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. Yes, Operation Butterball, Dressed to Kill, Dolpinger 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:

After Hey There, It’s Yogi Bear!, this was the second Hanna-Barbera motion picture. It’s also the last production of the original Flintstones series, ending it before it would be brought back in the 1970’s.

Special Agent Rock Slag looks exactly like Fred, which means that as soon as they meet in the hospital, Fred takes over the spy work while Rock recovers. This sends Fred and Barney — with family in tow — all around the world. This also raises the question as to why Paris exists in the past and has the exact same architecture as it does today. When it comes to the Flintstones, I try not to think too much.

The one thing that does baffle me is the number of musical numbers in this. I guess that the thought was if Disney did it in a full length, this film should too. The music is the reason why this movie was never released on video in the U.S. until 2008, as Columbia Pictures owned the rights to all of the many songs.

Obviously, this is as much Derek Flint as it is James Bond. It moves quickly and it plenty of fun, despite the strange song where Pebbles sings about going to sleep and the fact that Fred and Barney sing a ditty that pretty much affirms that they are the ones actually married.

Just when you thought we couldn’t all get along, the French, German and Italians all got together and made a James Bond ripoff. That should warm your heart.

Directed by Giorgio Ferroni (Mill of the Stone Women) — using the amazing fake name Calvin Jackson Padget — this Amsterdam-shot caper played double bills with another movie that brought together people of many countries — in this case Britain, Yugoslavia, Italy and the U.S. — The One Eyed Soldiers.

Secret Agent Super Dragon (Ray Danton, who played George Raft in The George Raft Story, was Sandokan in that series of movies, was married to Julie Adams and appeared in other spy movies like Code Name: Jaguar, the Jess Franco-directed Lucky, the Inscrutable and the Derek Flint TV pilot — whew!) is after the men who killed his partner and are now stuffing drugs into vases.

That’s pretty much it, but luckily, Marisa Mell shows up as Charity Farrel. Mell was typecast in her career as a femme fatale, but perhaps she earned that, what with her dating Pier Luigi Torri, a playboy who became one of the most wanted fugitives in the world and got her name all over the tabloids. She’s probably best known for being in Danger: Diabolik, which is a much better spy movie than this.

Speaking of spy girls, Margaret Lee is also in this. Beyond starring in twelve movies with Klaus Kinski and living to tell the story, Margaret was also in Our Agent Tiger, Agent 077: From the Orient with Fury, Kiss the Girls and Make Them Die and Our Man in Marrakesh. The more depraved amongst my dear readers — like me — will recognize her from Slaughter Hotel and Venus In Furs. And yes, that’s Fräulein Greta from Deported Women of the SS Special Section (and Patrizia from Strip Nude for Your Killer), actress Solvi Stubing in this as well.

Originally called New York Chiama Superdrago (New York Calling Superdragon), you can watch this pretty ridiculous movie on Amazon Prime. You also have the option of watching the Mystery Science Theater 3000 version on Amazon Prime and Tubi.

Henry Levin would direct the next two Matt Helm movies, starting with Murderer’s Row. He had some spy experience, having directed Kiss the Girls and Make Them Die.

This one starts off with a literal bang, as the Big O blows up the U.S. Capitol building with a heliobeam. Matt Helm better stop taking pictures of supermodels and start doing what he does best. No, not drinking. Killing enemy agents. But first, he has to fake his own death.

Karl Mulden is the main villain, Julian Wall, while Ann-Margaret plays the daughter of the scientist that Helm must recapture or kill. Camilla Sparv, who was once married to Robert Evans, shows up as a femme fatale, as does Playmate of the Month for May 1958, Corinne Cole (she used the fake name Lari Laine as her father was running for Congress at the time).

Beach movie regular Mary Hughes — she’s also one of the female robots in Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine — is here as Miss September. She used to date Jeff Beck and the Yardbirds song “Psycho Daisies” mentions here twice.

Jan Watson, another of Goldfoot’s robots and Levin’s wife for some time, is on hand, as is Jacqueline Fontaine (one-time comedy party of Duke Mitchell and one of the Outlaw Women in that Ron Ormond film) and Miss California 1964 Amadee Chabot.

Beverly Adams returns as Helms’ assistant Lovey Kravezit, James Gregory is back as his boss MacDonald and the singing group Dino, Desi and Billy — featuring Dean’s son Dean Paul Martin from Misfits of Science — make an appearance. Look out for Soon Tek-Oh (Colonel Yin from Missing In Action 2)!

The funny thing is, despite this being a spoof, the Bond movies would come to rip it off. For example, in Diamonds Are Forever, SPECTRE threatens the world with a heliobeam from an orbiting satellite. Ironhead (Tom Reese, the sheriff from Vanishing Point) the villain of this film, is a lot like Jaws in The Spy Who Loved Me. And the hovercraft chase and Hugo Drax in Moonraker are a lot like scenes and the villain of this movie.

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.

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.

For my money, Alberto De Martino made the best non-Bond Italian Bond film with OK Connery. He also covered so many genres in his career: giallo (The Man with Icy Eyes, Carnal Circuit, The Killer Is On the Phone, Strange Shadows in an Empty Room), gothic horror (The Blancheville Monster), peblum (The Triumphs of Hercules), Spaghetti Westerns (100.000 dollari per Ringo, Django Shoots First), the occult (Holocaust 2000, The Antichrist) and even superheroes (The Pumaman).

Alberto is joined by co-director Sergio Grieco, who would go on to make plenty more Eurospy films like Argoman the Fantastic Superman, The Tiffany Memorandum and The Fuller Report.

This is third and final episode of the CIA Secret Agent 077 series. Dick Malloy is played again by Ken Clark, who totally lived the Rick Dalton life.

Perhaps sensing that these films needed more than just a male hero, this film is named for Lady Arabella Chaplin, a professional killer and fashionista played by Daniela Bianchi, who just three years earlier played Russian Bond girl Tatiana Romanova in From Russia WIth Love. She also appears in De Martino’s OK Connery.

She’s the best thing in this movie, which begins with her dressed as a nun, walking into a church to machinegun some spies pretending to be monks before stripping her habit down to a swimsuit. All movies should start this great. Beyond wearing a ton of amazing outfits in this — she’s a fashion designer hitwoman, after all — she also dresses as an old woman with a wheelchair filled with guns.

Helga Line is also in this, which you can say about just around every other Eurospy movie of this era. This is not a bad thing. So does Ida Galli, who was in plenty of other movies under plenty of other names like Arianna, Evelyn Stewart and Isli Oberon. She’s in Fuci’s The Psychic, The Sweet Body of Deborah, Footprints On the Moon, The Bloodstained Butterfly, The Case of the Scorpion’s Tail, The Whip and the Body and so many more.

Villain Kobre Zoltan — who seeks to steal nuclear missiles from a submarine on the ocean’s floor — is played by Jacques Bergerac, who was the fourth husband of Ginger Rogers.

Mark Davis is secret agent No. 07. And he’s played by Mickey Hargitay, who as you may know, had a way with women. He was married to Jayne Mansfield, after all.

He’s looking for hidden Nazi treasure. There’s a clue hidden in a stolen Goya painting. I wonder if this was because Dr. No had Goya’s “Portrait of the Duke of Wellington” on display. That painting — which had been stolen from the National Gallery — was painted in a weekend by production designer Ken Arnold. It was used for publicity for Dr. No and then was stolen as well.

Mark attends an art auction but loses out on the painting. He soon learns that seven attractive women — each with a spy, art dealer or con men backing them — has one of the paintings. Now Mark has to use all his skills in art forgery and getting with the fairer sex to find the gold.

This was written and directed by Vincenzo Cashino, who also was in the movie as Barbikian the Armenian, a role he’d bring back for a sequel, Le 7 Cinesi D’Oro (7 Golden Chinese). He also wrote and directed The Sheriff Won’t Shoot and Le Sette Vipere (Il Marito Latino), which translates as The Seven Vipers (The Latin Husband). He was an Argentinian industrialist who moved to Italy to make movies and then disappeared after making these four movies, which are all filled with non-linear storytelling and plotholes so big you could drive a camion through them.