That a movie can even raise such questions renders any further review of it as pointless because such a thought provoking assortment of queries are only reserved for the very finest in masked-wrestler cinema and I can offer no higher recommendation than to say that Superargo wears his bright red costume (nicely accented with black briefs, boots, belt, gloves and facemask) throughout the entire duration of the film, even while pouring his old lady a drink back at his bachelor pad.

When the movie started and we were treated to the big showdown between Superargo and El Tigro I was thinking that more movies would benefit by easing us into the plot with a heavyweight bout. Since this was more of a James Bond movie than a wrestling pay-per-view though, Superargo and El Tigro weren’t really pulling out all the stops.

Sure there was some mat wrestling and Superargo seemed overly fond of the head scissors, but where were the ring entrances and the theme songs? Where were the pre-match promos promising total devastation? Where was the referee bumping and the outside interference by Ric Flair and Triple H?

No matter. I’m still giving the match four stars because of the finish: El Tigro was put in the bow and arrow and catapulted through the ropes and outside onto the concrete below where he cracked his skull and died!

Superargo is all broken up over this, quits the business, and goes into a lengthy (less than three minutes movie time) depression, though strangely he keeps his costume on even as he’s threatening to never wrestle again.

Luckily Superargo’s only true buddy (now that he killed his other one) is the head of some secret service or other. Superargo served under him during the war, but is too proud to go to his pal and ask him for advice. So his pal comes to him and offers him a job as a secret agent to break up some operation that’s been hijacking uranium shipments in the ocean. That’s just what I would have done for a friend who seemed kind of down!

Superargo takes the job and his pal stabs him in front of the rest of the secret service as a way to begin the demonstration of his super powers. Argo isn’t hurt because he’s got this special blood that coagulates instantly, but that’s not all this guy has in his tights!

They put him through a battery of tests that show us how he can hold his breath for seven minutes, how he can handle being frozen, and how he’s able to absorb a great deal of physical stress because he’s got great metaphysical equilibrium, whatever that means.

Next up is a visit to the labs where Q, I mean his buddy from the war, gives him all his special gear to go out and hunt down Diabolikus. You’ve got your souped up car, your bulletproof Superargo costume (which his buddy promptly tests out by shooting him several times – “It was just a .45, old chum!”), broach with hidden camera, player piano which acts as two way radio and the fake olives that are really miniature Geiger counters. (These suckers even came complete with toothpicks! They were to be used to detect the presence of uranium, presumably to make double sure that Diabolikus hadn’t spiked Superargo’s martinis or something.)

Superargo ends up crashing this guy’s place two separate times. The first time he gets caught and tries to claim that he was just a tourist who got curious about the island. I think that it’s at moments like that that maybe Superargo’s costume becomes a bit of a hindrance.

Diabolikus shows us that he isn’t a fool and rejects this lame excuse of Superargo’s and tells him that he is going to kill him. Superargo pulls the old classic “well, since I’m going to die and not be able to tell anyone, why don’t you clue me into your plans for world domination.”

Diabolikus agrees and says that it will be the last thing he hears so Superargo responds, “well, I hope that it’s lengthy and interesting then.” Is there any way that I’m going to skip his next adventure, Superargo and the Faceless Giants, after this?

This is the way masked wrestler/secret agent movies were meant to be done and you’ll watch enraptured and/or stunned as one stupefying moment after another plays out before your disbelieving eyes.

Superargo is rarely at a loss of what tact to take in any given situation, whether it be jumping off a bridge and playing possum on the ground below or getting his face whipped with a riding crop by Diabolikus’ girlfriend.

You never do get to see his face which only adds to his mystery and makes you think that he could be anyone: your neighbor, your boss, or even your dad!

Even at the end of the movie as the credits roll, Superargo is such a showman that he just stands there staring at you and making faces (it may have supposed to have been a smile, but it kind of came off as a cross between a snarl and that face you make when you’re nervous and aren’t sure what you’re supposed to do next). Bring on those Faceless Giants! And lets have a ten bell salute for old El Tigro!

© 2010 MonsterHunter

Then you’ve got films like Rocky V that don’t do anything to advance the series (or Tommy Morrison’s career) while the fifth Godzilla effort (Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster) saw Godzilla get a personality transplant.

Coming only one year after the fifth James Bond movie, was it possible that the Kommissar X movies could somehow rise above all the other five time losers out there? Is it possible to rehash everything that probably barely worked three or four times before, but change a few actors, the mission, and location just enough so we realize that we are actually watching a different movie than the first four Kommissar X movies and leave us thirsting for a sixth and seventh entry? Tough questions, but with an easy answer: Brad Harris climbs into a giant tire and rolls around during a massive gun fight at a quarry!

Not to be outdone, Kommissar X himself Tony Kendall somehow manages to survive getting run over by a bulldozer during the same battle! Despite being uninjured, he was caked in mud which caused Brad to ask him if he was getting ready for a minstrel show!

Clearly, Kill, Panther Kill! is coming down on the jokey, slapsticky side of the Eurospy genre. Thus you’ll be treated to protracted fight scenes punctuated by amusingly silly bits such as Brad smashing a guy on his foot with a brick and Kommissar X riding on a weight bench into some dudes.

Really though, Kommissar X’s unorthodox fighting technique is exactly what’s needed when you’re fighting a judo team because they think Kommissar X and Brad stole their diving suits!

Yes, you’re tempted to write that bit off as the movie trying too hard to be both funny and to squeeze some pointless action into things, but it all makes perfect sense once you understand just what is going on.

And what’s going on is that some bad guy gets harpooned in the back! It was a nifty trick by Kommissar X to use the guy as a shield when the other bad guys come gunning for him, but when the hunt is on for some missing jewels, you better not get between Kommissar X’s $100,000 insurance commission and a harpoon!

Both Kommissar X and his glowering boyfriend Captain Tom Rowland (Brad Harris) of the LAPD are after the jewels. At first Tom is after the guy that stole the jewels, but once it becomes clear that he’s dead (there was some doubt due to the not quite unexpected twin brother who was milling about for awhile), Tom realizes that Kommissar X’s insurance commission would go a long way to funding his retirement from the force.

The problem is that no one can find the jewels because no one is sure where the key to the safety deposit box is! There’s a lot of running around trying to figure this out, but once Kommissar X determines that the ugly blue statue of three panthers is involved, we shift over to a “switched key” plot before some double crosses are played out.

It would all be pretty bland and forgettable except for one little thing: Canada! Those who worship the great Maple Leaf, rejoice! It is the most exotic (and by exotic I mean you would have never guessed that Kommissar X would ever go there) Eurospy adventure of all time!

First stop: the world famous Calgary Stampede! If you’re like most normal people, you don’t know what the hell this even is! Believe it or not, it’s like some kind of rodeo! In Canada!

And you can bet that a globetrotter like Kommissar X already knows this because he’s deep undercover among all the Canadian cowboys dressed in a big ass sombrero and a serape! It’s like he’s the Man With No Name combined with Speedy Gonzales, but in Canada! And just so we all know he’s still in a Eurospy movie, he’s wearing sunglasses!

If this was only the third or fourth Kommissar X movie, I could understand if all our exotic Canadian action took place at the Stampede. But this is number five! And the stakes have to be raised that much higher!

Remember how in Bad Boys II they had to invade Cuba because the first Bad Boys was so awesome? Kill, Panther Kill! is like that because the Stampede is just a warm up for turning Kommissar X loose on Expo 67!

Holy Krap, Kommissar X! Are you freaking serious? Expo 67? Once I looked up just what the frig Expo 67 was, I practically filled my pants with my own brand of Canadian Whiskey!

Expo 67 was like a world’s fair or something! It had buildings with different countries’ names on it, a sky ride, monorail and even a biosphere! And Kommissar X was hanging out, trailing bad guys, taunting his good buddy Captain Tom and aided and abetted by his super hot blonde assistant who made periodic appearances in Swiss and Native American costumes for no reason! There was even a water ski show!

By the time Kommissar X survives a boat chase, a death trap so elaborate he advises the bad guy who set it to patent it (it involved a fuse being run through an air conditioner duct), and has Captain Tom shove a dildo-sized blunt into his mouth, you’ll barely be able to breathlessly utter the only phrase to describe this Canadian confection of Italian inspiration: Kommissar X-cellent!

© 2008 MonsterHunter

It’s all here – the pointless trip to the pyramids, the tacked on trip to a colder country (this time it’s Germany instead of Switzerland), the gadgets that surely only seemed awesome to Umberto, and of course the obligatory, but quite embarrassing reference to Ian Fleming’s James Bond himself! (I’m not watching a spy movie just to see secret agent Frank Smith lounging at the hotel pool with his copy of Live and Let Die! Hell, I could do that myself and I don’t even have a license to kill!)

The opening scene where guys are sitting at a desk explaining why and who our spies are after was one of those that I had to rewind because I always get drowsy when people start talking about Lebanese engineers, anti-radar gizmos, and Egypt.

I instantly knew that some strapping bland guy would be dispatched to hang around a hotel, make contact with a female spy whom he would work with and pepper with obnoxious pick up lines, and periodically fight sinister looking guys in sunglasses and hats before breaking the case wide open by jumping to some far fetched conclusion based on nothing more than his super spy intuition.

But what my own super spy intuition didn’t pick up on was that big bowling scene that concludes the film and reveals the shocking double-double-cross! (Hint: it involves a hideous Clark Gable-style glue-on mustache!)

Agent Smith arrives in Cairo and immediately sets about demonstrating that the good guys won the Cold War in spite of dingbats like him. He mills around the pyramids trying to find his contact by walking up to unsuspecting tourists and saying his secret spy phrase, “the baby has a fever.”

Thankfully, he notices a woman (Agent MacDonald) wearing a yellow neckerchief similar to his and uses his espionage training to discern that the only other person capable of making such a fashion misstatement is a fellow spy.

MacDonald advises that they should not be seen together, so they go and spend the afternoon at a museum, stay in the same hotel, and roll around in the same bed in the hotel even as they know that the room is being monitored.

The investigation finally ramps up as MacDonald goes about the business of cozying up to the Oriental who is suspected of somehow being involved with the anti-radar invention. The Oriental’s role in things would actually be totally beside the point, but for the gambling scene this allowed Lenzi to stick in the movie. Everyone knows, even an Italian filmmaker, that a spy movie needs a scene where dudes are playing poker or roulette. If you don’t believe me, just ask Agent Smith if you can borrow one of his James Bond novels.

The Oriental doesn’t figure much into plot, but who cares since Agent Smith is finally unleashed high atop an observation tower! Running up some stairs, he sees the shadow of a guy with a gun just around the corner and showing us that even the lamest super spies still have their moments, he pauses to get a cigarette out of his case before chucking the case in the direction of the gunman!

What follows is a brawl high up in the skies of Cairo! And even better, a loving shot of a dummy sailing through the air to the ground below!

More violence follows as it turns out that the hotel Smith and MacDonald are staying in is managed by Kemp, the guy who has captured the anti-radar device! So begins the completely unnecessary dance of death between the three.

Kemp spends his time concocting all these harebrained schemes to kill the two (attempted electrocution in the hotel pool, gassing them in the back of a truck) while Smith and MacDonald run around trying to avoid a guy with a glove that shoots blades as well as well as some mean bitch at a spa. If you can’t even manage to put a bullet in the head of a guy just laying out at your pool, maybe you shouldn’t tip your hand that you’re a bad guy by trying to kill him.

In a scene that I never did understand, MacDonald shows Smith a Life Magazine about a plane trip that actress Gina Lollobrigida was on, and Smith immediately deduces that a German guy on the plane was involved with the anti-radar gear, that he has a place in Luxor, and that’s where the anti-radar gear must be!

He’s right of course, and later while at Luxor he immediately deduces that the actual plans for the anti-radar gear must be back at this guy’s regular home in Germany!

Not to be outdone, Kemp again shows us the mental prowess of a rabid camel by confronting Smith and MacDonald in Germany about how he’s been there for a whole week and has the plans and then manages to get killed by MacDonald, while Smith brags after the fact to MacDonald about his totally ghetto bullet proof winter coat! (It just has strips of metal sewn into it!)

There’s lots more to keep the indifferent fan of Eurospy flicks amused in this one including MacDonald’s career as a nightclub singer, Smith beating down a woman spy (twice!), the tear gas disguised as lipstick gizmo that passes for a cutting edge spy gadget, Smith trashing the anti-radar gear by busting a light fixture and pulling out some wires (while stock footage of a real radar unit is shown stopping), and Smith whining about how the axle on their car is broken after they crash it in the desert because the brakes were tampered with.

The sudden appearance of a bunch of Russian tourists in the middle of the desert as well as Smith being drugged and talking in his sleep being used to explain a plot point which is ultimately negated by the ending of the movie only cements 008 Operation Exterminate as a film that will likely only be remembered as causing anyone who watches it wonder just who in the hell Gina Lollobrigida was.

© 2010 MonsterHunter

Superseven calling FTD! Superseven come in! We’ve got a guy not only trying to sell a deadly gadget that resembles a high class silver dildo to the highest bidder, but is making his dinner centerpieces too large!

Back in 1966, eager audiences who apparently didn’t know any better and were likely fooled by the nifty poster art had to wait an entire year for another Superseven adventure following his trip to the Pyramids in Super Seven Calling Cairo. This time secret agent Martin Stephens (Roger Browne) tracks the floral fiend all the way to Athens where director Umberto Lenzi gets another chance to use a historical location (this time it’s the Acropolis) to show us how that Martin’s codename should have been Stupidseven.

Martin has forced a captured Mei Lang to set up a meeting with her elusive boss, the Great Dragon, at the Acropolis. Martin, demonstrating the training that saw him loitering around the Great Pyramids in his previous film just waiting for a break in that case, this time stands right behind Mei Lang, looking every bit the secret agent who is forcing this chick to set a trap for her master.

If that wasn’t bad enough, Martin stands around with his thumb in his butt while Mei Lang not so subtly uses hand gestures to indicate that Martin was right next her. I suppose it’s meant to be quite dramatic, but it’s laughable because Martin is pretty much the only guy standing menacingly next to her. Of course, when you later find out that the Great Dragon knew who Martin was all along, the scene just comes off as ill-conceived and completely extraneous.

Other bad Eurospy conventions are repeated by Lenzi in this film as well. There’s the nightclub scene that actually improves on the one from the previous film, moving it from the merely forgettable drumming action of Super Seven Calling Cairo to the coed dancing by a group called the Mimis.

Their number is so boringly idiotic that you wonder if Lenzi might have had it left over from one of those sword and sandal movies that frequently made use of extended dance scenes to give our blown up muscle-bound hero a chance to catch his wind again.

And remember the embarrassingly low rent gadgets that Superseven got saddled with in his first movie? Don’t worry, he doesn’t have to make do with such cruddy discontinued spy gear as the shoe bomb, ink pen gun, or the shaver/transmitter this time around! In fact, he doesn’t get any gadgets at all!

He has a gun as well as some karate, but the closest thing to a wacky Superseven gizmo we get is the harpoon he almost uses on the Great Dragon! (An unfortunate car bomb intervened before Superseven could recreate one of Jason Vorhees’ most pleasing kills.)

Superseven’s mission itself doesn’t even inspire much in the way of breathless anticipation as he’s sent out to kill three people who may have memorized a formula related to the silver dildo he stole from a chick at a bullfight. Even Superseven has enough sense to sniff out that this mission stinks as bad his perpetually sweaty self does, complaining about it to his boss before trudging off to do what he does best. (But not as well as James Bond, which one of the bad guys manages to comment on!)

The mission is such a milk run that Superseven ought to be put on suspension for not immediately assuming a double cross was in the works.

If nothing else, he should have questioned a little harder the wisdom of a plan that involved him flying all over the world to kill these guys one at a time when it would have made much more sense to send out agents simultaneously to kill these guys so they wouldn’t be tipped off when hearing that one of their compatriots had been killed by Superseven.

Still, these are the same guys who sometimes try to kill Superseven and other times just capture him and fret over whether Superseven really has sent one of those envelopes full of proof to be opened in the event of his death or disappearance which will prove everything!

Of course, if he really sent it or if his proof was really worth a crap, Superseven would have advised them of this the first time they captured him or he would have just sent it without any conditions on opening it up.

The bad guys aren’t any smarter since instead of just going and checking to see if he really sent something (it was an inside job, so they surely could’ve gotten access without arousing suspicion), they concoct an elaborate scheme that would have Superseven dying in an accident that his traitor buddy miraculously survives! Naturally, it immediately backfires.

A decided lack of action (Superseven does accidentally run through a carnival though), a plot where every so often characters are prone to stopping what they are doing to give a speech explaining everything that has happened and why they are doing something, and Superseven getting a female sidekick in such an illogical fashion (she just happens to keep showing up right when he’s trying to kill people in different cities) that I spent most of the movie just assuming she was a secret agent herself (she wasn’t), all add up to a flick that couldn’t even give us a good catfight scene between Superseven’s old lady and Mei Lang!

For obvious reasons, this was the final Superseven adventure. For reasons much less obvious, Lenzi and Browne would team up again the next year for another Eurospy effort, Last Man To Kill.

© 2010 MonsterHunter

And if Superseven seems destined to handle Bond’s sloppy seconds, the same holds true for all the other trappings of the genre.

Remember all the cool gear that Bond would routinely be outfitted with for a given mission? And then wreck? Superseven gets a gun disguised as an ink pen, some sort of transmitter disguised as a shaver, and a shoe that has a little bomb stashed in the heel.

Luckily for Superseven the microbomb wasn’t top of the line since he implored his female companion not to drop it because it would explode, but then she clearly fumbles it onto the ground before retrieving it. It doesn’t go off, but we probably were supposed to be too distracted by the fact that the detachable heel from his shoe could somehow be used to saw through a bunch of ropes in about ten seconds to really worry about a super sensitive bomb that only exploded when convenient.

In addition to all the substandard, clearance, recalled, and discontinued spy hardware that Superseven gets saddled with using, he also picks up a fairly lame secret identity. He’s to travel undercover to Cairo as the assistant museum nerd in charge of getting Napoleonic relics. Somehow this will enable him to sniff around for the missing zoom lens.

Though the bad guys were literally waiting for him at the airport, his compromised-from-the-very-beginning deep cover did come in handy when he used a bunch of mannequins dressed up in Napoleonic costumes to trick the Egyptian police into not noticing that one of the mannequins was actually the corpse of a woman!

There was an especially suspenseful moment where Superseven had to deftly retrieve some money that was shoved into the cleavage of this dead chick before the cops noticed. In fact, I’m still in suspense because I have no idea why this dead woman had money shoved down into her jugs!

Credit must be given to Superseven for the way he handles the investigation despite it being entirely uninteresting. The zoom lens is important because it is made of a new element that is a billion times more elemental than even Uranium!

If it fell into the wrong hands something heinous would no doubt happen which is why Superseven pulls out all the stops, breaks all the rules, and goes totally no holds barred all over Egypt, Italy and even some Swiss border guards in an effort to recover it! And the first step is to lay the sexy intruder he finds in his hotel room! And then hit the local strip club to do more recon!

Now before you go and criticize Superseven for doing that, I’ll have you know that the bad guy and his girlfriend are also there! And the girlfriend is a sketch artist! And Superseven is with a sexy French chick who is an eyewitness to the guy who was last seen with the camera! And the sketch artist and Superseven have a past together! And the French chick Superseven is with is entirely different than the Egyptian chick he dropped a load into back at the hotel room!

Us guys watching can pretty much forgive Superseven when his big plan to find the zoom lens consists of sitting on a camel with the French chick at the Pyramids and periodically pointing to a tourist and asking her “is that him? How about that guy?” After all, at least half of any secret agent mission is proving your country’s superiority in the bedroom!

Director Umberto , who is probably best remembered for his various cannibal movies (Eaten Alive, Cannibal Ferox, Deep River Savages), actually had a lengthy career that pretty much tracked the vagaries of the Italian exploitation film industry. With Super Seven Calling Cairo though he manages to deliver a mostly dull picture punctuated by outbursts of almost laughable moments.

There’s a scene where a guy climbs up one of the Pyramids and gets shot. Instead of showing the guy falling, Umberto cuts to a hilarious reaction shot of Superseven and his lady friend where they silently look up at the pyramid and then down as the guy falls to his death.

Then there’s the moment where Superseven demonstrates to the Swiss authorities that the weapon he used to threaten the border guards was actually just a cigarette lighter shaped like a gun and they let him go!

And how did anyone involved keep a straight face when Superseven went into the bathroom to retrieve the lens for the bad guys, turned on his transmitter and then proceeded to talk to the bad guys about their exact location so his bosses would know where to rescue him? Superseven starts babbling about how likes it at the motel there by the sea near Fregene just a few miles from Rome on the main highway while the bad guys just stand around probably wondering just what the hell is wrong with him!

You may also laugh for all the wrong reasons when Superseven finds himself at a big go-cart race and chases one of the villains smack dab into a junkyard. The shootout that follows is typical of the movie as the bad guy gets distracted by a stray dog allowing Superseven to kill him.

There’s barely any action to speak of and star Roger Browne manages to combine an off-putting smugness with the acting presence of one of his museum mannequins that make him perfect for such a shoddy spy story which Lenzi also had a hand in writing! But not to worry because Superseven and Lenzi would return in The Spy Who Loved Flowers! Please let Superseven be undercover as an assistant florist!

© 2011 MonsterHunter

Harrison’s Fleming spends most of the movie milling around the same hotel in Casablanca getting mixed up with a variety of sexy babes who are trying to kill him. He’s in deep cover as the genius scientist Coleman who, along with two others, has discovered an alternative energy source to oil. The other two have been murdered and Coleman is next on the list and he’s gone so far as to have plastic surgery to hide his true identity from potential assassins.

This is perfect for the CIA’s efforts to protect Coleman and to root out the killers because it allows Fleming to assume Coleman’s identity. It might have been a teensy bit less than perfect though since this plastic surgery somehow turned an old ugly dude into a strapping blonde stud, but Fleming even thought of that!

Once Fleming encounters Coleman’s wife, he reveals his true identity to her and gives her information on how to contact her real husband to verify his story. He even demonstrates his secret agent prowess when he asks to be connected to the super secret phone number in Geneva where Coleman is hiding out by announcing they would take the phone call in the hotel’s phone booth since Mrs. Coleman’s phone might be tapped!

Unfortunately, he also demonstrates the secret agent prowess of a guy in a virtually unknown Italian spy movie by neglecting to think that the room itself might be bugged or that if the phone was bugged, the bad guys would already have the phone number and city where Coleman could be located.

Really though, how could anyone, even a guy like Fleming ever anticipate something so dastardly like a spy hanging a long cord with a microphone down from the room above him into the open window in Mrs. Coleman’s room?

Don’t worry about Fleming’s next job performance review though. Missing the bug hanging down in the window wasn’t nearly as critical as his telling Mrs. Coleman all this since she turns out to be one of the people trying to kill her husband!

She and a couple of other evil hotties are getting paid by a sweaty, pasty, wheelchair-bound Texas oil baron to take care of Coleman. Sure, it sounds somewhat ludicrous that Coleman just happened to marry a diabolical broad with a team of killers at her disposal, but I think you’ll see it makes perfect sense when Mrs. Coleman believes one of her gals has betrayed her and makes her strip to her black nightie and then whips her! Dang, I’d marry her, too!

As with any moderately boring Eurospy effort, there’s a few spots in the story that don’t make any sense outside of a desperate need to not have the movie end after only forty-five minutes or so. For instance, if you’re even paying the slightest bit of attention to things, you may wonder why once the bad guys realize that Coleman is in Geneva and that Fleming is just some CIA goof, they continue to try and kill Fleming.

Why not just check out of the hotel when Fleming is in the shower, fly to Geneva and kill Coleman? Why mess with our hero at all anymore? He’s irrelevant to evildoers’ objective at this point.

The need to stretch things out to feature film length may also help to explain why Margheriti (Lightning Bolt, Jungle Raiders) felt compelled to shoot the longest bar fight ever filmed. What started out as a confrontation between the oil tycoon’s henchman and Fleming at a dockside watering hole degenerated into a fifteen minute epic of slapstick stuntman welfare.

Though it would be easy to dismiss this sequence as mindless violence that has nothing to do with the plot, it is actually mindless violence that has nothing to do with the plot that features a midget wearing a fez!

In a movie decidedly lacking in secret agent spy gadgets, a midget in a fez is easily one of the greatest secret agent spy gadgets of all time! I mean, there’s just no contest between this little booger in a funny hat and Nick Nack from The Man With The Golden Gun!

Fleming’s second and final adventure (Secret Agent Fireball was the first) concludes the only way it really could with Fleming having absolutely nothing to do with defeating the bad guys, but still getting praised for his fine work by his superiors!

Coleman’s wife reunites with Coleman and tries to poison him, but his super duper poison-detecting mood ring alerts him to her evil intentions and he switches the drinks on her when she’s not looking!

Good job Fleming! We never had any doubts that you could stand around accepting undeserved accolades before retiring to your hotel to screw the Russian agent who just tried to sabotage your mission which you failed at anyway without her help! Good show, old chap!

© 2010 MonsterHunter

It is also remembered for such suspenseful spy moments such as when the professor in charge of things repeatedly broadcasts his burps to his sexy assistant’s speaker-broach in an effort to prevent her from getting hot and heavy with the Latin American dictator she’s trying to seduce as part of a plot to kidnap him.

There’s also the incident where the Professor plays some funky music over the ship’s radio as part of his getaway plan which causes the sailors on other ships who hear it to do some simple dance steps. Clearly, the world of mid 1960s Italian espionage cinema was one where thinking outside the box was as routine as using giant electromagnets on a submarine to hijack a large freighter loaded down with Russian gold!

The Golden Men are captured during a daring robbery right at the beginning of the movie setting the stage for them to work for the government in an effort to save the world from the evil machinations of the Castro-like leader of a sweaty island nation!

The fact that this general’s most diabolical scheme seems to involve dating the Golden Men’s sexy lady sidekick, Giorgia, is really irrelevant since the Golden Men have also booked themselves an additional secret mission to carry out during the boring parts of the kidnapping plan. Besides, dealing with this dictator is so easy, they only invade his island with three Golden Men and a jeep!

Even all that firepower seemed to be overkill with what Giorgia brought to the table! She sneaks into the general’s compound with a camera and begins taking pictures of him before being captured. She explains that she’s from Playgirl magazine and is there to do a story on him.

You have to remember that this movie was made before there was a Playgirl magazine so it is understandable that the general’s reaction was a positive one instead of just being creeped out by the prospect of appearing next to a nude pictorial of a smooth long-haired guy named Colt. It also probably didn’t hurt that Giorgia was decked out in a skintight black bodysuit either.

Giorgia’s spytacular outfits, endless supply of wigs, and her rainbow collection of colored contacts will keep the viewer moderately intrigued throughout an otherwise uninvolving film.

Except for the surly Adolph, the Golden Men are indistinguishable from one another, the action is mediocre with an over reliance on silly-looking gadgets, and the multiple mission plot only serves to diminish the importance of both missions, especially since one of them is just a standard gold heist accomplished with some sleeping gas and the aforementioned magnets. That the movie has about ten extra minutes of double cross endings tacked on to fill out it’s running time only further serves to hamper the effort to maintain any interest in the goings on.

Still, enough of the trappings of 1960s Eurospy flicks are present to no doubt satisfy hardcore fans. In addition to the boxing glove bazooka, there were infrared goggles, bulky video camera belts, a weird looking swamp boat/hover craft thing, a one-man submarine shot up to the second floor of the general’s headquarters, an interrogation device that showed what was in someone’s mind, and even a couple of jet packs!

The soundtrack packed a good variety of tunes from Russian dirges, to an Anchors Aweigh-inspired ditty, to the more standard swinging mod music you would expect. The Professor even occasionally dressed like John Steed!

And when the Professor babbles about there being 7000 tons of gold, you don’t get shortchanged on that either! Several scenes show mammoth stacks of gold bars including the best sequence of the film that has the Seven Golden Men turning against one another and waging an all out war on an island beach among towering mounds of bullion! It’s like The Treasure of the Sierra Madre with belching spies by way of an old Justice League of America comic book! It’ll leave you shaking with a healthy dose of Golden Men Fever, but not in a Playgirl sort of way!

© 2010 MonsterHunter