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.

Dr. Goldfoot and the Girl Bombs is an odd film. This 1966 Eurospy parody is at once a sequel to two different movies that have nothing in common: Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine and Two Mafiosi Against Goldginger.

Fulvio Lucisano, the head of Italian International Film, wanted a sequel to his film. American-International Pictures wanted a sequel to theirs. They got their chocolate into one another’s peanut butter and co-financed this movie.

That disparity continues the whole way through the two different versions. In America, the main story is about Vincent Price’s Dr. Goldfoot battling against Fabian. Yet in Italy, the film has a different title (Le Spie Vengono dal Semifreddo, which means The Spies Who Came In from the Cool, a parody of 1965’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold). It also concentrates more on the antics of Franco Franchi and Ciccio Ingrassia. Together, they appeared in 116 films, usually as the main characters, and are the most famous Italian comedy team of all time.

Despite being blown up real good at the end of the last movie, Dr. Goldfoot is working alongside the Chinese, making exploding female robots — Mike Myers owes this movie money — when he’s not impersonating a NATO general. Our hero is Security Intelligence Command agent Bill Dexter (Fabian!) who is too busy chasing women to save the world most of the time.

One of his conquests, Roseanna, is played by Laura Antonelli, who was Wanda in Venus In Furs. George Wang, who came to Italy by way of Shanghai to star in plenty of spaghetti westerns, is also here, as is former boxer Ennio Antonelli who is also in the spy films Danger: Diabolik, Matchless and Agent 3S3: Massacre in the Sun.

Amazingly, this movie is directed by Mario Bava. He had no interest in the film, but he had a contract with Lucisano. The script changed nine times, people argued over the right women for each shot and even Price would say that this movie was “the most dreadful movie I’ve ever been in. Just about everything that could go wrong, did.”

That’s right. The only time Bava would work with Price and we ended up with…this. Oh well. What can you do?

You can watch this on Amazon Prime.

Gerd Oswald is known for his TV directing and some of his film noir work, like A Kiss Before Dying and Crime of Passion. He directed this thinking it’d be the pilot for a TV series and then, with the spy craze, it ended up being a theatrical release.

Adam Chance (Peter Mark Richman, Dr. Charles McCulloch from Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan and Chrissie’s religious father on Three’s Company) works for the American spy agency H.A.R.M. (Human Aetiological Relations Machine). That may be the most ridiculous acronym ever. I mean what is aetiology? Research tells us that it’s the British spelling of etiology or the study of the causes and origins of diseases.

In this adventure, Chance has to protect a Russian defector who has created a skin-eating weapon. Complicating matters is a double agent — the defector’s niece Ava Vestok, who is played by one of the first ladies of giallo, Barbara Bouchet. Yes, that’s reason enough to suffer through this silly little spy film!

Martin Kosleck is in this as a villain. He was a German actor that hated the Nazis and Hitler so much that he set out to play them in every film to show how horrible they were. In fact, he played Joseph Goebbels five times. He’s a Russian here, though.

Vincent Price’s least favorite actor — Count Yorga himself — Robert Quarry, is also on hand, as are Rafael Campos (The Astro-Zombies), Robert Donner (Exidor on Mork and Mindy) and Playboy Playmate of the Month for December 1963 and 1964 Playmate of the Year Donna Michelle. She’s also in the two theatrical movies made from episodes of The Man From U.N.C.L.E., One Spy Too Many and The Spy With My Face.

Looking for someone to blame for all this? It was written and created by Blair Robertson, who wrote The Slime People. She’s also Mrs. Castillo in that movie.

Whether it’s Yor Hunter from the Future, Death Rage, Castle of Blood, And God Said to Cain, Cannibal Apocalypse or the Rick Dalton-starring Operation Dyn-O-Mite, Antonio Margheriti never disappoints.

Originally known as Operation Goldman, this Eurospy feature was bought by the Wooler Brothers — they brought Blood and Black Lace and Hercules In the Haunted World to America — and double-billed with the West German/Italian spy film Red Dragon, which was shot in Hong Kong. Eurospy movies really do bring the world closer together.

Their tagline? This movie “strikes like a ball of thunder.”

Yes, this was released a year after Thunderball.

Harry Sennet, Agent of Department “S” of the Federal Security Investigation Commission, is known as Goldman because he has an unlimited expense account instead of a license to kill. He’s played by former Hawaiian Eye star Anthony Eisley, who also appears in The Witchmaker, The Doll Squad and Al Adamson’s Dracula vs. Frankenstein. Margheriti  — billed here as Anthony Dawson — thought Eisley looked too Italian, so he dyed his hair blonde. It came out reddish. He no longer looked Italian.

Yes — I get the potential joke that Anthony Dawson was in Dr. No and played an early version of Blofeld.

He and his boss, Captain “Agent 36-22-36” Flanagan (Diana Lorys, who is pretty much a Eurospy queen what with appearances in this film, The Devil’s Man and Superargo and the Faceless Giants) are after Rehte. He’s a German beer magnate — Beerfinger, anyone? Dr. Reinheitsgebot? The Man with the Golden Lager? — who is destroying Cape Canaveral’s rockets with lasers on his beer trucks.

Miss Cinema of 1954 Wandisa Guida used the Americanized name Wandisa Leigh for this film. You may remember her from other Eurospy fare like Secret Agent Fireball and the amazingly named Bob Fleming… Mission Casablanca. And you can search for Barta Barri, the Hungarian-born Spanish actor here. You probably don’t remember him playing the crazy old man in Monster Dog, but I do. He was also in tons of Spaghetti Westerns.

You have to love any Italian movie that can’t afford to shoot in Florida, so they recreate the entire area in Rome. By the end of this, there’s an underwater empire, masked cronies, a submarine escape and so much more. It starts slow, but stay with it. And hey — it has a great Riz Ortolani soundtrack!

You can watch this on Amazon Prime and Tubi.

International Secret Police: Key of Keys is the fourth of five James Bond parody movies in Japan known as Kokusai Hhimitsu Keisatsu. Yet once Woody Allen got hold of it — it’s his directorial debut — the story turned into a battle for the world’s best egg salad recipe.

Originally intended to be just an hour-long made for TV movie, Henry G. Saperstein and American International Pictures took more footage from International Secret Police: A Barrel of Gunpowder, an actor imitating Allen’s voice and music numbers from The Lovin’ Spoonful to pad the running time of the film and get it into theaters. Allen had no control over that, a mistake that he wouldn’t make in any of his future projects.

The voices in the film include Allen’s writing partner Mickey Rose (he’d go on to write and direct Student Bodies), Julie Bennett (Madame Piranha’s voice in King Kong Escapes), Frank Buxton (a story editor on Love, American Style), Len Maxwell (the voice of Punchy, the Hawaiian Punch mascot) and Allen’s wife at the time, Louise Lasser.

After some nonsensical action about the mob and the secret agents vying for the egg salad recipe — intercut with Allen himself speaking about his work on the film — the credits include China Lee, Playboy Playmate of the month for August 1964 (and the then-wife of Allen’s comic idol Mort Sahl) stripping while Allen explains that he promised her a role in the film. She’d go on to appear in an episode of The Girl From U.N.C.L.E. and as one of the robot girls in Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine, while we’re on the subject of spy films.

Speaking of spy women, two of the secret agents in this movie — Akiko Wakabayashi and Mie Hama — would also show up in You Only Live Twice.

I’m going to be real blunt: I love Derek Flint more than I will ever and could ever love James Bond.

When the army tries to arm Flint, they offer him a Walther PPK and an attache case with a concealed throwing knife. He replies that they are both crude. He even fights Agent 0008, who says that Flint is going up against people more evil than SPECTRE.

Everyone talks about how many women Bond has. Derek Flint has at least four girlfriends at all times. In this film, they’re Leslie (Shelby Grant, The Witchmaker), Anna (Sigrid Valdis, Hilda from Hogan’s Heroes and the second wife of Bob Crane), Gina (Gianna Serra, who was Miss Italy for 1963) and Sakito (Helen Funai, who had a twin sister named Keiko; they often appeared as The Ding-a-ling Sisters because the 1970’s were racist and were also members of Dean Martin’s Golddiggers dance troupe).

Nothing is ever all that serious in these films. And in a life that is gray and dark, they’re the perfect balm for what ails you.

Flint was once a member of Z.O.W.I.E. (Zonal Organization for World Intelligence and Espionage), but he retired so he could get more out of life. But Galaxy — a group of scientists led by Doctor Krupov (Rhys Williams, How Green Was My Valley), Doctor Wu (Peter Brocco, who was in Spartacus and went into ceramics for a living while he was blacklisted in the 50s) and Doctor Schneider (Benson Fong, who started the Ah Fong restaurant chain) — have taken the very scientific tact that governments are ill-fit to rule the world and only reason can lead. So they start controlling the climate and blowing up the world real good, all in the hopes of getting every nation to give up all their nukes.

Yeah — that’s not going to end well.

There’s a bad guy named Hans Gruber years before Die Hard, an explosive jar of cold cream, a search for bouillabaisse, Flint faking his death via a yogic suspended animation state, Edward Mulhare from The Ghost and Mrs. Muir and Knight Rider as a villain, Mr. Whipple, Lee J. Cobb as the put-upon leader of Z.O.W.I.E. named Cramden and The Green Hornet star Van Williams doing a voiceover impression of LBJ.

How much of an influence on Austin Powers is this movie? Well, Cramden’s presidential red phone has a ringtone that shows up in that film, as well as Hudson Hawk, which features Flint himself, James Coburn.

Coburn is the most perfect leading man ever in this film. He’s bemused — as if he’s in on a joke none of us get to hear. Not that he’s above being in this movie; he’s just on a plane beyond it. He trained with Bruce Lee — indeed, he was one of Lee’s pallbearers, saying that the karate star had brought his “physical, spiritual and psychological selves together” in his eulogy. He’s the coolest, smartest and best-looking person in every room; in effect, he is Derek Flint and wholely imbues the role in a way that no other actor could.

How good is he? The scene where Flint relaxes by suspending his body supported by only a chair under his head and another under his feet? That was really something Coburn could do.

The more astute of you — like my friend Mark Rosato — will be able to pick out the USOS Seaview from Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea in this movie. Plenty of the props and costumes from Land of the Giants are in this movie as well. But can you find James Brolin in an early role as a villainous technician? Or hear a young Randy Newman create the song “Galaxy a Go-Go?”

This is a perfect movie. If only all of life could be this good.