Irving Allen and Albert R. Broccoli once worked together as Warwick Productions, putting movies out through Columbia Pictures. Broccoli wanted to buy the rights to the James Bond novels, but Allen wasn’t interested. They broke up their partnership, Broccoli went into partnership with Harry Saltzman and the rest was history.

After the success of the Bond series, Allen decided to make his own spy movies. He read a copy of one of the Matt Helm novels at an airport, saying it was”The Silencers or The Death of a Citizen, I forget which,” and within 24 hours had the rights bought and sold to Columbia Pictures to make a series of films.

Hamilton’s books were serious spy novels about an assassin recruited to continue killing for the government, while these films are spoofs starring Dean Martin. “We had wanted Paul Newman or one of the good stars but no one would go up against Sean Connery. Nobody wants to go up against a successful series,” said Allen. Martin had no such issues.

Matt Helm is a retired secret agent, much happier to be shooting models instead of foreign agents. Ably assisted by Lovely Kravezit (Beverly Adams, Torture Garden, as well as the wife of Vidal Sassoon), he goes back to the ICE (Intelligence and Counter-Espionage) agency to battle the Big O (Bureau for International Government and Order) organization and criminal mastermind Tung-Tze (Victor Buono, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?).

The Matt Helm movies are all really about our hero meeting all manner of gorgeous women, who are often called The Slaygirls. Here, they are Daliah Lavi (The Whip and the Body), Stella Stevens (Playboy Playmate of the Month for January 1960), Nancy Kovack (Marooned) and Cyd Charisse as the singing seductress Sarita.

Matt’s boss Macdonald is played by James Gregory, who would later play General Ursus in Beneath the Planet of the Apes and Frank Luger on Barney Miller.

As late as 2018, there have been rumors of a new series of these films with Bradley Cooper involved. Who knows what those will be like, but I doubt Helm will have a full bar in the back of his car.

Here’s a scopitone of the movie’s theme song. These color 16 mm film shorts with a magnetic soundtrack were designed to be shown in specially designed jukeboxes. Joi Lansing was inspired by burlesque to do her own version of the theme song from this movie. Lansing appears in two of my favorite crazy films, the musical mess Hillbillys in a Haunted House and the 1970 biker monster mashup Bigfoot.

The third installment of the Japanese horror franchise was written by franchise creator Yasushi Akimoto and directed by Manabu Asou.

A high school student named PAM has been bullied so much that she hangs herself, but is saved and survives in a mental hospital while in a coma. Asuka Matsuda, her bullied friend, takes revenge by exposing their class to the cell phone curse as they travel on a field trip to Busan, South Korea. As each of the bullies gets a death text, they forward it on to try to escape the curse of Mimiko.

This version of the story moves past voice calls and into the world of texts and private messages, keeping the curse of Mimiko vibrant and real as technology and culture evolves.

Bullying is not an issue just in the U.S. This movie shows how it can cause people worldwide to not try to end their lives, but those of the people around them.

This film is available on the One Missed Call Trilogy release from Arrow Video. Not only does it have all three films in high-def 1080p, it also features plenty of extras for each film. This one includes a making of doc, behind the scenes footage, a short film The Love Story that ties in to this movie and a location tour with Mimiko.

DISCLAIMER: This set was sent to us by Arrow Video.

Roger Moore was out and Timothy Dalton was in, along with the return of an Aston Martin to Bond films. This would also be the last 007 film to be named for a Fleming book until Casino Royale. It also has one of the few themes not recorded by a British or American artist, with Norwegian pop-music group A-ha contributing “The Living Daylights.”

There was a big search for the new Bond, with Sam Neill, Pierce Brosnan and Dalton all in the lead. Brosnan actually was the first choice, but when word got out, his series Remington Steele went up in the ratings and NBC decided to keep his contract. Brosnan lost out, the series was still canceled and he’d have to wait some time to play Bond.

Supposedly, Christopher Reeve was offered the role as well, but I can’t see him as Bond.

This film is about the end of Cold War tensions between the UK and Russia, most specifically MI6 and the KGB. A false defection, Joe Don Baker as an arms dealer, Maryam d’Abo as love interest Kara Milovy and plenty of sniper scenes. Felix Leiter even shows up.

Dalton’s Bond is a definite change from Moore. It’s closer to the books, a man who lives on the edge and is constantly at odds with what he must do. There’s less room for jokes and gadgets here. Your mileage may vary based on the era of Bond that you love best.

Joe Don Baker would later play CIA agent Jack Wade in GoldenEye and Tomorrow Never Dies, making him — along with Charles Gray and Walter Gotell — one of three actors to play both an adversary and an ally of Bond.

Marty Allen and Steve Rossi — who used the catchphrase “Hello Dere!” — were a comedy from 1957 until 1968 that appeared on over 700 television shows including 44 appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show.

This film is their spy spoof, featuring Nancy Sinatra acting and singing “The Last of the Secret Agents,” which is also in the Billy Murray movie The Man Who Knew Too Little.

Paramount Pictures knew all about comedy teams. In the 1940s, they made big money off of Bob Hope and Bing Crosby and Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis in the 1950s. There was the hope that Allen and Rossi could do the same here, but it didn’t happen. That said, they did make Allen and Rossi Meet Dracula and Frankenstein.

In this movie, they play tourists who are recruited by the Good Guys Institute to battle Zoltan Schubach and THEM, who are stealing art treasures.

It was directed by Norman Abbott, who worked a lot with Jack Benny and was a director for the Get Smart! TV show, amongst many other programs.

Lou Jacobi shows up (he’s Murray, the man who gets lost inside his TV in Amazon Women on the Moon), as does Thordis Brandt (The Witchmaker), Harvey Korman and the one-time wife of Russ Meyer, Edy Williams.

It’s petty dated, but an interesting watch.

AUTHOR’S NOTE: This movie originally ran on the site a year ago, but it’s so related to James Bond week — and such an unappreciated film — I decided to bring it back.

The last time I saw this movie, I was 7 years old and watching it under the stars at the Spotlight 88 drive-in theater in Beaver Falls, PA. Sadly, that theater was destroyed by a freak tornado that tore through the Pittsburgh/Southwestern PA area on May 31, 1985. This was a seminal location for my childhood, a place where I saw tons of double features and built memories that would provide the foundation for the movie love that I still hold dear today.

Woodrow “Woody” Wilkins (future Andrew Lloyd Webber Phantom Michael Crawford) is a comic book artist whose devotion to realism extends to creating his own Condorman suit and attempting to fly off the Eiffel Tower. Instead of arresting him, his friend Harry (James Hampton, Uncle Harry the werewolf from the Teen Wolf movies), a CIA file clerk, asks him to exchange papers with someone in Istanbul.

Woody finds KGB spy Natalia Rambova (Barbara Carrera, Wicked Stepmother), who he tells that he is really Condorman. Impressed by how he protects her and how poorly she’s treated by her KGB boss Krokov (Oliver Reed!), she defects to the U.S., but only if Condorman helps her.

Woody’s already in love — he’s added Natalia to his comic as Laser Lady. When he’s asked to help her defect, he only agrees if the CIA designs him gear like his comic. Amazingly, they agree and the adventure is on.

Imagine James Bond crossed over with the Adam West-era Batman and you have an idea of how Condorman plays. For a Disney movie, Carrera is really sultry, which probably had an effect on my nine-year-old mind.

Before the days of licensing, Condorman had two cool tie-ins. A daily strip by Russ Heath and an ice cream flavor at Baskin-Robbins!

If the Austin Powers movie parodied Bond before, with the third installment, they go way over the top. This movie not only is a version of Goldfinger, it also has parts of You Only Live Twice, Live and Let Die, The Man with the Golden Gun, The Spy Who Loved Me and GoldenEye.

It also has a movie-within-a-movie called Austinpussy, directed by Steven Spielberg — who famously didn’t get to make a Bond film — and stars Tom Cruise as Powers, Gwyneth Paltrow as Dixie Normous, Kevin Spacey as Dr. Evil, Danny DeVito as Mini-Me and John Travolta as Goldmember.

The people that were making Bond took notice. The title of the film, Goldmember, led to legal action being taken by MGM and the brief removal of the film’s title from trailers and posters. The lawsuit stopped when a provision was added that every showing of the film would come with trailers for the next Bond film, Die Another Day, and The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers.

Dr. Evil (Mike Myers) plans to travel back in time to 1975 and bring back Johan van der Smut (also Myers), also known as “Goldmember.” Their plan is to use a tractor beam to pull a meteor into the Earth, smashing into the polar ice caps and causing a global flood. Austin foils this attempt and is knighted, but saddened when his father Nigel (Michael Caine, referencing The Ipcress File) doesn’t show up.

There’s also more time travel, Beyonce as Foxy Cleopatra (pretty much every blacksploitation heroine all rolled into one), the return of Mini-Me and Fat Bastard, a Japanese businessman named Mr. Roboto, the revelation that Evil and Austin are brothers, another revelation that Frau Farbissina is Scott Evil’s mother, tons of cameos and, of course, Clint Howard.

Believe it or not, this is also the only movie that Michael Caine and Michael York have ever been in together.

In the eighteen years since this film, Myers has continually hinted that he has a fourth film in the works from Dr. Evil’s point of view. Sadly, Verne Troyer died in 2018, so there will be no Mini Me. But here’s hoping that it happens someday.