The Forbidden (1966)

Get ready for sixty-six minutes of pure scum from 1966, presented by Lee Frost (who wrote Race with the Devil and directed A Climax of Blue Power, along with The Thing With Two Heads) and Bob Cresse (whose Olympic International Films also brought The Scavengers and Love Camp 7 to the not so silver screen).

AGFA, who got the print of this out to the world all over again, says that it is “packed with staged scenes of Swiss lesbians, L.A. rapists, Parisian tarts and Nazi strippers.”

There’s also a sexy karate school commercial that for some reason has a girl taking a shower, murder and lots of strip club footage because it was 1966 and that’s the kind of thing that wasn’t widely available yet.

There’s also a great jazz/surf rock soundtrack under the hyperbolic narration. This had to blow minds fifty years ago. Today, it’s all pretty tame. But hey — somebody had to break ground, right?

You can get this on a double blu ray — along with Ecco — from Severin.

Mondo Freudo (1966)

Mondo Freudo is all about “a world of sex and the strange & unusual laws that govern it,” as told by two absolute maniacs: the producer/director/distributor team of Lee Frost and Bob Cresse, with Cresse himself ranting as we try and make it through another swing through the world of mondo.

Hollywood strippers, Tijuana hookers, London lesbians, Asian sex shows, Times Square Satanists and topless Watusi clubs. Hidden cameras have recorded everything from teenagers making out to a Mexican slave market, a Black Mass near Times Square, while we also see people get painted, beaten and wrestle in mud.

Cresse would go on to make Love Camp 7 and plenty of other upsetting — or awesome — movies before his life fell apart one day while he walked his dog. Coming across two men beating a woman in broad daylight on Hollywood Boulevard, Cresse pulled his gun and ordered the men to stop. Turns out they were cops and shot him in the stomach and then killed his dog. He’d spend seven months in the hospital with no health insurance, losing most of his fortune.

Frost would make The Black Gestapo and put sex inserts into a foreign mondo all about the occult, creating the near-class Witchcraft ’70. He was smart enough to not fight any police.

You can get this movie, along with Mondo Bizarro, from the fine filth merchants at Severin.

Superargo Versus Diabolicus (1966)

This movie is everything I want it to be and more. A pro wrestling hero? A Eurospy James Bond rip-off? Future technology that is now charmingly quaint? A red masked lucha libre-esque hero massacring dudes with a flamethrower while the main villain and his mistress tie said hero’s girl to a torture table on fire? You should watch this movie three times and then stare into the sun and burn your eyes out. That’s how great it is.

Nicola Nostro made a few of the Ten Gladiators movies, but nothing prepared me for the madcap mayhem that he’d unleash on me with this movie. I mean, this is a film where the good guys stab and shoot Superargo just to show us all that he can’t be hurt and that his blood instantly coagulates.

Spanish actor Gérard Tichy (he was in plenty of Spaghetti Westerns and The Corruption of Chris Miller) plays Diabolicus. Loredana Nusciak — Maria, the lover of Django — plays his mistress who, of course, screws him over and gets machinegunned for her troubles by Superargo’s lady.

Superargo is — of course — Ken Wood (Italian real name: Giovanni Cianfriglia). He was Steve Reeves’ body double and shows up in another Italian superhero movie, Sandokan the Great. I love that Superargo becomes a super spy because of depression — he’s too strong and he threw another wrestler named El Tigra from the ring, killing him. Now, he just stays inside until his woman goes to his old army buddy and gets Superargo some government work.

There’s a scene where Argoman does a bicycle thing-a-majig with his feet while they test his blood pressure and scientist dudes lose their minds. Scenes like this are exactly why I adore this movie.

This is a movie that invents gadgets that are totally preposterous: a two-way radio inside a gigantic player piano. A geiger counter that looks like a cocktail olive. And a feminine brooch that has a television inside it that totally clashes with Superargo’s entire wardrobe!

The greatest thing about this movie is that at the end, Superargo awkwardly stares at the screen, kind of smirking, while the credits play. It’s not paused — he’s just standing there — and you’re like, “Yeah. That Superargo is a pretty good dude.”

There aren’t enough stars in the galaxy to rate this one.

Seven Golden Men Strike Again (1966)

Remember Seven Golden Men? No? Well, this is obviously the sequel to that film, written and directed by the same man, Marco Vicario.

Philippe Leroy (Mother of TearsMannaja), Rossana Podesta (Hera from Cozzi’s Hercules), Maurice Poli (Rabid Dogs), Manuel Zarzo (Nightmare City), Gabriele Tinti (Lisa and the Devil) and Giampiero Albertini (The Case of the Bloody Iris) all show up.

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.

You can watch this on Amazon Prime.

Target for Killing (1966)

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.

You can watch this on YouTube:

Password: Kill Agent Gordon (1966)

What’s that you say? Another Sergio Grieco spy caper after his Agent 077 movies, The Tiffany Memorandum and Argoman the Fantastic Superman?

This time, Roger Browne (Super seven from Super Seven Calling Cairo) plays Doug Gordon and, of course, Helga Line is in this as the “not Bond” girl. Helga has been in more movies I’ve watched this spy month than just about anybody, with appearances in KriminalAgent 077: Mission Bloody MarySpecial Mission Lady Chaplin and Avenger X.

You know who has been in just as many and is in this as well? Rosalba Neri, who was in Super Seven Calling Cairo, Two Mafiosi Against GodgingerOSS 117-Double Agent and The Spy with Ten Faces.

Points to this film getting ahead of the curve and being about sending weapons to the View Cong about five years before anyone was thinking of that. Otherwise, it’s an average film — except for, of course, Helga and Rosalba being in it.

You can watch the whole thing on YouTube:

The Spy Who Loved Flowers (1966)

Italy and Spain combine to create this sequel to Super Seven Calling Cairo, written and directed by Umberto Lenzi using the name Hubert Humphry.

It brings back Roger Browne as Martin Stevens, Agent Super Seven. Emma Danieli from Spies Strike Silently, Daniele Vargas (Electra One from, well, Electra One), Marino Mase (Tenebre), Yoko Tani (The Secret of Dr. Mabuse), Sal Borgese (Super Fuzz), Tullio Altamura (A Black Veil for Lisa) and Attilio Dottesio (Death Smiles at a Murderer) all show up too.

Yoko Tani is honestly the only reason to watch this. Her life sounds pretty interesting by comparison, so let’s talk about that. Her Japanese parents worked at the Japanese embassy in Paris, with the actress conceived en route via ship and born in Paris, which is where she got her first name, which means “ocean child.”

After two years of time in France, her family moved back to Japan. She’d return in 1950 to attend a Catholic girls school for two years before she began dancing in cabarets, becoming famous for her sexy geisha dance. This got her the attention of director Marcel Carne, which is how she met her first husband Roland Lesaffre.

Between spy and sword and sandal films, she was in two films for Toho and is also in the Dean Martin movie Who’s Been Sleeping in My Bed? She continued dancing until late into the 1970s before remarrying to a wealthy French industrialist. Their shared grave has the phrase “Always together” on it.

As for Lenzi, he’d follow this movie with Kriminal and his last spy film Last Man to Kill. Along with a few war films, he’d begin making the giallo that so many in the U.S. know him for, like So Sweet…So PerverseOrgasmoA Quiet Place to KillSeven Blood Stained OrchidsEyeball and Spasmo, as well as incredibly out there — and much beloved to me — films like Nightmare CityIronmasterGhosthouse and Nightmare Beach.

You can watch this on YouTube:

 

Modesty Blaise (1966)

Joseph Losey was blacklisted, which is no surprise, as he directed The Boy with the Green Hair. He took his career to Europe, where he made movies like Boom! and Don Giovanni.

This film is based on the popular comic strip Modesty Blaise by Peter O’Donnell, who co-wrote the original story. There was a major battle between Losey and O’Donnell on this film, with the director wanting to create a pop art Eurospy spoof while the comic is serious. The avant garde-inspired editing and production design, musical numbers and deliberate continuity errors drove O’Donnell insane. He hated that Willie and Modesty had any romance at all.

Losey also had problems with leading lady Monica Vitti, as she would be joined on the set by director Michelangelo Antonioni, who would whisper suggestions to her, and she would take direction from him rather than the actual director of the film.

Ever notice how many spy movies start with another spy getting killed to set the events in motion? This is no different, with British Secret Service chief Sir Gerald Tarrant recruiting former criminal mastermind Modesty Blaise to protect a shipment of diamonds after their agent is offed.

Terence Stamp is in this as Willie Garvin, Modesty’s loyal sidekick and Dirk Bogarde is Gabriel, the criminal mastermind who is, for some reason, sensitive to violence.

Originally, Barbara Steele was going to play Modesty with Michael Caine as Willie. In a strange twist, Caine would ultimately star in Alfie, a role intended for his friend and former roommate Stamp.

I bought this for $3 at a Dollar General this year after wanting a copy for a long time. Inside it, there was a coupon for buying three Eurospy films — Fathom or the two Flint movies — and getting one free. I was really excited until I realized that the offer ended 17 years ago. That’s what you get for still buying DVDs.

Kriminal (1966) and Il marchio di Kriminal (1967)

Roel Bos, using the stage name Glenn Saxson, appeared in this movie and its sequel, as well as a few spaghetti westerns in his career before becoming a producer.

This is based on the fumetti neri Kriminal, which has a hero of sorts that has no issue murdering people and then sleeping with women before killing them to keep his identity a secret. Director Umberto Lenzi wanted to make a comic film, with the goals of making Satanik or Danger: Diabolik, but ended up making this.

Kriminal is much less ruthless in this film, which is more a fun spy film. Andrea Bosic (the optician from Fulci’s Manhattan Baby) is Inspector Milton, who follows our antihero around. Horror actress — and spy film too — par excellence Helga Line shows up too. I’ve mentioned her in so many Eurospy reviews, but you can also find her in Horror ExpressNightmare Castle and The Vampires Night Orgy.

The best part of this movie are the animated open and close titles, which lend a really interesting look.

Lenzi, Saxson and Line would return a year later for Il marchio di Kriminal, a sequel that becomes more of a travelogue spy adventure, as many late 60’s films become.

Instead of diamond robberies as in the first film, the sequel finds Kriminal looking for missing paintings, with the map hidden inside four statues of Buddha.

I’m fascinated by this era of Italian comic book movies, so I loved these perhaps a bit more than the ordinary film watcher. You should check them out for yourself.

James Batman (1966)

Imagine: A Filipino James Bond and Batman hybrid starring their King of Comedy. It’s 100% true — starring Dolphy, who from 1965-1966 made several James Bond spoofs including Dolpinger, Genghis Bond: Agent 1-2-3, Dr. YesOperation ButterballDressed to KillDolpinger Meets Pantarorong, Dolpinger: Agent sa lagim and even a Man from U.N.C.L.E. parody, Napoleon Doble and the Sexy Six

Boy Alano is his Ruben as they battle CLAW in the face of nuclear armageddon. Of course, Batman and James Bond don’t get along, despite being played by the same actor.

There’s also Alyas Batman at Robin, a ripoff of Batman made around the same time that was remade in 1989 but earned the ire of Warner Brothers, sitting for two years until lawsuits could be settled. Bob Soler, who played Batman in the 1965 version also played a fake version of Lee Falk’s The Phantom, Captain Philippines and the Shazam/Superman/Captain America hybrid Captain Barbell.

There’s also the 1965 film Batman Fights Dracula and the 70’s brought us Fight Batman FIght! where Batman literally goes to hell to kick Satan’s ass.

You can get this movie right here, download it from the Internet Archive or watch it on YouTube: