You know how I always say that these Eurospy movies are like the UN? How about this one, which is an Israeli/German/Italian movie co-directed by Gianfranco Baldanello (Danger!! Death Ray) and one of my favorite insane people, Menahem Golan — the man who would soon enough direct the magnum opus The Apple.
If you hate the films of Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer — Scary Movie, Date Movie, Epic Movie, Meet the Spartans, Disaster Movie, Vampires Suck and so on — blame this movie. This was their first script and it was directed by Jason’s dad Rick, who had met star Leslie Nielsen while directing his Bad Golf VHS series.
Sadly, this movie is The Naked Gun without any of the brains behind the stupidity. There’s a fine line between clever and stupid, after all.
The best part of it? The credits, which features Weird Al becoming Tom Jones, all while repeatedly that the name of the movie is Spy Hard. If you love James Bond openings — obviously we do, as this site is hosting an entire month of Bond movies — you’ll go nuts over this.
Tom Jones may have passed out in the studio holding that last note. Weird Al? His head explodes. Bonus points for having Bill Conti, who composed the music for the Bond film For Your Eyes Only, create this song with Mr. Yankovic.
Sadly, the movie fails to live up to the great premise of the opening.
Secret agent WD-40 Dick Steele (two jokes for the price of one; I’m of the early SNL school that silly names are the easiest form of humor) is Nielsen’s role here and he has a partner, Veronique Ukrinsky, Agent 3.14 (Nicollette Sheridan) who helps him battle the armless and wheelchair-bound General Rancor (Andy Griffith, of all people).
It’s worth noting that the Bond films had a major role in Sheridan’s life. Her mother Sally played one of Blofeld’s Angels of Death in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and fell for Telly Savalas, who became her stepfather.
This is a movie packed with great folks trying their best to make it better, like Robert Guillaume as a former agent, Charles Durning as the director, Marcia Gay Harden (who has noted how much she hated being in the movie, despite having kind words for Nielsen) as the Moneypenny of sorts, Barry Bostwick as an old rival, a Home Alone-inspired agent named McLucky (Mason Gamble, who starred in Dennis the Menace and was also in Rushmore), Talisa Soto as an assassin (beyond he Mortal Kombat roles, she was also in the Bond movie Licence to Kill) and all manner of ridiculous cameos, from Dr. Joyce Brothers, Hulk Hogan and Ray Charles as a bus driver to Fabio, Pat Morita, Mr. T, “Downtown” Julie Brown, I Spy star Robert Culp, stuntpeople Ginger and Lauren Janes playing the same roles from True Lies, Michael Berryman, Curtis “Booger” Armstrong and, of course, Taylor Negron, an actor who valiantly tried to make every role more than it was.
The credits are stupidly funny, perhaps more than the rest of the film. I don’t know — I have a weakness for Nielsen’s movies, no matter how bad they get. You may hate this. Or love it. See it for yourself.
It’s based on the novella “The Day Remo Died.” Chiun feels that his student is becoming complacent, so he hires an assassin to teach him a lesson. What Chiun doesn’t know is that the killer wants to become Chiun’s student and will stop at nothing to kill Remo.
Andy Romano, who played Eric von Zipper’s henchman J.D. in sixties beach movies, is in this, as is Judy Landers from Dr. Alien.
This movie didn’t air until 2009, when the Encore network finally played it. The one other time it did air — August 15, 1988 — a speech by President Reagan cut off the first forty five minutes of the movie.
It’s nowhere near as good as the original film. But hey — if you love Remo Williams like I do, you can watch it on YouTube:
AUTHOR’S NOTE: This review originally ran on May 1, 2018. Seeing as how Remo Williams is an American blue-collar James Bond, I figured that I should bring this back, while also adding some new information.
After Burton’s Batman, Hollywood wanted tentpole movies that could make sequel after sequel. So why not turn to men’s paperbacks, like The Destroyer, a series of 152 books written by the team of Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir (as well as some ghostwriters) that have 30 million books in print?
Sam Makin (Fred Ward, The Right Stuff) was a tough New York City cop who died in the line of duty before being resurrected as Remo Williams, now the CURE organization’s front man in the war against the enemies of the United States. Now with a new face, no fingerprints and training in the assassination skill known as Sinanju from the Korean martial artist Chiun (Joel Grey, who is not Asian and is actually a Jewish man from Cleveland), Remo is ready to battle corrupt weapons dealers and save Kate Mulgrew’s military officer character.
I’ve been begging Becca to watch this movie for years and she responded to it by asking, “Was this a real movie or one of those ones you like that no one knew about?” It was an actual movie. Maybe people didn’t care as much as me, because in 1985 I was fully into The Destroyer thanks to Marvel publishing a black and white comic book version.
Watching this film years later, it’s weird how little happens. “Are they ever going to do anything or is this the entire movie?” my wife asked. “This is his origin story,” I tried to say, but she’s right. For all the amazing things Remo learns to do, he gets to do very little of them. But guess what? I still love this movie.
That said, I quote this movie all the time. There’s a great line when Remo is about to run into a building and is told, “Be fast. Like a duck mating. In and out.”
Wilford Brimley is great as Remo’s boss, Harold Smith. And Michael Pataki is always a welcome face in any film. Plus you get cameos from Reginald VelJohnson (Die Hard) and William Hickey (National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation).
This was intended to be a blue-collar James Bond. Which makes sense, once you realize that they used Bond screenwriter Christopher Wood (The Spy Who Loved Me, Moonraker) and Bond director Guy Hamilton (Goldfinger, Diamonds Are Forever, Live and Let Die and The Man with the Golden Gun).
Sadly, there was a 1988 TV spinoff of the movie that never made it past the pilot stage, starring Jeffrey Meek as Remo and Roddy McDowall as Chiun (who was British and also not Asian). Spoiler warning: It’ll be on the site later today.
The original DVD of this film is out of print, so you’ll probably pay $10-15 for a used copy. Arrow Video did release it awhile back, but not in a U.S. friendly format. There’s a limited edition at Diabolik DVD that you can hurry up and get, too.
You had us at Willem Dafoe. You know the roles: Raven Shaddock in the rock ‘ n’ roll noir Streets of Fire and lost rocker Johnny Harte in one of my personal favorites, Roadhouse 66. Then there’s the diabolical forger Eric “Rick” Masters in To Live and Die in L.A. and Sergeant Elias Gordon in Platoon. We can go on and on . . . yes, ye film youngins, you know him as The Green Goblin in Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man franchise.
The always amazing and never disappointing Argentinian director Hector Babenco — who you know through his multiple award-winning works with Tom Berenger and John Lithgow in At Play in the Fields of the Lord (1991), Kiss of the Spiderwoman (1985) with William Hurt, and Ironweed (1987) with Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep — returns, sadly, with his final film: an autobiographical examination about life and death through a film director’s bout with cancer.
Willem Dafoe is Diego Fairman, a talented, but acidic, filmmaker who is as adept at social alienation as he is with film — and his decade-long bout with cancer only amplifies his curmudgeonly outlook on life. With his new wife, Livia (award-winning Brazilian actress Maria Fernada Candido), he leaves Brazil for a new round of treatments in Seattle. And the only man who can save him, via a bone marrow transplant, is his brother, Antonio, who haven’t spoken to each other in ten years. While in treatment, Diego comes to find solace in the friendship of a young Hindu boy also dealing with cancer.
The philosophical question asked in this, the final masterpiece of the then dying Babenco (he passed in July 2016), asks: Does someone, who went out of their way to make the lives of others miserable and never took responsibility for said actions, deserve a free pass because they’re dying? Or do they deserve to die alone — with their soul in agony as much as their body? Will others forgive . . . to release the sinner from their guilt?
And when Death arrives to take him, Diego asks from his death bed, for one more chance to make one more film. And he makes that film within his soul — with the help of his Hindu friend. And the fact that My Hindu Friend is the film that Death granted Hector Babenco to make — makes this film all the more powerful.
Yeah, I cried. I’m man enough to admit that.
In an overseas rollout since 2015, My Hindu Friend is finally available in the U.S on May 1 through Rock Salt Releasing on DVD, Blu-Ray and all digital streaming platforms (Amazon, AT&T, DirectTV, FANDANGO, FlixFling, Google Play, Hoopla, inDemand, iTunes, inDemand, DirecTV, Vudu, Google Play, FANDANGO, Sling/Dish, Sony, Vimeo on Demand, You Tube Movies, and Xbox).
Disclaimer: We were provided a screener by the film’s P.R firm. That has no bearing on our review. Besides, with Dafoe, and the fact that it’s Babenco’s final film, we would have bought our own copy.
About the Author: You can learn more about the writings of R.D Francis on Facebook.He also writes for B&S About Moviesand publishes on Medium.
If I’ve done one thing this Eurospy month, I’ve watched a ton of Lindsay Shonteff movies. This was his first spy film, although he’d eventually also make No. 1 of the Secret Service, Licensed to Love and Kill (1979) and Number One Gun.
This was called Licensed to Kill in the UK, but Joseph E. Levine was bringing it to the U.S. He’d had great financial success with teh Steve Reeves-starring Hercules and went all out on this one. There’s a new scene at the beginning with a woman pulling a machine gun out of her baby carriage and a new theme song sung by Sammy Davis Jr. Of course, he also took out all teh doubel entendres and enough of the plot to have the ending make no sense.
A Swedish scientist has invented an anti-gravity device and his daughter seek to provide the invention to the United Kingdom, if they can get there safely. With James Bond unavailable, Agent Charles Vine (Tom Adams) comes in.
Veronica Hurst (Peeping Tom) and Judy Huxtable (Die Screaming, Marianne) fill in for the normal Bond girls.
There were two sequels to this film: Where the Bullets Fly and Somebody’s Stolen Our Russian Spy/O.K. Yevtushenko, which was shot in 1969 but didn’t escape the film laboratory until 1976.
This isn’t the best Bond ripoff or the second-best, but it’s not all bad. You can watch the whole movie here:
Bobby A. Suarez isn’t mentioned in the same breath as other genre directors, but if I have anything to say about it, that’s going to change. The One-Armed Executioner, two Bionic Boy films, Warrior of the Apocalypse — the guy has made some interesting films. Perhaps none as wonderuflly odd as this one — which somehow synthesizes the best parts of James Bond, martial arts films and the sheer insanity that is at the heart of all great movies from the Phillipines.
Cleopatra Wong (Marrie Lee, who also played the same role in two more films) is an Interpol agent who is a master of martial arts, archery and shooting guns. She’s ambushed by three clowns and escapes with a teleportation device — yes, Cleopatra’s world is much stranger than outs — and regroups.
Soon, she’s on the trail of a counterfeiting plot, which means that she must battle pro wrestlers and sniff out the fake money in jars of strawberry jam headed for Hong Kong. This all brings her to a strawberry plantation, where she assembles a team of four other female agents known as The Super Sirens to battle evil nuns and monks.
This movie is everything that I love in one package: fisticuffs, spy action and craziness. If it had a black gloved killer and better fashion, it might be the best movie ever made. You can watch it on Amazon Prime.
This time, The Professor (Leroy) and his men are captured by U.S. agents as they try to rob a train. To keep out of prison, they must kidnap a Latin dictator, but there’s so much gold that gets in the way.
Fats-moving, lots of gadgets and wow, Podesta is the real selling point of the film, acting above it all and sexy even when menaced by poisonous spiders.
Maniacs like me love Stewart Granger for his role in The Wild Geese, but he was also a leading man until the mid 60’s, when he started making movies in Italy. This spy film — an Austrian/German/Italian mash-up — was directed by Manfred R. Kohler, who wrote Daughters of Darkness and Franco’s The Blood of Fu Manchu.
Three years after making this, Karin Dor would play Bond girl Helga Brandt in You Only Live Twice. It’s also nice to see Klaus Kinski, Curd Jurgens (Karl Stromberg from The Spy Who Loved Me) and Molly Peters (the nurse who takes care of Bond in Thunderball) and Adolfo Celli, who between this, Danger: Diabolik, Thunderball and OK Connery is Eurospy royalty.
This movie has an exciting beginning, with an entire crew of a plane trying to murder Dor’s character, even parachuting out of the plane and leaving her without a flight crew. There’s brainwashing on a major scale, but the film doesn’t live up to that initial promise.
Franco and Ciccio — yes the same comic team who were in the Eurospy parodies Dr. Goldfoot and the Girl Bombs, The Amazing Dr. G and the sequel to this one, 002 Operazione Luna, are back, doing what they do best.
They’re two simple-minded Italianos who get mistaken as KGB agents and hijinks ensue. Those crazy moments include a giant robot that can barely move around, a masked maid/secret agent who flashes message to the boys on her panties, an assassination scene where the X targets keep getting moved around, a microfilm hidden in a tooth that causes all manner of issues and spies from America, China and Russia all chasing the two around the French Riveria.
This would be your standard 60’s spy comedy if not for who directed it: none other than the man who would become the Godfather of Gore 16 years after making this movie, Lucio Fulci. Yes — he made a movie about spies and assassination and not one eyeball got blown out the back or front of someone’s skull.
Believe it or not, this was released by Allied Artists in the U.S. In fact, it would be the first time one of Fulci’s movies made it over here.
Mary Arden, who plays Nadja in this, was Peggy Peyton inBlood and Black Lace and would write the English dialogue of the film, as she found the translated dialogue too stilted.
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