marcell the opportunity to augment his already somewhat cheesy score with the predictable, stereotyped music cues to represent each of the faraway lands name-checked.     Upon arriving in Montreal, Arthur arranges a meeting with his brother at -- where else? -- Expo 67. Tailed by Rowland and Walker, Arthur instructs Robert to join him on one of the aerial cable cars that travel over the Expo grounds. Arthur presses Robert for the location of the jewels, but Robert will only tell him that they are in a safe deposit box and that he has hidden the key. Arthur responds to this by shooting Robert to death and -- by means of switched clothes and some adjustments of facial hair -- assumes his identity, emerging from the cable car with a tale of how he, Robert, was attacked by Arthur and had to shoot him in self defense. Everyone seems to fall for this somewhat obvious ruse, and soon Arthur is back at Robert's villa with Robert's lovely wife Elizabeth (Erika Blanc). Arthur doesn't bother to keep up pretenses with Elizabeth very long, however, and is soon having his minions slap her around and demanding to know where the key to the safe deposit box is. Unfortunately, that key has gone missing from its regular hiding place -- right around the time, we've seen, that Robert donated a small statue called The Blue Panther to a local museum. And it is with this revelation that we realize that the panther referred to in the movie's title is just a statue, and won't be doing any killing at all, no matter how emphatically it's instructed to do so -- a fact which still doesn't diminish Kill, Panther, Kill! as the coolest of any of the Kommissar X movies' titles. Meanwhile, Joe Walker has done his research and determined that Robert's lovely nurse and secretary, Emily (Corny Collins) is his best hope of gaining access to the Tracy family's dark secrets.     And so Joe Walker -- a man who, if he existed in the real world, would be enveloped in a perpetual cloud of mace -- sets about ingratiating himself with Emily by sneaking up on her while she's sunbathing and stealing her clothes. It works, of course, and soon Emily is confiding in him that all does not seem right at the Tracy household -- as it very well might not, given that "Robert" all of a sudden has all of these scowly underlings in tow and is yelling about "where are the jewels?" all the time. At some point someone behind the scenes must have said, "Look, I know that this is basically just a cops-and-robbers story that we're telling here, but, being that this is a Kommissar X film, we should at least have a frogman shoot at Joe Walker with a harpoon gun." And so at this point a frogman emerges from the river beside where Walker and Emily are talking and shoots at Walker with a harpoon gun. Walker overpowers the frogman and demands to know who sent him, but -- in another turn of events that seems to have come from an entirely different movie -- the frogman himself is harpooned by an unseen accomplice before he can answer. Rowland arrives on the scene, and the two trail the accomplices to a nearby gym, where the first of two pretty great fight scenes in Kill, Panther, Kill! takes place. This particular one isn't even plot driven, since the guys they're fighting aren't Tracy's men, but instead a bunch of judo guys who are simply pissed off that Walker and Rowland have barged in on their work-out. The scene peaks with a corny/awesome bit in which Brad Harris picks up a barbell and tosses it like a toy at several burly guys who collectively crumple beneath its weight.     Shortly after this, Elizabeth Tracy secretly approaches Rowland and tells him the truth about Arthur. Saying that she fears Arthur will kill her if she doesn't produce the key, she asks Rowland to help her find it, and Rowland -- the big, soft-hearted lug -- being sweet on her (awww!), agrees. Rowland and Elizabeth return to the Tracy villa to find that it has been ransacked. More surprisingly, they find that Arthur has been murdered, and that evidence left with the body suggests that Emily was the culprit. Meanwhile, Arthur's associates, Anthony and Smokey (the latter played by director Parolini) are holding Emily hostage in the villa's basement, and after some vaguely alluded to torture get her to divulge that the key is hidden in the panther statue. The hoods race to the museum, only to find that that wily cad Joe Walker has beaten them to it and gotten the key for himself. An attempt to take Walker out once-and-for-all follows, which leads to Kill, Panther's second rollicking fight scene, which involves Brad Harris rolling around inside a truck tire, clocking people with expertly tossed bricks, and actually looking grief-stricken as Joe Walker is apparently run over by a bulldozer. I have no idea who the people that Harris and Tony Kendall are fighting in this scene are supposed to be, since Arthur Tracy's entourage -- which, for the most part, appears to consist of only Anthony and Smokey -- seems to contract and expand as the action requires. It's an example of how this movie seems to occasionally strain at its narrative limitations -- in this case, by wanting to provide it's standard issue villain with a super-villain's endless supply of expendable henchmen. In any case, the fight is a jolly piece of work -- no doubt staged by Harris himself -- and, like any other aspect of Kill, Panther, Kill!, shouldn't be robbed of its affable charms by exposure to the rigors of logic.     Once it's established that Walker has the key, a tussle ensues between him and Rowland for its possession. At one point Rowland thinks he has stolen the key from Walker, but once the crooks in turn take the key from Rowland, they find that it leads only to a safe deposit box that contains an 8x10" photo of Joe Walker winking at them. This accumulation of typical Kommissar X nonsense ultimately leads to an antique cliffhanger in which Walker and Emily, tied up in the cellar of the villa, watch helplessly as the lit fuse on a gas bomb that Anthony has set reaches its end -- as meanwhile Tom Rowland lies unconscious upstairs. All of this, of course, is handled with about the same attitude as that exhibited by Joe Walker in that aforementioned photo. In addition to the usual hijinks, Kill, Panther, Kill! features a couple different bits of recurring, Joe Walker-themed business that struck me as a little odd even considering the context. One involves an effeminate, flamboyantly dressed young fellow who, throughout the film, turns up to eagerly tag along after Walker, and whom Walker repeatedly dismisses with annoyance. Of course, this -- like Walker's anti-drug lecturing in Death Trip -- struck me as a disappointment, clashing as it did with my image of Walker as a dedicated hedonist and pansexual. I wouldn't think that he'd refuse an offer of sex from any warm blooded creature, be they male or female -- or that he would even be above dropping a gerbil in his trousers on a slow night -- so why he would reject this obviously smitten young man's advances is a mystery. The second bit involves Walker spending a lot of time throughout the film reading the Bible. For obvious reasons, this is pretty funny on its own, but the way in which this activity is later credited for Walker making a leap of logic that helps him solve the case is pretty weak, and makes you wonder at what the possible reason for including the bit in the first place was.     All in all, the plot of Kill, Panther, Kill is more appropriate to an episode of Columbo than a Eurospy film, which makes the movie by far the most pedestrian in the Kommissar X series thus far. Which is not to say that I didn't find it completely entertaining nonetheless. Then again, I firmly believe that prolonged exposure to any movie series can actually alter the brain's chemistry, and, as such -- while the strains of "I Love You Jo Walker", or the masked face of Santo might, for me, serve as endorphin triggers -- for others they might simply serve to tell them that its time to turn off the TV and pick up a book, or to put one's head in one's hands and slowly shake it from side to side while murmuring disconsolately about the fate of mankind. In other words, while, if you were to ask me if you should watch Kill, Panther, Kill!, I would answer, "Absolutely", I may not be the right person to ask. But you should watch it anyway, just in case. Labels: Country: Germany, Country: Italy, Eurospies, Series: Kommissar X, Stars: Brad Harris, Year: 1968 posted by Todd at 1:19 AM | 0 Comments Wednesday, May 14, 2008Death Trip Release Year: 1967Countries: West Gremany, Italy, France, Lebanon, Hungary Starring: Tony Kendall, Brad Harris, Olga Schoberova, Christa Linder, Dietmar Schonherr, Sabine Sun, Rudolf Zehetgruber (as Rolf Zehett), Herbert Fux, Rossella Bergamonti, Samson Burke, Emilio Carrer, Carlo Tamberlani Writers: Rudolf Zehetgruber, Giovanni Simonelli, Paul Alfred Muller Directors: Rudolf Zehetgruber, Gianfranco Parolini Cinematographers: Georgio Garibaldi Schwarze, Angelo Lozzi Music: Francesco De Masi ("I Love You, Jo Walker" written by Bobby Gutesha, performed by Angela Monti) Producers: Fadel Kassar, Theo Maria Werner Alternate Titles: Kommissar X - Drei Grune Hunde For me, one of the hazards of watching one of the Kommissar X movies is that it means I'll have that "I Love You, Jo Walker" song stuck in my head for the next two weeks and will be at constant risk of bursting into it at any given moment, which is actually more of a hazard to those around me than it is to myself. Personally, I don't care if the world knows that I love Jo Walker (though my wife might have some questions about it). Given that he's a character with all the depth of a walking Playboy cartoon, it's actually surprising how lovable he can become with repeated exposure. Death Trip, the fourth entry in the Kommissar X series, is also quite lovable, though only once you get past the expectations that it raises and learn to love it for who it really is. For those familiar with the series, the phrase "Kommissar X on acid" would seem like a redundancy. These movies, as is, are already strange enough to make you suspect that some kind of chemical inspiration was involved in their conception. But "Kommissar X on acid" is exactly what Death Trip, on paper at least, promises us: Our world-hopping team of swinging adventurers/super sleuths, Jo Walker and Tom Rowland, getting entangled in the wild world of LSD trafficking, and even sampling some of the stuff themselves. What's most strange about Death Trip, however, is that, despite it's concept, it somehow manages to be the most low key entry in the series so far. And that's not all bad... in fact, it's not bad at all.     For one thing, unlike the three films that preceded it -- which were all made virtually back-to-back over the course of one year and, as a result, have a very similar feel -- Death Trip gives the impression of having had the benefit of some breathing room. As a result, there is not only a distillation of some of the better elements from the preceding films, but also evidence that, having firmly established the formula, those involved felt they were on sure enough footing to attempt stretching its boundaries a little. In addition, the performances by the two leads, Tony Kendall and Brad Harris, clearly show them settling into their characters, as well as having an intuitive grasp of their relationship. There is less sparring between the two than seen in the earlier films, and what there is of it is more affectionate, cluing us in that Tom Rowland really doesn't hate Walker nearly as much as he sometimes appears to in the other films. One thing that has not changed from previous entries, though, is the generally good natured tone of the proceedings. And that's a good thing, because once you've sat down and tried to make sense of one of these movies, you really realize just how much they get by on personality. For instance, take that great unsolvable mystery that is at the heart of every Kommissar X film: that of why and in what capacity our two heroes, New York city police captain Rowland and New York private detective Walker, are in whatever exotic foreign locale they're in. In the case of Death Trip, they're in Turkey, and the film begins with Jo Walker in progress, taking on all comers in a wild bar fight while at the same time kissing any cocktail waitress who wanders within his impressive lip-reach. One thug, who we will later learn is a member of the criminal gang the Green Hounds, remarks to another that Walker has been at the bar every night stirring up trouble and had to be dealt with before he learned too much about the gang's operations.     But is Walker really on the trail of The Green Hounds? Later exchanges will reveal that the existence of the gang and their activities are news to him. So why is he in Istanbul? Unless hanging out in shady, gang-infested Turkish bars and getting into fistfights is his idea of a vacation (which, granted, it very well might be), he's presumably there on business -- and given that he's a private detective, that would mean that someone has hired him to be there. But who? And for what? Only frustration awaits those who come to Death Trip expecting clear answers to such questions. For I imagine that if you were to ask anyone behind the scenes, the answer would be a resounding, "Who cares?" The point, after all, is simply to get both Walker and Rowland into the chosen picturesque locale by whatever cursory means possible so that they can proceed with the business of getting into all kinds of entertaining and improbable scrapes and chasing some attractive women around, a goal that clearly overrides any paltry considerations of credibility or logic. And following that line of reasoning, we're next shown Tom Rowland, a New York City policeman, arriving in Istanbul on a mission from the Pentagon carrying a million dollars worth of LSD, which he is to deliver to the American Consul General, a combination of circumstances that effectively strikes a death blow against whatever remaining intentions I might have had to question the logic of anything that happens in Death Trip. Rowland's stated purpose is to deliver the drugs to the U.S. armed forces in Turkey, with the intention being to help our boys achieve parity with unnamed enemies plotting to undermine NATO's forces by means of making them high out of their minds on acid. (As Rowland says at one point, "Every important nation has a supply of it on hand.") The truth, however, is that Rowland's plan is to use the drugs as bait to draw out a gang of international LSD traffickers, of which the Green Hounds are a part. To that end, the canister of "LSD" that he leaves with the Consul is actually a decoy filled with sugar (a result, I'm guessing, of someone hearing once somewhere that one of the ways people took acid was by lacing sugarcubes with it), though for reasons I won't speculate upon, he also has a stash of the real stuff which he keeps to himself.     At the consulate, Rowland meets Allan Hood (Dietmar Schonherr), a NATO military advisor, and Joyce Sellers (Sabine Sun), the Consul General's secretary. Joyce, we will soon learn, is secretly a member of the Green Hounds, so it's no surprise when, later that night, Joyce and a mysterious second party return to steal the putative canister of yellow sunshine from the Consul's safe. Unfortunately, in an especially taxing earlier bit of needlessly complicated plotting, Hood had made arrangements with his brother, the owner of a tourist service, to provide a guide for Rowland during his stay, and for some reason that brother shows up at the consulate with that guide in the middle of the night, just as the heist is taking place. Hood's brother is captured by the villains and presumably killed, but the guide, a young woman named Leyla (Olga Schoberova) manages to escape and, as a result, lands right at the top of the Green Hounds' hit list. Meanwhile, Jo Walker returns to that shady bar he was seen trashing at the beginning of the movie and makes contact with a young American girl named Jenny Carter (Rossella Bergamonti), who, judging by their conversation, is working as a prostitute, and who, furthermore, appears to have some connection with the Green Hounds. Out of my own childish clinging to restrictive notions of coherence, I decided to make this the reason for Walker being in Istanbul -- i.e. that he has been hired by Jenny's family to bring her back to the States -- even though that is in no way made explicit. In any case, this scene occasions one of the members of the Green Hounds approaching Walker and asking him if he'd be interested in a little LSD, which occasions Walker telling him that LSD is bad and, once Jenny has rejoined him, telling her, also, that LSD is bad. To be honest, there's something a bit dissonant about seeing the Kommissar X boys lecturing people about the dangers of drugs the way they do in this film, especially in the case of Jo Walker, who seems like the kind of guy who would try anything at least once. It has a whiff of the obligatory about it, reminding me of those times when my cool aunt, under coercion from my mother, would give me a talking to about the risks of smoking -- something she would do hastily and half-heartedly in between long drags on a Camel. So when Walker extols the virtues of Scotch to Jenny while warning her of the comparative evils of acid, as much as I wholeheartedly agree with the sentiment today, I find it a bit disconcerting to see him landing so squarely on the establishment side of the 60s culture war. Especially considering that the freshly illegalized drug had only very recently made the transition from being the subject of mildly naughty cocktail party conversation among middle-aged swingers to being pilloried as a scourge of youth. Adding to this ill-fittingly stolid characterization is the fact that Death Trip seems to employ the term LSD as sort of a generic catch-all for drugs of all species, since, given the locale and a lot of the effects they're attributing to the drug, it seems like heroin would have been a more appropriate choice of chemical villain. It kind of reminds me of those people who refer to any music of any degree of aggressiveness beyond that of the most mainstream pop as "Hard Rock".     Not that I'm any expert on the subject of drugs, of course. Or, at least, I don't consider myself to be one. In fact, given the circles I once traveled in, I feel that my youthful indiscretions in that area were fairly moderate in scope. Though I must admit that others don't agree. Recently, at a dinner to honor a certain life passage of mine, I sat in stunned silence as one of my oldest friends regaled some of my not-quite-so-old friends with tales of what a disgusting drug whore I used to be. So, okay: it was the 80s, I was a young musician and aspiring hipster living on my own in the big-ish city for the first time -- and keep in mind that this was way before the concept of "straight edge" was invented, when it was still inconceivable that you could have any kind of "edge" at all without shoveling all kinds of illicit substances into your face (Keith may correct me on that point, but just ignore him) -- so perhaps I did "experiment" a little. But I never did LSD. Well, okay, just the once. The fact is that, at that time, I found maintaining control enough of a struggle as it was, and so preferred those substances that gave me delusions of mastery over those that made me feel like my head was separating into individual parts. Still, there came a time when I decided that, in order to be a more well-rounded degenerate, I needed to sample psychedelics. So a friend -- of course, that very same friend who would years later point the accusing stinkfinger of drug whoredom at me -- procured us some LSD, which, indicative of the drug lightweights we really were beneath our cultivated exteriors, we made a date (a "drug date", if you will) to consume, rather than simply scarfing it all down the moment it came into our hands. That date rolled around, a warm and sunny Sunday afternoon in the middle of Summer, and he, myself and a third friend ate our drugs and hit the streets. With characteristic transparent bravura, I expressed skepticism that the dose would have any effect on me at all.     Now, the thing that I recall about psychedelics is that, because they make you very receptive to outside stimuli -- and in very unpredictable ways -- it's very important to do them in an environment that's as free as possible of unpleasant stressors. So why we decided to go to Fisherman's Wharf, somewhere no one who actually lives in San Francisco ever goes, and which at that time of the year would be packed shoulder to shoulder with loudly-dressed tourists and their shrieking children, I will never know. But it was probably my idea. Anyway, once the chemicals started kicking in, we quickly realized that we had concocted the perfect recipe for a bad trip, and quickly tried to get to safety before we saw anything that would scar our minds forever. Unfortunately, in the course of our scramble to sanctuary, I saw the following: (1) A kid in a cardboard Burger King crown who, hoisted up on his dad's shoulders, appeared to be hovering above the crowd, which caused me to exclaim loudly, "It's the king!' (2) An old Chinese man with an enormous goiter; and (3) once we were in the presumed shelter of a darkened bar, on the TV that Twisted Sister video where the guy from Animal House looks into the camera--right at YOU, man!--and shouts, "WHAT DO YOU WANT TO DO WITH YOUR LIFE?" Truly, even today, as I describe them, all of these sights flash in my mind with a horrible vividness, illuminated with the blinding clarity of a million hateful suns, much like a flashback in a David Fincher movie. So, needless to say, I never did that again. Anyway, back in the world of Death Trip, the Green Hounds decide to take care of Walker by dosing his delicious Scotch with LSD. This has the somewhat muted effect of making him just a bit nonconfrontational and indecisive, and also nervous about handling handguns -- in other words, a lot like most normal people. As disappointing as this is to those of us who were wanting to see a full-scale Jo Walker freakout, it's also a little refreshing by comparison to other anti-drug movies of the period, which all would have had Walker shouting "I can fly!" and running headlong toward the nearest window. Thankfully, before Walker can make the decision to quit adventuring and pursue an undistinguished career in office management, the bar's cigarette girl, Gisela (Christa Linder), causes a diversion and helps him to escape. A chase follows that ends with him taking a flying leap into the Bosphorus, after which he emerges at the exact spot where Rowland and Leyla are sightseeing, providing the opportunity for Walker and Rowland to do their usual meet cute. Once the only slightly addled Walker makes his way back to his hotel room, he finds it occupied by one of the Green Hounds' goons, Shapiro (Herbert Fux), and by Jenny, whom Shapiro has overdosed and placed in Walker's bed with the intention of framing him for her murder. After tricking the none-too-bright Shapiro, Walker escapes, and a nicely shot daylight foot chase follows that makes the most of the film's Istanbul location (and which covers some territory familiar from similar scenes in the Kilink movies). Finally, Walker finds shelter, along with Rowland, in Leyla's houseboat, and Leyla introduces the pair to her neighbor Alman.     Now, Alman, aside from Walker and Rowland, is probably the most important character in Death Trip. Though he's described as a fisherman, what he really is is this movie's all purpose deus ex machina, stepping up with some new, previously undisclosed skill or area of expertise whenever the script requires it. He's a doctor (thanks to working as a veterinarian's assistant in Kentucky) when Walker needs a shot to bring him down from his LSD high, an expert marksman (thanks to a stint in vaudeville) when some fancy shooting is required, and, when exposition about the bogus history of barbarian tribes in Turkey is needed, a former student of archeology. He even proves to be an accomplished balladeer -- complete with his own canned orchestral accompaniment -- when the filmmakers determine that Death Trip, not quite containing enough amiable silliness as is, needs a third act musical number. To ice the cake, Alman, thanks to the four-legged residents of his ark-like houseboat, also insures that Death Trip contain more adorable puppies than any other entry in the Kommissar X series, hands down. In short, a character like Alman is the lazy screenwriter's best friend. And who, in this case, is that lazy screenwriter? Why, it's Alman, of course! And he's also the director! In fact, writer/director Rudolf Zehetgruber had already appeared on screen in his previous Kommissar X entry, Death is Nimble, Death is Quick, using, as he does here, the name Rolf Zehet, which was just one of many screen aliases he used over the course of his career. Unfortunately, Death Trip takes most of the joy out of making fun of the whole over-reliance on Alman thing by making it clear that all involved were well aware of how gratuitous it was and, in typical fashion, pushing it to tongue-in-cheek extremes. Curse you Kommissar X! (In truth, as someone charged with summarizing the plot of this movie, I was very happy to see Alman come along, because it meant that we could dispense with all of this "so-and-so's brother is a tour guide and knows a girl, etc." nonsense and simply have all plot points from that point on established with the actions of just one character.) Aside from that insatiable glory hog Zehetgruber, the cast of Death Trip, like that of any other entry in the Kommissar X series -- or, heck, of any other Eurospy film, for that matter -- is littered with faces recognizable to anyone well-versed in 1960s European B cinema. Dietmar Schonherr, who plays Allan Hood, is probably best known for his lead role as Commander Cliff McClaine -- the Teutonic Captain Kirk with a smirky attitude -- in the German science fiction series Raumpatrouille Orion. Because of his commanding presence in that series, I was surprised that he makes so little of an impression here, despite having a substantial role. Having a much slighter role, but making a more substantial impression -- because she's hot -- is the beautiful Christa Linder, who plays the cigarette girl Gisela. Linder really made the rounds in the worldwide B movie industry during the sixties, and even did a stint in Mexico, where she became an inadvertent co-star to Teleport City's favorite luchadore, Blue Demon. This occurred after her actual co-star in Invasion of the Dead, the escape artist Zovek, died during filming and the producers used totally unrelated footage of Blue puttering around in what looked like a high school's boiler room to pad out the running time. Linder gets a decidedly better showcase in Death Trip, even if she is forced to wear her skimpy cigarette girl uniform throughout the entire length of the movie.     Once Death Trip has gotten Walker and Rowland effectively teamed up and its villains clearly established, it proceeds with a series of set pieces in which the gang make alternating attempts to kill both Leyla and Jenny, all of which are foiled in high style by Jo and Tom. Finally the Green Hounds, realizing that Rowland has pulled a switch-a-roo on them with the LSD, kidnap him in order to get him to divulge where the real stash is hidden. Rowland ends up imprisoned along with Leyla, Giselda and Hood in the Hounds' desert camp, which is located in a network of caves in a region aptly named the Valley of a Thousand Hills. It's up to Walker to rescue him, and in the attempt he employs a desert sheik disguise that, for all its ridiculousness, is still less silly than the lemonade vendor get-up he sports in an earlier sequence. Death Trip then goes all Lawrence of Arabia as Walker and Alman caravan across the desert, finally finding their way to the Hounds' lair. Then, during a pretty spectacular mounted raid by the Turkish police, Walker manages to effect Rowland's escape, setting in motion a truly action packed climax. While it's Tony Kendall who gets top billing, it's Brad Harris, with his rough and tumble stunt work, who can always be counted on to provide the bulk of the Kommissar X films' action highlights, and, after that fashion, Harris completely owns the final twenty minutes of Death Trip. In a sequence in which Rowland eludes his captors after escaping from his desert prison, we watch Harris careening recklessly down the sheer faces of some very steep dunes like a bobsledder without a sled. Then he engages in a prolonged and brutal hand-to-hand fight with Canadian wrestler-turned-actor Samson Burke (playing the Hounds' muscle-bound strongman Kehmal) that sees the actors furiously hurling one another through walls like a pair of human wrecking balls. Finally there is a wild motorcycle chase across the dunes that ends with Harris making a leap from his bike into a moving car. Harris is clearly having a blast during all of this, and in the dune-surfing sequence in particular, a huge grin is clearly visible on his face throughout. That might serve to undermine any sense of real peril or suspense that these scenes might otherwise have had, but, more importantly, Harris's giddy demeanor highlights everything that this particular series is all about: fun at the expense of all else. That the result is so enjoyable makes it all the more sad that such undisguised eagerness to entertain seems today to be so quaint and old fashioned.     Another notable difference between Death Trip and its predecessors in the series is that its dubbing is done by a different and less recognizable cast of voice actors than that employed for the first three. I actually missed those familiar voices at first, but then came to prefer their absence, because, to tell the truth, it's a lot less distracting when you're not hearing Racer X's voice coming out of Brad Harris' mouth. Given the general and very hard to argue with opinion that all dubbing is bad, it's easy to forget that there are actual degrees of quality involved. Of course, the dubbing for 80s kung fu movies would have to represent the absolute bottom of the scale, and Death Trip resides quite a bit higher than that. For instance, at no time did I -- as I have with other Eurospy films -- feel that I was simply watching live actors acting out the soundtrack of a cartoon. This in turn helped me to maintain my illusion that what was being presented on screen was actually happening, and that Tom Rowland and Jo Walker were my friends, and that we were maybe going to start a band together. What? For all the enjoyment I got out of it, Death Trip is not without its problems. Firstly, it's a little top heavy with characters, a problem that could have been solved by introducing all-purpose Alman about twenty minutes earlier. Secondly, because the leader of the Green Hounds is not revealed until the very end, the film for most of its running time lacks the type of over-the-top villain that has served these movies so well in the past. Thirdly, it makes Jo Walker and Tom Rowland both look like somebody's dad by having them lecture people about drugs -- though thankfully that's dispensed with pretty quickly. Still, it's difficult to determine how much weight to give such concerns when they occur within a context as blissfully weightless as a Kommissar X movie. Personally, I'd prefer to roll with Death Trip and ride the high. Any more serious consideration that that and I fear that Death Trip might just turn around and laugh in my face. However, for those of you who do choose to approach Death Trip with a serious mind, Death Trip will reward you for your efforts by way of a closing gag involving a talking donkey. If you haven't gotten the joke by then, you really are tripping. Labels: Espionage, Eurospies, Series: Kommissar X, Stars: Brad Harris, Year: 1967 posted by Todd at 9:58 PM | 0 Comments Wednesday, April 23, 2008Casus Kiran Release Year: 1968Country: Turkey Starring: Irfan Atasoy, Sevda Ferda, Yidirim Gencer, Suzan Avci, Reha Yurdakul, Cahit Irgat, Erol Gunaydin, Faruk Panter, Huseyin Zan, Haydar Karaer, Mehmet B. Gungor, Zeki Sezer, Umil Kader, Mete Mert, Feridun Cakar Director: Yilmaz Atadeniz Writer: Cetin Inanc Cinematographer: Rafet Siriner Producer: Yilmaz Atadeniz It's hard to write about these old Turkish superhero movies--especially those directed by Yilmaz Atadeniz--without making reference to the Republic serials of the 1940s. The problem with doing so, however, is that many of you young people out there, with your newfangled transistor radios and souped-up hotrods, will have no idea what the hell I'm talking about. I suppose the appropriately curmudgeonly response to that would be to refuse to continue this review until you've educated yourselves on the topic, instead filling space with horrific, Andy Rooney-like ruminations on how butter doesn't taste the way it used to and why on earth is the print in Reader's Digest so small until you return with at least one complete viewing of The Perils of Nyoka or some-such under your belts. But, as much as the thought of such an exercise appeals to me, I'm afraid I can't do so in good conscience. The fact is that those serials were meant to be seen in a very specific context, a context which simply doesn't exist anymore. Now, despite what I said previously, I'm actually not old enough myself to have seen them as they were originally presented--i.e in weekly installments as part of a Saturday matinee at the local movie house presented to an audience that I imagine as being made up entirely of young boys in immaculate baseball caps and striped shirts with names like Skip, Biff and Scooter. I did, however, have a vaguely analogous experience of them in that, when I was kid--back in those lean, desperate times when the selection of TV stations barely scraped the double digits--our local "Creature Features" show started featuring old serials as part of their line-up. This meant that every Saturday night, in the middle of a double feature along the lines of Godzilla vs. The Sea Monster and Agent For H.A.R.M., the host, with much ironic fanfare, would present a chapter of King of the Rocket Men, or Flash Gordon, or one of a number of other serials they showed in their entirety over the course of time. This viewing experience provided me with knowledge that allowed me in later years, while viewing the Turkish film Yilmayan Seytan, to remark, "Why, this film is nothing more than a slavish remake of the 1940 Republic serial The Mysterious Doctor Satan!" And, as all you guys out there know, having the kind of knowledge that enables you to let fly with pithy observations like that gets you a whole lot of the you-know-what. You feeling me, ladies?     But the boon that such knowledge was to my budding social life aside, my point is that I was basically able to see these serials as they were meant to be seen: in twenty minute chunks with a week separating them, so that I had enough time to forget just how exactly similar those chunks were before taking in the next one. As such, I was less bothered by how the serials, by nature of their structure and budgetary limitations, were extremely repetitive in their action from chapter to chapter, and depended a lot on expository dialog included to keep people abreast of a story that, for their audience, unfolded over a couple of months' time. Today most serials that are available for viewing at all can only be seen by way of DVDs which contain them in their entirety. And while it's still possible to watch them one chapter at a time, having them in such a format, the natural inclination is to watch them in a sitting as you would a regular movie--and if you want to have an experience that rapidly goes from being mildly engaging to tedious beyond all imagining, that is exactly what you should do. So, in short, young people, I'm going to let you slide on this one. In fact, I'm going to go so far as to say that, if you want a taste of what the Republic serials were like, but distilled down to their essence--and with a lot more near nudity and violence--you couldn't do much better than a Turkish film like Casus Kiran, aka Turkish Spy Smasher. Now, I say "Republic Serials" not because Republic was the only studio that produced movie serials. It's just that, while other studios, such as Universal and Columbia, did produce them, they only did so as a sideline to their main business, whereas for Republic they were a primary focus. As such, Republic developed and honed the particulars of making these films to such an extent that they would serve as a model for makers of low budget action films the world over for years to come. The Republic method, first of all, was to recycle, recycle, recycle. Not just costumes and sets, but also story concepts and footage would be handed on from serial to serial, with scripts and action structured to accommodate as much hand-me-down content as possible. Secondly, the hands at Republic knew that the best way to keep things moving at a brisk pace without having to resort to too many costly stunts or special effects was to feature wild fist fights--featuring as many participants as possible--at regular intervals, a practice which became a studio trademark.     One young filmmaker who was paying attention to the lessons that Republic had to teach was Turkish director Yilmaz Atadeniz. In fact, Atadeniz would take his love of American serials and channel it into an entire subgenre within Turkish action cinema. His 1967 film Kilink Istanbul'da--which featured both a masked villain in a skeleton costume and a flying hero called Superman--was one of the earliest entries in a wave of masked hero films that would flood Turkish cinemas throughout the late sixties and into the seventies. These direly low budget features not only built upon Republic's model by including as many frenetic multi-person brawls as their running time could contain, but also took that studio's recycling ethos to new heights, borrowing freely not only from each other but from the whole of world cinema, lifting ideas and well-known characters--frequently even actual footage and musical scores--from Western films at will with no regard for copyrights. In Altadeniz's case, the homage to the American movie serials didn't stop at a simple appropriation of style, but went on to include actual remakes of them, such as his take on Columbia's The Phantom, Kizil Maske, and the film we'll be discussing here today, Casus Kiran, which was a remake of Republic's 1942 serial Spy Smasher. Now, I haven't seen the original Spy Smasher, though I am aware that it's widely considered to be one of the best of the Republic serials. Being a recovered comic book nerd, however, I am familiar with Spy Smasher himself. The character originated in the pages of Fawcett's Whiz Comics, which was also the home of the original Captain Marvel before DC Comics sued him out of existence in the fifties (proving that the "D" in their name stood for "Douchebaggery"). When Republic set about bringing the character to the screen, they cast frequent serial star Kane Richmond in the role, and placed at the helm one of their premier directors, William Witney, who had also been responsible for the much lauded Adventures of Captain Marvel the previous year, as well as serial adaptations of Dick Tracy, Zorro and The Lone Ranger. The result proved enduring enough to merit a revival in the sixties and, following the success of the Batman TV series, was edited down to feature length for American TV under the title Spy Smasher Returns.     As originally presented, Spy Smasher was a patriotic wartime American hero who did battle against the axis powers. This means that some perhaps less than slight changes would have to be made to adapt him to a 1960s Turkish milieu. One of the most obvious of these in Casus Kiran is that the villains, rather than being Nazis or Japanese saboteurs, are simply rendered as all purpose enemies of Turkey of unknown political bent or national origin. Another change is a result of a certain tendency that these Turkish comic book adaptations have of always making things just a bit more sexy than their source material. As such, Spy Smasher is provided here with a female sidekick/girlfriend in the well-rounded form of Sevda (Sevda Ferda), who accomplishes her end of the spy smashing clad in a black leather tunic and matching knee-high boots. As for Spy Smasher himself, while his comic book incarnation looked like a cross between a superhero and a WWII era fighter pilot, Casus Kiran presents him kitted out in a form-fitting black ensemble complete with cape, Batman-like mask and conspicuously padded chest. Casus Kiran was made in close proximity to Atadeniz' first series of Kilink films, and the director brings a lot of familiar faces over from those movies into the main cast here. Star Irfan Atasoy was an exhibitor and distributor who, at the time of Kilink Istanbul'da's inception, asked that he be given a starring role in the picture, as well as exclusive distribution rights in his territory, in return for providing financial backing. Atadeniz cast him as Kilink's nemesis Superman and would go on to use him as a hero in a number of subsequent films. Fortunately for all involved, Atasoy, in addition to deep pockets, also possessed the rugged good looks and robust physicality necessary for such roles, as he proves handily in his turn as Spy Smasher. Also present is Kilink himself, Yildirim Gencer, who here plays the masked villain, The Mask, as well as appearing unmasked as "Yildirim", which is simply The Mask posing as a mild mannered suitor of Sevda's in order to gain intelligence on Spy Smasher's operations. Finally we have Suzan Avci reprising her role of "Suzy", Kilink's sexy moll--only here she's "Suzy", the sexy moll of The Mask's number two man, The Black Glove (who doesn't wear a black glove, by the way).     Casus Kiran is a film that is in constant, rapid motion from beginning to end, presenting more of a continuous event than an actual story. One furious fight will lead to a furious chase, which in turn ends in yet another furious fight, and so on. As such, trying to impose the strictures of plot upon it is sort of like trying to identify the conflicts and character arcs within a hurricane or brush fire. Making that task even harder is the fact that, despite no doubt heroic efforts by Onar Films, the existing version is missing large chunks of its running time, with many scenes fading out or simply cutting off before they're resolved--suggesting in turn that there are other scenes that were probably lost entirely. Despite this, however, I will make my best effort to assign some kind of coherent structure to what I witnessed as I watched the film unfold. The film begins with a rapid series of scenes showing spies committing various types of mayhem--mostly consisting of blowing stuff up--all over Istanbul. All of these spies are dressed in black with identical hats and skinny ties, which lends sort of an absurd, surrealist air to the proceedings. Over this, a narrator, stating the obvious, notes that spies have become a bit of a problem for Turkey, and then goes on to tell us about a "plucky young man" who, along with his girlfriend, has taken it upon himself to deal with that problem. Soon after that we see Spy Smasher and Sevda in action, roaring in on their motorcycle to the accompaniment of thundering surf music to shoot and punch the black hats into retreat. When the dust clears, the heroes have gotten their hands on a precious tape recording containing the names of all of the spies in Turkey--a tape that will prove to have little consequence at all to the plot, such as it is, of Casus Kiran.     Sevda is the daughter of police Detective Cavit, and she and Spy Smasher use the fruits of their clandestine crime-fighting activities to secretly help him in his investigations. Because of this, everyone thinks that Cavit is buddies with Spy Smasher and knows his real identity, which seems to really annoy him. The fact is he doesn't know, nor does he know of Sevda's involvement in Spy Smasher's activities, yet no one wants to hear it. By the time we meet the old guy, Cavit is so exasperated with this state of affairs that, whenever someone says that he and Spy Smasher must be really tight, what with all of his helping him with his investigations and everything, Cavit just says, basically, "Look, I could tell you I'm not, but you'll just say that I am anyway, so let's just drop it". Beyond the fact that they're sort of making Sevda's dad's life miserable in the course of helping him, another notable thing about Spy Smasher and Sevda is that he calls her "Darling", while she calls him "Spy Smasher". Of course, all of those black hats aren't just running around blowing stuff up all over Turkey of their own accord. That sort of thing requires management, and what better way to meet the men--and woman--in charge than in a scene in which they slap around some chained women in lingerie. At the top of the organization, as I've mentioned before, is the appropriately named The Mask, with the more mysteriously named The Black Glove at his side. Suzy, in her role as moll, seems to mainly keep the home fires burning, but also serves a crucial function by performing some weird musical numbers in the seedy nightclub that rests atop the gang's headquarters (numbers that sound like traditional Turkish folk music despite Suzy being shown performing in front of a standard issue 1960s pop combo). The Mask and his spy ring's main activity seems to be counterfeiting, but there are also repeated references to "product" in "bags" that, in combination with the existence of a laboratory and some suggestions of tests done on human guinea pigs, seem to indicate that they are also involved in drug trafficking, though it's never entirely made clear. At the time of our meeting them, however, what they're really excited about is that they've kidnapped a British scientist whom they hope to use as bait to draw out a rival gang of spies they wish to eliminate. Spy Smasher and Sevda foil this plan, however, by barging in and rescuing the scientist as soon as The Mask's black hats have finished blowing the rival gang of black hats away. With this The Mask decides that the gang's first order of business should be getting rid of Spy Smasher. He, too, has heard that Detective Cavit is cozy with the hero, and so Spy Smasher and Sevda's efforts to "help" her dad result in him being targeted by a ruthless gang of spies who will stop at nothing to get him to divulge information that he actually doesn't have. With this begins a series of attempts by the gang to kidnap Detective Cavit, which lead to a series of furious fights, chases, and narrow escapes. Somewhere in all this The Mask starts showing up at the Cavit residence in the guise of Yildirim, Sevda's suitor. To be honest, you're not supposed to realize that Yildirim is The Mask, but I don't feel that telling you counts as a "spoiler", since trying to maintain an air of mystery around the villain's identity in a film in which Yildirim Gencer appears is a pretty futile endeavor--much as it would be in a Bollywood movie that featured Amrish Puri or Amjad Khan in the cast. Anyway, knowing that Yildirim is The Mask will make you appreciate all the more the hilarity of one particular scene in which The Mask's goons invade the Cavit home during one of Yildirim's visits. When the black hats pressure Sevda to reveal Spy Smasher's identity, she--apparently weary of Yildirim's advances--fingers him as Spy Smasher, and the black hats, apparently also unaware that Yildirim is their boss, give him a thorough working over, during which one of the goons tells him that he "looks like a duck" without his mask on. In addition to each other, Spy Smasher and Sevda also have a constantly muttering comic relief sidekick, Bidik, who performs a number of undercover assignments for them. These invariably seem to result in Bidik bringing back information that leads Spy Smasher and Sevda into a trap, necessitating that they engage in yet more furious fights followed by chases which end in fights. The inclusion of such a sidekick is just one of many similarities that Casus Kiran bears to a slightly later Turkish film, 1969's Iron Claw the Pirate. This is no real surprise, as Iron Claw was directed by Cetin Inanc, a longtime assistant to Atadeniz who was also the screenwriter of Casus Kiran. Like Casus Kiran, Iron Claw features motorcycle riding boyfriend and girlfriend masked heroes doing battle with a masked villain determined to bring ruin to Turkey--though in the case of Iron Claw that villain was none other than Fantomas. One thing that I think Casus Kiran has over Iron Claw, however, is that, as the female half of the team, Casus Kiran's Sevda gets a much better shake than Iron Claw's girl hero Mine, who tended to get sidelined a lot and didn't seem to play a part in the action equal to that of the male hero. Sevda, on the other hand, despite Spy Smasher's top billing, gets an equal amount of screen time and plays a comparable part in the action, even coming to Spy Smasher's rescue on occasion. As Casus Kiran nears its conclusion, The Mask, finding the entirety of his operation foiled by Spy Smasher, starts to plan his exit from the country. As one last, generous act of silliness, he determines that this move necessitates the casting of the gang's massive supply of gold "into the mold for armchairs". The resulting armchairs look like passenger seats from a commercial airliner, which I think may make this an instance of a plot point that is purely salvage-driven. In any case, The Mask's refusal to travel light proves to be his undoing, and the delay allows Spy Smasher and Sevda to catch up with him, leading to the final furious chase and fistfight. More than any of the other examples of Turkish pulp cinema I've watched, Casus Kiran seemed to have a sort of dreamlike quality. Even after repeated viewings, I still had difficulty maintaining a grasp on its details, as if it had somehow eluded comprehension by way of its combined surreal velocity and faded, ghost-like appearance. A state of hypnosis seemed to set in soon after I pressed "play", as if I was watching less a movie than a screen saver featuring men in black hats and skinny ties being perpetually hurled back and forth to a soundtrack of pilfered surf music. Given this, I have to marvel anew at what is one of the true wonders of world genre cinema: that an inspiration as prosaic as old American movie serials could result in an experience so strange and almost uniquely un-movie like in its effect as Casus Kiran. Though it's a movie of many--if perhaps somewhat simple--pleasures, I think that it is this hallucinatory kick that I treasure most of what I took away from it. It just serves to confirm that, as drugs of choice go, mine--meaning. batshit insane movies like Casus Kiran--is a very good choice indeed. Labels: Action: Superheroes, Country: Turkey, Eurospies, Year: 1968 posted by Todd at 10:04 AM | 4 Comments Thursday, March 20, 2008Phenomenal and the Treasure of Tutankhamen Release Year: 1968Country: Italy Starring: Mauro Parenti, Lucretia Love, Gordon Mitchell, John Karlsen, Carla Romanelli, Cyrus Elias, Charles Miller, Mario Cecchi, Agostino De Simone, Teresa Petrangeli, Spartaco Battisti, Bernardo Bruno, Mario De Rosa, Pieraldo Ferrante, Enrico Marciani. Writer: Ruggero Deodato Director: Ruggero Deodato Cinematographer: Roberto Reale Music: Bruno Nicolai Producer: Mauro Parenti Original Title: Fenomenal e il tesoro di Tutankamen Availability: Buy it from Amazon  Like many people, I find that there are certain types of films that appeal so strongly to me on a conceptual level that I tend to cut them considerable slack when reviewing them. Often times, even the very worst of these films, like when Santo is old and fat and spends half the film driving a station wagon to the grocery store, muster enough of the elements I like to keep me satisfied. And one of my very favorite genres is the Eurospy film and the various offshoots and influenced tributaries -- among them the Italian fumetti-inspired films. As we covered in some weird and convoluted fashion in our review of Kriminal and the three Turkish Kilink films, as well as Danger Diabolik, fumetti were saucy Italian comic books populated by sexy, violent anti-heroes and villains. Super-thief Diabolik became the flashpoint for a whole series of comics and related films that drew both from Diabolik and the James Bond movies. Diabolik himself was a throwback to the old pulp heroes like The Shadow, The Spider, and European counterparts like Fantomas -- with a bit of Batman thrown in for good measure. Most of the heroes and villains of fumetti did not possess super powers. They simply liked dressing up in outlandish body stockings and kicking people in the head. Needless to say, the combination of gratuitous sex appeal in the form of various Eurobabes slinking around in mod 60s mini-wear, combined with garish space-age sets and amoral violence really speaks to a sophisticated man like me. So I tend to gravitate toward these fumetti-inspired films whenever I can find them, and I'm always happy to discover new ones (such as the ones from Turkey). However, it ain't all steak and onions, and if the 1968 fumetti film Phenomenal and the Treasure of Tutankhamen proves nothing else, it proves that it is possible to make a film that will disappoint even someone like me with my incredibly low standards.
Phenomenal and the Treasure of Tutankhamen may be infamous to some for squandering an awesome title and the lovely Lucretia Love in a movie that, in its best moments, manages to be a middling affair. To others, it is infamous merely by association. Wait, let's backtrack. To most people, it isn't infamous at all, because they've never even heard of it. But among people who keep track of movies with titles like Phenomenal and the Treasure of Tutankhamen, the film is notable as the debut (or very close to it) directorial effort from Italian exploitation filmmaker Ruggero Deodato. Deodato is a man who has built his entire career on the shoulders of the controversy generated by his infamous cannibal gore films -- specifically Cannibal Holocaust, a film that amazes me in its ability to be simultaneously disgusting and boring, shocking and banal. Cloaked in the taboo surrounding the film's content -- Deodato was put on trial by a prosecutor who was convinced the film contained actual human snuff footage, instead of just actual animal snuff footage -- Cannibal Holocaust has passed into the rarefied airs of the best known and most infamous cult films in the world. What gets lost amid all the stone dildo rape and ass-to-mouth impaling is that stripped of these few Grand Guignol scenes of brutality, Cannibal Holocaust is a really boring film helmed by a largely pedestrian director. Hell, even with them, the movie is still kind of dull, though if nothing else, it serves as a very useful intellectual exercise for twenty year olds in film studies classes, wanting to prove how shocking yet insightful their reading of the film is. And yes, shamefully I speak from first-hand experience. Deodato's short-comings as a director are made more obvious when you have to watch one of his films that doesn't benefit from several minutes of controversial cannibal torture footage. As I am a sucker, I have seen pretty much everything he's done short of the various TV movies he directed, and then something about a washing machine full of dead people or something, and there's really only been two times that Deodato kept me entertained from start to finish. In my younger and more formative years, I admit I was a booster for films like Jungle Holocaust and even Cannibal Holocaust (actually, I admit I still sort of like Jungle Holocaust), but once the initial gee-whiz shock wears off, you're left forcing yourself through a really boring couple of movies.
Really, the only times Deodata succeeded for me was with the outlandish Raiders of Atlantis, which propels itself along under power of its own brain-twisting looniness, and Barbarians, a sword and sorcery clusterfuck that is as infamous for being idiotic as Cannibal Holocaust is for being disgusting and boring. I guess my big problem with Deodata is his need to intellectually justify the basest of his works by casting them as "cautionary tales" of the hoary old "who's the real savage?" vein. Sort of like the endless string of films that teach me heroin is bad for you, or that absolute power can corrupt you. Thanks, movie makers of the world, for these news flashes. I never would have thought to question the brutality of modern man if Deodata didn't force me to, just like I never would have dreamed that people with untold amounts of power might go mad with it until Caligula taught me otherwise. But heck, at least Caligula is funny, and it has even more film school intellectuals attempting to rationalize and justify its excesses. Even with the Deodato films I've enjoyed, it's often been despite his direction, rather than because of it. Raiders of Atlantis gets by on weirdness, and on hot pink-haired Filipino Road Warrior chicks. Barbarians gets by on the astounding yet affable ineptness of its twin bodybuilder stars. Neither of these films could ever be taken seriously -- unless you see Barbarians as a cautionary tale about letting annoying jugglers and mimes have free passage throughout your kingdom -- and that's probably what makes them tolerable Most of Deodato's other work is just as incompetent, but with the added bonus of having a pretentious moral forced in to make the film seem more palatable and smarter. Given that Phenomenal and the Treasure of Tutankhamen has the title Phenomenal and the Treasure of Tutankhamen, and given that it was a comic book movie supposedly cut from the same cloth as Diabolik and Kriminal, I expected to enjoy the hell out of it despite a rookie Deodato being behind the camera. With any luck, his penchant for making boring movies out of intriguing topics would not yet have kicked in. Alas that being boring seems to be the core competency he showed right out of the gate, and rather than ending up being cut from the same cloth as Diabolik and Kriminal, Phenomenal is more assembled as an elementary school art class project out of the scraps left over. Against all logical presumptions based on the title and the subject matter, Phenomenal and the Treasure of Tutankhamen ends up being a barely watchable bore that is notable only for its ability to turn a movie about villains trying to steal King Tut's treasures being foiled by a dude in a featureless black pantyhose mask into something fairly uninteresting.
Things start out fairly promising, as we join a drug smuggling operation already in progress. Unfortunately for our dastardly ne'r-do-wells, mysterious superhero Phenomenal has smuggled himself onto their smuggling boat, and as they approach the docks, he sets about kicking some ass. Notable is that Phenomenal, unlike most of the other fumetti heroes who made it onto the big screen, is actually a hero. Diabolik and Kriminal were thieves, and certainly not above the occasional murder. But Phenomenal is expressly on the side of the good guys, operating with the blessing -- or at least with the appreciation -- of the local police. Also notable is that Phenomenal has the lamest superhero outfit I've seen in a long time. He wears the aforementioned featureless black mask, which he somehow manages to see out of despite the lack of eyeholes, and this mask he accessorizes with...a long sleeve black t-shirt and a pair of plain black dungarees. Seriously? Diabolik took the time to buy himself all sorts of cool latex suits, and Kilink spend a whole week knitting himself skeleton themed bodystockings, and Phenomenal shows up in jeans and a turtleneck? That's like being the obnoxious kid who shows up on Halloween wearing a cardboard box and says he's a cardboard box when everyone else has awesome Frankenstein and Dracula outfits. Unfortunately, Phenomenal's lame outfit pretty much embodies the thrill level of the movie as a whole. To be fair, the opening is good stuff, and exactly what I wanted from the film. And if you, like me, enjoy it, I suggest you watch it a couple times, because that's pretty much the last you'll be seeing of Phenomenal or of action for a long time. The drug smuggling foiled, Phenomenal dives into the bay, and the plot proper kicks in. A priceless collection of treasures from the tomb of King Tut are on display at the local museum, so naturally security is skittish since every criminal gang in Europe is plotting to steal the treasures. Since, you know, that's what criminal gangs spend their time doing, rather than running prostitution and extortion rackets. Seriously, when was the last time you picked up a newspaper and read the headline, "Mafia Steals Tut's Mask! Scotland Yard Baffled!" Maybe I wouldn't have put it past John Gotti -- he liked to be flamboyant, and has a jacket made from the skin of unborn wolves (or so I was once told). But besides him, I think Tut's treasures are safe from any gangs of guys in gold chains and jogging suits. But they are not safe from big Gordon Mitchell, who leads one of the criminal gangs intent on stealing King Tut's treasures. Of course, they're not the only ones after the goods, and things are further complicated by the fact that cheap but convincing copies of the treasures were made for security reasons. Also thrown into the mix is the standard issue fu-loving, Bruce Wayne style rich guy, Count Guy Norton, played by Mauro Parenti. We are immediately lead to believe that maybe he's Phenomenal, but of course, the most obvious character is never revealed to be the masked man -- unless the film is exceptionally clever or exceptionally dumb. In the end, I'm not even sure why the film played coy with Phenomenal's identity, as it never becomes crucial to the plot, and it never manages to make the viewer give a damn one way or the other. I will say that if you do have a secret identity and a signature costume, no matter how lame, you probably shouldn't carry it folded neatly on top of everything else in your luggage when going to the airport. Most of the film revolves around Gordon Mitchell's thugs plotting to steal the treasure, getting double-crossed, and then plotting again to steal the treasure. Seriously, man, you're a super-powerful gangster. Surely you can hire better help, or I don't know. Beat up old people who run delis and make them pay you protection money. Or just open a casino. There are lots of ways for thuggish mobsters to get rich without having to concoct elaborate plans to steal stuff from natural history museums. But maybe I'm being crass and shallow, assuming that it's all about the money. Maybe it's the thrill of cat burglary, or the beauty of the objects d'art. Or maybe Gordon just wants to put on King Tut's mask and run around town making groaning noises and scaring Lou Costello and Buckwheat. I guess I can see the appeal in that.
Eventually, Phenomenal shows up to stand on the rocks along a winding country road, where he can put his arms on his hips and laugh at people. This was Kilink's specialty, but he usually followed it up by doing a plancha onto a gang of bad guys and starting a fist fight. Phenomenal is in it mostly for the standing around with arms akimbo. But at least our title character is finally back in the movie, leading us on what should be a wild chase across Europe and northern Africa as the various sides steal and re-steal the treasures. Unfortunately, by this point, the film has pretty much drained the viewer of any energy and good will at all, so the globe-trotting final half-hour fails to make up for the previous sixty minutes of uninspired tedium and long shots of Gordon Mitchell's living room. My standard disclaimer applies: I hate hating movies. Teleport City has never been about "ripping bad films a new one." I genuinely enjoy enjoying movies, and if my taste is somewhat suspect, that's really only bad for the people who read these reviews and then get fooled into thinking they want to watch Asambhav just because I liked it. And if there's anything I hate more than hating movies, its hating movies I really thought I was guaranteed to like. It never occurred to me, before viewing the film, that I would be anything but overjoyed by Phenomenal and the Treasure of Tutankhamen. So about half way through, I was more than bored; I was genuinely distraught, like something had gone horribly, horribly wrong. "No!" I yelled earnestly and confused at the television as I watched yet another scene of Gordon Mitchell sitting in a recliner. "No! You're supposed to be a great movie! Come on! Quit messing with me!" but by the time the credits rolled, I had to hang my head in sadness and admit that, despite all the rooting I'd done for it, despite the fact that I believed in it, Phenomenal and the Treasure of Tutankhamen let me down like a politician six months after getting elected on appealing campaign promises. My opinion of Deodato, already low as you know, was made even worse now that he had wandered into one of my favorite genres and stunk the joint up. But I try to be positive, and so let me first mention some of the few good things Phenomenal and the Treasure of Tutankhamen delivers. That first scene was short but cool, with Phenomenal wearing that dress sock on his head and punching out a lot of guys. The music that accompanies that scene, and plays throughout, is far better than the movie in which it appears. Bruno Nicoli was one of the stalwarts of Italian film music, and he's rarely not on top of his game, even if the movie for which he's writing music leaves a lot to be desired. And although it's too little too late, the finale is sort of fun, including a great little fight that stumbles into a women's steam room -- a scene for which there exist several stills featuring the women doing nudity. That was either done for some unseen "international" version, or purely as titillation for the promotional stills, because when the fight actually happens, the women all manage to keep their towels wrapped around them, since even a giant guy beating up a dude in black dungarees with a black toboggan pulled over his face isn't enough to make a proper lady forget her modesty. Not that gratuitous boob shots would have helped this movie -- they just wouldn't have hurt. But a couple fun fights and the coy promise of flesh aren't always enough to salvage a film, and Phenomenal and the Treasure of Tutankhamen has more problems than can be compensated for with those meager table scraps. Phenomenal himself is an obvious rip-off of Diabolik, minus the menacing cool streak, hot girlfriend, awesome lair, and cool collection of cars. Where as Diabolik makes love on a rotating bed covered in stolen hundred dollar bills, Phenomenal seems more likely to find a penny stuck to his ass after he's finished jerking off on the couch. He may stand like Diabolik, and laugh like Diabolik, and wear the Wal-Mart Halloween costume version of Diabolik's outfit, but Phenomenal is certainly no Diabolik. But that's OK since Ruggero Deodato is no Mario Bava. Phenomenal and the Treasure of Tutankhamen never achieves that phantasmagoric, sprawling, big budget feel that Diabolik managed without a big budget. Everything here feels small and uninspired.
The performances of the actors deserve a better movie. No one here is bad at all, though Gordon Mitchell does at times look like he's completely forgotten he's in a movie and is thinking about something else. Still, are you going to pick on Gordon Mitchell? He'll kick sand in your face and steal your girl, leaving you in the lurch to contemplate purchasing a "Charles Atlas Secrets of Dynamic Tension" informational package. As Count Norton, Mauro Parenti is serviceably bland. He lacks the smoldering hotness of John Phillip Law, who played Diabolik, and the impish charm of Kriminal's Glenn Saxson, but if nothing else, he's too dull to be bad. It's no big shock that he never became a big star. It's also not a big shock that he was the producer of this film, not that I'm suggesting he made this film purely as an exercise in vanity. Lucretia Love, who shows up as a love interest/possible criminal/possible good guy, is always a welcome sight, but amid a flimography that includes Battle of the Amazons, The Arena, From Istanbul: Orders to Kill, and Seven Blood-Stained Orchids, a lump of a movie like Phenomenal and the Treasure of Tutankhamen tends to just get forgotten. There are probably worse fumetti movies out there, but right now, this one is the bottom of the barrel for me. Doedato disappoints on every level and fails to deliver pretty much everything you'd want from a fumetti inspired film. It's a shame a title like Phenomenal and the Treasure of Tutankhamen was wasted on a movie that can't live up to its promise. You really shouldn't be calling yourself Phenomenal if you aren't. Labels: Action: Superheroes, Country: Italy, Eurospies, Fumetti, Year: 1968 posted by Keith at 6:17 PM | 6 Comments Friday, November 30, 2007Our Man in Marrakesh
1966, Italy. Starring Tony Randall, Senta Berger, Terry-Thomas, Herbert Lom, Wilfrid Hyde-White, Gregoire Aslan, John Le Mesurier, Klaus Kinski, Margaret Lee. Written by Harry Alan Towers and Peter Yeldham. Directed by Don Sharp.
I expounded recently, in my review of Throne of Fire, on the fact that I am still a sucker for cool cover/poster art, even though I know full well that the movie being advertised is rarely as good as the illustration advertising it. So let me now explore another of my sundry weaknesses: I have a weakness for cool-sounding team-ups. It probably started back when I was a wee sprout camped out in front of the television late at night, watching old Universal horror films. Frankenstein and the Wolfman, in the same movie? Boss! And while the high concept team-ups were generally slightly more dependable than poster art, that didn't mean that they still weren't, by and large, a bit disappointing most of the time. But still, come on! Frankenstein versus the Wolfman! Dev Anand versus hippies! And in the case of Our Man in Marrakesh, Tony Randall versus Klaus Kinski. Tell me that one isn't epic sounding. And while my gullible faith in the high-concept team-up often let me down, I was certain that Tony Randall versus Klaus Kinski in a lighthearted Eurospy adventure would live up to the promise. I'm happy to say that, unlike Throne of Fire, I was pleasantly rewarded this time around. Klaus Kinski is one of those actors whose mere presence in a film is enough to convince that I might as well go ahead and watch it. Even if the movie is no good, it's likely Kinski will be good for a laugh. He's sort of like Vincent Price in that way, and while people bemoan the fact that no one ever did a proper pairing of horror icons like Price with venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee™ or Price with Peter Cushing (they were paired in movies -- Price and Lee in The Oblong Box, and Price, Lee, and Cushing in Scream and Scream Again -- but anyone who has seen those movies was sorely disappointed by the amount of time their horror heroes spent on-screen together), I think what really would have been something to behold would have been Vincent Price versus Klaus Kinski. I can scarcely even fathom how delicious it would have been. I would have cast them as, oh let's say a mortician and a deranged count who must...oh, I don't know, join forces to save the local community center from being bulldozed to make way for a shopping mall. And there would be a scene where Kinski has to pose as a shopping mall Santa (because, you know, Santa Klaus -- har har har) and makes children cry by telling them about medieval torture methods or something. And also there's a pie fight, and a scene where Vincent Price ends up on an out of control pair of roller skates.
So where was I? Oh yes, Klaus Kinski. Putting Kinski in your movie, even for a few minutes, is enough to make me think, "This movie doesn't look very good, but it's got Kinski in it, so what the hell?" And I've seen plenty of movies where it seems like they put Klaus Kinski specifically for that reason. In the cruddy James Glickenhaus espionage film The Soldier, Kinski shows up in a throw-away role that feels like they may have just happened to catch candid footage of Kinski on vacation in the Alps and decided to work it into the movie some how. He might not even know he was in The Soldier. And his presence in Codename: Wildgeese consists almost entirely of him being a jerk while playing golf with Ernest Borgnine -- once again, quite possibly nothing more than Knski vacation video that was inserted into the movie, since I assume Klaus Kinski's vacations consisted to a large degree of banging aspiring actresses and yelling at Ernest Borgnine. Still, even at his worst, Kinski was pretty good, and at his best, he was absolutely mesmerizing. He was, of course, also completely and totally batshit insane. His working relationship with German director and fellow batshit insane guy Werner Herzog has become the stuff of legend, involving as it supposedly did, stabbing, shooting, taking contracts out on each others lives, and lord knows what else. You know, total aside here, but as a kid, I always assumed that Werner Herzog looked like former St. Louis Cardinals manager Whitey Herzog, who to me was just a big fat guy with a tremendous wad of tobacco in his cheek, as depicted in a baseball card I had of his from the 1980s. I can't remember which year it was, but he wasn't looking too good. I was obsessed with that card, one of four that I was obsessed with. The others I remember with more clarity. There was Oscar Gamble's 1976 "Ripped from the Headlines" card from Topps, famous among me and my friends because of the mind-blowing size of Gamble's afro and his ability to tuck part of it into a baseball cap. Then there was the 1981 Topps card for Gene Richards, who we dubbed "the ugliest man in baseball" thanks to his particularly unflattering photo that year. Seriously, dude looked like a hobo who just rolled off a train and into a Padres uniform. Actually, that Topps set from 1981 is chock full of great moments (what the hell was up with Steve Trout?) Then there was the 1976 "Bubble Gum Blowing Champ" card for Kurt Bevacqua. He's just standing there with his hands on his hips, blowing a giant bubble like it's the most bad-ass thing in the world to do.
Anyway, it turns out that Werner Herzog didn't look anything like Whitey Herzog; Werner Herzog looks more like Rollie Fingers. And as for the Oscar Gamble card -- I have that shit in a frame, hanging up on my wall. No joke. As kids, we used to pretend 1981 Gene Richards was waiting under the bed and would come out and kill us once the lights were out, which leads me to think that a team-up between Klaus Kinski and 1981 Gene Richards would have been pretty cool, too. So my point is, I like Klaus Kinski, and his mere presence is enough to creep up even the most innocent and/or boring of movies. I mean, I always fall asleep during Crawlspace, but while I asleep, I have nightmares thinking about Klaus Kinski peering down at me from within an AC vent, like some sour-pussed little angel, yelling insults at me in German. And now that I know Gene Richards is in there with him -- man! There is no way I'm getting to sleep tonight. And then there's Tony Randall. Good old neat and tidy Tony Randall. Good old effeminate (unlike the not at all effeminate Rod Taylor) Tony Randall. Good old bangin' hot chicks 'til he's 80 Tony Randall. Pitting him against Klaus Kinski seems like the perfect idea, and it pretty much is. Randall stars as Andrew Jessel, a mild-mannered traveler who finds himself on a tourist bus from Casablanca to Marrakesh along with a group of other travelers who are not what they seem. There's doddering old British guy Arthur Fairbrother (Wilfrid Hyde-White). There's less doddering old British guy George Lillywhite (John Le Mesurier). And there's scintillating Senta Berger (The Ambushers) as Kyra. One of them is a courier transporting two million dollars to local master criminal Casimer (Herbert Lom) to exchange for a case full of secret documents that are all part of some scheme to corrupt the United Nations, because lord knows the U.N. doesn't do well enough with that on its own. Casimer has the bus tailed, but due to over-zealous security concerns, he ho idea who the courier is. He just knows that everyone on the bus is lying about who they are.
Jessel winds up in Kyra's room, where the two of them discover the body of a man Kyra claims is her lover. It's right about here that Our Man in Marrakesh tips its hand and lets you know that, although it's going to have plenty of thrills and adventure, it's also going to play out with a fairly witty sense of humor. For instance, upon seeing a body with a knife protruding from its back tumble out of a closet, Jessel starts to panic and explain that he thinks there might be something suspicious about the body. Kyra uses her Senta Berger powers to convince him to help hide the body, spinning some vastly complex yarn about jealous parents, attempts to scandalize her, so on and so forth. All Jessel seems to know is that the longer he's with this woman, the more guys who pop up to shoot at him. Eventually, Jessel ends up with Casimer's cache of secret documents, and he and Kyra find themselves on the run across the Moroccan countryside, pursued by dogged henchman Klaus Kinski and aided at times by cop-hating truck driver Achmed (Gregoire Aslan) and adventure-seeking Eaton graduate turned Lawrence of Arabia, El Caid (Terry-Thomas). Our Man in Marrakesh has a lot going for it. First, the cast is top notch, relying on the dependable talents of a host of solid British character actors. Terry-Thomas is...well, he's Terry-Thomas. You know he's going to say "splendid" and "old chap" a whole lot while grinning his magnificent gap-toothed smile. Herbert Lom, last seen around these parts hassling Jason Robards -- and rightly so -- in Murders in the Rue Morgue), plays Casimer with a mix of sophistication and desperation, never going over the top even in a movie that would have tolerated it (there's plenty of over the top once Terry-Thomas shows up). No one in this movie phones it in, and no one comes across as a stiff, as was very common in Eurospy films, especially for the hero. But Tony Randall was hardly the typical Eurospy hero, and Our Man in Marrakesh trades in the predictable rock-jawed man of action for one who is constantly confused and terrified before ultimately rising, more or less, to the occasion. Randall turns in exactly the performance you'd expect. About the only thing he doesn't pull off is the obligatory "seducing the lady" scene, but that's played mostly for laughs anyway, and considering the fact that Randall was siring new kids well into old age, one has to assume that he just knows something I don't. Our Man in Marrakesh relies primarily on the appeal and charisma of Austrian bombshell Senta Berger to fulfill the femme fatale position, and she does so perfectly. Berger was one of my favorite dames of the 1960s, with outrageous curves and a smoky stare that would burn a hole right through a lesser man than Tony Randall. Even as the things she asks him to do for her become increasingly outlandish, I found it easy to believe that he would end up going along with her no matter what. She just has that sort of hypnotic appeal. On the opposite end of the law is Casimer's window dressing girlfriend, Samia, played by the drop-dead beauty Margaret Lee. Lee was a familiar face from all sorts of Eurospy productions in the 1960s, including many of the best and most enjoyable like Secret Agent Super Dragon, Agent 077 Fury in the Orient, Kiss the Girls and Make Them Die, and Dick Smart 2007, among others. Even though Senta is the head-turner here, there's no denying that Margaret lee's parade of mini-dresses and bikinis is more than enough to keep the eye occupied. It's just that hers is a more comedic role, designed mostly to get Herbet Lom to either roll his eyes or jump up and run off to bed.
And then there's Kinski as the head henchman Jonquil. He spends most of the movie wearing a fedora and running around while yelling at other henchmen to come with him. It's not a big role, but it's crucial, and Kinski throws himself into it with his usual manic energy. In the end, it turns out the only way to defeat him is by making him wave his arms around wildly as he falls into a pond, accompanied by pratfall music. Spy spoofs were easy to come by the in the 1960s. In fact, most of the Eurospy films were made with a sense of humor. But then, so were most of the Bond films, so that shouldn't be a surprise. Our Man in Marrakesh is aided greatly by a spirited, witty, fast-moving script that perfectly balances thrills with laughs. It makes sure you are smiling, but not at the expense of wowing you with frequent chases, fist fights, and scenes of Tony Randall sliding off of rooftops. The action and comedy culminate in a finale that sees Casimer and his army of thugs pitted against Jessel and Achmed's army of street hustlers in a hurricane of guns, swords, curved knives, and guys falling into ponds. Our Man in Marrakesh comes to the world courtesy of the team of director Don Sharp and writer-producer Harry Alan Towers. If Sharp and Towers are a duo that sounds familiar to you, that's because the same men brought us the fabulously campy and energetic Face of Fu Manchu just a year earlier. British producer Towers was famous for throwing lots of money at somewhat ridiculous concepts, sort of like a British Dino De Laurentiis, except that Towers would also throw tiny amounts of money at stuff, too (thus the Fu Manchu films directed by Jess Franco). Sharp, aside from directing Face of Fu Manchu and Brides of Fu Manchu for Towers also directed the excellent occult thriller Witchcraft, one Hammer's better vampire outings, 1963's Kiss of the Vampire and then went on to direct episodes of The Avengers.
Between these two men, they give Our Man in Marrakesh a more ambitious scope and A-list feel. Sharp brings the same polish, crisp pace, and playful energy to Our Man in Marrakesh that he would bring to The Avengers and many of his other films, while Towers throws his weight and cash around enough to score a great cast and beautiful location work -- or anyway, I assume it's beautiful location work. Since the best you can hope for right now is a relatively washed out looking old print of this film, you have to infer how great it would look if it wasn't all tattered. Suffice it to say that Towers and crew make their most of the local color, taking us on an action-packed tour of Morocco. On top of that, the "no one is who they seem to be" plot works pretty well without ever becoming irritating or obvious. You really don't know exactly who is who until the very end. Even the "mistaken briefcase" complication that could have been a tired old "oh no, not this again" device works out pretty well. Plots in Eurospy films are usually either terrible, or just completely loopy. Our Man in Marrakesh has a plot that is actually quite good -- the difference between English spy films and continental spy films, I reckon, where the focus was more on the outlandish. However, I do have to point out one rather glaring gaffe in the film. It comes when Tony and Senta are fleeing from Casimer's men and the police. They burst into an open air market where the entire crowd is standing perfectly still on their marks. After a couple seconds of Tony Randall scrambling around, the crowd suddenly starts milling about. Although it's nothing more than a missed cue and a failure to edit it out of the film, it also lends the film a really bizarre, surreal couple of seconds. So Kinski and Randall didn't let me down. I had a blast watching this film. It's too bad Sharp didn't stick around to direct more spy films. He obviously had a knack for it. Although I hadn't heard very much about this movie, and there are almost no reviews online or in print (the indispensables Eurospy Guide is the only mention of it I found, and the only reason I even knew that it would be something worth looking for), I was completely satisfied. Randall makes for an excellent everyman hero, and he's supported by an able cast who act like they care rather than acting like they're above the material...like you, Jason Robards. For shame!
Labels: Espionage, Eurospies, Stars: Klaus Kinski, Year: 1966 posted by Keith at 6:26 PM | 4 Comments Monday, November 26, 2007So Darling, So Deadly Release Year: 1966Country: Italy/Germany Starring: Tony Kendall, Brad Harris, Barbara Frey, Luisa Rivelli, Ernst Fritz Furbringer, Gisela Hahn, Margaret Rose Keil, Jacques Bezard, Giuseppe Mattei, Carlo Tamberlani, Nikola Popovic, H. Amin, Gianfranco Parolini, M. Ojatirato, Sarah Abdullah. Writer: Stefan Gommermann and Gianfranco Parolini Director: Gianfranco Parolini Cinematographer: Francesco Izzarelli Music: Mladen Gutesa Producer: Hans Pfluger and Theo Maria Werner Original Title: Kommissar X - In den Klauen des goldenen Drachen Alternate Titles: Agent Joe Walker: Operation Far East Availability: Buy it from Amazon  It's time for another visit to that magical land where smarmy cheeseballs can sashay up to any hot dame that strikes their fancy and plant a kiss on her without getting slapped in the face or slapped with a lawsuit. The amazing kingdom where smart suits and cocktail dresses are the norm and endless explosive attempts at assassination are met with nothing more than a cocked eyebrow and a knowing smirk. It's the astounding universe of the Kommissar X films, among the most enjoyable and most bizarre entries into the spy craze that swept across the world in the 1960s thanks largely to the success of the James Bond films. The Kommissar X stories began life as a prolific series of espionage potboilers written by Bert F. Island -- a pseudonym that spanned hundreds of novels and who knows how many different authors. The first book was written by C.H. Guenter, but it's doubtful that he wrote all 1,700 plus novels that ended up as part of the series. That number, quite frankly, boggles my mind, and sometimes I look at it and think it can't possibly be right. I mean, Nick Carter operated under a similar multi-author assembly line model, and I think excluding the old pulp novels and restricting ourselves to the stories of the 60s and later, there were...what? A couple hundred novels? The Mack Bolan novels hit something like 670 entries, and I think that's about as high as we got here in the United States.
Anyway, I've never read any of the Kommissar X novels and don't know if any of them have been translated into English, so I can't judge how similar to the source material the movies that were based on them actually are. And really, it doesn't matter to me, because what's important for watching a movie is how much I enjoy the movies. The first film in the series, Kiss Kiss, Kill Kill was a heady concoction of everything I love about Eurospy films and life: jetsetter locations, cool clothes, outlandish villains, mad schemes, and robotized women in lavender wigs and skimpy leather outfits. And lording over it all were co-stars Tony Kendall and Brad Harris, looking good and kicking a little ass. Having enjoyed the first film so much, I was looking forward to the other films in the series. So Darling, So Deadly did not let me down, and in fact, it might have even exceeded my expectations. For the first half hour or more of the film, you'll wonder if there's even a plot, but even if you decide there isn't, you're not going to care, because everything is just that cool. After a series of assassinations, we meet up with tough-as-nails police captain Tom Rowland (big Brad Harris) and sleazy, cheesy private investigator Joe Walker (Tony Kendall), in Singapore, where mysterious, often female assailants start attempting to assassinate the duo as soon as their plane lands. However, this is Rowland and Walker, we're talking about, so their plane exploding on the tarmac, their train exploding on the rails, or the multiple killers taking potshots at them aren't even close to enough to keep them from going water skiing or hitting on the chicks down by the pool at their hotel. Eventually, they get around to their case, which involves protecting a professor and his super secret weapon, which is yet another dumb laser beam that takes ten times as long and is ten times as complicated in performing a feat that would have been ten times more effective if you just used a missile or something. I guess that's why these secret weapons are always being stolen by crackpot criminal societies instead of actual governments. The Soviets probably knew enough to think to themselves, "Hmm, it takes like half an hour and involves all this crazy complex computation and aiming, and all it does is slowly burn a hole in metal. I think we'll stick with missiles." Thus, only the crazies would go after the idiotic super weapon, safely keeping them on the sidelines and out of the real game, in which people eschewed complicated slow-moving lasers in favor of bombs and bullets.
Lucky for us, the efficacy of the weapon being protected has never had much of a correlation to the enjoyment of the film in which the weapon appears, and really, So Darling, So Deadly is so much ridiculous fun that you'll hardly even worry about the super weapon. Tom and Joe certainly don't seem all that concerned about it. They're more interested in the scientist's beautiful daughter, among other hot tamales on parade. So Darling, So Deadly was shot on location in Singapore as a co-production with Cathay Studios, one of the biggest and most prestigious of Asian film studios. I'm not sure how much input they had in this crackpot adventure beyond throwing money at it and procuring shooting permits, but the film certainly makes good use of the location, sending Rowland and Walker on a variety of episodic adventures packed with travelogue footage that would be good material for the board of tourism if it didn't always end with Brad Harris karate chopping the hell out of people while stuff blows up. Still, I suppose even that works for certain types of tourists. The highlight of the Kommissar X sight-seeing tour of Singapore is a chase scene through some sort of theme park full of sculpted gardens and traditional architecture. Shots of hulking Brad Harris leaping with the gingerness of a ballet dancer from pillar to pillar across a fountain are both an amusing visual and a reminder that Harris, unlike many of his former sword and sandal co-stars, maintained a build that mixed bulk with flexibility and athleticism. The bulk of the film's action rests upon his shoulders, both as a performer and as a choreographer, and as he always did, Harris rises to the occasion with inventiveness and gusto. Harris was an accomplished martial artist, and he brings that to the film via a series of impressive, often bone-crunching judo and karate style fights that move fast and furious without the aid of undercranking or trick photography. Tony Kendall tend sot hang out on the sideline, making faces and occasionally punching some sucker in the jaw, but he is very much the more effeminate, Rod Taylor type smoothie contrasted with Brad Harris' gleeful machismo. Both actors are perfect in their roles, and it didn't take long for them to formulate amazing chemistry. The Kommissar X films would be good starring anyone, but they're great starring Harris and Kendall.
The stars are always surrounded by a bevy of sexy ladies who will attempt to kiss or kill -- often both. Sexy German actress Barbara Frey stars as the improbably gorgeous daughter of Professor Akron (E.F. Furbringer). How is it that every crazy scientist who creates a super weapon or an amazing new rocket/jet fuel always has a sexy daughter waiting in the wings to be romanced by the hero and kidnapped by the villain? Oh well, we should all be thankful, I guess, and not look gift horses in the mouth. On the opposite side of the espionage plot are the Golden Dragon Society's army of whip-wielding, machine-gun toting, hotpant-wearing female assassins led by...well, to be honest, the Kommissar X films love to outfit their women is similar costumes, and sometimes it can get hard to keep track given how quickly the film throws new gals up onto the screen. The ladies are led into battle by a mysterious mastermind in a red hood, though the eventual revelation of his identity will surprise absolutely no one. He makes his lair beneath a wax museum of mayhem and torture, which always strikes me as a pretty cool move if you can't afford an island or a hollowed-out volcano. He also employs a vast array of torture implements that are far less effective than just shooting your captives but afford the film ample opportunity to allow Kendall and Harris to escape certain doom after they have been stretched out by a variety of esoteric devices, often involving spikes and laughing evil women at the controls.
Outlandish villains were a staple of Eurospy films, thanks largely to the larger-than-life super-villains that populated Doctor No and Goldfinger. The leader of the Golden Dragons, however, is a character straight out of an old serial. His "house of horrors" lair, his torture devices, his ill-fitting red hood -- these are elements straight out of an old Republic serial. You have expect to catch a glimpse of Bela Lugosi lurking around in the background, winding up clockwork spiders or bossing around an ugly robot. Of course, the Bond movies and novels can trace their roots directly back to pulp series like the Bulldog Drummond stories, and without pulp stories, it's unlikely we would have all been as exited about serials. But Bond downplays these aspects, and in the movies you rarely get the feeling that you are watching a serial. So Darling, So Deadly, on the other hand, revels in its pulp serial trappings, and that helps make this and the whole Kommissar X series something unique within an often cookie cutter genre.
As fun as everything has been up to this point, as cool as the clothes are, as great as Brad Harris' action choreography is, the inarguable highlight of the entire film is the nightclub scene. It finds Harris, clad in his nightlife best, thrashing around like a teenage spazz as a groovy young band plays. Upon witnessing the flailing shenanigans of his partner, Kendall issues one of his two trademark facial expressions (he has "the knowing smirk" and the "pained look of disbelief") and proceeds to slink his way across the dance floor in his own style. I know making big guys do things like dance or tend flower gardens is a cheap and easy way to get a laugh, but it works. Plus, Brad Harris dances with such giddy abandon that you can't help but love the scene. American actor Brad Harris started his career as a football player at UCLA but soon found himself working as a stuntman in Hollywood. At the end of the 1950s, he found himself in Italy working first as a stunt choreographer and then as a second unit director. It was only a matter of time before he found himself in front of the camera again, but in more substantial roles. When Hercules starring Steve Reeves became an international phenomenon, Italian producers were desperate to cash in on the craze. Due to a lack of bodybuilders in Italy, Americans were often brought over to fill the tunics. Since Harris was already huge and in Europe, he was an obvious choice and became one of the early peplum stars. Unlike many of his sword and sandal cohorts, Harris was able to sustain a career once the genre faded from popularity. Harris was a big guy, no doubt, but he maintained his athleticism rather than sacrificing it to size. As such, he was able to adapt to other roles, the most successful of which was Captain Tom Rowland. Harris looks impressive in a smart suit, and he's invaluable as a stunt choreographer. The last Kommissar X film had it's fair share of action, but this one ups the ante. Harris' Tom Rowland seems to be perpetually beating the tar out of people in this movie. On top of that, he's a great actor in this role. It plays to all his strengths. Harris went on to work as a writer and producer
All in all, this is another top-notch, highly enjoyable entry into the series. It handles itself with tongue planted in cheek but never condescends to the audience or forgets to be an enjoyable example of what it's having a little fun with. Harris and Kendall click wonderfully, and the script by Stefan Gommermann and Gianfranco Parolini is breezy and fast-paced. Parolini, who also directed, was a solid Italian exploitation director who, like most of the men who plied their trade in Italy during the 60s, directed everything that was popular, including sword and sandal, espionage, and spaghetti westerns. He worked with Brad Harris on a couple peplum films, including 1961's Samson and 1962's Fury of Hercules. The two must have been pretty comfortable around one another by the time Parolini wrote and directed the first of the Kommissar X films, 1966's Kiss Kiss, Kill Kill (aka Hunting the Unknown). Parolini went on to lend his sure-handed writing and direction to So Darling, So Deadly, Death Trip, and Kill, Panther, Kill, lending the Kommissar X series a consistency in both cast and crew that was missing from many other Eurospy film series. Kids, this is good stuff. This is why we love movies, particularly batty spy movies. Labels: Espionage, Eurospies, Series: Kommissar X, Stars: Brad Harris, Year: 1966 posted by Keith at 12:19 AM | 3 Comments Friday, August 31, 2007Kriminal Release Year: 1966Country: Italy Starring: Glenn Saxson, Helga Line, Andrea Bosic, Ivano Staccioli, Esmeralda Ruspoli, Dante Posani, Franco Fantasia, Susan Baker, Armando Calvo, Mary Arden, Rossella Bergamonti. Director: Umberto Lenzi Writer: Umberto Lenzi and David Moreno Cinematographer: Angelo Lotti Music: Romano Mussolini Producer: Giancarlo Marchetti Promote It: Digg | del.icio.us Round about 1992 or so, when I was but a young sophomore in college, this guy Shannon started turning me on to all sorts of swanky adventure films which, in my myopic kungfu- and horror-centric worldview, I had yet to see. This was good stuff, the sort of films that would become the basis for my goals in life: The President's Analyst and the "Flint" movies starring James Coburn, Robin and the Seven Hoods starring the Rat Pack, Dean Martin's "Matt Helm" spy comedies, and a candy-colored slice of pop-art brilliance called Danger: Diabolik, directed by none other than acclaimed Italian horror master Mario Bava and based on an Italian comic book -- or fumetti if you are feeling all cultured and wantin' to use words from whatever the hell crazy moon-man language it is they speak in Italy (Yoruba, I believe). I vowed on that fateful night, with a thunderstorm raging through the heavens and the rain beating down mercilessly upon my half-clothed body (I was tan and didn't have a beer gut back then, so it's cool), that come hell or high water my life would one day reflect the lives of these heroes and anti-heroes, these capering criminals and swingin' spies who populated these Technicolor adventure confections, with the high-water mark for success being one of two -- preferably both -- scenes: either I would have a waterbed that would, at the press of a button, slide me and a chosen scantily clad bombshell (or two -- I'm a decadent libertine, after all) across the room, tilting as it goes so that we are dumped gracefully into a waiting Jacuzzi, at which time a fully stocked bar would conveniently lower itself from the ceiling (thank you, Matt Helm); or I would drive my black 1967 Jaguar E-Type Series I 4.2 Roadster down a ramp into my secret, underground space-age lair so I could go make love to me beautiful woman on a rotating circular bed covered in piles of recently stolen hundred dollar bills (a moment referenced so many times on Teleport City over the years that I shouldn't even need to tell you where it's from at this point). Truly, the inclusion of either or both of these elements into my daily schedule would signal that I had, indeed, made it. Anyway, it's a work still in progress. Seeing Diabolik was -- well, to call it life-altering is to be a bit overly dramatic, I think. But it was something like that, and the movie did have a curious influence on me. For years, there had been this certain look and style of movie playing in my head. I knew it existed, but I had no clue where to start looking for it. Keep in mind that this is some years before the widespread adoption of the World Wide Web, DVD, and the rise of digitally remastered two-disc special collectors' editions of Porno Holocaust. I knew these movies I wanted were very much like James Bond without being James Bond movies -- sometimes a little cheaper, often more fanciful and outlandish. But just as in those disconnected days with a dearth of information I was unable to find a manufacturer or store where I could purchase a black, slim-cut three-button suit (I'm quite particular about such things), so too was I at a lost as to where I might find these mythical movies I'd invented in my mind and filled with go-go dancing Eurobabes and dudes in fezzes and sunglasses throwing stiletto daggers at each others' backs. Diabolik realized many of these visions, and pointed in the direction I needed to face (Italy) to begin digging up the titles for which I'd been searching (though getting the movies associated with those titles, even in today's era of widespread easy availability, is still proving difficult). It was the key to unlocking a whole world I'd sort of known was out there but could never get to. In that sense, it was much the same as that fateful (oooh!) night that I, a confused teen in Buckner, Kentucky floundering for a sense of identity, stumbled across a broadcast of the USA Channel's Night Flight that was focusing on this stuff called punk rock. As corny -- or disturbed --as it sounds, there was much in this brightly-colored, fast-paced comic book of a movie that I found worth admiring. I appreciated Diabolik's amoral hedonism. He wasn't really a bad guy. He simply disregarded the agreed-upon rules of an over-governed society. He had his own code. And he had a bad-ass pad.
The years filed past, and with the spread of the World Wide Web in the latter half of the 1990s, I was able to start digging up bits and pieces of information about Eurospy films, Diabolik, and much to my elation, the many copycats and offshoots that, like me, had been inspired by this diabolical mastermind (I also found the right suit). Among these, and of particular interest to a guy who, even in his older age, still listens to The Misfits, was a cat named Kriminal, and he wore a skeleton suit. But lets turn the clock back even further, to the era of pulp stories, to where these super-criminals like Diabolik and Kriminal, and lots of other characters who wore cool masks and spelled their names with K's instead of C's (Krispy Kreme was among them, and possibly the most salacious -- certainly the most delicious), trace their roots. In 1911, France was introduced to the character of Fantomas, a suave master of disguise and, in stark contrast to many of the pulp characters with whom people were familiar (like Edgar Rice Burroughs' swashbuckling uber-man John Carter, or any number of smilin' cowboys), a thief. It wasn't the first case of a traditional villain being recast as a charismatic anti-hero, but it certainly opened the door for a wave of similar lawbreakers and misunderstood vigilantes. During the 1930s, there was an explosion in pulp culture of these mysterious costumed characters and anti-heroes, including The Shadow, The Spider, and Robert Howard's Conan the Barbarian. When superhero comic books made the scene in the 1930s, American tastes shifted toward brightly costumed do-gooders like Superman, though at least one notable character remained firmly rooted in the darker elements of the pulp stories: The Bat-Man. Inspired by Zorro and a character from the 1930 film The Bat Whispers, The Bat-Man, as his name was written at the time, is also heavily rooted in the amoral (or at least morally ambiguous) philosophy of pulp anti-heroes, and although Fantomas remains a great influence on the European comic market (and perhaps on The Bat-Man as well -- though both Fantomas and Batman seem to owe a debt to Dumas' Count of Monte Cristo), it's in the brutal origins of The Bat-Man that we can find many of the traits that would be commonplace among the fumetti stars of the 1960s. The tragic past, the vengeful mindset, the playboy alter ego, a distinct lack of superpowers compensated for by near superhuman levels of discipline and training, the willingness to kill and maim the guilty -- these things were in sharp contrast to Superman (though not entirely uncommon in early comic books) but would have been perfectly at home in the Italian comics of the 60s -- which is funny, in a way, considering that during the 60s, DC Comics turned Batman into a smiling boy scout.
Some combination of Batman and Fantomas (who would enjoy his own revival in the 1960s via a series of colorful French productions) cross-pollinated with James Bond beget Diabolik in 1962, the creation of sisters Angela and Luciana Giussani. As many post-war comics, Batman included, became more fantastical and juvenile, diabolic was a brash return to the seedy days of the pulps. He was an accomplished thief, a master of disguise, and an ace at killing anyone who meddles with his ambitions. Clad entirely in a black suit that show sonly his eyes, and accompanied by a beautiful woman who shares his vision, diabolic cut an audacious path through the otherwise sunny, happy era, reflecting no doubt the growing tension and frustration bubbling beneath the veneer of the perfect 50s and that would explode into a time of social upheaval and unrest during the latter half of the 60s. Diabolik's amoral mayhem struck a cord with readers, who quickly catapulted the master thief to the upper limits of pop culture stardom, thus making it obvious that others would follow in Diabolik's steps, each one trying to be more outrageous and offensive than the last. Among the many characters inspired by Diabolik was Kriminal, created by Luciano Secchi working under the pseudonym Max Bunker. Kriminal was a master thief from England, most notable for his curious choice in clothing for a grown man: a black and yellow skeleton suit with a creepy skull mask. It's a difficult look to pull off, but he makes it work. Kriminal -- whose alter ego was Anthony Logan -- did his best to one-up Diabolik, exhibiting sometimes absurd levels of cruelty and violence, as well a parade of increasingly scantily-clad females that he couldn't help but menace. I mean, the dude was wearing a skeleton suit. You either have to menace or be laughed at. It was this potent combination of violence and hitherto unheard of levels of near-nudity that got Kriminal in trouble with so many critics and censors -- and also made it such a hit with readers. Like Diabolik, Batman, Fantomas, and the Mexican luchadores lead by El Santo, Kriminal had no actual superpowers. He couldn't fly or run at super-speeds, and if he needed to kill you, he usually did it with a Luger. In time, as with Batman and Diabolik, Kriminal's sadistic streak was softened, until eventually he really only killed those who were asking for it anyway, though as far as I can tell, he never did get over his need to continually menace a buxom babe whose blouse was falling off. No worries, though, because another skeleton suit wearing anti-hero was waiting to take up the slack and commit depraved acts of which even Kriminal couldn't approve. But we'll come to him in a later review of a different movie.
Although he followed in the footsteps of Diabolik in print, Kriminal beat him to the big screen. In 1966, Kriminal made the jump to movies in a feature film directed by Umberto Lenzi. Among American fans of Italian cult films, Lenzi is probably one of the best known and most misunderstood directors. And in fact he's most misunderstood because of what he's best known for. Lenzi's two best known films in American happen to be his two worst films: 1981's grubby Make Them Die Slowly (aka Cannibal Ferox), a nonsensical cannibal exploitation film that exists for little more reason than to showcase a carnival of primitive tortures in the half hour; and 1980s City of the Walking Dead (aka Nightmare City), a giddily idiotic, totally incompetent, but highly entertaining zombie film. They're both terrible, though amusingly so. Judged on the merits of these two movies, Lenzi perhaps would deserve to placed at the bottom of the barrel. But these are barely his films, and it's obvious that he was just cashing a paycheck. Lenzi's true talent was in the crime film, and during the 1970s he directed a string of blistering hits that are brutal, fast-paced, and proof of what a phenomenal director he could be when the material moved him. If you've poked around Teleport City for any length of time, you know that , Violent Naples is one of my absolute favorites, but it's hardly the only great cop film he made. From Corleone to Brooklyn, The Cynic, The Rat, and The Fist, Gang War in Milan -- these are all top notch films, and alongside Enzo G. Castellari, Lenzi practically created the poliziotteschi genre. In 1966, Lenzi was already a veteran of the Italian exploitation market, having worked his way through Eurospy films, sword and sandal adventures, and historical hellraisers. Making the shift from Eurospy to comic book super-villain hijinks was no problem, as the fumetti-inspired films of the late 60s were a direct outgrowth of the espionage genre and shared many of the same trappings and stylistic flourishes. His big-screen adaptation of Kriminal looks very much like a big budget Eurospy film, taking the strangely clad anti-hero on a globe-trotting adventure that leads from the gallows of London to Spain, and finally to Istanbul in pursuit of some diamonds. Or something. To be honest, the DVD I have of this movie isn't subtitled, and I learned enough Italian to get by in the country on a two-week long road trip. So my grasping of some of the nuances of the plot -- if indeed Kriminal can be said to have nuances -- is tenuous in many spots.
Dutch actor Rolf Boes (under the pseudonym Glenn Saxson, which is Italian for "Son of Clarence Clemens") stars as the titular Kriminal, about to be hanged for attempted robbery of the Crown Jewels of England -- a fate he escapes by somehow turning out the lights. Look, if you go into a movie about a guy who runs around in a skeleton costume and immediately start complaining about the implausibility of his escape trick, then you're not going to get anywhere in life. He is pursued by Inspector Milton of Scotland Yard, because all costumed villains need an arch-nemesis at Scotland Yard, where they have a whole division dedicated to opposing garishly costumed super-villains from Italy (like Marco Materazzi). Kriminal then gets involved with a diamond heist, and along the way he romances ladies, kills people, and plants a bomb in the inspector's office that is specifically designed to blow off the shirts of attractive women (or so it seems when we witness the aftermath of his bomb). Kriminal doesn't need to steal -- he could just market this bomb to anyone who attended college in an 80s teen sex comedy, and he'd rake in millions. When Lenzi is at his best as director, his films are snappy and crisply paced. Kriminal is one of his best. It never slows down, but it never goes so fast that you can't stop to luxuriate in all the exotic location work or admire all the swank 60s fashion. It's a much more down-to-earth film than Danger: Diabolik, which two years later would take the genre to a level of pop-art gorgeousness unmatched even by the mighty Barbarella (herself another saucy comic book character), but being less phantasmagorical than Danger: Diabolik leaves plenty of room for swingin' style, and Kriminal has it in spades. The skeleton costume looks a bit ludicrous, but even Glenn Danzig could never really pull a skeleton body stocking off. Within the context of the film, set in such a bizarre universe as the one inhabited by all the fumetti anti-heroes, we can quickly learn to accept the skeleton costume. Plus, as goofy as it looks, it's also sort of awesome. I mean, he puts on a skeleton costume, throws daggers at people, steals from the Queen of England, and makes love to gorgeous Italian women. Truly, Kriminal leads THE LIFE. And Glenn Saxson looks suave and dashing as the lady-killer (among others he kills). Saxson had previously starred in Alberto De Martino's spaghetti western Django Shoots First (De Martino, incidentally, directed a number of great films, including the top notch Eurospy capers Special Mission Lady Chaplin and Operation Kid Brother starring Neil Connery, as well as the infamous poliziotteschi meets giallo , Blazing Magnum starring Stuart Whitman and John Saxon). He would go on to star in a follow-up Kriminal film (which I've yet to see), a couple other actioners, and then a string of saucy 70s erotica with titles like The Hostess Also Likes to Blow the Horn and School of Erotic Enjoyment. He's perfectly suited for the role of Kriminal, and somehow, he manages not to look completely ludicrous when he's strutting around with his mask off and the rest of the skeleton suit still on. Supporting him is a cast of Italian exploitation stalwarts lead by Andrea Bosic as the harried Scotland yard inspector (he would later be a harried bank manager endlessly hassled by Diabolik in that movie). Bosic had appeared previously in Lenzi's Sandokan the Pirate adventures starring American muscleman and Hercules star Steve Reeves, and he starred in something called Two Mafiosi Against Goldfinger, which sounds like something I really need to see. The bombshell factor is fulfilled by a couple of chicks whose character names I couldn't keep straight because I was too busy yelling, "Dove il bagno! I know what that means!" Look, when you speak like five lines of Italian, you get excited when you can understand what the hell someone says. But I do know German-born Helga Line plays ravishing twin sisters Inge and Trudy, hired to transport jewels so Kriminal won't know which one to follow (he still figures it out, because he wears a fuckin' skeleton costume). Line's been in tons of films where I caught myself admiring her: War Goddesses, Hercules and the Tyrants of Babylon, Mission Bloody Mary, Special Mission Lady Chaplin, Password: Kill Agent Gordon; she was even in another fumetti-inspired comic book adventure, 1968's Avenger X, as well as a Santo film! She also made a lot of horror films in the 70s, including Vampire's Night Orgy and some Paul Naschy films where he doesn't even turn into a werewolf. Far and away one of the all-time great Euro cult beauties, she looks painfully beautiful (in double, no less) here as the woman pursued by the diabolical master of evil.
Highlighting the wonderful art design and snappy pace is an incredible swinging score by Roberto Pregadio and Romano Mussolini. While I would still class Kriminal the movie slightly below Danger: Diabolik, the score for Kriminal is outstanding, going so far as to outclass and out-swank Ennio Morricone's great Diabolik score. It keeps perfect pace with the movie and, like the movie, is equal parts suave, menacing, and playful. Even working with the language barrier, Kriminal is a great movie. Lots of action, lots of wit, sexy ladies, and a guy in a skeleton outfit swimming around in ponds and stuff. It easily proves the equal of even the best espionage and comic book capers, qualifying for such rarefied company as Danger: Diabolik, Deadlier than the Male, the Flint movies, and the Connery Bonds. There wasn't a minute of the film that didn't thoroughly delight me, and if I had to drum up any sort of complaint, it would be the cliffhanger ending (Diabolik did the same thing). I know, I know. There's a sequel, with the lead cast all back in place (and directed by Fernando Cerchio). But I haven't been able to find that one yet. No matter -- Kriminal is incredibly cool and highly recommended, even if you don't speak a lick of Italian. Hot dames and a guy in a skeleton suit are, after all, the international language we can all understand. In addition to a sequel, the fact that much of this film was shot in Istanbul inspired Turkish filmmakers to launch their own Kriminal franchise. Kriminal the fumetti character was eventually succeeded by the even more brutal and irredeemable Killing in a series of photonovels -- comic books that use still photography of live-action scenes. As outraged as people were by the Kriminal comic books, Killing was even worse. Kriminal had been banned in France and eventually toned down even in Italy, but Killing more than made up for it, with our skeleton-clad evil-doer sometimes crossing the line into outright psychopathic terrorist and serial killer. In love with the Kriminal movie and inspired by the even more absurd Killing photonovels, Turkish producer-director Yilmaz Atadeniz made Kilink Istanbul'da, and our favorite murderous thief in a skeleton suit found a new home in Turkey. To be continued... Labels: Action: Superheroes, Director: Umberto Lenzi, Eurospies, Fumetti, Guys Dressed as Skeletons, Series: Kriminal and Kilink, Year: 1966 posted by Keith at 5:53 PM | 4 Comments Saturday, December 16, 2006Two Undercover Angels
Digg this article. 1967, Spain/Germany. Starring Janine Reynaud, Rosanna Yanni, Adrian Hoven, Chris Howland, Alexander Engel, Marcelo Arroita-Jauregui, Manolo Otero, Dorit Dom, Ana Casares, Michel Lemoine, Maria Antonia Redondo, Vicente Roca, Jess Franco, Elsa Zabala. Directed by Jess Franco. Written by Jess Franco. Buy it now from Amazon
 .It is always with a heady mix of glee and trepidation that I wander into the fecund and often putrescent waters of Jess Franco's imagination. As we summarized when we reviewed his off-kilter espionage film, The Devil Came from Akasava, Franco's films are often as intriguing as they are awful, and his bizarre mix of genuine talent and an absolute lack of talent make him one of the most difficult European directors to discuss in a way that has any relation at all to some tenuous concept of logic. But then, logic seems to be the least of Franco's concerns when he's making a movie, so perhaps we'd do well to worry about it a lot less when discussing those films. While many fans of B-movie and cult film tend to center their discussion of Franco on his horror and sexploitation (though one could argue that all his films fall into this latter category) output, I tend to be more familiar with his action and espionage films-- and keep in mind that, when discussing Jess Franco, the term "action" is used in an extremely loose fashion by which "action" can be defined as people sitting in a nightclub watching a psychedelic performance art striptease, or it can mean two people standing silently and staring at a rug for a spell. But the reason I like looking at Franco's non-horror films is that, within the realm of horror, and certainly within the more narrowly defined realm of European horror, there is already a lot of incompetence and weirdness and a tendency to abandon logic. So the fact that his horror films are often so weird, and more times than so awful, really isn't all that impressive. However, working in a genre that doesn't carry the baggage of horror film prejudices, one is forced to deal more overtly with Franco's peculiarities. In other words, a weird horror film is just another weird horror film, but a weird spy or caper film seems much weirder because it does not take place in that bizarre world of horror where the bizarre is the point of the genre. Instead, you have to deal with Franco's weirdness as applied to a more recognizably real world (or as real as the world of spy films ever is). Granted, Eurospy films are packed with weirdness and nonsense, but they are also rare and often obscure even to fans of the genre, where as the weirdness of most horror films is a mainstream given.
This serves to augment Franco's whacked-out approach to pretty much all his material and make it glaringly obvious. This means the things he does well tend to shine, just as the things he does poorly (or at least with reckless abandon and disregard for quality) stand out even more than usual. It also serves to better illustrate the techniques and obsessions that go into defining the overall, cross-genre approach of this strange Spanish director, meaning that no matter if it's a spy film or a movie about invisible zombies or something about Frankenstein, there are certain constants that define "the Jess Franco film" at a level above genre categorization, perhaps making "a Jess Franco film" into a genre all itself. These peculiarities, stylistic flourishes, and lapses in talent and/or judgment that together create the Jess Franco Experience (I think they toured with the Jody Foster Army for a while back in the 80s) have been well-documented in just about every write-up of Jess Franco's work, including my own. His 1969 "spy" film Two Undercover Angels, which was later given the more sexploitation-y but less accurate title Sadisterotica, is no different. You can expect weirdly framed shots, lengthy jazz club stripteases, haphazard editing, vacant acting, and a plot that, at its best, flirts with making any damn sense at all. What sets Two Undercover Angels apart from most of Franco's other films is that, like The Devil Came from Akasava, it's pretty enjoyable even if you haven't steeled yourself to the films of Jess Franco (though you will still need a hearty acceptance of weird filmmaking to squeeze any enjoyment out of it). It's not really a spy film per se, but rather like Deadlier than the Male (which seems to be coming up a lot as I plow through this newest crop of spy film reviews), it's a private detective film with the look and feel of the more jet-set, exotic swingin' spy films of the 1960s. It also adopts the good humored, tongue-in-cheeky, anything-goes attitude of the genre's more freewheeling entries, and it's this quirky sense of winking fun that keeps the film afloat.
The film opens with some sort of a fashion shoot, culminating in a gorgeous lady in a wedding veil and white thigh-high stockings preening in front of a mirror. And then, right as that's happening, we cut to the psychedelic credit sequence, then back to the chick, only now she's being attacked by a sort of ape-looking hirsute beast-man thing. It seems like someone asked Franco where the title sequence should go, and he just shoved it somewhere near the top of his film with no regard for whether or not it made any real sense. The beast man, probably moonlighting from his usual gig prowling the night streets alongside the guy from Night of the Bloody Apes and Paul Naschy in werewolf form (I do believe the three of them comprised the core members of the Jess Franco Experience, or as it was known then, "The Jess Franco Experience featuring Gnashin' Paul Naschy"), is named Morpho, and his job is kidnap beautiful women so they can be menaced to the delight of eccentric artist Klaus Tiller, who paints them in the throes of terror. Then, just to be a dick about it, he covers them in plaster and turns them into sculpture, though I don't know if it really counts as sculpture if all you're doing is pouring plaster over a living person. I know lots of madmen do it, so there must be a name for this artistic discipline, but I don't know it. In New York, I think they call it "performance art." The disappearance of this --and many other -- women attracts the attention of two sexy international jet-set private eyes known individually as Diana (Janine Reynaud) and Regina (Rosanna Yanni) and collectively as the Red Lips Detective Agency. I think they toured...oh, never mind. But it does sound like the title of a Tinto Brass film or something starring Shannon Tweed. OK, tangent here: Are Shannon Tweed jokes played out? I'm thinking maybe they are. Like, that's a really out-of-date joke reference, the cult film review equivalent of Martin Short still relying on gags that were tired even before the death of Vaudeville. Do you kids know who Shannon Tweed was? Does Cinemax still play crummy erotic thrillers late at night? Is Cinemax even still around? Why do things change? The world makes me mad. I'm old, and I don't like stuff!
I'm of the opinion that all you need to know of the plot is contained in the summary above, minus my lame old man bit. If you pare it down to, "beautiful women disappear, and two other women try to solve the mystery," then Two Undercover Angels makes sense. If you worry about anything else, the film gets increasingly incoherent. Of course, if you ever go into a Jess Franco film expecting it to be the least bit coherent, you're going to be sorely disappointed and horribly confused. And even if you do pare this film down to a comprehensible high concept, what you have left is still pretty daft. The Red Lips seem to have some sort of connection to Interpol, and I like the idea that, when they could have been chasing terrorists or fighting piracy in the South China Sea or something, Interpol's main concern is solving the case of the disappearing go-go dancers. Actually, I only have the vaguest of ideas regarding what Interpol actually does. I'm an American, and we're protected by Walker Texas Ranger, Dog the Bounty Hunter, and Jack Bauer, so we don't need Interpol. With those three on the case, we barely even need the Army. So for all I know, Interpol's mission isn't to arrest terrorists or combat piracy, and they really do spend the whole day tracking down missing go-go girls and helping out Jackie Chan. It occurs to me, in fact, that everything I think I know about Interpol has come from the Kommisar X films and Jackie Chan's Police Story III: Supercop. And now Two Undercover Angels. So yes, Interpol's mission in the world is to find missing models and go-go girls, slap dames on the bottom, drink cocktails, and put Jackie Chan in a giant metal ring and roll him around a warehouse.
Once Diana and Regina are on the case, the movie becomes a long, welcome procession of atrocious fashion and pointless go-go dancing routines -- both Franco staples, both essential ingredients for a decent movie, as far as I'm concerned. Diana, in particular, wears what has to be one of the most mind-blowingly amazing outfits I've ever seen. Her mega-bell bottomed jumpsuit of many colors is very much the fashion equivalent of taking an LSD trip in an ice cream store staffed entirely by hobo clowns. You could get sucked into that thing and never, ever emerge. We fare better when the girls retire to a beach resort and spend much of the film in cocktail dresses and tiny bikinis. The men, for their part, are a split of the usual Eurospy duds: you have the fat guy in a fedora, you have the mysterious man in a fez and sunglasses, and then some guy in a mustard yellow blazer that looks to have been fashioned from Stein Mart. If it seems like I'm dwelling on the fashion, it's only because Eurospy films, and especially Eurospy films directed by Jess Franco,a re about the look, and clothing plays an important part in setting the proper finger-snappin' tone for the movies. Franco is well-known for inserting striptease and go-go scenes into his films, sometimes seemingly at completely random points and with no connection to anything else going on in the movie. For my money, you never need a real reason for inserting random striptease and go-go dancing scenes into a movie. Any movie. In fact, as I think I've said before, if I were king of the world, I would decree that every single movie, regardless of the genre or the tone, must contain: 1) random stripteases and go-go dancing scenes, 2) a chimp in a fez who slaps someone upside the head then does that impish chimp (or "chimpish") grin while flipping the guy the bird, and 3) Yor using a giant bat to hang glide into a cave to the tune of bombastic prog rock. Also, ninjas.
Two Undercover Angels is pretty solidly packed with go-go stripteases, all of which are set in that magical nightclub that exists in every Jess Franco film. It's the sort of nightclub I wish I could go to in real life, because not only is the floor show comprised of naked women rolling about and go-go dancing, the clientele is comprised entirely of seedy international playboys, assassins in fezzes and sunglasses, bored members of the idle rich, secret agents in smart suits, and hot women in slinky cocktail dresses. Much of the second half of the film seems to play out in such a setting, when we're not on the beach watching Diana's boobs fall out of her bikini while some guy dressed as either a gaucho or a gondolier plays the guitar. Jess Franco may have his shortcomings as a director, but I can't really find any fault with the universe he creates, which is full of the above-mentioned citizens, along with the occasional hairy werewolf henchman and guys in mustard-yellow blazers. In Jess Franco's universe, nothing has to make sense, and everything is accompanied by a snappy cocktail jazz score. So while I may not want to watch many Jess Franco films, I certainly wouldn't mind living in one. Speaking of sense, the plot of Two Undercover Angels starts to make less and less of it as things progress. We soon learn that the Red Lips themselves, specifically Regina, may be the true target of the mad artist and his hirsute companion. This causes them to go to the resort, where they much engage in much go-go dancing and lounging about on the beach in little bikinis before the whole film explodes into an utterly ridiculous and incomprehensible finale in which everyone dashes around the hotel trying to either capture, avoid getting captured, or double-cross each other. When the final credits role, you may have no idea what just happened, but like a wild night out drinking and carousing with beautiful women, you'll still know you had a good time.
Two Undercover Angels came out at the height of what I consider to be sort of a golden age for Jess Franco, or as golden as Franco could ever hope to get. Not coincidentally, this is the era in which he was involved primarily in making crackpot spy and caper films. Beginning with Agent Speciale LK in 1967, Franco plowed through a slew of enjoyable films (to me, anyway), including The Blood of Fu Manchu, The Girl From Rio, Justine, The Castle of Fu Manchu, Eugenie, The Bloody Judge, Venus in Furs, and Nightmares Come at Night, culminating with the sexadelic (a word I think must have been coined explicitly to describe Jess Franco films) one-two punch of Vampyros Lesbos and She Killed in Ecstasy. Also nestled in there quite nicely is Kiss Me, Monster, which also features Regina and Diana as the Red Lips on another assignment that makes even less sense than this one. Most of these films contained at least some air of the 60s spy craze about them, though few of them could really be considered actual spy films. His work is tangential to the spy film, most of the time, possessing many of the trappings but never being flat-out espionage thrillers. If you wanted to plot them on some sort of graph, then Franco's movies are more spy than Bulldog Drummond movies, but less spy than a Kommissar X film. In the end, they simply play out like unrestrained comic books. Franco's direction on Two Undercover Angels is a microcosm of everything that is good and bad about Franco. Keep in mind that, despite the fact that Franco is generally seen as a totally incompetent boob, there were a lot of filmmaking luminaries who had great respect for him as a cinematographer and second unit director (these luminaries would include Orson Welles, among others). And Franco does have moments of brilliance, which is why he's such a hard director to write about. I'd liken him in some ways to Lucio Fulci. Both directors, when they were on their game, could create incredible images. If you simply took stills or small passages of film, it's easy to see how truly inspired some of their visions were. At the same time, a film is more than a procession of images, and it's in the gestalt that Franco, like Fulci, often goes to pieces. Franco often operated without any sense of self-restraint whatsoever, which is why there's so much good stuff in his films, but is also why there is so much tedious, mind-numbingly awful stuff. He would often wear multiple hats, serving as director, editor, cinematographer, and writer (as well as making cameos), and this means that some jobs would get done better than others, and no one was there to reign him in when he started packing his movies with boring crap.
It's in the editing, in particular, that Franco most often fails. His scripts are nonsensical but often fun, especially within the realm of his spy and caper films. His cinematography is often quirky, but it's also full of interesting angles and framing and bright, vibrant colors. But the editing! Oh, the editing! Franco never saw a mundane process he didn't like documenting in its entirety. So you get a lot of scenes of people walking and walking...and walking. Or sitting. Or doing other things that just aren't interesting to watch. I think his spy films like Two Undercover Angels are much better edited than his horror work, much of which I find unwatchable. In fact, Franco's A Virgin Among the Living Dead has the honor of being one of only two films I turned off and have never bothered to finish watching (the other is the Japanese film Casshern, and Ultraviolet came pretty damn close). But in films like Two Undercover Angels, everything is so bubbly and jubilant and fun that Franco's short-comings are pretty easy to roll with, especially if you can just distract yourself with the outlandish fashion and cool music. Two Undercover Angels boasts all of Franco's negative traits, but hey seem far less noticeable in the film this campy and playful than they do in his drearier horror films. If I had to compare it to anything else, I would say it sports an attitude similar to the later Matt Helm films starring Dean Martin. They ain't all that good, but ya can't help but love 'em. Well, I can't, anyway. Franco is helped in delivering a fun movie by the cast, who all perform admirably. Janine Reynaud looks good and performs with charisma and energy. Franco had recently worked with her on the film Succubus, and liked her performance so much that he immediately set about making another film to feature her. I don't know if she ever played the muse the way Soledad Miranda, and later Lina Romay, did for Franco, but he has a long and steady history of building whole periods of filmmaking around a single leading lady. Reynaud already had several Eurospy films tucked into her dayglo bell bottom jumpsuit, including Mission to Caracas, Special Code: Assignment Lost Formula, Agente Logan - missione Ypotron, and Mission Casablanca. In 1968, she worked with Franco for the first time, on Succubus, and would go on to work with him on both of the Red Lips films. She also appeared in a couple saucy sexploitation films from Max Pecas, as well as the superb Sergio Martino directed giallo The Case of the Scorpion's Tale. She seems to disappear almost entirely after 1973, though I don't know the reason. Her work in Two Undercover Angels is exceptionally enjoyable, though, played with a wink and a quick kiss, but never annoyingly so. She's joking around, but she's also being friendly and warm about it.
Her co-star, Rosanna Yanni, looks kind of like a transvestite sometimes, but I don't hold that against her. Franco does have a tendency to swab his female leads in a little too much make-up, and his frequent use of close-ups, bright lighting, and bad touch ups can sometimes wreak havoc on a face. The first time I saw Yanni was in the Paul Naschy film, Frankenstein's Bloody Terror, which um, is a werewolf movie. Actually, it's a werewolf movie where the werewolf (there the werewolf!) fights vampires. Frankenstein? Yeah, he's not in it. You'll have to watch Santo & Blue Demon vs. Doctor Frankenstein if you want some Frankenstein action. Anyway, from there she went on to appear in a movie I should probably see, White Comanche starring William Shatner. Only if your last movie was White Comanche starring William Shatner could working on a Jess Franco film be considered a major step up. She didn't work with Franco much beyond the Red Lips films, but she stayed busy in Spanish horror and action films and ended up working with pretty much all of the major directors of those genres during the 70s, including Leon Klimovsky, Amando de Ossorio, and more outings with Naschy (including Dracula's True Love, which is another movie I came awful close to turning off and never finishing again). She also appeared in one of my favorite curiosities, War Goddess, a boobs 'n' barbarian banes exploitation classic directed by a slumming Terence Young, best known for directing most of the Sean Connery Bond films. Unlike her Two Undercover Angels co-star, Yanni would continue working well into the 80s, and still makes the occasional appearance. Although she looks a little mannish here, she's still an able performer, and more than willing to do at least half a dozen scenes where Morpho sneaks up and grabs her from behind. She has great chemistry with Reynaud, and while only in a Jess Franco film could these two ditzy dames ever successfully solve baffling international crimes, both Yanni and Reynaud are likeable and, within the context of this loopy film, perfectly believable.
Everyone overacts and hams it up, but such histrionics are called for in a movie this loony. There's even a bit of moustache twirling, just in case you were worried. There are plenty of men in the film, but other than Morpho (Michel Lemoine), there's no real reason or way to remember any of them beyond the most basic of traits -- they guy in the fez, the fat guy, the old guy with the epic moustache, the guy in the yellow blazer, etc. The show really belongs to Yanni and Reynaud, and to Franco's elaborately staged go-go striptease sequences. Everything else, including most of the plot, is superfluous, at best, and most of the time it just gets in the way. The Red Lips detectives made their first appearance in 1960, in a black and white Jess Franco film called, simply, Labios Rojos, starring Suzanne Medel and Ana Castor as Christina and Lola respectively. The film was never released in the United States, and indeed it seems as if very few (if any) people have seen hide or hair of it since the original release. It's the pair of 1969 films starring Yanni and Reynaud that define the concept, for anyone who would happen to have a definition of such concepts, that is. Franco would resurrect the Red Lips during the 70s, in two fairly awful films starring Lina Romay, and although I love Lina, those films possess none of the charm of the 60s films, but do contain all of the really bad attempts at comedy.
Of course, a positive review of any Jess Franco film has to be issued with some serious caveats. Two Undercover Angels is not the film for everyone. If your most outre experience with spy or private eye films is You Only Live Twice, then it's unlikely you will get much out of Two Undercover Angels. Wading through the copious amounts of nonsense, bad comedy, and offbeat pacing is more than the average film fan will endure. If you watch a lot of Eurospy films, however, you're a little bit better suited for watching Two Undercover Angels and enjoying it, because you'll be accustomed to quirky spy films with crazy fashion and convoluted plots. Similarly, if you waded into the sillier waters of spy films from other countries -- Black Tight Killers from Japan, for instance, or Dino's Matt Helm films -- you'll probably be better suited to roll with a film as oddball as Two Undercover Angels. I don't know how fans of Franco horror films (I know there must be some) will react. The lack of blood, coyness about nudity (there is some, but it's mostly flashes and teasing), and overall light-as-a-feather mood of the film might put them off. I mean, Morpho has bad facial hair, and may even qualify as a monster, but that's not much. I really enjoyed Two Undercover Angels, though. It's fun and completely weird. It has major flaws, as most Jess Franco films do, but I find them pretty easy to ignore when everything else bops along so breezily. Some day, I'm going to take this, Kiss Me Monster, Blue Rita, The Devil came from Akasava, The Girl from Rio, and Franco's two Fu Manchu films and edit them all together into one massive orgy of disco lights, go-go dancing, naked women, and insane fashion. It would hardly make any less sense than any one of those films taken on their own. Labels: Director: Jess Franco, Espionage, Eurospies, Year: 1967 posted by Keith at 10:49 PM | 4 Comments Friday, December 08, 2006Kiss Kiss, Kill Kill
Digg this article. 1966, Italy/Germany. Starring Tony Kendall, Brad Harris, Maria Perschy, Christa Linder, Ingrid Lotarius, Nikola Popovic, Giuseppe Mattei, Jacques Bezard, Danielle Godet, Olivera Vuco, Giovanni Simonelli, Liliane Dulovic. Directed by Gianfranco Parolini. Written by Werner Hauff, Gianfranco Parolini, Giovanni Simonelli. Buy it now from Amazon
.From time to time we accidentally wander into the realm of the nearly comprehensible, that no man's land where the movies almost make sense. Our journeys sometimes bring us to these uncharted waters, and when cast adrift in them, we do the best we can in such a strange sea. But always what guides us, our great hope on the horizon that forever propels us forward even when things are at their most sane and logical, is the knowledge that we shall one day, like Ulysses returning home to Ithica, return to a familiar port and once again watch the sun set slowly and with fiery bombast over an ocean littered with films that are completely and unequivocally batshit insane. And when we return to this port, to our home, then can rest assured that a smirking Tony Kendall and former peplum b-teamer Brad Harris will be waiting there with open arms, our sweet Penelope clad in a smart suit and ready to duke it out with any number of mad scientists, hooded assassins, or telekinetic donkeys we may have met on these, the legendary journeys of Teleport City. And so with the 1966 Eurospy adventure Kiss Kiss, Kill Kill -- aka Hunting the Unknown -- we here on the HMS Teleport City can raise a mug o' rum, drop anchor, and let loose with a content sigh. It's good to be home, lads. It's good to be home.
Although I rarely turn to quoting other critics and writers, I can't help but highlight the words of Matt Blake, author of The Eurospy Guide (an essential book, if you don't already own it) when he writes of Kiss Kiss, Kill Kill, "When God created man, He had no idea man would ever come up with anything quite this daft." Kiss Kiss, Kill Kill, which is an Italian-German co-production based on the Kommissar X espionage potboilers from Germany, exemplifies everything that was good and right and completely loopy about the more ambitious espionage capers of the 1960s. Kiss Kiss, Kill Kill has everything of which you have ever dreamed in a spy film. It has two heroes -- one a cheeky, smart-ass ladies' man private eye (Tony Kendall), the other a hulking, straight-laced Interpol inspector (Brad Harris). It has smart suits in spades, not to mention dapper fedoras and dames in a vast array of skimpy outfits from bikinis to slinky cocktail dresses. It has fist fights, gun fights, and judo. It has boat chases and car chases and foot chases. It has a sprawling, space-age underground lair staffed by a team of robotized hot chicks in go-go boots. And of course, it has a megalomaniacal super-villain with a goofy plan to hold the world ransom. And unlike some films of the era that have all the ingredients but just invite too many chefs into the kitchen, resulting in a total confectionary disaster (1967 version of Casino Royale, I'm looking you your direction), Kiss Kiss, Kill Kill comes out of the oven smelling sweet as fresh baked pastry but twice as sweet. In other words, this is a damn good movie.
Super-sleuths Joe Walker (frequently accompanied by a theme song with the lyrics, "I, I, I love you, Joe Walker! Just like any woman would love you!") and Tom Rowland have one of those friendships best characterized by the cliche slogan, "Together, they just might save the world...if they don't kill each other first!" Walker is always smirking, always checking out the ladies, and always breaking the rules and regulations by which the uptight Rowland has sworn to operate. When Walker is hired by a beautiful woman whom he meets at random while driving down the road (this happens a lot when you're as suave as Joe Walker) to find her missing nuclear scientist brother, and Rowland is assigned to investigate the assassination (by explosives) of several prominent businessmen, it looks like the two will finally get out of one another's hair, which is especially good news for Joe Walker, as his hair takes considerable effort to style and maintain. Of course, this being a Eurospy film, we know way ahead of time that a convoluted and often times completely improbably chain of events will lead to the two cases being one and the same. And no nuclear scientist has ever disappeared in a Eurospy film without said disappearance being the result of his being kidnapped by some evil mastermind in an underground lair.
Although this is the sort of movie heavily spoofed by things like the Austin Powers series, it's pretty evident that at no point does this film ever take itself very seriously, and as such, it's already something of a parody itself. It feels like the writers just sat down one day with a big bottle of booze and tried to come up with a script that pushed every spy film cliche to the illogical extreme. Joe Walker isn't just a ladies' man. He actually seems to have almost supernatural power over them. His kisses are pretty tame to look at, but simply receiving one can make a woman he's just met and slapped on the bottom loan him her expensive Italian sportscar, no questions asked. A kiss from Joe Walker can make a hypnotized female judo master instantly dismiss her allegiance to her villainous master in favor of helping Joe Walker. He can't go a single scene without having some dame in a short skirt show up in his room. It's like every hot female on the planet, upon being identified as hot, is issued a key to Joe Walker's hotel room. And as Walker himself says when he returns to his room and finds a leggy bombshell he's never met before waiting for him, "The later the hour, the shorter the skirt, the lovelier the guest." Actor Tony Kendall's face is frozen throughout the entire movie in a smarmy smirk. His character is utterly ridiculous. Every line of dialog is a one liner or a corny come-on, and the skirts eat it up no matter how feeble the attempt may be in reality. He pours on the corniness thicker than the pomade in his hair, and believe me, there's a lot of pomade in that hair. He also plays Walker with a sort of disarming feyness. Yeah, Joe Walker is tough, and he bags the dames, but he's also not afraid to sashay if the mood hits him.
Kendall started out life as Luciano Stella, but changed his name just before appearing in Mario Bava's The Whip and the Body alongside Christopher Lee and Dahlia Lavi (who appeared in Casino Royale, alongside Dean Martin in the Matt Helm film The Silencers, and in Some Girls Do, the sequel to the fabulous Deadlier than the Male). Shortly before that, he appeared in the peplum film, Brennus, Enemy of Rome, which starred Gordon Mitchell, who worked the bizarre Mae West Revue alongside fellow bodybuilder and eventual movie star Brad Harris. Kendall starred in a couple more costumed adventures before director Gianfranco Parolini cast him as the oozing playboy private eye Joe Walker, turning Kendall into a European superstar.
His polar opposite is the anal, eternally put-upon Captain Tom Rowland, played by body builder turned peplum star Brad Harris. While Walker is blowing kisses and mixing cocktails and jumping over police barriers in the most dapper fashion possible, Rowland is concentrating on calling in to headquarters, reporting in, and doing that thing where he shakes his hands next to his head and makes the veins in his neck bulge out in exasperation over whatever impish mischief Joe Walker has gotten them into. Whether or not Harris is a good actor doesn't matter, because he was born to play Tom Rowland. Kendall is the smoothie, but as is often the case, Harris's Martin to Kendall's Lewis turns out to be the source of the real comedy. Brad Harris is totally convincing as a man who is being driven completely nuts by his sometimes-friend, and through facial expressions and body language (the two most important aspects of acting in an Italian film, especially one like this where the cast was speaking a mix of German, Italian, English, and Lord knows what else) he mines comedy gold. He's the perfect counterbalance to the lovable-yet-sleazy Joe Walker. Harris was one of the few peplum (those old Hercules movies, in case you missed out on the lingo lesson) stars who successfully transitioned out of the genre when it faltered around 1965 or so. At that time, the two most popular genres in Italy became the spy film, thanks to the success of the James Bond films, and a couple years later, the spaghetti western, thanks to the success of Sergio Leone's A Fistful of Dollars. Most of the stars of the sword and sandal films that ruled the first half of the 1960s with the iron grip of Hercules himself were unable to make the leap into these new genres. Some were just too big -- as Steve Reeves said, you put a bodybuilder in a gunslinger's clothes instead of a tunic, and it just looks silly. Some, like Reg Park, had made their money and decided to call it a day rather than try to adapt to the new films. But a couple -- specifically Brad Harris and Gordon Scott, both of whom had slightly leaner, more athletic builds -- were successful in extending their acting careers beyond the lifespan of the peplum genre (Scott was established before his time in peplum, as the star of a series of well-thought-of Tarzan films that sought to more closely reflect Edgar Rice Burrough's original source material and move the films away from the corniness with which they had become infected).
Harris was more than perfectly cast as Tom Rowland; he was also tapped to choreograph the action and stunts for the films, which results in Kiss Kiss, Kill Kill boasting more dynamic, faster moving action set pieces than many of its contemporaries. Harris was able to work everything out and tap the right men to pull the stunts off -- including himself. Harris looks great in action. The fist fights are fast and brutal, plus he gets to slide down a rope, run around with a machine gun, and kick guys in the nuts. Together, he and Kendall possess a wickedly entertaining chemistry that will keep you laughing and cheering for the duo no matter how harried Rowland becomes, and no matter how groan-inducing Walker's pick-up lines get. Kiss Kiss, Kill Kill is the rare Eurospy film that puts a lot of work into developing its lead characters and pinning the success of the film on their shoulders.
Luckily, they're up to the task, because without Harris and Kendall, Kiss Kiss, Kill Kill would probably have ended up being just another goofy Eurospy film, along the lines of something like Operation Atlantis. Operation Atlantis is a pretty enjoyable espionage adventure, but only if you're already a fan of Eurospy films. If you're not, the combination of a completely insane and nonsensical plot and a lead actor apparently carved from solid granite and with all the command of facial expressions such a material gives you will probably keep you from ever cracking the surface of the movie or getting past the first inane come-on line. Kiss Kiss, Kill Kill has a plot that is only marginally less nonsensical than Operation Atlantis (which we will be reviewing soon enough), but Kendall and Harris are so engaging and charismatic and funny that even someone not accustomed to the, ahh, peculiarities one frequently finds in Eurospy films can still find plenty to enjoy in this movie.
And if not, there's always the fact that this film is pretty to look at. Boasting a decent budget and a fair scope, Kiss Kiss, Kill Kill may not look as lavish and polished as a James Bond film, but it still boasts a gorgeous pop-art sensibility in both set design and costuming. Every hotel room, every living room, is a swingin' pad. Every lobby, every bar, is a swank cocktail lounge full of smartly dressed patrons. The only thing skinnier than Joe Walker's slim-cut suit is his tie. And we get all this before we've even gotten to the villain's lair, which is a sprawling underground lair patrolled by hypnotized women in go-go boots, black catsuits, and metallic lavender-colored wigs, who do their patrolling in convertible stretch Caddies. The lair itself is an endless jumble of sci-spy stuff: multi-colored pipes, multi-colored liquids in beakers, multi-colored blinking lights, and of course, trap doors, drop-down cages, a corridor of fire, and other instruments of death. Our villain, Oberon (played by Jacques Bezard) prefers the posh look of a silly space tunic, while most of his men wear the black pants and tight-fitting shirts preferred by your finer henchmen. From time to time, someone will wander by in a radiation suit, purely so we can establish that people walk around in radiation suits from time to time, thus allowing Joe Walker to don one as a disguise, even though all he does once he has it on is walk up and start punching people. What's the point of a clever disguise if all you do is show up in, stand for two seconds with your arms crossed in a manly fashion, then you start punching everyone? Oh yeah -- the point is that it looks awesome, and Joe Walker is all about awesome. Sometimes he can barely see himself through the glare of his own awesomeness.
Two things get lost in this incredible jumble of cool: the plot, and the lead actresses. Oh, you won't fail to notice the actresses, who spend the entire film clad in whatever makes their bosoms look largest and their rumps look the juiciest, but good luck remembering anything about their characters -- or telling them apart, since half of them show up out of nowhere wearing the same metallic lavender-colored wigs and black catsuits. Maria Perschy plays Joan, the sister of the missing scientist, who also goes undercover as Oberon's secretary. Then there's Bobo, who wears a lavender wig and wants to hire Joe Walker to investigate something, and in so doing puts him in contact with another chick in a lavender wig. Then Joe slaps some dame on the butt and she loans him her car. She turns out to be the daughter of an admiral, and she goes along with Rowland for the big finale in which he and Walker raid Oberon's secret island and the robotized women are freed from their mind control and go on a rampage (a sexy rampage) throughout the lair. And they all have lavender wigs on, too, and sort of out of nowhere, their leader and judo master falls for Joe Walker after she tosses him around judo style for a spell and he responds by planting a big wet one on her lips. Man, look, you're just going to have to go with the flow, because chicks in lavender (and sometimes blonde) wigs are all over the place in this movie, and they're all sporting machine guns.
Somewhere in there is a plot about Oberon and his partners having possession of a large sum of gold, and Oberon offing his partners so he can have all the gold to himself, then irradiate it and use it somehow or other to hold the economies of the world ransom. As far as I know, the Kommissar X books have never been translated into English. I've certainly never read them, and these are the sorts of things I would read if I could. So I really have no idea how closely, if at all, this film reflects any of the books. And although James Bond is the obvious reason movies like this started getting made, Kiss Kiss, Kill Kill actually looks more toward the German Jerry Cotton films for inspiration -- that's Jerry Cotton the FBI agent played by George Nader, not Jerry Cotton the actor, who did not star in any of the Jerry Cotton films. I can't imagine hardly anyone going into Kiss Kiss, Kill Kill worried about the intricacies of the plot, which isn't so much thin as it is completely ludicrous. It's nice that they put it in there, but this is largely an exercise in swanky, swinging fun and attitude, and Kiss Kiss, Kill Kill boasts both of those attributes in spades. Director Parolini, who was a veteran of several peplum before he made the jump to spy films, keeps everything moving as fast as Joe Walker through a bevy of beauties. Even during scenes of exposition, what's being said is so weird, and the guys saying it are so cool, that the movie never loses its cool or falters in its snappy pace. Cinematographer Francesco Izzarelli was winding down a career that started in the 1930s (the Kommisar X series would be his last work), and he brings decades of experience and craftsmanship to the framing and photography of this film. It's absolutely gorgeous, drenched in candy-coloring and full of beautiful locales and wacky sets all filmed to great effect. And matching the jaunty look of the film is the score by Bobby Gutesha, which is a finger-snapping mix of cocktail lounge music and that godawful theme song that will be stuck in your head no matter how hard you fight it. Like Joe Walker's kiss and cocked eyebrow, you can try to deny it, but it will eventually consume you, and your co-workers will wonder why you are walking around the office crooning, "I, I, I love you Joe Walker!"
There are better Eurospy films than this, and there are more outlandish ones (some of the subsequent Kommissar X films, for example), but I don't know if there are any that are this much flat-out fun. Kiss Kiss, Kill Kill is pure pop cinema. It wants nothing more than to look good, have a laugh and a wink, and entertain the viewer. And that it certainly does. Although it looks low budget by Bond standards (thanks in no small part to the dearth of a high quality print, leaving us with scratchy somewhat washed out prints that make the film look a lot cheaper than it actually does), Kiss Kiss, Kill Kill is still unadulterated eye-candy. Kendall and Harris are beyond cool, and the entire goofy, action-packed mess will leave you a with a big, stupid grin on your face even as you realize that Joe Walker, Rowland, and a bevy of bikini beauties reclining by the poolside can only mean one thing:
Someone is getting pushed into that pool, and everyone else is going to laugh as the credits roll. Why not be one of them? Labels: Espionage, Eurospies, Series: Kommissar X, Stars: Brad Harris, Year: 1966 posted by Keith at 2:49 AM | 7 Comments Sunday, December 03, 2006Face of Fu Manchu
Digg this article. 1965, England/Germany. Starring Christopher Lee, Nigel Greene, Joachim Fuchsberger, Karin Dor, James Robertson Justice, Howard Marion-Crawford, Tsai Chin, Walter Rilla, Harry Brogan, Poulet Tu, Eric Young. Directed by Don Sharp. Written by Harry Allen Towers.
It seems fitting that my first post-thanksgiving review should be of a film this goofy. Thanksgiving back home in Kentucky was grand, as it included a visit to Churchill Downs where I raked in a small fortune in winnings (and by small, I mean small, like fifty bucks), bourbon drinking, fried chicken and fried biscuits at Joe Huber's Orchard, Winery, and Family Restaurant, a visit to the Bass Pro Shop where I got to go on a light gun safari (end conclusion -- you don't want to hire me as your crack shot assassin -- the only thing I could consistently hit was the turtle, and that was by accident), and a late-night conversation with my sister, my best friend from high school, as well as another friend newly met, about cadaver dissection in East St. Louis, machine gun battles in Guyana, and watching sub-dermal parasitic worms from the Amazon crawl around beneath the skin of your ankle. It also included the traditional Thanksgiving dinner culminating in the company of my uncle and his five children, almost all of whom were sick. As a result, predictably enough, I have contracted a bit of the sore throat, which means I rely once again on my sweet and sour colored medicine of choice, DayQuil, which tastes like rotting hippie foot but takes care of the pain and makes my head feel light and magical. It also means that, when I sit down to write a review of a film like The Face of Fu Manchu, the review, like the movie, is going to be a little goofier than usual. I should write all my reviews while high on cold medicine. It would be good for my readership and give this site that unique hook it's been missing. I've always assumed that my writing would be better if only I was more whacked out or drunker.
And whacked out or drunk is a pretty good state to be in when you venture into the murky waters of Fu Manchu. In case you need one, the brief history of the name goes a little bit like this. Back in the second decade of the 20th century, there was a British pulp writer by the name of Sax Rohmer, whose specialty -- speciality if you're British like Sax -- was tales revolving around Chinatown and its many shady inhabitants. Much of the imagery Western culture has regarding Chinatown and the Chinese can be traced directly to the fantastical works of Rohmer, who envisioned Chinatown as an impenetrable tangle of secret passages, opium dens, brothels, trap doors, and long-fingernailed assassins wielding ancient ceremonial daggers lurking in the shadows. The Chinese themselves in Rohmer's world were frequently described as cunning, deceitful, and perhaps most pervasive of all, inscrutable. Rohmer was tapping into the Caucasian fear of what became known as the "Yellow Peril." For much of the 19th century, several Western powers, most notably among them Great Britain, maintained substantial control over key ports and cities in China, and managed to wrangle some small manner of control (though to a far lesser extent) over areas of Japan. It was an arrangement that wasn't going to last forever, though, and rightfully so if you were one of the natives, who often found themselves second-class citizens, if indeed they were considered citizens at all, in their own countries. The Boxer Rebellion got the ball rolling, even though the rebellion itself was crushed, but things really came to a head during the Russo-Japanese War, which was fought primarily in China and for control of what would logically be considered Chinese territory. The Japanese had seen the writing on the wall and began an extremely diligent and rapid campaign to modernize their system of government as well as their military to more closely reflect and take advantage of advances that had occurred in the West. Most famously, this included the abolition of the samurai class and the sword and armor in favor of a national army trained and equipped with rifles, Western military structure, and lighter, Western-style uniforms. In contrast, China had sort of piddled about with similar modernization here and there, but they never really took it seriously, and no substantial progress was ever really made.
So China found itself remaining a largely untrained and almost medieval country caught in between the powers of the West and an increasingly ambitious Japan, who was identifying herself far more with Western nations than with her Asian neighbors. With no real standing national army and no navy to speak of, especially when compared to the modern navies of Japan, Great Britain, and the United States, China -- despite its size and population -- was a ripe plum waiting to be plucked. Its most important city and port, Shanghai, already belonged by default to a consortium of Western powers. It's other most important port, the island-city of Hong Kong, had been British territory since the Opium Wars. Japan, now modernized and ready to rumble, wanted to expand its own influence in China, and their initial dreams of manifest destiny brought them in direct conflict with the vast and mighty empire of Czarist Russia. Well, vast and mighty by reputation, anyway. In reality, Czarist Russia was a creaking, feeble dinosaur on the verge of total collapse. Although it boasted the biggest army in the world, the majority of Russian soldiers were poorly equipped and poorly trained, often charging into battle armed with little more than bladed farm tools. The officers, more times than not, attained their position through political maneuvering or nepotism and were, by and large, ill suited for the actual demands of being a military officer. Russia assumed, for the most part, that the sheer threat of Russia was enough to keep them from conflict, and so the machine fell apart without anyone noticing. Anyone but Japan, that is. Either because they were giddy with their newfound weapons and training, or because they sensed the core incompetence rotting away the Russian military machine, Japan decided to pick a fight. Now excuse me here, because that wicked combination of DayQuil and an obsession with military history is going to kick in and result in a long-winded and ultimately unnecessary look at all this stuff, when in fact, all I really need to do is say, "by the turn of the century, lots of Asians didn't like the West, and lots of Westerners didn't like Asians, and that resulted in the 'inscrutable Oriental' becoming a major villain in Western pulp fiction." But you know how I am. I like to hear myself ramble, especially when I'm light-headed and have had nothing to consume all day but caffeine and cold medicine.
So China and Japan had already gone to war over who got to control Korea. In what became known as the Sino-Japanese War, China was soundly trounced by her better trained and more modern island neighbor. This resulted in Japan gaining dominance in Korea, as well as picking up control over Taiwan and a little place called Port Arthur. Port Arthur isn't the sort of place lost of people hear about and go, "Oh yes, dear, dear Port Arthur! What a fine place!" But if you were Russian at the end of the 19th century, Port Arthur was a big deal, because it was that empire's only warm-water port in the Pacific. They had signed a lengthy lease on the port with China and were none too pleased to see their tenancy voided once Japan won control. So troops were deployed to defend Russian interests in Port Arthur. Additionally, Japan was grappling with maintaining control of Korea, with whom the Russians had signed a mutual protection pact -- presumably for the sole purpose of sparking conflict with someone else, since it was unlikely Russia was going to ever see Korea galloping to their defense against some European country (it was just this sort of tangled network of mutual protection pacts that pulled most of the world into World War I). As a result of the pact, Russia further deployed troops throughout Manchuria and the northern reaches of the Korean peninsula. Needless to say, diplomacy failed and war broke out in the early months of 1904. The long and short of it is that by September of 1905, Russia had been beaten into submission, and a cold, hard slap to the face had been delivered to the empire that had previously assumed that, even with poorly trained and equipped soldiers, they would be able to crush any enemy by sheer force of numbers. Japan felt cheated by the peace treaty brokered by Teddy Roosevelt, feeling that they were robbed of both territory and reparations they deserved, as well as feeling that the West was refusing to give them the respect due to a country that had just proven itself a major global power (there must have been similar feelings about the rapid ascension of the United States back in the day). Additionally, the rest of the Western World received a similar wake-up call. Here was an upstart country of Asians, barely out of their feudal era, and they'd just delivered a crippling defeat to what was supposed to be one of the preeminent powers in the world. Anger and fear resulted, and such paranoia about these devious Orientals was bound to enter into the psyche of the mainstream by way of its popular culture -- which, at the time, would have been manifest primarily in pulp magazines. At the same time, other Asian countries suffering under the yoke of Western "influence" -- and by other I mean China -- were emboldened by the Japanese victory and so decided it was just about time for people to get discontent and uppity with colonial masters who were showing the first signs of losing the grip they had on their territories in the East. And all this brings us to Sax Rohmer.
Born in 1883, Rohmer would have grown up between the era that included the post-Opium war domination of China by Great Britain and the gradual erosion of power and influence that came in the wake of the Russo-Japanese War. He would have been hit by the full force of growing Yellow Peril paranoia at a very impressionable age, and it would seem that the fears, apprehension, and racial condescension that came from growing up in an empire and are often amplified to desperate levels when that empire seems to be slipping, took firm root in the mind of young Rohmer. In 1912, after publishing a few stories and working as a skit writer for comedic stage performers, Sax Rohmer published the serialized adventure The Mysterious Dr. Fu Manchu, featuring the "Oriental" criminal mastermind who would become the embodiment of all the West's fears about Asia getting all uppity and in-their-faces. Rohmer was sort of the quintessential pulp writer: he really wasn't especially good, but he dreamed up some outlandish ideas and knew how to keep you excited and reading regardless, sort of like the precursor of all those people who write airport bookstore spy and thriller novels. Rohmer was writing Fu Manchu stories well into the 1950s, long after the Yellow Peril had overstayed its welcome, and the stories made him phenomenally rich. With such popularity, it was only a matter of time before Rohmer's signature villain found his way onto both stage and screen. The early Fu Manchu films were serials, featuring bad acting, cheap sets, and clumsy writing, but also packed with all that dark, shadowy Chinatown exoticism that made the original stories such hits. Fu was played by a variety of actors, all of them Caucasians in fake eyelid make-up, of course, and the most famous of which was Warner Oland. He wasn't famous at the time, mind you, but he would soon be going on to play another famous "Oriental," albeit a decidedly more heroic one in the form of Charlie Chan. During the 1930s and 40s, as tensions between the West and Japan escalated (never mind that Fu Manchu wasn't Japanese), the character got more impressive screen treatments, being played by none other than Boris Karloff in a relatively lavish adventure. By the end of the war, however, though there was no end of Caucasian actors in Asian make-up hamming it up in Poverty Row potboilers, Fu Manchu and his trademark moustache (which he is never described as having in the stories) pretty much faded from the scene. Until 1965.
By that year, the concept of the Yellow Peril had pretty much vanished, replaced as it was by the Red Scare (as a people, we are terrified of the colors that come together to make McDonalds). The British Empire was finished, Japan was our friend, and though Communist China was a major concern to the powers of the West, Russia and other Communist countries were of equal or greater concern. So the Chinese had to share the duties of playing the boogeyman of the West with other Communist nations. There were still plenty of tensions even between the West and friendly Asian nations. The United States was still grappling with an Asian immigration boom, and there was a bit of nastiness brewing in a little country known to most in the West as French Indochina. But for the most part, things were far more relaxed than they had been in the past hundred years. Which is why dusting off the hoary old visage of Fu Manchu for a new series of films seemed like rather a daft idea. And it would have remained so, had The Face of Fu Manchu not been clever enough to recognize the inherent goofiness of its own premise and arch-villain. Unlike the Yellow Peril serials and stories of the past, this was Fu Manchu for a new, swinging society -- one that had started going nuts over the globe-trotting, smirking espionage adventures of the newly launched James Bond franchise. It was to these films, rather than the Fu Manchu films of the past, that writer-producer Harry Allen Towers and director Don Sharp were looking, and as a result, The Face of Fu Manchu bursts with energy and a sort of good-natured awareness of it's own campiness -- a self-awareness it never lets develop into farce or parody. Towers and Sharp knew that the entire concept of a Fu Manchu film in 1965 ("Not the Yellow Peril again!" one character exclaims in exasperation when the hero of the film mentions Fu Manchu) was joke enough, and the best way to satirize the entire concept of Fu Manchu and the Yellow Peril was to play the film straight and let the concept itself be the joke. It was important that a Caucasian actor be cast. In the past, this had been done either because: 1) while there was no shortage of Asian actors in Hollywood during the 30s and 40s, there was a dearth of Asian actors who could speak precise and clear enough English to make the jump from silent films to talkies, or 2) Hollywood was just racist and didn't really want to work with actual Asian actors. The truth is likely some combination of the two, as is so often the case. By 1965, however, there were plenty of American, Canadian, and British born Asian actors who spoke fluent English (often as their native language), but Towers and Sharp decided that in the case of Fu Manchu, the character should be played by a Caucasian because, in a way, the character was a Caucasian. There was no Asian like Fu Manchu. He was purely the creation of feverish Caucasian imaginations, and so it made thematic sense -- as well as satirical sense -- to cast a white actor in the part. And when that actor is Christopher Lee (last seen in fake eyelids in the early Hammer adventure film Terror of the Tongs when he was a relative unknown), who was by 1965 recognizable and internationally known as Christopher Lee, then it should have been obvious that there was a bit of a joke going on. No one could possibly look up at the screen and think they were watching anyone but Christopher Lee. There was no attempt at all to ever really pass Fu Manchu off as an Asian, or they would have gotten someone less well-known or layered more make-up on (his henchman are even worse, as they slap on some eye shadow and call that "Asian").
The rest of the cast is comprised of well-known British character actors, and the quality of everyone involved should go a long way in telling you that, while they may all be out on a bit of a lark, this is still a big-time production. Set in the era of Sax Rohmer's original stories, British acting stalwart Nigel Greene plays Sir Nayland Smith, the intrepid defender of all things white and British who has spent his life chasing Fu Manchu around the globe and now finally stands, during the credit sequence of this film, present at Fu Manchu's capture and beheading at the hands of the most Caucasian looking Chinese government ever to preside over the Middle Kingdom. But something in the back of Nayland's mind keeps him thinking that, although he's seen Fu Manchu's head roll, the evil criminal mastermind has somehow pulled a fast one and remains alive, in hiding, and plotting his next devastating attack on the white race. This seems to pan out when a famed scientist goes missing. Nayland ends up working with the scientist's daughter, Maria (played by Karin Dor, an experienced vet of European gothic horror films who would go on to become a mainstay in Eurospy films, as well as playing a major roll in the 1967 James Bond adventure You Only Live Twice, featuring Sean Connery as the one white actor in the world even less convincing as an Asian than Christopher Lee), to track down her father and prove that Fu Manchu is indeed alive and behind the kidnapping. Although the Fu Manchu character often results in this film being instantly discarded onto the rubbish heap of racist misfires, that sort of pre-judgment is unfair to The Face of Fu Manchu, which freely acknowledges its own absurdity and pokes a subtle fun at it that may, at times, be too subtle for modern audiences, bred as they are on broad farce and wacky obviousness. Not that I have any problem (sometimes) with farce or wackiness, but The Face of Fu Manchu comes from the school of thinking that holds that the best form of satire is one that doesn't beat you over the head with the fact that it's satire. Instead, it plays it straight, strives to be a damn good example of the type of film it satirizes, and lets the premise be the gag -- in other words, the thought of having Christopher Lee play a towering Chinese guy is silly enough without heaping extra silliness on top of it. Now whether or not you accept The Face of Fu Manchu as satire, successful or otherwise, will have a lot to do with coloring exactly how you react to it. Because if you don't see the joke the makers of the film see, then the movie is going to come across as old-fashioned and racist. But if you do accept that The Face of Fu Manchu is, at its core, poking fun at itself, then you can sit back and enjoy what turns out to be a completely absurd and thoroughly enjoyable blend of comic book super-villainy and sixties style espionage capers wrapped up in a turn-of-the-century cloak. The Face of Fu Manchu is briskly paced, full of action, and packed with all the secret passages, trap doors, and horrible tortures one expects from such a film. It also boasts some great performances, though you wouldn't expect anything less from such a solid bunch of pros. Lee is hilariously pitch perfect in the lead role, adopting all the stereotypical mannerisms and appearances that Sax Rohmer wrongly envisioned the Asians to have. Matching him squarely is Nigel Greene as the stick-up-his-ass defender of the white race. Dor is wonderful as well, and my only complaint about the cast is that Tsai Chin, who plays Fu's equally evil daughter (and would go on to appear in a few Eurospy films, before appearing in You Only Live Twice as the girl Bond is in bed with when he gets "killed" during the pre-credit sequence), isn't given a chance to shine. She's a good actress, and the character of Lin Tang is just as -- perhaps even more -- open to ripe satirization than Fu Manchu himself.
The setting of the film is occasionally problematic, and if you're the sort who gets bent out of shape over anachronistic costumes, weapons, and cars in a sixties pulp action movie about an eight-foot-tall Chinese criminal mastermind with a penchant for kidnapping scientists, then The Face of Fu Manchu might give you pause. The makers of the film play pretty fast and loose with authenticity, but considering the subject matter and the fact that Sax Rohmer's original stories were practically warped fantasy lands unto themselves, I'm not going to get too concerned about guns that don't belong in the era. There are also some plot holes here and there, including the small one of how Fu Manchu escapes his own execution. A double is obviously employed by Fu, apparently because eight-foot-tall Chinese guys are a dime a dozen, and the Chinese government apparently verifies the identity of the greatest villain in the history of the world before Hitler using the method of, "Now you promise you are the real Fu Manchu?" If Harry Allen Towers was writing reality instead of Fu Manchu movies, then we'd be seeing Saddam Hussein hijacking our broadcast airwaves to taunt us with news that we had only hanged his double, and even as we speak, the real Saddam is plotting to hold the world ransom by kidnapping the top scientist in Sweden to force him to invent a lipstick that would kill the leaders of the world when they kissed their mistresses. Not scary to George W. Bush, maybe, but imagine the bullet Bill Clinton dodged! Oh wait...Saddam did use a lot of doubles, didn't he? And the moustache...great Scott, man! SADDAM HUSSEIN IS FU MANCHU!!! Don Sharp (who had recently directed Hammer Studio's superb Kiss of the Vampire), working with cinematographer Ernest Steward (who would go on from this film to work as a cinematographer on the exceptionally enjoyable Deadlier than the Male, as well becoming a regular cinematographer for The Avengers television series), paints a gorgeous picture, full of nice sets and vivid colors. The action (if not the actual location shooting) wanders from China to London, and finally to Tibet for the explosive showdown between Nayland and his army of good guy Asians (played by actual Asians) against Fu Manchu and his evil Asians. Producer Harry Allen Towers also wrote the screenplay, which is clever and enjoyable without ever becoming annoyingly jokey. Towers was still early in his career both as a writer and a producer, but this film helped springboard him to fame and fortune, enabling him to produce a whole slew of Fu Manchu movies, European sexploitation films, and those Gor films, among countless others. His films may not be respectable, but frankly, if you're a regular Teleport City reader, chances are you've not only seen a Harry Allen Towers films; you've probably also claimed it to be one of the greatest movies ever, at some point. I wouldn't call The Face of Fu Manchu the greatest movie ever, but it is a damn good film. If you don't accept it as satire, then yeah, the racial implications may be a little hard to swallow. At the same time, it's awful hard for me to imagine anyone sitting down to watch something this utterly daft and coming out of it with a newfound paranoia regarding sinister eight-foot-tall Chinese dudes. Satirical or not, what I definitely find The Face of Fu Manchu to be is a rollicking good adventure yarn, full of fist fights, car chases, exploding monasteries, underwater lairs, and fiendish traps. A good-natured sense of humor permeates everything, even though the actors themselves play it dead serious, and the overarching feeling of amiability and excitement is as infectious as the snappy Gert Wilden soundtrack. The film was a big success, and that meant more would follow. Some of those retained the lavish look, knowing wink, and sense of fun and adventure that make The Face of Fu Manchu such a delightful films. Others in the series, however, were directed by Jess Franco, and we shall come to those in due time. Labels: Espionage, Eurospies, Series: Fu Manchu, Stars: Christopher Lee, Stars: Karen Dor, Stars: Nigel Greene, Year: 1965 posted by Keith at 10:47 PM | 1 Comments Friday, March 24, 2006Devil Came from Akasava
1971, Germany/Spain. Starring Soledad Miranda, Fred Williams, Horst Tappert, Ewa Stromberg, Siegfried Schurenberg, Walter Rilla, Paul Muller, Blandine Ebinger. Directed by Jess Franco. Written by Paul Andre, Ladislas Fodor, Jess Franco. Purchase from Amazon.com
If you run a site like I do, full of the sort of vitamin-packed goodness that has kids in rolled-up jeans and coon skin caps throwing their glasses of rich, chocolaty Ovaltine over their shoulder with reckless disregard for the public good, in order that they may get to Teleport City's most recent post that much quicker on their rickety soapbox scooters, then there are certain inevitabilities you have to face. For instance, you're probably going to write about Zombie Lake sooner or later. You're probably going to know more about the careers of Wings Hauser and Michael Pare than any sane person would. And, sooner or later, you're going to have to review a Jess Franco film. Franco is a looming monolith that casts a long shadow over the cinematic landscape, a monolith constructed purely out of sheer force of volume. This Spanish-born director, who has worked in Spain as well as Italy, France, Germany, and on occasion, the United States, has made roughly seventy-three million films since the 1960s, and he shows little sign of letting up. In fact, if you break down the cinema of the world based on number of productions per nation, Jess Franco alone qualifies as a sovereign film-producing state, falling just below India but well above Hong Kong and the United States in terms of number of films produced per year. Like any good European cult film director, Franco has worked in every genre conceivable, and perhaps more than a few you of which you wouldn't want any conception whatsoever. Horror, adventure, espionage, thriller, comedy, even a hardcore film or two -- Franco has been there, done that, and most likely in a way that is imminently interesting and often thoroughly unwatchable. How he manages to capture two mutually exclusive reactions is one of the great mysteries of Jess Franco's career, and likely the main reason people keep coming back to his films despite being bored stiff (or in the case of his saucier films, bored but not stiff) by every one of them they've ever seen. There's really no effective way to describe Jess Franco to the uninitiated. He is something they will simply have to discover ont heir own, n small bits and pieces, perhaps completely unaware of the fact that they are learning things about Jess Franco, until the day they wake up and realize they understand him, though they may not like him, and they certainly won't be able to articulate their comprehension to others. If anyone tries to puzzle you with one of those Zen koans, your reply should be to simply show them a Jess Franco film. The thing that makes Franco so unique among the legions of oddball Eurocult directors is that, although he's certainly working in exploitation, he has a very definite artistic vision in even the worst of his films -- and believe me, "the worst of the films" describes the bulk of his film work. Beneath the avalanche of half-assed productions and trashy films, however, lingers the haunting realization that Franco is actually possessed of a tremendous amount of talent in certain respects, making him not unlike guys like Jean Rollin or Ray Dennis Steckler. Steckler, as an example, has never made an especially good film, though he certainly has his moments. But if you sit down, sad as this may found, and really study The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies, there's quite a bit about that film, especially in the realm of cinematography and the ability to create an exceptionally eerie atmosphere, that is quite accomplished. French director Jean Rollin was the same way. He was a master of the quirky, off-kilter mood.
But where guys like Rollin, Steckler, and Franco fall down is in the fact that they are so driven by a vision, however cracked it may be, that they attempt to control as much of the film as possible. This means, on the one hand, that they are able to truly put an auteur's stamp on each film. It also means, unfortunately, that whatever weaknesses they may have (for Rollin and Franco, being of the European cult school, this usually manifests itself in the script and pacing of a film, when they bothered with a script) are significantly augmented by the exclusion of outside voices. Franco is left to wallow in his own vision, and thus in his own excesses, often allowing a film to completely lose focus in favor of dwelling on tiny bits and pieces that fascinate him but simply don't resound with audiences. Franco had his talents -- Orson Welles, of all people, considered Franco a kindred spirit and employed him as a cameraman and second unit director, if I'm not mistaken (and I might be). Thus, watching a Jess Franco film is like going on an archaeological dig. You turn up a lot of useless junk, but from time to time, particularly if you are digging in the mud of cinematography, lighting, costuming, mood, and music, you turn up some real choice pieces. It is traditional, for anyone setting out to write their first review of a Jess Franco film, to begin with his highest profile cult movie, Vampyro Lesbos, a movie that has managed to enter the annals of cult film history based purely on the strength of its title. It is a fine movie with which to begin, because it showcases pretty much every Jess Franco quirk and obsession, not to mention the fact that it boasts a performance by sultry Eurocult beauty Soledad Miranda, who until her untimely death, served as Jess Franco's muse (after her death, Franco would wander lost for a spell until finding Lina Romay, an actress whose willingness to do pretty much anything made her the perfect match for Franco -- she still appears regularly in his films, all these decades later, and often still totally in the buff).
Somehow, I just never got around to reviewing Vampyro Lesbos, just as somehow, I've managed to go all these years without reviewing, as far as I can remember, a Jess Franco film. Well, the latter I can rectify here and now, but as for the former, I'm afraid that the wheel of fate has been spun and landed on a lesser-known, at least until it's recent DVD release, film called The Devil Came from Akasava, though it came out the same yearas Vampyro Lesbos and also stars Soledad Miranda in (and out of) eye-popping outfits and features plenty of Jess Franco trademarks, though none will be so obvious as his undying commitment to the zoom lens. Coming out in 1971, The Devil Came from Akasava (which is based on a story by mystery writer Edgar Wallace) was a bit late to jump the Eurospy bandwagon of the 1960s, which Franco had previously entered with his thoroughly ridiculous and highly entertaining Danger! Death Ray. Still, when a movie is this utterly strange, we can forgive it showing up to the dance a little late, especially since it shows up clad in silver boots and a see-through black tunic thing. Our action, if you want to call it that, begins in the fictional country of Akasava, where a geologist discovers the fabled Philosopher's Stone that can turn any metal into gold. The only problem with the stone is that exposure to it causes one's face to fry. Oh, and it also turns you into a zombie. So, right away, we're going to have zombies, spies, and Soledad Miranda striptease performance art? I guess you can see why Franco has his admirers. No sooner has the geologist found the stone than he is getting shot at. He manages to deliver the stone to Doctor Thorrsen (German cult movie mainstay Horst Tappert, who would work with Franco on a regular basis during the 1970s), but it isn't long before someone show sup to off the assistant geologist and steal the stone. Then Thorrsen himself mysteriously vanishes while, at the same time, back in London, a mysterious man in the shadows who may or may not be Alfred Hitchcock is lurking behind the curtains in Thorrsen's office, just long enough to kill a man sneaking in to try and crack a safe. How's that for intrigue?
It's enough to get sexy British intelligence agent Soledad Miranda assigned to the case, and like any good female operative, she ascertains that the best way to approach the case would be to travel to Akasava and immediately get a job as a stripper in one of those arty, weirdly-lit strip-jazz clubs that only exist in Jess Franco films yet exist in every Jess Franco film. Here is the first, most noticeable, and most enjoyable of Franco's reoccurring obsessions. It kills the man to go ten minutes without inserting a performance art striptease at a jazz club full of swirling lights and candy colors. The man should have made a Bollywood film at some point in his career, because he shares the same affection for cutting to the musical number and the hot dancing girl, regardless of whether or not it has anything at all to do with the scene before or after it, or with the movie in general. Thing is, though these scenes were often gratuitous asides, it's obvious that Franco (himself an avid jazz fan and musician) adores them. They are shot and choreographed beautifully, and Franco's taste in groovy sixties cocktail lounge jazz is impeccable. I've certainly had worse times at the movies than watching Soledad Miranda dance (if you want to call it that; it's more a series of stylized poses -- "voguing," I suppose) while breezy lounge music from some of Europe's most accomplished composers of swanky bachelor pad music go wild. Miranda teams up with Fred Williams as Rex Forrester, a detective from Scotland Yard, who all things considered, seem a little out of their jurisdiction operating in a fictional African nation, but jurisdictional squabbles are really the least of anyone's concerns in a movie with magic stones, Lugers, zombies, and avant-garde jazz-strip clubs. Together, at a very languid and meandering pace, they get around in one way or another of working on the case at hand, tracking down Thorrsen and recovering the stone. Like most Franco films, The Devil Came from Akasava walks to it's own idiosyncratic beat, and it takes its sweet time getting anywhere, allowing Franco to linger on whatever catches his fancy. Luckily, mor etimes than not, that's Soledad Miranda, the sort of women who make sit perfectly clear how a man could be instantly smitten and totally obsessed by a single glimpse. In the world of Eurocult starlets, Edwidge Fenech has always been my favorite, but Soledad Miranda, with dark hair and dark eyes and an engaging yet reserved personality, is the kind of intoxicatingly beautiful woman over whom men willingly destroy themselves. She certainly had that effect on Franco. And film of his in which she appears is about her, even if she isn't the main character, and Franco shoots her like a work of art. One is sort of blinded by her beauty, but even if her presence alone wasn't enough to overshadow the rest of the cast, it wouldn't matter, because there's really not much to this film. Franco populates his film with a cast of experienced B-movie actors, all of whom turn in exactly the performance you expect from a band of such professionals -- which is to say, some are good, and some are just weird. Besides, Soledad, the real star of the film is the zoom lens, which Franco employs with almost gleeful abandon, zooming slowly, zooming rapidly, on any and every thing that happens to catch he camera's eye. It gets disorienting after a while, as the mere act of walking down a hallway seems to justify Franco zooming in and out. Often called the cheap man's dolly shot, the zoom can be petty brutally abused. Witness the deadly "slow zoom" of any number of home vacation movies. It seems like a good idea when you are doing it, like the "slow pan," but when you have to sit through a shot that takes a full two minutes to zoom into some detail, all you can do in the end is curse the day your father ever learned what that button did. Still, there are times when a director or cinematographer can use the zoom to great effect. For example, whenever a cool guy walks into the room in a kungfu film. You just know you're getting a fast zoom in on his face, which can be really disconcerting if the character happens to be played by Lo Lie in the mid-to-late 1970s, when his case of Greasy Uglies was in full effect. Jess Franco, however, seems to zoom as often as possible, very rapidly, usually with no discernable reason other than to keep the shot moving. The end result is that a rather run-of-the-mill trashy James Bond knock-off like The Devil Came from Akasava becomes suddenly hallucinatory. Creating a dreamlike atmosphere is the primary goal in many European cult films, but while we expect it from a vampire or zombie or ghost film, seeing the same technique applied to a straight-forward spy thriller is really odd. Pleasant, though, and along with Soledad Miranda, it's that quirky approach to filmmaking that saves an otherwise dull spy film from going on the scrapheap alongside clunkers like Agent for H.A.R.M.. There's nothing particularly exciting about The Devil Came from Akasava. The action, when it does come, is pretty clumsy and not the least bit thrilling. The espionage isn't particularly engaging, either. But the film appeals to me never the less, perhaps because I can sympathize and relate to Franco's weird pacing and personal quirks. There are times when I simply can't struggle through one of his films -- A Virgin Among the Living Dead remains to this day one of the most excruciating chores to finish that I've ever failed at completing -- but The Devil Came from Akasava is much breezier, eye-catching and fun, helped in large part by Franco's dwelling on Soledad Miranda, a goofy spy plot, and some really good Euro-lounge cocktail music, which gets better when it's employed at really inopportune times that should be tense and exciting save for the breathless "la de do za zu!" female vocals accompanying the action. The Devil Came from Akasava is probably one of Franco's more accessible film from the 1970s, when he really started getting weird. He even appears (as he often does) in a small role. But the film belongs to Soledad Miranda, and she remains the over-arching reason to watch. She made three films in 1971, all with Franco: this, Vampyro Lesbos, and the Lesbos follow-up, She Killed in Ecstasy. It was shortly after completing the filming of The Devil Came from Akasava that she was killed in a car wreck. Like Franco, we were all the worse off for her tragic passing. As far as cheap Eurospy films go, this one clicks nicely into the middle of the pack, though Franco's offbeat direction and Miranda's presence lift above other middle-of-the-road spy films. I have a weakness for goofy spy films, though, so be forewarned that not only to do I go into The Devil Came from Akasava with a higher Franco tolerance than many, I also have a soft spot for European spy capers. So The Devil Came from Akasava is definitely not the sort of spy film I'd recommend to everyone, but I would recommend it to a select few, and you know, if you are looking to dip your toe into the Jess Franco pool, which is deep and wide and rather choked with weeds and surface scum, I think it's a more accessible starting point than Vampyro Lesbos, though really, what you should do is set aside a night and just watch all three Miranda-Franco films from 1971 in a row. That'll do some glorious damage to ya, right there. Labels: Director: Jess Franco, Espionage, Eurospies, Netflix Diary, Series: Edgar Wallace Krimi, Year: 1971 posted by Keith at 11:01 AM | 2 Comments Wednesday, November 30, 2005Lightning Bolt
1965, Italy. Starring Anthony Eisley, Wandisa Guida, Folco Lulli, Diana Lorys,
Luisa Rivelli, Francisco Sanz, Bernabe Barta Barri. Directed by Antonio Margheriti. Written by Alfonso Balcazar and Jose Antonio de la Loma. Eurospy films are like any other continental knock-off of a popular American or British genre. Some are very good and quite lavish, managing to rise above small budgets to deliver a slick looking little thriller full of beautiful women, sets, and locations. Others are threadbare pieces of junk that will bore you to tears. And some are utterly bizarre and incompetent in the most wonderfully enjoyable of fashions. Lightning Bolt falls closer to the last description, but as always, how much of that is the fault of the original filmmakers and how much is the fault of American distributors who recut and dubbed the thing I cannot say. These days, even old porn movies get digitally remastered and restored to their original, uncut version, but no one seems interested in providing widescreen, subtitled prints of the original cuts of cheap European spy capers. So we're left scrounging on the gray market for the dubbed American versions, which isn't a bad thing really, in terms of pure entertainment, but does make it tricky to honestly judge the merits of the film in its original form. So we'll dispense with honesty and simply go with what we have. Just about every Eurospy film that got made during the craze that began right after the death of peplum and right before the rise of spaghetti westerns got made because of the success of the James Bond films, and most of the Eurospy movies aren't shy about wearing their influences on their sleeve. For some, it was by way of casting one of the many European actors who played a villain or a love interest in a Bond film. Thunderball's Adolfo Celli appeared in several Eurospy productions, as did Bond girls like From Russia With Love's Daniela Bianchi. Bernard "M" Lee and Lois "Miss Moneypenny" Maxwell actually both starred as characters very similar to their Bond characters in a Eurospy film starring Sean Connery's younger brother, Neil, who was passed off as 007's brother in a way vague enough to avoid being sued by the producers of the Bond films. For most, however, it was simply a case of repeating the formula and mimicking the ad campaigns. Lightning Bolt is particularly obvious about its intentions to compare itself to Thunderball, which came out in the same year, right down to the tag line, "Lightning Bolt -- He Strikes Like a Ball of Thunder!" The main villain, however, is straight out of Goldfinger with a dash of the Matt Helm film The Ambushers, of all things, thrown in. The original Italian title, in fact, works as hard to recall Goldfinger as the American one does to recall Thunderball. Unless you think Operacione Goldman is a coincidence. The plot -- in which a nefarious arch villain is using laser waves to misguide and blow up moon rockets launched from Cape Canaveral, is actually quite similar to the plot of the Nick Carter novel, Operation Moon Rocket, which was published in 1968. Although it seems unlikely that an obscure Italian spy movie would have been an influence on the Nick Carter novels, it's certainly still a possibility. The Nick Carter stable of authors was varied, after all, and they were drawing ideas from everywhere. So here we go. NASA is in trouble. Every moon rocket they've tested has exploded into a great, fiery ball, though whether or not it's a thunderball remains debatable. The scientists are convinced that computers and technology behind the rockets are sound, so the only answer must be sabotage. Lt. Harry Sennet (American actor Anthony Eisley, who has an impressive b-movie filmography on both sides of the Atlantic) is called in to get to the bottom of things. His cover, naturally, is that of a rich, womanizing playboy looking for good times and big boobs along Florida' coast, which has been visited by just about every 1960s spy from James Bond to Matt Helm. Assisting Sennet on his mission is bombshell captain Patricia Flanagan, another genre stalwart who had appeared in everything from The Awful Dr. Orloff to Superargo and the Faceless Giants. In between gratuitous but welcome scenes of Sennet cruising around the bikini-clad babes lounging about the hotel swimming pool area and frequent grainy stock footage of rockets from NASA, our tale of intrigue is woven, and it leads to a powerful, um, beer brewer (thus the Matt Helm movie similarity). But this is a Eurospy film, and one of the wackier ones at that, so this particular evil brewmeister (who bears more than a passing resemblance to Gert "Goldfinger" Frobe), has a laser he uses to blow up rockets from his -- get this -- space age underwater lair where he keeps his biggest enemies frozen in a state of suspended animation so he can thaw them out from time to time to taunt them and get them up to speed on the success of his mad, evil schemes. Although the production is cheap and the plot is outlandish, this is actually a pretty fun little adventure. Anthony Eisley looks tough and handsome, and he's probably one of the few spies in any of these movies who begins his mission by trying to buy off the bad guys -- with a check! Imagine Sean Connery asking Robert Shaw how much money he'd need not to kill Bond, then saying, "OK, mind if I write you a check?" They don't even accept checks at the grocery store where I shop! The women surrounding Eisley are ridiculously gorgeous, which is one of the things even the cheapest of Eurospy films could get right. The set designs are actually pretty impressive considering the budget and have a swanky 1960s pop art feel to them. There's plenty of fist fights, lots of clumsy sexual innuendo, shoot outs, sea plane flying, and then the whole finale in the undersea fortress. A-ha! James Bond producers must have paid this movie back by stealing that idea for The Spy Who Loved Me. A lot of the film's energy undoubtedly comes from director Antonio Margheriti, possibly the most prolific of all Italian action and thriller directors. Margheriti, who was often renamed "Anthony Dawson" when his films were exported to America, directed his fair share of clunkers, but the bulk of his career is filled with perfectly acceptable genre films, and a few genuine classics like Castle of Blood. You don't get very far in a cult film fan career without getting acquainted with Margheriti, and for the most part, I've always enjoyed his film. Even his weaker work is often infused with a sense of energy and gusto that lifts it above the material and makes it better than it should be. Lightning Bolt, like most Eurospy films, is completely ludicrous, but it's not as if anyone involved with the film doesn't seem aware of that. There's a playful sense of fun, almost tongue in cheek, that makes the film a great deal more entertaining than it might otherwise be. Labels: Director: Antonio Margheriti, Espionage, Eurospies, Year: 1965 posted by Keith at 3:25 PM | 0 Comments Monday, December 13, 2004Danger! Diabolik
1968, Italy. Starring John Phillip Law, Marisa Mell, Michel Piccoli, Adolfo Celi, Claudio Gora, Mario Donen. Directed by Mario Bava. Available on DVD (Amazon).
This lavishly colorful and thoroughly enjoyable comic book romp features what is without a doubt one of the swankest moments in all of cinema, if not the swankest. Having just completed a major heist, our cool-as-liquid-nitrogen anti-hero, Diabolik, returns to his sprawling, space-age underground lair full of cool mod furnishings, where he and his staggeringly beautiful girlfriend, Eva, proceed to make love on a gigantic rotating bed covered in piles upon piles of the money he's just stolen. When I was young, and even not so very long ago, I always looked at this moment as the goal to which all men should aspire. Our lives should be like this, lived with ferocity and daring, panache and style, sexiness and suaveness. I swore, on that day, that I would work tirelessly toward such a destiny, never resting until I, too, could collapse into my rotating bed covered in cash and roll about with the woman of my dreams. As it stands right now, rather than going out drinking with socialites, rubbing elbows with countesses, and dancing the night away in a fancy club before stepping out to steal priceless emeralds and sapphires (I always preferred those stones to diamonds), I spent the evening sitting at home drinking bourbon, watching Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, and cutting out little color cover printouts for all the VHS tapes I'm finally converting to DVD-R in the name of conserving precious space in my ever-shrinking Brooklyn apartment. Diabolik would weep for me, or rather; he would slap me and laugh heartily before bounding off to live his dreamlike, lusty life of adventure and romance. Make no mistake about it. Though I may dress better than many of my fellow movie website masters and perhaps be in slightly better physical condition (though tonight's dinner of bourbon and cake could put an end to that), I'm still pathetic in my own special, desperately lonely way. I mean, I don't even have a hundred Friendsters yet. Granted, Diabolik would look at the whole Friendster thing and shake his head in amused disbelief as he hopped in his Jag to go punch a criminal kingpin then make sweet love to his woman all night long. The 1960s were defined by different things to different people, and while some saw the paramount of the decade as a bunch of scruffy hippies wallowing in the mud for a few days in upstate New York, I always looked at the defining moments of the decade as the films Barbarella and Danger! Diabolik. That or the violence at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Or, um, the start of American involvement in the Vietnam War. Or the Bay of Pigs. Or maybe the assassination of the Kennedy Brothers and Martin Luther King, Jr. Or the arrival of The Beatles. No, it was Barbarella and Diabolik, if for no other reason than they were the exclamation points at the end of an era of which I am particularly fond, that being the carefree Swingin' Sixties that brought the world pop art, slim mod suits, mini-skirts, go-go boots, lots of spy films, and that cute pixie haircut sported by Twiggy. Although born a shade too late to enjoy the proceedings, it's the time with which I most closely identify and still attempt to recreate in my own impoverished and pathetically undaring way. With the escalation of the war in Vietnam and ensuing civil unrest and violence, not to mention the whole hippie movement destroying any vestige of standards in the realm of courtesy, manners, social grace, and dress, there was really no way the swingin' era could survive. Being care-free was taboo, even though hippies tended to spend a large amount of time smoking pot, dropping acid, and staring at their hands. Likewise, adhering to a uniform anti-code of dress became the standard. I won't argue that increased social awareness is a boon to an individual, though I would argue against anyone who claims those who defined the latter portion of the 1960s were any more politically aware than those who came before them who were seen as shallow because they enjoyed go-go dancing more than that weird wavy-hand dance. I know many of you enjoy the ultra-casual, anything-goes world in which we live thanks in part to our hippie forefathers, but I can't count myself among you. I don't wear a shirt and tie because I have to; I wear one because I want to. I like it. It's comfortable to me. Granted, I didn't always hold this sentiment, and there was a time when I could deliver a wild-eyed sermon against the chains of suit and tie oppression as well as any other young punk rocker. But as you get older and start having more important things about which to worry, such as how you're going to get that rotating bed covered in money and a delicious European blonde to accessorize it, you realize that punk, casual - everything is as much a fashion uniform as anything else, and there really is no sin in putting a little effort into things. The only sin, really, is in wearing pleated, relaxed-fit Dockers. The mod era was on its way out, and what better way to send it off than with a duo of eye-popping, self-indulgent, cinematic flings? In 1968, director Roger Vadim gave the world a zero-G striptease by his then-wife Jane Fonda, who was without a doubt in her prime as far as bombshell status is concerned. Dino De Laurentiis, famous for throwing big-budgets and low-budget genre ideas, produced this phantasmagoric, Technicolor acid trip adapted from a French comic strip about a sexy space agent plying the galaxy in search of missing scientists and lustful encounters. It was such a hoot that De Laurentiis decided more of the same would be in order. Again he turned to European comic strips for his source material, this time setting his sights on Diabolik, the ongoing saga of a master criminal who confounds both the police and the established criminal underworld. On paper, it was supposed to be a spiritual if not narrative follow-up to Barbarella. De Laurentiis snagged Mario Bava to direct, and it couldn't have been a better choice. Since his first film in color, Bava had been a mater at playing with light and creating surreal atmospheres even on the tiniest of budgets. Films like Blood and Black Lace (1964), Planet of the Vampires (1965) and Kill, Baby...Kill! (1966) continue to influence films to this day for their bold, convention-bucking use of color and lighting, not to mention violence. With Diabolik, Bava would be allowed to indulge his sweet tooth for candy colored psychedelia equipped with a budget that dwarfed anything with which he'd previously been supplied. Not that the bigger budget mattered to him. In fact, though De Laurentiis granted Bava some $3 million for the film. Bava brought it in right around $400,000, though you'd never know it. The film looks like he spent the full budget, and one can only imagine how out-of-this-world it would have been had Bava not been so conditioned to make the most of every single cent - or lira, or whatever currency applied. French star Jean Sorel (Short Night of Glass Dolls, Lucio Fulci's One on Top of the Other) was slated to portray the suave super-villain/anti-hero Diabolik, while the beautiful Catherine Deneuve (Indochine) was to star as his partner and lover, Eva. Mere days into the production, however, Bava determined that Sorel simply wasn't right for the part, and he was replaced by John Phillip Law, who had starred as the blind angel Pygar in Barbarella and would go on to appear as Sinbad in The Golden Voyage of Sinbad. Law was a jaw-dropping hunk with phenomenal good looks, but he was never the greatest actor on the block. Still since the idea behind Diabolik was not style over substance but rather, as with Barbarella, style as substance, he fit the bill perfectly and certainly looks the part. His reserved - some would say wooden - acting style clicks nicely with the character. Casting woes continued, however, as Deneuve refused to do the nudity required for the aforementioned "making love on a pile of money" scene. Bava had always thought more of concealing than revealing, and while there is certainly plenty of flesh both male and female on display in the scene, there is no actual nudity per se, as in no one sees the earth-shatteringly taboo bare bottom or nipple. All the strategic areas were suitable strategically covered by piles of money. But the scene had to be shot with both actors in the buff, and Deneuve balked. She was quickly and, for us viewers, blessedly replaced by European starlet Marisa Mell. Mell is every bit Law's physical match. A beauty so great as to cause men to drop tot heir knees and weep, she ranks right alongside some of the all-time most beautiful women to ever grace the screen, which is a list that for my money is topped by Nicole Kidman and also includes Halle Berry, Maggie Cheung, Sylvia Koscina, and Kim Novack. As the sophisticated and liberated sidekick to the devil-may-care Diabolik, I can imagine no one else better than Marisa Mell. A serious auto accident in 1963 had left her partially disfigured, and after years of rehabilitation and reconstructive surgery, she emerged looking like some incredible kind of goddess, with the only lingering side effect of her accident being a quirky upturn at the side of her mouth which, just about everyone agrees, amplifies her beauty tenfold. It is most unfortunate that her life would take a drastic downturn not too long after this film. She was relegated to B and C-movie status, then more or less forgotten, making ends meet by posing in a nudie mag and reading poetry to try and supplement what was, by most accounts, rather a wild lifestyle. In the end, Marisa Mell died from cancer in 1992, relatively penniless. A melancholy note, but still she exists on screen in this movie as one of the great and timeless images of grace and beauty. It is that way that I think she is best remembered, as a stunning woman with an impish and playful curl to her lip. For the roll of Diabolik's foils on both sides of the law, Bava had experienced French actor Michel Piccoli as the dogged Inspector Ginco, and the robust Adolfo Celi, still relatively fresh off his memorable turn as the vastly enjoyable villain Emilio Largo in the James Bond film, Thunderball (1965), as the flamboyant Mafia boss, Valmont. It was as solid a cast of character actors as Bava had ever had. He plucks them down into a world that isn't quite real. One of Bava's great strengths, and the element that perhaps made his horror films so successfully eerie, is his ability to warp the familiar, to twist the mundane into something foreign and menacing. Here, he's pulling the same stunt, but purely for laughs. The world of Diabolik is not the world in which we live, though it bears a striking resemblance. It is, instead, a campy pop-art extraction. Money is transported in bags marked with huge dollar signs on the front. Stylistically, it has the most in common with Bava's previous Blood and Black Lace and forthcoming Five Dolls for an August Moon and Four Times that Night, both of which revel in trippy modernist fashion and psychedelic over-indulgence. It wouldn't be surprising to see the characters from any one of those movies show up in the other, though Diabolik is, in my opinion the most realized stylistically and conceptually. It is Bava at his most impish and playful. The story, as stated earlier, was adapted from a long-running European comic strip, or fumetti. Although I'll admit to being a comic book reader in my youth, with intellectual fare like G.I. Joe and the ten thousand or so Spider Man titles that littered the 1980s being at the top of the list, I don't really count myself among the legion of comic book fans. I have no interest in them now, and even the ones that people insist I'll like because they're intelligent and mature, leave me cold and a bit disappointed. Even the ones where people tell me, "no, this one is different," still fall flat. It's not that I deny their power or their artistic merit, even if I find some of the obtuse attempts to appear more "adult" by adding more violence, sex, and cussing, to be monumentally tedious. There are, to be sure, plenty of superbly written comics out there, and none of them appeal to me. Not the big names, not the plucky little independents. It's just a matter of taste, and since my taste in literature these days consists primarily of travel essays, Tony Hillerman Joe Leaphorn/Jim Chee mysteries, and old espionage novels from the 1960s, I'm hardly one to pass judgment on anyone else's reading material, though I am finally getting around to reading John Dos Passos' American trilogy, which I suppose is something every American ought to do. One of my goals for the current phase of my life, after all, is to finish up the many classics and essentials I missed during high school, college, and those heady post-college years when I spent too much time watching pro wrestling. That said, these European comic strips from the 1960s seem like they would have been a lot of fun. Considering they birthed such chain-smoking, sexy anti-heroes as Diabolik, Barbarella, and Modesty Blaise, all clad in skintight fetish gear. Well, I guess that last one is pretty common, actually. Having never read any of the original Diabolik comic strips, but having at least glanced over some English-language plot summaries, I don't think the storyline for the movie is lifted from any single episode, though bits and pieces may have come from all over the comics. The main characters certainly come from the comic strip, and here we get to watch them as Diabolik goes through a series of heists that get him on the bad side of both the police and the old crime syndicates - the establishment, basically. Chief of police Ginco sets a number of traps for Diabolik, but each time Diabolik outsmarts the inspector and makes his getaway with the loot. When one of his heists angers crime lord Valmont, Ginco hatches an unholy alliance with the mob to finally catch this thorn in both their sides. Each heist is more or less a little self-contained episode building toward Ginco's plan to melt down the whole of France's gold reserve in order to lure Diabolik into a trap. The heists are exciting and outlandish, this again being a fantasy world in which the standard laws of common sense and logic do not apply. In his quest to steal a priceless jeweled necklace, Diabolik defeats the inspector's trap by pulling the ol' "stick a photo in front of the security camera" gag. He later smuggles the jewels to safety by fashioning them into bullets, using them to kill an opponent, then posing as said opponent's relative to collect the jewels after cremation. Obviously, there are some logistical problems with this plan, not the least of which would be fitting jewels into a revolver, but this is a comic book world. We're not meant to take anything seriously or worry about realism. This is part of the reason it's also easy to accept Diabolik as the hero of the story even though he is, without a doubt, a villain. He kills cops. Not corrupt cops, but regular guys just doing their job. He has no concern for anyone but himself and his one true love, Eva. When he dynamites the nation's tax records, he doesn't do it out of any sense of Robin Hood-esque duty to the poor and oppressed masses. He simply wants to screw with The Man -- which leads to one of the film's funnier moments, in which the Minister of Finances makes a public plea to all the outstanding citizens to come forward and voluntarily pay the taxes they owe. Comedic touches like this, along with the purposeful disregard for realism, keep the movie light-hearted and chipper even when our main character is committing acts of a most heinous nature. It's not that Diabolik is immoral, however. If anything, he is adamantly amoral, completely rejecting the standards by which society judges the concepts of good and evil. He's not an evil person. In fact, he's quite likeable, almost childlike, even when he's clad in a skintight white leather outfit and scaling a castle wall to rip someone off. At his heart, he is 1968. He is the social upheaval, the youthful rebellion that was engulfing countries across the globe. It's no coincidence that the two forces most opposed to him are established law and established crime - two sides of a coin in which Diabolik sees no difference. They are the old guards; the outdated, out-of-touch generation whose lack of modern sophistication and intelligence is best exemplified by the fact that Valmont's gangsters dress anachronistically, looking like something out of a 1930s mob movie. They don't understand Diabolik's approach to crime, his use of modern technology and embracing of modern ideals. Likewise, on the other side of the coin is Inspector Ginco, a man who seems to respect Diabolik in a way, just as Diabolik respects him. In fact, it's possible that Ginco could catch Diabolik, best him, if only the inspector could break away from the established way of thinking. Unfortunately, he is a man too mired in the old ways, and thus destined to be one step behind Diabolik. If only he could escape the constant supervision and micro managing of the bureaucrats, Ginco could make real progress. In a way, Ginco must envy Diabolik his freedom of thought. It is in this way, more than through the story itself, that Diabolik achieves the depth so many people seem to claim it lacks. It is a tale of a super criminal versus the cops on one level, but on a deeper level, it is a tale of the generation gap, of the culture conflict between young and old that characterized the late 1960s. Diabolik and Eva are the new way, feared and misunderstood by their elders. They are the iconoclasts, perhaps more symbols than actual people, as is Valmont. Ginco is the man in the middle, who knows things and times must change, but not by the methods employed by the amoral and self-serving Diabolik. He is, despite being the supporting character and foil to Diabolik, the most sympathetic and human of all the characters. He is, in effect, most of us, dissatisfied with the establishment but still committed to some sense of orderly progression and society. The relationship between Eva and Diabolik is further example of the film's hidden but most definitely present depth. They are in love, deeply and passionately. Ginco seems to forego romance in favor of duty, and Valmont can see women as nothing more than playthings. But Eva and Diabolik are liberated and modern. They are sexually attractive and have an insatiable appetite for one another, but they are also in love. Diabolik steals for Eva, but Eva does not stay with him because he steals; she stays because she loves him. Stealing is simply what they do, a game, and an amusement. Another way for them to thumb their noses at the generation that does not understand them. Their relationship is strong, and they are willing to sacrifice for one another. In the face of a world that wants to rub them out, they always have each other. Sometimes, they have each other on a rotating bed covered in money. So Diabolik is not an example of style over substance as much as it is an example of style as substance. The mod, liberated, pop art lifestyle of Eva and Diabolik is a stark contrast to the buttoned-up, confining world inhabited by Ginco and Valmont. Not that the style lets itself be overshadowed by the substance. They walk arm in arm, and even if you disregard anything Diabolik might have to say, there's no denying it's look. That Mario Bava pulled this off on a miniscule budget is staggering. With the possible exception of Barbarella and some of the wilder Bond adventures from the 1960s, few films look as sleek and sophisticated as Diabolik. The fashion is impeccable, and for a man like me who has endless admiration for the mod styles of the 1960s, it's like some crazy kind of dream come true. Every outfit donned by Marisa Mell is gorgeous enough to make you cry, especially when it's draped upon someone as beautiful as she was. Likewise, Diabolik's fetishistic head-to-toe leather outfits are beautiful, leaving as they do only John Phillip Law's intense and deep eyes visible. Their underground lair is a sight to behold, as are the old Jags they both drive. I love me a good Aston-Martin, but if I had to chose, I'd go for a 60's Jag. They're just about the coolest cars ever manufactured - taking nothing away, of course, from my dust-and-road-salt-streaked black Honda Accord. Diabolik is, indeed, a mod man's dream, even more so than the more outlandish Barbarella. After all, someone out on the town dressed as Barbarella would turn heads but ultimately look just kind of silly; someone out dressed in the mod fashions displayed by Marisa Mell would simply look breathtaking. This isn't the type of film where you fret over the details, and if you do, you're just going to miss the point. Like I said, it exists in a fictitious comic book world. It's not meant to be any more realistic than any other superhero/villain movie or comic book. What does count is the pace of the story, and Bava keeps things moving along at a fair clip. It's not an action-packed movie, not by today's standards where something big must explode every ten minutes in between a sequence involving bikini girls freak dancing. But it is expertly and briskly paced, with a light-hearted tone that keeps you from worrying too much about the fact that the man we're supposed to love is a murderer and a thief. Ultimately, of course, Diabolik is a criminal and must pay for his crimes. The film's ending is vague in its resolution but absolutely fitting. Ginco must prevail, after all. The exuberance and reckless abandon of youth must be tamed. And so we are left with Diabolik encased in a coffin forged out of his own greed, a gold plating from which he cannot escape. Or can he? We'll never really know. De Laurentiis was so pleased with the fact that Bava brought the movie in $2.6 million under its $3 million budget that he practically begged for a sequel. Unfortunately, the reportedly mild-mannered Bava could not bear the oppressive and often dictatorial producer, so no sequel ever came about. We are left, then, with the final shot of Diabolik imprisoned by his own greed, laughing either slyly or maniacally, protected by his special suit from the molten gold but unable, as far as we can tell, to escape. His rebellion, after all, was not perfect. And while the establishment is able, at least for the time being, to contain Diabolik and his socially challenging threat, while they may suppress it, it's unclear as to how long that will be the case. It could always resurface. It is a beautiful tongue-in-cheek ending, one that even works quite cleverly in conjunction with the fate of Valmont, who finds eventually himself on the more fatal and literal end of greed. Although it would seem, at first, to be a major departure from Bava's greater body of work, most of which up to the point had been gothic horror and giallo, Diabolik still manages to cover most of the director's pet themes and thus fits quite perfectly into his oeuvre. Diabolik is an outsider who rejects what those around him see as established common sense. Appearances are, as always, deceiving at their very best. Diabolik's use of disguises and his foiling of Ginco's trap by using a photograph of an empty, peaceful room are the most obvious examples. And like most of Bava's anti-heroes, Diabolik eventually gets his comeuppance. For my money, Diabolik is an unabashed success on all levels. The art design is without parallel. The script is crisp, witty, and fast-paced. The universe Bava creates is wild and enjoyable. And the performances - yes, even John Phillip Law's - are wonderful. It is the ultimate super-villain movie, with a villain so charismatic that you forget he isn't the hero. Campy, clever, and never taking itself as seriously as some dim-witted critics seem to think it does, Diabolik is one of the best, if not the best, European comic book/fantasy/sci-fi films, not to mention of the most breathlessly beautiful and fun films of the 1960s. Labels: Action: Superheroes, Director: Mario Bava, Espionage, Eurospies, Year: 1968 posted by Keith at 6:20 PM | 1 Comments Monday, November 22, 2004Deadlier than the Male
1966, Great Britain. Starring Richard Johnson, Elke Sommer, Sylva Koscina, Nigel Greene, Suzanna Leigh, Steve Carlsen, Virginia North, Justine Lord, Zia Mohyeddin, Yasuko Nagazumi, Laurence Naismith, George Pastell, Milton Reid, Leonard Rossiter. Directed by Ralph Thomas. Available on DVD (Amazon).
The phrase "in the wake of James Bond's success" is probably the single most over-used phrase in any examination of the flood of spy films that flowed freely onto screens worldwide in the wake of James Bond's success. Unfortunately, facts are facts and while the Bond films certainly were not the first espionage thrillers to grace the silver screen, they remain to this day the most popular and influential. While many of the films that followed Dr. No and From Russia with Love were very different from those two seminal Bond movies, there's little doubt that Bond opened the doors, paved the way, and made producers a lot more interested in green-lighting spy movies. Nowhere was this truer than in Europe, where spy mania swept the continent and resulted in hundreds of espionage and caper films taking full advantage of the wealth of gorgeous European locations and equally gorgeous European screen sirens. Italy and Spain had far and away the most audacious entries into the parade, which got underway shortly after the release of Dr. No in 1962 and really gained steam near the middle of the decade. England had already done its part by giving us James Bond but also fit to turn in an impressive array of spy movies that usually boasted more coherent and intelligent scripts than their continental brethren but also lacked the anything-goes bravado. France got in on the act as well with a few notable entries, the most fabulous of which was the Fantomas series, a pop art updating of a classic French anti-hero and master thief. Germany's biggest contribution was the long-running series of Jerry Cotton adventures - that's the character of Jerry Cotton, not the actor Jerry Cotton. All in all, it was a glorious cavalcade of men in turtlenecks or tuxedos, women in mini skirts or cocktail dresses, and assassins in slim-fit mod suits and fezzes.
Naturally, some of the films were better than others. Though none had the lavish production values and big budget look of the Bond films (which was attained thanks to the keenness of art director Ken Adam, as Dr. No was actually a fairly modestly budgeted affair), some were never the less quite good. Others were slapdash but approached the genre with such off-the-wall gusto and flat-out weirdness that they more than compensated for their shortcomings with energy, zeal, and insanity. And of course, some were just dreadful bores and cheap, slapped together nonsense. What is often overlooked in the stampede to dismiss the entirety of the Eurospy genre as a bunch of cheap and chintzy Bond knock-offs is the fact that not only were quite a few of the films exceedingly enjoyable, many of them used the Bond formula as a starting point but then took the spy story into wild and uncharted territory complete with unique approaches, ideas, and enough mod pop-art quirk to stay fresh and innovative even while dutifully fulfilling the genre requirements and expectations passed down from on high. Some of the twists were superficial, others were deeper, but the fact of the matter is that it's unfair to wave off the entire body of work as one big Bond imitation. One of the most frequent digressions from the Bond formula was to mix the film's story and sense of design with the pervading artistic and fashion trends of the time. James Bond was set up as a timeless figure, a man who exists above flash in the pan trends and fashion sensations. He is a classic, a conservative, and he looks damn good. Likewise the women he encountered were usually similarly dressed in clothing befitting someone with grace, class, and elegance. At least until Diamonds Are Forever, which is when Bond finally started giving in to fashion trends. By the Moore years, Bond had swapped the classics for flared tuxedo trousers and a safari suit -- which was still better than Timothy Dalton's Members Only, casual Friday Bond. But for the Connery years, Bond's appearance was the paramount of timeless male fashion, a paragon of men's style. For what it's worth, Pierce Brosnan has done his best to return Bond to his style roots. Many of the other European films, however, were more sympathetic to trends, and so we'd get heroes in slim-fit suits and turtlenecks, or women in mini skirts and go-go boots and fabulous mod dresses. Although I count myself as a lifetime fan of classic and conservative men's fashion, I'm also a bigger fan of the 60's mod look, which I think maintained elegance and class but mixed it with a rebel sensibility. With limitless funds, I'd choose to be equal parts Saville Row and Canarby Street. As such, I'm a huge fan of the psychedelic swingin' 60s look adopted by a lot of the spy films of the era. An elegant black evening dress or an orange and white mini - either one is fine with me on a gal. Likewise, give me a smart black Merc suit or a well-tailored tux, and I'll be a happy lad. As with clothing, a lot of the smaller budget films looked to appeal more to the pop-art sensibilities in art and design. As such, even some of the lowest budget films can boast gorgeously realized interiors full of eye-popping candy, a tendency toward the psychedelic and surreal that woudl reach its eternally unmatchable apex in 1968 with the sci-fi spectacular Barbarella. Throw into the mix the fact that in Europe you can score striking and historic locations simply by walking out your front door, and the end result is a lot of films that looked very jet-set despite budgets that would have limited a similarly financed American film to be restricted to one location and a bunch of cheap indoor sets. In other words, you'd end up with Agent for H.A.R.M.
Despite the fact that London was the swingin' center of the universe in the 1960s, as I said the British films tended to be ever so slightly more subdued than, say, their Italian counterparts. But then, being more subdued than the Italians still leaves plenty of room to blow minds. Its like saying, "Oh no, he's less violent than Vlad the Impaler." The two best British films besides the Bonds, which in my opinion are still the overall best of the 60s (yes, I even love You Only Live Twice), would be 1965's The Ipcress File and 1966's Deadlier than the Male. The films couldn't be further apart in tone and style, but along with the Bonds, they represent the cream of the crop in espionage actioners. The Ipcress File was producer Harry Saltzman's response to the fact that his Bond movies (which he co-produced with Albert "Cubby" Broccoli) were getting bigger and more cartoonish (often thanks to his own overzealous desire to throw anything and everything he could possibly think of). It introduced the character of Harry Palmer, as realized spectacularly by Michael Caine in one of the first and still best performances of his career. Palmer was a downbeat secret agent forced into service after some unpleasantness during his tenure in the military. His surroundings were the gritty, gray streets of London, and his biggest foe was actually the British bureaucracy and the endless barrage of forms that had to be filled out. He was, in many ways, a soul mate for American author Donald Hamilton's Matt Helm character, though when Helm made it to the screen, it was in the form of a goofball spoof filled by Dean Martin. Deadlier than the Male, by contrast, has more in common with James Coburn's Derek Flint films. It's jokey and clever but not outright slapstick the way Matt Helm tended to be. It's more reserved than a Bond film, but still plenty flashy, especially when compared to artfully distressed look of The Ipcress File (which incidentally allowed art designer Ken Adam from the Bond films to go just as wild but in the exact opposite direction as the Bonds, creating sets that were as gorgeously sparse as the Bond sets were complex). Consider that Deadlier that the Male opens with legendary Eurobabe Elke Sommer skydiving from a jet seconds before she blows it up, plunging into the water to be picked up by another devastating European beauty, Sylvia Koscina (from the first two Hercules films, among others), in a skimpy bikini. Seconds later, both bikini-clad women emerge from the ocean and find a man lounging on his seaside patio, whom they promptly impale with a shot from a spear gun. Now that is how you get the viewer's attention. The whole scene is obviously meant to spoof the iconic scene of Ursula Andress emerging from the sea clad in her skimpy white bikini and wielding a diving knife in Dr. No. For my money, any three of those women can emerge from the water and threaten me with bladed or pointy weapons. We soon learn that the girls are industrial assassins, hired ostensibly to broker difficult to close multi-billion dollar deals. The people who hire them are rarely aware that their most common means of persuasion involves bombs and spear guns. In one case, however, their actions attract the attention of ace investigator Bulldog Drummond, played with aplomb by Richard Johnson, who manages to artfully walk the line between hip modster and middle-aged square, taking the best of both worlds and making them into his own style. Since one of their most recent victims was a friend of his, Bulldog Drummond is especially keen to unearth what sort of disreputable deeds these two gorgeous women have been engaging in. Hampering him, and later helping him, in his mission is his hip young nephew, Robert. Contrary to that description of the character, Robert never becomes tedious or odious. And since he's usually accompanied by yet another comely lass, his appearances aren't the cringe-inducing events they might otherwise be if Steve Carlson had been a more irksome actor. It turns out that the girls are working for a mad genius who lives in a opulent castle high atop a cliff overlooking the ocean. Their current mission is to secure a nearly impossible-to-exploit oil contract from a country none to eager to have Europeans stealing their black gold. The man in charge of the yea or neigh on the matter, young King Fedra, happens to be good friends with Robert, meaning now Bulldog finds his own nephew in the position of being potential collateral damage in an assassination attempt.
Bulldog Drummond has, much like the character of Nick Carter (the detective and spy, not the boy band idol), a very long pedigree. He got his start in the 1920s in a series of stories revolving around a man who returns from the trenches of World War One to find peaceful intolerably dull. He begins to hire himself out as a private eye and all-around global adventurer. Written with breakneck action in mind and the pre-World War II British national pride, the stories were embraced by upper-class British schoolboys who would, soon enough, find themselves serving as officers on the front lines of World War II. In updating Bulldog for the 60s spy craze, screenwriters Liz Charles-Williams and David Osborn transform him into a high profile insurance investigator with a knack for involving himself in fighting schemes and scams orchestrated by international crime syndicates. I always thought insurance investigators did things like try to determine of some guy faked the theft of his Thunderbird and thus had to skulk around a lot in garages down South, but I guess they also jet set around the world and flirt with Elke Sommer, though I'm sure if I became one, I'd end up with the car theft case orchestrated by a big burly guy named Scout or Dakota. The story in Deadlier than the Male, like most stories if the truth were put bluntly, is not spectacularly original, but the execution is marvelous. The script is smartly written and packed with clever dialogue and double entendres that are actually funny and witty, unlike say, the often nonsensical sex joke ramblings spouted by Dean Martin in the Matt Helm film (which, don't get me wrong, are glorious in their own ragged way even if I constantly make fun of them). Bulldog Drummond is a determined and likeable lead, even though the real stars here are Elke and Sylvia. As was the case in the Matt Helm novels, the wicked women are often the most complex and best fleshed-out characters, and this movie does not prove to be the exception. Bulldog's the hero. We know what he's going to do and who he'll judo chop. But the girls are unpredictable, fierce, and perverse in the almost childlike pleasure they take in the business of killing and torturing men. Clad in an array of graceful cocktail wear, evening gowns, and bikinis, they are a sight most pleasing to the eye. Elke Sommer plays the more sultry Irma Eckman - not exactly the sexiest name you might think, but then, pretty much anything attached to Elke Sommer is going to fall victim to the woman's undeniable and near overwhelming sensuality. Elke Sommer - now this is a sexy woman, and she carries herself in this film with an easy and natural grace that makes it easy to believe any man would succumb to her charms even he expected to be harpooned at the end of things. And then there's Croatian beauty Sylvia Koscina, in my opinion one of the most beautiful women ever to walk the face of the earth (but not quite in the same class as Diana Rigg -- I don't thing anybody is or ever will be). Sylvia's Penelope is just as gorgeous but more playful and coquettish, more flirtatious and at the same time, infinitely more delighted by dealing pain that her more professional counterpart. Up until I saw Deadlier than the Male, I'd only seen Sylvia in her two Hercules films (Hercules and Hercules Unchained, both with Steve Reeves) and Mario Bava's delightfully bizarre Lisa and the Devil (also with Elke Sommer in the lead role). She was given very little to do in the Hercules films beyond cry and look out the window at the say and say, "Hercules my love, you've been gone these many years. When shall you return to my love?" Her part in Lisa and the Devil was relatively small but memorable, especially if you've seen the extra spicy uncut love scene between and her and well-known Italian genre actor Gabriele Tinti. Other than that though, the film focuses primarily, as the title would suggest, Lisa (Elke Sommer) and The Devil (Telly Savalas), and Koscina is little more than window dressing. With Deadlier than the Male, Sylvia really gets to flex her flirtatious sex appeal and showcase a comedic and charismatic acting skill that will suckerpunch you with how deliciously cute she is even when she's giggling to herself as she ties you up and cuts your throat. Together with Elke, they're one of the most devastating screen combinations ever. There is enough sex appeal and beauty on that screen to make a grown man weep. Not to leave the ladies out of things, Richard Johnson is wonderful as the stylishly square Bulldog Drummond. Although he hasn't Sean Connery's rough and edgy raw sex appeal, he's still a good-looking guy, the kind of good looking you can relate to the real world. I bet you could still depend on him to get the chores done even if he had to kill dastardly evil spies earlier that day. He's solid but not excessively spectacular, and his reserved manner hides the fact that if he needs to he can outshoot and out-judo any henchman who gets in his way - and plenty of henchmen will get in his way. Mastermind Nigel Green's castle lair is crawling with karate masters and a bevy of beautiful gals trained to pleasure or kill a man, or more likely, pleasure and kill a man. As Nigel Green, actor Carl Peterson is perfectly serviceable but ultimately overshadowed by his more flamboyant chief hitwomen. With ample eye candy of this caliber, one could forgive a film if it had a daft script and shoddy direction. Quite to the contrary, however, Deadlier than the Male has a smart script that moves along at a brisk pace and is full of crisp dialogue. Like Our Man Flint, it manages to spoof and poke fun at the spy genre without being disrespectful and while always remembering that spoof or not, it also has to be a very good film. Some films lived and died by their wit - well, died mostly - and it was always an important part of the spy genre. Deadlier than the Male acquits itself quite nicely in this regard, and Ralph Thomas's direction is snappy, taking full advantage of the locations and the ladies. There are some nice set-pieces too, especially in Nigel's booby-trap strewn castle, which culminate in a deadly game of chess with giant electronically controlled pieces and spaces on the board that open to reveal spiked pits. The film is dazzling, full of vibrant color and energy and well-deserved of its position as one of the most fondly remembered and best respected of the playful 1960s spy films. Labels: Espionage, Eurospies, Stars: Elke Sommer, Stars: Nigel Greene, Stars: Sylvia Koscina, Year: 1966 posted by Keith at 2:18 PM | 0 Comments Saturday, April 17, 2004Incredible Paris Incident
1967, Italy/France. Starring Robert Browne, Dominique Boschero, Dick Palmer. Directed by Terence Hathaway
I've been trying to write this review for a little while now, and it just wasn't working out. I knew what I wanted to say, despite the fact that this movie very nearly overwhelmed me, but something just wasn't coming out right. My fingers kept hitting the wrong keys -- more so than usual, that is. I was forgetting words, unable to complete thoughts and sentences. And then it hit me. I was wide awake and lucid. This is not the sort of film you can watch or write about in a sane state of mind. Now I sit here, exhausted and in pain, and suddenly the words flow like the crystal clear waters of a bubbling mountain brook. Power surges from my fingertips, and each touch on the keyboard is like a bolt of lightning striking down my enemies. I am tired, my vision is blurry, I'm listening to traditional Native American flute songs, and finally I am in the right state of mind to discuss what is, far and away, the most mind-alteringly weird spy film I've seen in many a moon. The Eurospy film. Traditionally, it's not among the more accessible genres here in the United States. A few meager offerings trickled over, primarily because they starred Neil Connery, the Connery with the slightly less cool name than his slightly more famous brother. But just about all traces of the Eurospy film in the States have faded along with cool tiki themed lounges full of men and women in sharp outfits. They were products of the 1960s through and through, and unlike their bigger budget cousin, the James Bond films, they could not adapt themselves to the changing times. For that matter, Bond himself had a rough time of it. Think about it. You're a spy. Do you feel cooler while wearing a sharp suit, driving a hovercraft, and bedding some beautiful buxom French woman in a mini-skirt and go-go boots (the 1960s), or do you feel cooler wearing a leisure suit and making time with some waifer-thin disco queen with feathered Farrah Faucett hair and a beige pantsuit? In the 1970s, you could be grim and gritty, but you could not be suave. That's why tough cop films ruled that decade instead of the spy films, which ruled the 1960s. I'm hoping that there will be some renewed interest in Eurospy films. It happened over the summer with obscure sword and sandal films, so maybe soon we'll see these debonair men of espionage parading triumphantly back into the $8.99 bin at Tower Video. Until then, Something Weird Video is about the only place you can turn for these films, but wit Something Weird's cheap prices, that's not a bad place to turn. The Eurospy film came about as most genres do -- in the wake of the success of a trend-setting film, in this case Dr. No, the first of the many James Bond films. In the blink of an eye, dozens of people were dashing off cut-rate imitations as well as a few big budget ones. A lot of these films sucked. Some of them were pretty good. But the one thing that makes the genre interesting is that, this time, it wasn't really the Italians. Fans of exploitation cinema know that when something becomes popular, while the Italians won't be the only ones to rip it off, they'll sure be the highest profile at doing it. But with the spy films, countries from all over Europe got in on the fun, thus paving the way for the eventual reunification of Germany, the fall of Communism, and the introduction of the Common Market and the Euro. Oh sure the Italians cranked out plenty of Eurospy films, including many of the cooler ones (after all, the Italians are pretty cool), but they were matched stride for stride by Germany, England, much of Scandinavia, and England. I think even the Swiss got involved at one point, and you don't hear very much about the Swiss film industry. Note the reserve I show in not making a joke involving the Swiss and cheesy films. Of course, to simply reduce it all to "they rip off James Bond," is over-simplifying things and ignoring quite a bit of history. For starters, the Europeans had been making spy films since Fritz Lang in the 1920s. And while there's no denying that the success of Bond is entirely the reason there were so many spy films made in the 1960s, it still helps that Europe was well versed in spydom, not to mention the hub of real-life espionage across the world. America got in on the action as well, but the result was often disastrous. While the Eurospy flicks were often bad, they seldom lacked entertainment value. Many of the American Bond rip-offs came out looking like Agent for H.A.R.M., and no one wants to relive that. Sure, we made a few good Matt Helm films, and both Derek Flint movies are classics, but those are all spoofs as well. It's no wonder Europe was better at making spy films. They had cooler spy stuff. When you think of the Cold War, you think of the United States and the Soviet Union, but most of the "fighting" in the Cold War took place in Europe. You can't really do espionage in America or Russia because they're both just too damn big. Plus Russia has those harsh winters. Europe is full of all those nice little countries with cool ancient architecture and winding country roads. There are lots of borders to cross, and lots of cool things lying about. If you are going to be doing espionage, you have to do it in Europe, or possibly "Arabia." Ahh yes, many are the nights I've dreamed of engaging in some cloak and dagger slyness in "The Casbah," where people wear fezzes and smoke those big water pipes and are always helping out Pepe Le Moko. Asia is okay too, but that's an entirely different case. So it's only natural and only fair that the continent where all the espionaging is happening in real life would wind up making the coolest spy films. The most realistic spy films? Well, maybe not, but who really cares? If you want a realistic film, set a camera up and film yourself sleeping and watching television for twelve hours. If I want realism, I'll go out and do something, because nothing on film is more real than real life. No, I do not want realism in my spy films, because that would be a movie about some guy sitting in a cramped room doing research. Would you rather watch James Bond repel down a fake volcano to machine gun a bunch of Commies with the help of a secret army of Japanese ninjas, or would you rather watch two hours of Wen Ho-li shuffling floppy disks around? And in the realm of unrealistic spy films, I don't think any could get any less realistic than Incredible Paris Incident, which is about one of the most honest film titles ever. Well, maybe this is the second most unrealistic spy film ever. Denise Richards as a brilliant nuclear physicist is definitely the most unrealistic moment in spy film history. The most realistic spy film moments are probably all those moments in Agent for H.A.R.M. where Derek Chance just sits around in the living room. Incredible Paris Incident begins with the daring burgling of the Crown of England, which a guy steals by dressing up as one of those Beefeater chaps and hiding the crown under his big tall furry hat. It didn't seem like the most ingenious scheme of all time, but I guess it's better than stuffing an overcoat full of porno mags then walking around the store staring and the ceiling and whistling tunelessly. The police are baffled, as they often are. For all their big reputation, every time Scotland Yard appears in a movie, it's usually in a newspaper headline followed by the phrase "Is Stumped!" They look cool and all, with their tweed jackets and London Fog overcoats and pipes, but when is the last time they successfully solved a crime in a movie? "Scotland Yard Baffled!" "Scotland Yard Left Without a Clue!" "Scotland Yard Mystified!" Hell, even the Scotland Yard guy in this film goes, "What? They expect us to solve these crimes?" What's the deal with Scotland Yard? The inspector also gets to make an offhand dig at Northern Ireland, but that doesn't get him any closer to solving the crime. Meanwhile, on his own private island somewhere in the Mediterranean, we meet our hero, code name: Argoman. Don't confuse him with Super-Argo, another European spy-cum-superhero. Sure, they're almost identical characters, but what are you gonna do? Complain about plagiarism in a film genre that is already just stealing ideas from other films? With all that goes on in the world, I'd like to think that no court time was lost debating the copyright violations in the case of Argoman versus Super-Argo. Luckily for copyright holders, Argoman is supposed to be a wacky spoof of Super-Argo, who himself was supposed to be something of a spoof of spies, superheroes, and possibly Mexican wrestling movies. Argoman is your typical ultra-smooth European spy guy. He has his own island and one of those mansions with the cool space-age bachelor pad look. Everything is hooked up to remote controls and computers. It's sort of like where I live, except that instead of an island, it's a neighborhood in Brooklyn, and instead of a space-age mansion, it's a crumbling one-bedroom apartment in a shabby prewar brownstone. Except that half the brown stones are were painted a rusty yellow and have a faux castle design to them. Stupid building. While relaxing poolside in his villa and chatting with his very European looking Indian servant (we know he's Indian because he's tan and has a turban on), Argoman senses something unusual. That's right, Argoman has various psychic abilities, one of which allows him to detect when sexy women are piloting their own private hovercrafts near his island. Being a sly devil and all, he uses his psychic powers to the hovercraft to his island, and then levitates the sexy woman across the beach and right into his lap! Really! If this doesn't make Incredible Paris Incident the coolest movie you've ever seen, then I don't know what will. Perhaps the fact that he follows this act of kidnapping with the line, "Please forgive me, but when I sensed you passing by I couldn't help but dabble in a little telekinetics." The woman (Jenabelle) who we recognize as the woman behind the thievery of the Royal Crown (the hat, not the soda -- no one would steal RC Cola), is annoyed at first that this total stranger has mentally hijacked her boss hovercraft and levitated her across the island into his lap, especially since he is wearing those shiny little European man micro-short swim trunks. The way I see it, if you're going to wear something like that, you might as well just go naked. You'll be much more comfortable. However, when she is witness to a display of his rapier-sharp wit and charm, she can't stay mad at him for kidnapping and molesting her. Argoman's servant is nervous, and reveals to us that after having sex, Argoman loses his powers for six hours. Argoman just laughs and says he is safe because he's on his own secret island. Plus, he hasn't gotten laid in a while. But this is a Eurospy film, so our two potential sex partners can't simply retire to the boudoir for a night of tender passion and animal lust. No, they must play a little game. Argoman gives the woman a bow and arrow. If she can hit the bull's-eye on a target, he'll give her an assorted gift pack of precious jewels and a brand new Rolls Royce. If, however, she misses, well then he hits the button on a remote control to slide open the wall, revealing his rotating suspended bed. I wonder if this is the first time he's done this, or if this is a pretty regular little Price is Right shtick for him. Anyway, Jenabelle lights up a cigarette because, well, smoking may be bad for you but it looks cool, and in full Jackie-O beachwear, takes the bow and arrow and just narrowly misses the target. Darn! But, something crafty seems to be going through her head as she and Argoman head toward the bed. After they do something behind closed doors, presumably playing Boggle though I can't be certain, she comes out, nonchalantly picks up the bow and arrow and nails the bull's-eye with no problem. Why, that lovable scamp! She was a master archer all along and just wanted some nookie! She then thanks Argoman for the sweet lovin' in the rotating suspended space-age bed, takes the sapphires, and says she won't need the Rolls as she already has one. Never one to be outdone, much like Al Gore, Argoman has to huff, "Well, I have several." Then she hops back in her hover craft and darts off across the sea. Man alive, if I could tell you how much this was like my own life, well, you'd know I was one lyin' son of a bitch. This is maybe the swankest sequence ever in any movie, maybe even swanker than the scene in Danger: Diabolik! where Diabolik and his sexy girlfriend/accomplice are in his space age secret cave hide-out, making love and rolling around naked on a giant rotating bed covered in hundred dollar bills. When I go on job interviews and people ask me where I see myself in the future, I am going to describe one of these two scenes to them, and hopefully, they'll say, "Well, this job will give you all that and more." Unfortunately, building websites may pay the rent, but it's hardly paving my way to having a secret lair of a private island, and though I have met many women, none of them have their own personal hovercrafts. Most of them don't even have cars. And while I may not be able to make love on a giant rotating bed covered in hundred dollar bills, I might be able to get a little action on a futon covered by a pile of pennies. So I'm on my way, working slowly up the ladder of swankiness, and in a few years, I figure I'll have all the stuff Diabolik and Argoman have. Meanwhile, back in England, Scotland Yard is still stumped by the theft of the crown. They have decided to blame Argoman, who we learn is sort of like Batman in that he does heroic things but everyone thinks he is a criminal. Granted, they think he is a much suaver criminal than Batman. However, the inspector seems to have some secret knowledge about Argoman, and soon contacts him. Argoman is annoyed that the same guy who tells the press Argoman stole the crown is the one calling him for help in solving the case, and who can really blame him? It's like saying, "Well, I ordered your execution today, but I was hoping you could drop by beforehand and help me move a couch." Luckily, Argoman is a sport, plus he can levitate sexy women across and island and right into his lap, so he's probably in a good mood most of the time. He agrees to leave his plush sub-tropical private island in order to help the bumbling buffoons of Scotland Yard get their stupid little crown back. When reviewing security photos of the museum, Argoman recognizes Jenabelle in the crowd. He then begins to think something fishy is going on. Could Jenabelle possibly be the dreaded "Queen of the World" who has been taunting Scotland Yard via telegrams? Speaking of which, Scotland Yard must have a palace full of "letters from master criminals taunting Scotland Yard." Meanwhile, Jenabelle returns the crown, just to further taunt Scotland Yard. She also demands that they turn over to her a giant diamond that was created by a nuclear blast. With the human head-sized diamond as the centerpiece of her giant computer, she will be able to harness untold powers! Meanwhile, Argoman is on his way to Paris, or Gay Paris as they call it, to stop her diabolical scheme, even though no one really knows what it is. Right off the bat, Argoman catches her men, who are dressed in the same leather outfit that David Hasslehoff used to wear when he was lip syncing on Solid Gold back in the 1980s, robbing a bank. He uses the old "distract the guard with a naked woman" shtick that we've probably all used a thousand times, but hey! You stick with what works. He sneaks into their truck to find her secret layer, and soon finds himself getting his ass kicked by out-of-shape guys in form-fitting leather Buck Rogers outfits. So he does what any man would do -- he instantly transforms into a laughing super-hero in yellow and black underwear and a cape that is three sizes too small to actually look cool. He thing proceeds to stand with arms akimbo, laughing that manly laugh as he tosses lackeys about with his mind powers. Argoman has what has to be the goofiest looking superhero outfit I've seen in a long time. If superhero shows and movies have taught us anything, it's that normal humans don't look good in spandex superhero outfits. No matter how buff the guy may be, you put the brightly colored spandex long johns on him, and they have the strange ability to make him look scrawny as a scarecrow while, at the same time, having a rather pronounced beer belly. Take the suit off the guy, and he could be a chiseled god with abs of steel, but the second you put the superhero outfit on, he becomes a goofball. But this is what makes this film so special. Oh sure, it could have been a straight-forward Eurospy film, but they decided to go on and throw the whole superhero thing in for good measure. It's the little things that make these things so special. For instance, Darth Vader had to wear the sexy leather outfit and helmet so he could breathe, but he just went ahead and threw the cape on for the hell of it because he knew it looked cool. Likewise, Argoman could have just been a slick undercover spy with psychic powers and a private island and a sexy secretary and glowing green eyes, but he goes ahead and puts the superhero costume on just for the hell of it. Unfortunately, it doesn't work as well as Darth Vader's cape. Jenabelle counters by dumping tons of money on the streets of Paris and following it up with a threat that she will flood the French economy with currency, thus throwing the country into a state of gross inflation and causing it to collapse. Naturally, the French representatives immediately mobilize to surrender to her every demand. Argoman has other ideas, however, and dresses up in a Patrick MacNee outfit to meet up with Jenabelle again. He's not so happy about having to wear the bowler hat and suit, but would you really take fashion criticism from a man who wears yellow spandex and a mini-cape? Upon meeting Jenabelle again, they immediately pick up where they left off, which is in bed. But Argoman knows better than to go all the way, lest he lose his mental super powers. Jenabell gives him the "join me and together we could rule the world" speech, which has never worked ever in the entire history of its being attempted. Even when someone agrees to it, they are always just playing along until they can get the opportunity to foil the villainous scheme. Well, let me step forward with this message to all super-sexy would-be queens of the world: I will gladly accept your offer and rule the world by your scantily clad side. Of course, Argoman simply turns her down and puts on his superhero spandex so he can do some laughing. Just as he's about to subdue Jenabelle, she turns the tables on him and shows him a video of his secretery being attcked a very slow and poorly made robot. Jenabelle escapes while Argoman battles the robot, which is slightly less mobile than a Dalek. At some point I must have missed, Jenabelle also gets the giant diamond, and we finally learn the details of her heinous plot: she is going to use it to program an army of automatons who look just like the various leaders of the world. This is an especially diabolical plan in light of today's politics, as no one, no matter how astute, could possibly tell the difference between a poorly made robot and the actual politicians we are stuck with these days. Would we really be that much worse off being ruled by a sexy woman and her army of robots? We're already at the mercy of the robots, so we might as well get the sexy woman in for good measure. Argoman sends some time dispatching automaton agents, then returns for the final showdown with Jenabelle. The movie takes a turn for bizarre -- well, even more bizarre -- when he uses his mind powers to disarm Jenabelle, then proceeds to blow her away! The hell kind of hero is this guy? He can use his mental powers to incapacitate and disarm someone, then he just goes off and shoots her! Of course, everyone cheers this, and the world is saved! Hooray! Oh well, at least they didn't do tat ending where he lets her live only to kill her when she suddenly turns with a hidden weapon and attacks him in one last ditch effort. Wait a second! I just realized that not once does the fact that after having sex he loses his power for six hours play any role at all in the plot. He never gets tricked into doing the deed only to find himself powerless at the hands of Jenabelle and her forces. Oh well, that's small potatoes in the greater ocean of a film involving a grown man in yellow underwear wrestling with other grown men in black leather bondage suits. Incredible Paris Incident is indeed one of the most incredible damn things I've ever seen, and I've seen a lot of incredible things. It has a good sense of humor, tons of action, and more weirdness than you can shake a walking stick at. Director Terence Hathaway, also known as Sergio Grieco, directed several Eurospy films, including Password: Kill Agent Gordon, Operation Istanbul, and a few others, but this is far and away his weirdest, and probably one of the weirdest the genre has to offer. It's also cooler than I could ever hope to be. It's movies like this, where everyone is so amazingly smooth and swank and sexy, make me ashamed to be the slothful loser than I am. I wish my life could be more like Argoman's life. I wish I could be more like Argoman. In fact, this movie is so astoundingly good that it has inspired me to do more than just sit on my ass, watching wrestling, and complaining. I am going to take control of my life. I am not going to wish I was swanker. I am going to make it happen! And I am going to begin by wearing bright yellow spandex and a little red cape everywhere I go. Labels: Action: Superheroes, Espionage, Eurospies, Year: 1967 posted by Keith at 4:00 PM | 0 Comments Thursday, March 20, 2003To Chase a Million
1967, Great Britain. Starring Richard Bradford, Ron Randell, Yoko Tani, Anton Rodgers, Warren Stanhope, Aubrey Morris, Simon Brent, Mike Pratt, Alan White, Dave Baxter, David Scheuer, Norman Rossington, Gay Hamilton, Harry Landis, Jeremy Wilkin, Harry Tardios, George Zenios, Agarth Angelos, Maki Marseilles. Directed by Robert Tronson and Pat Jackson.
As we all know by now, the success of Dr. No and subsequent films in the James Bond series resulted in a flood of espionage films from all over the world. Some of them, such as The Ipcress File and Our Man Flint, were wonderful. Many were average, and most were prime examples of just how much better the Bond films were than the many films that attempted to emulate them. It wasn't just the budget that sunk these copycat adventures. While later films in the Bond parade enjoyed large budgets, Dr. No was a modest financial affair, but it managed to hide that fact completely. By the same token, The Ipcress File was shot largely on the streets of London, in abandoned warehouses and dull offices, yet it remains a stellar film. A film doesn't need lavish production values to be engaging. What goes wrong in most of the other espionage films isn't just that they lack the money to pass themselves off as international jet-set adventures. What sinks them is that they're often shoddily directed and dully acted. But you know? We tend to love them anyway. Bond's popularity and influence wasn't limited to the silver screen, though, and many of the best espionage adventures came not from the movies, but from television. The Avengers, The Man From UNCLE, I Spy - there are plenty of shows we remember fondly, and many more that were enjoyable but simply lost in the herd. While copycat espionage films attempted to of very little unique or different from the inspirational material, television shows took bigger risks. Wild Wild West took the espionage theme and dropped it into the American Old West. Mission: Impossible gave s a team of spies who often relied primarily on their wits and featured an episode with Leonard Nimoy as a mod rocker in Beatle Boots and striped pants. Patrick McGoohan's Secret Agent, a.k.a. Danger Man, sought to actively subvert the James Bond archetype by giving us a secret agent hero who neither drank nor caroused with women, and in fact, never carried a gun. McGoohan really turned the spy genre upside down with his next series, the ground-breaking show The Prisoner, which remains to this day the smartest, most innovative, most daring, and most enjoyable series in television history - at least for my money. Both of McGoohan's shows were produced by the British television studio ITC, and somewhere between Secret Agent and The Prisoner, they also produced a short-lived but intriguing show known as Man in a Suitcase (not to mention also being the studio that brought us The Saint starring Roger Moore) . The series starred American-born actor Richard Bradford, who had been struggling for years to make it in show business but found himself hampered by, of all things, prematurely graying hair! After scoring a role in the Marlon Brando film The Chase, Bradford caught the eye of producers looking to cast the role of former secret agent McGill in Man in a Suitcase. Like many of ITC's numerous spy shows, Man in a Suitcase came up with a unique approach that made it different from the scores of James Bond imitators. McGill was, for starters, a disgraced American agent who took a fall for a crime he didn't commit, all in order to protect the name of the Agency. With his career in ruins and nothing to live for in America, he picks up and moves to London, where he ekes out an average living as a private investigator who, naturally, often gets involved in matters of international intrigue. There exists only one person - McGill's old CIA boss -- who knows the truth about McGill and can work to prove his innocence. Unfortunately, protecting the reputation of the Agency takes precedence over proving McGill's innocence. Compared to the jet-set, thrill-a-minute live of James Bond, McGill's future is rather bleak. He's rarely happy, and there's not much hope that he'll ever be redeemed, that his name will be cleared and his life returned to him. Bradford plays the character with a world-weariness that, rather than suggesting wisdom or inner peace, simply suggests world-weariness. McGill is exhausted, with very little to look forward to, yet he keeps on moving forward, his entire life contained in a single suitcase he takes with him as he moves from one place to the next. Not that he doesn't try to enjoy life every once on a while. He has a so-so apartment and a decent car, and he seems to have had his fair share of experience with beautiful women. But ultimately, you can't be James Bond on Harry Palmer's salary, and even Michael Caine's frustrated blue-collar spy from The Ipcress File seemed to take life's pitfalls with wit and humor. Palmer had his cooking, he had a cranky boss who secretly respected the hell out of his "worst" best agent, and he had the love of espionage office secretary Sue Lloyd. McGill, on the other hand, has nothing but the suitcase. With such a nihilistic character, it's no doubt that the series has become more or less forgotten despite the risks it took (and often succeeded at). Even Number Six in The Prisoner kept hope alive that he would one day regain his freedom and best the powers controlling The Village. With McGill, it's like your watching a man who's already been beaten yet is determined to play the game out to the bitter end. Although the show wasn't the success that Secret Agent or The Prisoner was (which is nothing to be ashamed of -- you'd be hard-pressed to find two better shows, and harder-pressed to find a writer and star more impressive than Patrick McGoohan), it was popular enough so that one of the two-part episodes, entitled "Variation on a Million Bucks," was edited together into a feature-length film called To Chase a Million. Like Harry Palmer and The Ipcress File, To Chase a Million grounds itself very firmly in reality. Where James Bond enjoyed his flights into fantasy, and other films followed, To Chase a Million - partially because of its origins as two episodes of a relatively low-budget television show - remains stuck firmly in the real world. Make no mistake about it - I am a huge Bond fan, and like many people part of what I love about them is the pageantry and lack of realism. I even dig most of the Roger Moore adventures. They are the thrill-a-minute escapism while a movie like The Ipcress File is the "so familiar you can't help but relate to it" excursion into the world of espionage populated by frustrated military officials, endless paperwork, and dull staff meetings that, rather than featuring Desmond Llewellyn showing off an exploding fountain pen that can also remote pilot a gyrocopter, instead features a mid-level bureaucrat's out-of-focus slideshow and droning narration detailing surveillance of some guy in a raincoat. Both types of film work well, and I have no interest in pitting one approach against the other or making any judgment as to which is better. I like the over-the-top bombast of Bond just as much as I like the gritty realism of Palmer, and wasn't the Cold War ultimately all about defending our right to freely watch more than one type of spy film? So while movies like To Chase a Million may be more realistic in their approach to the world of espionage, that doesn't make them any better or worse. They're just different. To Chase a Million, in fact, exists somewhere in between the two extremes. Closer to the world of Harry Palmer than James Bond, but you still never see McGill have to wake up and make some eggs. And in fact, all three have some common threads running through them. Ipcress File was produced by Harry Saltzman, who along with Cubby Broccoli was the producer of the James Bond movie series. It also sported Ken Adam as art director, a role he fulfilled in the Bond films as well, and Bond composer John Barry. To Chase a Million, or rather the series from which it was culled, was filmed on location around London but also frequently used lots and stages at Pinewood Studios, known primarily as the home of the James Bond films. So you see? They're really all one big Cold War era family, so there's no need to make choices between them. The film opens with McGill running into an old flame played by Eurospy film stalwart and one of my favorite actresses from the genre, Yoko Tani. The estranged couple rekindle an old romance, and for the first time in a long time, it looks like McGill might achieve some semblance of happiness in his otherwise dismal life. His best friend, a Russian defector named Max Stein, completes the happy trio. Of course, Max is hiding something big, which just happens to be a cool million in cash he swiped from the Ruskies before defecting. It's safely hidden away in a safe deposit box somewhere in Lisbon, but that doesn't stop Russian and American agents from tailing both Max and McGill in hops of recovering the cash. When Max is murdered, McGill realizes that his only hope of having a normal life with Yoko is if he can find the money, smuggle it back into London, then get the hell out of town, possibly moving to Japan to finally settle down and put the cloak and dagger business behind him once and for all. Since "Variation on a Million Bucks" occurs rather early in the series, you can guess how well McGill's plans work out in the end. It has the same sting as when the Rat Pack realized what was happening to their stash at the end of Ocean's Eleven. There is a lot going for To Chase a Million, as well as a fair number of things going against it. On the negative side, first and foremost, is the fact that this is a television show masquerading as a feature film. As such, it has the look and feel of a small-time production. There's a lot of dialogue, and most of it isn't especially interesting. The sets are appropriately claustrophobic and small-scale, which isn't entirely a bad thing as they also don't look cheap. I've seen Eurospy feature films where the office of the CIA were nothing but an empty classroom with red sheets draped across the windows and an American flag propped up in the corner. While To Chase a Million may have small-scale sets, at least there's an attempt to dress them up properly. So while the small-screen origin works against it as a feature film, at the same time the fact that you'll be watching it on your television set makes it easy to overlook these limitations. Another strike against the film is Bradford's sometimes somnambulistic performance. Although his bleary-eyed, tired reading the character does a lot to convey the hopelessness of his character, it can also wear the viewer down. Max Stein goes for the same muddled, monotonal delivery, and that makes for some really dull exposition scenes. Yoko Tani acquits herself nicely, as she always does, but her character is given very little to do. I would have appreciated more of her, but I guess I can always go elsewhere for that. Aside from a number of decent Eurospy features, she also starred in a couple episodes of McGoohan's Secret Agent. The uneven pacing and action is, however, offset by what the film does well. On the most basic level, it's well-written and constructed, with a plot that generates some real thrills as you root for McGill to succeed against all odds with his plan. Part of what makes his character so sympathetic is the fact that he isn't doing this so he can live a jet-set lifestyle full of women and glamour. He's not doing it to stop some megalomaniac madman in a hollowed-out volcano. He's doing it so he can get the goddamned Man off his back and settle down into a nice quiet life with a woman he loves. His motivations are so simple, and so familiar, that it endears him to us even when Bradford is giving a less-than-shining reading of his lines. Where we all know Bond is going to succeed and come out smelling like roses and getting laid, McGill's success is never guaranteed. In fact, we're pretty sure he's going to fail, but like the character, we keep hoping anyway that it'll turn out for the better. Another thing I like about the film is the fact that McGill gets his ass kicked a lot, and when it happens, it really hurts. It's real-world ass-kicking. He's not a bad fighter, but when someone gets the jump on him, or when he's outnumbered, he's going to go down, and he's going to hurt. This isn't the sort of movie thrashing where get the tar kicked out of you and then pop up in the next scene as if nothing has happened. When McGill gets the stuffing beat out of him, he feels it for a few days. When he gets shot or stabbed, he bleeds profusely and almost dies. And even in recovery, he's groggy and unable to use one of his arms. By the end of the movie, he looks like he's being held together by fraying duct tape and might just drop dead at any second. Death warmed over. He can't fight anymore, and in fact he can hardly even walk. It's a wonderful change of pace from heroes who get punched, shot, and run over but then can still run down the street at full speed, leap onto a moving train, and take out a dozen henchman without breaking a sweat. McGill is most definitely one of the most believably human characters in any espionage film. That vulnerability - he falls in love, wants a normal life, and can be seriously wounded - makes him all the more interesting and sympathetic. While Richard Bradford's performance may be uneven in spots, it's never anything less than competent. He draws you into the character, an underdog who you know isn't going to triumph in the end against all odds. The supporting cast is pretty good as well. There are a host of guys whose job it is to wear fedoras and lurk in shadows and take potshots at people. Anton Rogers as Max Stein is lukewarm, but his primary function is to play chess and get murdered. The rest of the bunch are solid character actors, and Gay Hamilton is superb as Lucia, the sympathetic woman who shelters McGill after he arrives in Lisbon having been beaten up by shifty smugglers aboard a boat, stabbed in the shoulder, beat up some more, and dumped on the side of the road to die. While the sets may be small, the location work is pretty impressive. Scene sin a gothic opera house hearken back to From Russia With Love's scene in the massive cathedral, and the street chases in Lisbon (which aren't actually in Lisbon, but do have that opressive walled-in labyrinth effect so many European streets seem to have) are great. The interiors are convincing as well. While it's not a feast for the eyes, it's also not an eyesore. McGill isn't as snappy a dresser as James Bond or Derek Flint, but he gets the job done. So it goes to for the film as a whole. The action sequences are fairly realistic, meaning they're kind of sloppy and awkward looking but also fairly brutal and convincing, especially if you ever seen any real fights, which rarely look all that spectacularly choreographed. Shootouts are few and far between, and McGill lets his fists do most of the talking. Unfortunately for him, there are a lot more fists talking back. As far as bad-asses go, the man is no John Shaft or Bruce Lee. If the odds are against him, he's going to lose. He's not going to bust out any kungfu moves, and he's not going to perform any near-superhuman feats of combat prowess. And he has almost no one-liners. About all he does after a fight is grunt and pass out and bleed all over the caret. Like Michael Caine's Harry Palmer, McGill exists in a very believable world where it's a lot harder to be a bad-ass. McGill's toughness come from his determination to press on, his dedication to Yoko Tani's character Taiko, and his ability to take a severe beating and stumble on, even in the face of certain defeat. He's kind of like the tough woodland animal who gets killed by a larger predator, but at least causes the predator to choke to death on the way down. He may not be flashy, and he may lose most of this fights, but there's something undeniably cool about him never the less. What really carried the film is the plot. As I mentioned, the fact that McGill's character will likely fail in his bid for a better life really draws you in. It's not entirely hopeless, so you can keep on clinging to the notion that he just might pull off recovering the million dollars and starting life over with Taiko in Japan, but you seriously doubt it. Most of the people he meets double-cross him, but not everyone. You can never be entirely certain who McGill can trust, and the writing keeps you off-balance enough so that everyone's motivations remain suspect. There's no sparkling dialogue to speak of, but the situations are smartly constructed and intriguing. Not having seen the original two episodes, I don't know what was changed between them and the film. They do a nice job of integrating McGill's backstory into the plot, though, through a series of exchanges witht he head of the CIA. You get enough information to understand what's happening without knowing the full story. Bbased just on this movie, we never know what it is that McGillw as framed for and what brought him to London, and we only have a vague idea of what it is he does for a living. But we get the idea, and even though it's exposition, it doesn't feel overly forced or out of place. If you're not sympathetic to talky films, or if you're not a fan of Man in a Suitcase going into the picture (I'd never seen it myself, but I'm interested now), then it's unlikely To Chase a Million is going to appeal to you. It is pretty slow in spots, and while slow and interesting is okay, slow and dull tends to lose people. And To Chase a Million does have its dull spots. For me, however, it does more things right than it does wrong, and I appreciated both the sense of realism and the change of pace it offers from so much other spy fare. It's not a knock-out, but it's a solid punch never the less. It is slow-moving in spots but still thrilling in others, small-screen in nature but with an ambitious premise and above-average writing, and it's low-rent without being low-class or low-quality. To Chase a Million may not be James Bond, and it may not be The Ipcress File. It may not be Secret Agent or The Prisoner - but that's the point. It is film (and a series) that goes for something different and attains it. You can appreciate that without actually liking the film, of course, but I was lucky and did both. Labels: Espionage, Eurospies, Year: 1967 posted by Keith at 1:21 PM | 0 Comments Friday, July 13, 2001Superargo and the Faceless Giants
1968, Italy/Spain. Starring Guy Madison, Ken Wood, Luisa Baratto, Diana Lorys, Aldo Sambrell. Directed by Paolo Bianchini.
There is a place unlike any other; a place where the women are all bombshells, the scientists are all mad, and masked wrestlers are consulted frequently regarding affairs of state. It's a place where the fate of millions is entrusted to the hands of a man in ill-fitting tights whose primary qualification for the gig of "protector of the masses, champion to all" is his ability to take out a dozen henchmen with a well-executed plancha. In the place, the police are impotent and the henchmen are either mystical and wise Asian masters or super-strong midgets in devil-red leotards. It's a place where a man in a silver mask and three-piece-suit can cruise down the boulevard in his boss little convertible sports car and not be thought of as a freak. A freak? Not only is he not a freak - he's a hero, ready do dispatch evil with a flurry of dropkicks, forearms to the head, and figure four leglocks. Such an assault may seem outdated, even quaint in this day and age of high-tech computer glitches and military targeting blunders, but think for a second about how simpler this world would be if Arafat and Sharon simply locked it up in the squared circle to settle this thing once and for all. Imagine if, when asked what he was doing in response to some touchy and complicated situation in the Middle East or anywhere else in the world, the President of the United States could look squarely into the camera and, with a voice dripping in confidence, tell the world, "There's nothing to worry about; I've got the Nature Boy Ric Flair on the case." Unfortunately, this place seems to no longer exist, though for a time Mexico came pretty damn close. The Mexican masked wrestler movies that peaked in quality and popularity during the 1950s-1960s constructed for us a world in which men with names like El Santo and Blue Demon saved the world, or at least Mexico, from any number of vampires, vampire women, aliens, ninjas, gangsters, werewolves, mad scientists, and countless midget henchmen in devil-red leotards and capes. The Santo movies spanned decades and pitted a masked Mexican luchadore against all manner of opponents, and in the process El Santo became one of the biggest legends in Mexican wrestling and film history. In his wake, a legion of masked wrestlers launched similar careers, often fighting alongside El Santo for the good of all humanity. The Mexico of the lucha libre sci-fi adventure films is just about as close to our version of the Promised Land as you can get. I'd gladly turn in our world of turmoil, suffering, and nouveau French cuisine for a good chimichanga and a world where the biggest news comes when pro wrestlers have to thwart the diabolical scheme of some mummy. Oh sure, no one is going to be crazy about a world full of mummies all walking around with their dusty heads full of diabolical schemes, but once you get over the shock of "Hey, look! A mummy! Is that a midget in a cape next to him?" things really are not so bad. The mummy might kidnap a sexy chica in a flimsy negligee so he can carry her around a bit, and he might injure some old pipe-smoking man by knocking him out with the patented "chop to the shoulders" blow that seems to comprise the mummy's only real offense, but that's about it. In the end, you know the mummy poses only a minor threat to the world as a whole, and Santo or Mil Mascaras will be around eventually to bodyslam the mummy and burn down an old castle. Compared to what we have to deal with in the real world, I'd much prefer luchadores duking it out with mummies. Wrestling heroes were not limited to Mexico however, though that's certainly where the best of them hung out. America got in on the scene with a handful of rather lame wrestling films that were little more than juvenile delinquency films, completely lacking all the outlandish imagination and supernatural trappings of their south of the border compadres. Closer to the mark were the few notable European entries into the heroic wrestler genre. Germany had a couple entries into the scene if I recall, but Europe's big winner was Superargo, a Spanish-Italian co-production Superargo and his European compatriots were not, however, simply stealing the Mexican formula and plopping it down in the middle of the BeNeLux powers. While Mexican wrestling movies mixed grappling action with science fiction and horror (and the occasional gangster or ninja storyline), European wrestling superhero films generally selected from different genres, mixing their costumed crime fighters with the equally popular Eurospy films that came in the wake of James Bond's success. Superargo is equal parts Santo film and swank Eurospy adventure, with more than a little influence being drawn from American superhero shows like Batman and Green Hornet. The result is a film that is heavy on elements from each genre but ultimately lacking the eerie atmosphere achieved in the better Mexican films. More Umberto Lenzi, less Mario Bava in feel. Since Eurospy films often incorporated elements of science fiction into their espionage storylines, you get plenty of that here -- including zombielike robots, a mad scientist, Indian mysticism, and assorted ray guns -- but there's something crips about it, a failure to conjure up the gothic, otherworldly feel of the Santo films. Not that what Superargo has going on is bad. It's just a different approach. Superargo got his start in the film Superargo Vs. Diabolikus, where we met the superhero secret agent who retires from the ring after accidentally killing an opponent, only to return to action when his special powers - like telekinesis, levitation, and "fast coagulating blood" that allows him to accelerate the healing process - cause the secret service to enlist his aid in a case. Since his Superargo mask and tights brought him luck in the ring, he insists on wearing them on the case as well, no doubt causing no small amount of embarrassment to the men who hired him. Superargo returns in this sequel, Superargo Vs. The Faceless Giants, a curious title since the opponents Superargo must overcome are neither faceless nor especially gigantic. Sure, some of them are big, but none of them are Andre the Giant size, and all of them not only have faces, but many of them have very large faces. A psychedelic credit sequence clues you into the fact that this isn't going to be business as usual. I wonder why it is that European and Mexican wrestling movies were so far-out while American wrestling movies were so mundane. I guess part of it was the more colorful nature of Mexican wrestlers. Clad in masks and capes, drawing on a rich history of masked warriors, the Mexicans looked like superheroes right out of the gate. All it took was Santo beating up some Martians, and the wrestlers found themselves occupying the same territory as other costumed crime fighters. Lou Thesz was an incredible in-ring performer, but by contrast, no one would accuse the man of being especially flashy. Besides, American already had plenty of comic book heroes running around in garish, skin-tight outfits. Still, you'd think if someone was going to go through all the trouble of making a wrestling movie, they'd at least through a wolfman into it. Superargo's action begins where it always should - in the ring. A tan, shaven man (thus the good guy) is pounding the tar out of a hairy, pasty dude (thus a bad guy). The good guy's post-match celebration is cut short when a gang of saggy-faced (but not faceless) guys in black leather body suits and huge, unwieldy silver helmets rush him. Well, they don't actually rush him. They sort of stagger very slowly toward him in that style of walking that is meant to signify to the viewers that the people doing the walking are, in fact, robots or zombies. No matter how slow they walk, the robot zombies are still able to surround our hero, who is overwhelmed by the sheer number of exceptionally slow moving lunkheads wandering to and fro and emanating an extremely annoying electronic "bing" noise. The robots kidnap the wrestler, and unfortunately for him, Macho Man Randy Savage isn't there to make the save by jumping on top of the van while wearing a big-ass lime green foam cowboy hat. The wrestler's sister, Claire, does manage to escape by walking slowly away from rather than towards the assailants. It is a technique that could have saved a lot of people a lot of trouble if only it had been employed on a more consistent basis. No matter how many times it happens, and no matter how well I know that it's just one of those things, I can't help but ask why people are always being overtaken by lumbering, slow-moving lugs. A child walking at a brisk pace could outdistance these things and have time to stop and buy a Rocketpop from a pot-smoking ice cream man. Yet in movies, as we all know, even the very fit are unable to outmaneuver or outrun villainous assailants who exhibit all the fleet-footed dexterity of Manny Yarborough. Part of the reason I always appreciated Tom Savini's remake of Night of the Living Dead is because Patricia Tallman as Barbara takes a look at the zombies and surmises that she and her cohorts could escape simply by walking in a speedy and orderly fashion away from the ghouls. Then later on, she does just that. Problem solved. Alas, she is one of the few in horror film history who has proven able to outpace attackers possessing a quarter of her speed. The police are baffled by the case of the loud robots. You know, there is a lot that is good about Europe: Scandinavian women, ancient buildings and castles, fine food and spirits, Bjork kicking the shit out of reporters. There's plenty of good stuff about Europe, but if Eurospy and superhero films are to be believed, one can never offer too few compliments to the police force of any European nation. Not only to the British insist on wearing outdated, goofy hats, but every single time we see the police force, even those geniuses at Scotland Yard, they're baffled and at a dead end. Even the most trifling of cases has some moustache-sporting inspector throwing his arms into the air and whining, "That's it! We're stumped!" These guys can't issue a parking ticket without having to first phone up some womanizing globetrotter named Super Dragon or some guy who insists on conducting official police business while wearing a red body stocking and a black leather mask. The only police officer that was more useless than the police in a Eurospy film was that guy Mahoney who hung around Commissioner Gordon in the old Batman TV show. How the hell did that guy even keep his job? Maybe they would have depended on Batman less if they fired Mahoney's sorry behind and got someone more competent, like McCloud. With no leads and no hope of solving this bizarre case, even though slow-moving robots with giant metal headgear aren't exactly capable of blending seamlessly into society, the government decides to once again call upon the services of Superargo. To put this in context, try to imagine the confidence you would have instilled in you if the police and FBI had been unable to solve that mailbox pipe bomb case, and their solution to the problem had been to call a press conference and announce to the country that, "I think La Parka might have some insight into the situation." Oh sure, it works in a comic book, but the whole concept of costumed crusaders doesn't stand up too well to real-world analysis. Of course, the real world is also where we pay taxes and have to get the timing belt replaced on our car, so it's not as if I'm totally married to everything having to be just like it is in the real world. No one wants to see a movie about someone getting their timing belt replaced, or at least I don't want to see that movie -- not unless while the mechanic is working on the car, the garage is besieged by a Frankenstein monster. Still, it's amusing to think about the idea of comic book superheroism being applied to the real world. Can you imagine if, during the hellish civil war between Tutsi and Hutus in Africa, a guy in a purple leotard and mask came riding out of the jungle and yelled, "The Phantom commands you to stop this madness!" Or for a less sinister example: anyone remember that talk show where they had the guy on who really thought he was Batman? He would skulk around the city all night long in his homemade Adam West duds just looking for crimes to fight. All this reminds me of a story once relayed to me, I think by my friend Pat, though i could be wrong. Anyway, he knew a guy who was making a movie or a Halloween costume based on the Stainless Steel Rat character. The guy had crafted this whole sheet-metal get-up and was trying it on one night when a burglar, unaware of the fact that anyone was in the isolated work room, broke intot he house. Upon hearing the noise, the guy grabbed a bat or a crowbar or something and, in full Stainless Steel Rat armor, rushed the burglar, who was suitably freaked out by seeing a big-ass armored rat charging at him. Apparently as he was being arrested, the criminal kept babbling about the freak in the rat suit, not unlike people int he comic books do about Batman. So I don't know. Maybe there's more validity to costumed crime fighting than we think. Whatever the case, I wouldn't have made it very far in life if I was the sort of person who sat around whining about how Spider-Man wasn't realistic because he wears a silly costume. I mean, the dude can crawl up walls and make wavy black lines emanate from his head when danger is near! Who am I to judge his fashion sense? Complaining about the inherent nuttiness of costumed superheroes is like complaining that Star Wars is unrealistic because you shouldn't be able to hear all that sound in space. We first meet Superargo as he's practicing his levitation skills with his personal swami and sidekick, Kamir. When the police arrive, Superargo proves his power to them by doing the whole "I knew you were going to come here" thing, meaning that so far, Superargo has proven himself at least as capable as Mistress Cleo. When the secret service rep seems less than enthused about employing a pro wrestler (perhaps he was familiar with the cinematic body of work attributed to one Terry "Hulk Hogan" Bollea), Superargo further impresses all parties by concentrating for thirty seconds in order to crack a vase using nothing but his astounding mental powers. Never mind that he could have just walked over and kicked the thing in a lot less time than it took him to whip up his Force abilities. I'm not saying that if I could break priceless ceramic antiques using just my mind that I wouldn't do it, but in a pinch if it came down to focusing the sum total of my chi powers for thirty seconds versus just slapping someone, I'd go with the slap. I know it's not very metaphysical of me, but that's the kind of guy I am. The government is still hesitant to entrust the fate of the country to Superargo and Kamir, at least until the robotic zombies strike again, this time robbing a bank. For some reason, the police run right by the van parked on the sidewalk in front of the bank, with its hatch open. You'd thin they would at least take a passing notice to such a prominent getaway vehicle. They might also at least pretend to be interested in the guy sitting in the black sedan next to the van with the big blinking control box in his lap. But what do I know about police work? In classic dumb movie cop form, they realize the robots are impervious to bullets and respond to this revelation by shooting even more bullets. Superargo soon surmises that someone is kidnapping the world's best athletes and turning them into slow-moving robotic zombie minions. Exactly why you would take the time to kidnap the worlds best and brightest athletes, the fastest and strongest people in the world, then turn them into shuffling buffoons is beyond me. Seems like you could really be kidnapping any old slob and getting the same ultimate outcome. Superargo also figures that Claire, being an acclaimed swimmer, is still a target since nothing is handier to your sluggish robot army than having one of them who might be a decent swimmer were it not for the pounds and pounds of electronic equipment strapped to its head. Superargo devises a genius plot involving Claire hiding in one room while he waits in the other for the robot men to come after her. His plan works wonderfully. She stands in one room, and he's in the other getting his ass handed to him by the robotic thugs. For some reason, one of them is carrying a medieval mace. What the heck is his deal? If Superargo's plan included getting beat up and allowing Claire to be successfully kidnapped, then it all worked out pretty well for him. Superargo gives chase in his keen little sports car, the kind that all spies and heroic wrestlers seem to own. Fat lot of good having a fast car does him, because the Faceless Giants with big faces manage to shake him. For his next plan, Superargo decides to stage a dramatic comeback in the world of wrestling, figuring that this will make whoever is behind the kidnapping want to kidnap him too. At Superargo's request, the German secret service sets up a match. I didn't know that among the police force's many duties were booking and promoting pro wrestling matches, nor that these matches would be nationally celebrated affairs reported in all the papers. Despite the blatant transparency of his ruse, a plot so feeble and obvious that there is no way the mysterious villains couldn't recognize it as a trap, it still works. The Faceless Giants show up and kidnap Superargo - except that it's not Superargo at all! It's an impostor, and Superargo is following close behind in his inconspicuous sports car. It might be easier if he had allowed himself to get captured, but that's just my stupid plan. I do know that by this time, all Superargo has managed to do is break a vase and get two innocent people kidnapped. By this point in the movie, El Santo would have wrestled three matches, judged a beauty contest, and punched Frankenstein in the face. Kamir and Superargo begin wandering aimlessly around in the woods in the general vicinity of where they last saw the robots. Superargo's bright red body stocking aids him in blending into the dull brown background of the woods. Kamir sees one of the kidnapped athletes making a run for it, and this athlete was obviously not a track star. He moves like Rerun from What's Happenin', with arms flailing wildly in little circles at his side. What was this guy's sport? Maybe rowing? Or curling? Unable to help for some reason, possibly laziness, Kamir and Superargo regroup back at the road, only to be discovered by a sultry beauty in a car every bit as sporty as Superargo's own ride. She seems especially unimpressed that a pro wrestler and his Hindu sidekick are wandering around in the woods, like that sort of thing happens all the time. I know I'd be pretty shocked to see Honky-tonk Man and Mr. Fuji in the city, let alone loitering along the side of a dirt road out in the middle of nowhere. We soon learn that the woman works for the man creating the robot army, and that man is none other than famed iconoclastic rock star Elvis Costello, or at least someone strikingly similar in appearance. Superargo and Kamir get attacked in the woods, and once again one of the robots is lugging around one of those spikey morning star things. What the hell? You have the technology to turn the world's greatest athletes into awkward, clumsy robotic minions, yet the best you can do for arming them is some Renaissance Festival surplus? Look, I know Europe has a rich medieval history and all, but give your guys some guns or something. Who robs a bank or fights heroic costumed superheroes with a mace? Superargo, in turn, throws trees at the robots. So I guess on top of mental powers and fast-coagulating blood and levitation, he also has super-strength. Doesn't that sort of make his in-ring career even more of a sham? I mean, how heroic is it for a guy with supernatural strength and mental powers to pick on lugs whose only real power is a mean hammerlock? Meanwhile, for all his metaphysical mumbo jumbo, Kamir's only power seems to be to yell "Superargo, help!" really loud when he is getting choked by robots. He does this in pretty much every scuffle the duo gets into, making you wonder why Superargo even brings the guy alone. Sure, he may be an ace at helping you develop your telekinetic abilities, but that obviously doesn't translate into him being a good fighter. Chun this guy is not. Superargo does manage to kill and capture one of the Faceless Giants. After struggling to get the thing into the tiny back seat of his European sports car (I bet Superargo wishes he'd bought something a little more sensible now), he takes it back to HQ where it is operated on by Jeffery Combs and Will Farrell, or at least two more striking look-alikes. They don't tell him much except for what he already knows, but it does cause him to remember some crazy old scientist who had been doing robotics research before going totally insane. While Superargo and Kamir visit the mad scientist in a building labeled "Asylum for the Criminally Insane" (would they really advertise that so prominently?), the diabolical Dr. Wond hypnotizes Claire into trying to kill Superargo. The remainder of the movie involves a lot of running around in the woods and Kamir screaming, "Superargo! Help me!" before everyone ends up in Wond's underground lair for the big final showdown. Wond could have avoided a lot of trouble if he just killed Superargo with a knife or a gun or something instead of some goofy mad scientist way (gas chamber). To his credit, at least Wond does try and kill Superargo instead of pulling that "I want you alive so you can see the fruition of my mad scheme" nonsense that most mad movie scientists pull. All in all, Superargo is a pretty cool little superhero film. Thanks to it being a European production from the 1960s, there's a lot of trippy phantasmagoric stuff. His powers are okay, I guess. I mean, I wouldn't complain if I could throw trees and levitate. Superargo is no Santo, and this isn't nearly as cool as the better Santo films, but it's still a fun adventure with a few twists and turns in the plot. Granted they're very predictable twists and turns, but what do you want from a movie about a superhero wrestler battling robots? It delivers chuckles and thrills, which is enough to keep a lowbrow chump like me satisfied. Although there are scenes of "deduction," the movie generally eschews exposition in favor of more scenes involving Superargo having to pull Kamir out of quicksand. Can't he just levitate out? Anyway, that's a good example of the "show, don't tell" rule, though when my composition teacher told us that, I don't know if she had in mind red-tight-wearing superhero pro wrestlers pulling swamis out of quicksand. Superargo manages to pull off a ludicrous costume fairly well, though I still don't know how comfortable I'd be with Superargo being the last, best line of defense against the forces of evil. I guess he's better than Hulk Hogan, but what I'd really like to see is a group of villains that have to contend with Abdullah the Butcher or Cactus Jack. Superargo's wrestling outfit is no more outlandish than The Phantom's sweet lavender tights -- and that guy was in the jungle! -- or Adam West's pot belly-enhancing spandex. At least Superargo looks fit beneath his tights, a feat that is actually harder to pull off than you might think. Even big, muscular Henry Rollins type guys tend to look silly and skinny in long-sleeve bodystockings, which is probably why most of them opt for those bodybuilder tank tops with the foot-wide arm openings. When Rollins had on the Superman outfit for one of his videos, he looked like a scrawny goofball, yet weirdly enough, when the decidedly non-muscular Christopher Reeve had the blue and red on, he looked okay. All things considered, I'd rather have Adam West looking goofy in tights than any of those absurd "built-in fake muscles" suits that have been so popular since the Tim Burton Batman movie. At least Adam West and Superargo can turn their heads. What the heck was Batman thinking when he made that costume? And then when he had the chance to revise it, what did he do? Add head mobility? No, he added fake nipples. Man, I hope SUperargo kicks his ass some day. Acting-wise, there isn't much to gauge here since my copy of the movie is dubbed. Besides, when you don bright red jimmies and a leather mask, those tend to do the acting for you. The rest of the cast is pretty stiff it seems, but honestly, are you watching Superargo and the Faceless Giants in hopes of spotting the next F. Murray Abraham? Or M. Emmet Walsh? The cops are there to huff and say, "Well old chap, I'm completely baffled." The women are there to scream or say, "Superargo, you will protect me, won't you?" The mad scientists are there to say, "Those fools will pay for laughing at my research!" And Superargo? He's there to kick a little butt. Dr. Wond comes across as a bit of a weak villain. Sure, he has a keen underground lair full of random scientific equipment, and he has the beautiful female assistant who isn't as evil as she thinks, but where the heck are his midget henchmen? Although I would have appreciated a little more in-ring action from a wrestling superhero movie, the action overall is pretty good. The fights are well-choreographed, with only a few of those horribly telegraphed stunt set-ups. I wonder why the only time Superargo uses his super strength is when he throws the tree at the robots. Maybe I'm wrong and that wasn't a super power at all. Maybe it was one of those surges of adrenaline you read about in the papers. The rest of his powers are pretty useless. He gets to levitate once, but he misses the chance to really piss off Dr. Wond by using mental powers to shatter the madman's assortment of antiques. Superargo was spoofed in the film Incredible Paris Incident, and while this movie isn't nearly as goofy or as fun as that one, it's still plenty goofy and plenty fun. With so many people attempting to make superheroes dark and serious and "adult" (or as adult as a costumed crime fighter can be), this campy, wacky throwback to a simpler time is positively delightful. Unless the success of Spiderman reminds Hollywood executives that superhero movies can actually be fun rather than all somber and sour-faced, then at least we know we can look back to the golden age of the 1960s, when all you needed to save the world was a bulletproof bodystocking, a mask, some telekinetic powers, and a turban-wearing sidekick. Hey, what ever happened to that guy who pretended to be Superargo in that one scene? Labels: Action: Luchadores, Action: Superheroes, B-Masters Roundtable, Eurospies, Year: 1968 posted by Keith at 5:49 PM | 1 Comments |
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