Shot directly after Mario Bava’s Danger: Diabolik, this Roger Vadim-directed movie is based on the comic book of the same name by Jean-Claude Forest. The film stars Vadim’s then-wife Jane Fonda as Barbarella, a United Earth agent sent to find scientist Durand Durand, who has created a weapon that could destroy humanity.

Vadim was hired to direct this film after producer Dino De Laurentiis purchased the rights. This led to Vadim looking to cast several actresses in the title role, including Virna Lisi, Brigitte Bardot (that’s who the character was originally based on) and Sophia Loren before ending up picking his wife.

In case you’re wondering why this movie is such a mess, Charles B. Griffith was the last writer to work on it, saying that he had done uncredited work on the script after fifteen other writers — including Terry Southern — worked on the movie.

This film is packed with fashion, amazing sets — you can credit Bava’s film for some of that, and great characters, like John Phillip Law as Pygar the angel, Anita Pallenberg (Performance) as the Black Queen, Milo O’Shea as Durand-Durand, Marcel Marceau in a rare speaking role as Professor Ping, David Hemmings (Deep Red) as Dildano and even cameos from Fabio Testi and Antonio Sabato (who was originally to play the role that Hemmings ended up doing).

So yeah. This is a gorgeous film that makes no sense whatsoever. Is that such a bad thing?

A sequel was planned with producer Robert Evans called Barbarella Goes Down, but it never happened. Nor did a 1990 remake, a Robert Rodriguez idea or a potential project with Nicolas Winding Refn, who moved on to other projects, saying, “certain things are better left untouched. You don’t need to remake everything.”

AUTHOR’S NOTE: We first wrote about this movie on April 26, 2019. There was a whole series of these films, which combine Eurospy and Batmania action all into one quite silly group of movies. One of the posters for this literally said, “Move over 007.” 

You gotta love this Amazon description, which assumes that we know who these fellows are:

“FBI agent Brad joins Tony and Nick, the seself-styledupermen who battle crime wearing bullet-proof super-suits. They are on a case involving radioactive counterfeit money and people who can be broken down into precious jewels. With some really nice stunts and awesome kung fu, gimmick weapons & gymnastics!”

I mean, I wasn’t interested and then you hit me with gymnastics?

Director Gianfranco Parolini is better known for his Sabata films, as well as God’s Gun. For this movie, he went to Yugoslavia to get the adventures of these three heroes to the big screen. And it wasn’t easy — for one stunt, actor Aldo Canti jumped out of a 20 feet high window, hit a trampoline and then jumped into a truck moving at full speed.

After this movie, the Supermen went around the world: Japan in Three Supermen at Tokyo, Africa in Three Supermen in the Jungle, Hong Kong in the xenophobically titled Supermen Against the Orient,  and seemingly have run out of countries, they went back in time to the wild west in The Three Supermen in the West.

Tony is played by Tony Kendall, who is also in The Whip and the Body and The Return of the Blind Dead, as well as the Kommisar X series of films. And Nick, another of the Supermen, was played by actor/stuntman Aldo Canti, a real-life thief with strong mob ties that was released from jail just to appear in this film. He was replaced by Sal Borgese in the other films in this series before coming back for the Turkish co-production Supermenler in 1979.

Guy Madison somehow found himself in two of the oddest Eurospy films — this one and LSD Flesh of the Devil — movies that have only a tenuous connection to spying and instead devolve into pure strangeness. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

This movie is much closer to an American movie serial than a spy movie. But hey — whatever it takes to get people into the theater, right?

Known as Devilman Story in Italy, this was the first of three pictures that director Paolo Bianchini (he also made Superargo and the Faceless Giants, whose poster was recycled for this, as is much of the cast) directed for producer Gabriele Crisanti. This movie helped recover the costs of the Guido Malatesta directed I Predoni del Sahara, reusing some of the footage from that epic.

Madison plays Mike Harway, a journalist who is helping his friend Christine (Luisa Baratto, Bloody Pit of Horror) find her missing father Professor Baker. Luciano Pigozzi — yes, Pag from Yor Hunter from the Future — shows up, as does Diana Lorys, who was in The Awful Dr. Orlof and Blue Eyes of the Broken Doll.

They end up in Africa, where they meet Devilman, who dreams of the bran transplant that will make him perfect. That goal ends up being his downfall, as he crashes into a machine and dies. He totally had the best looking headquarters ever, all 60’s future and gleaming steel. Too bad his foolish dream of getting a new brain got in the way. I mean, it was a good plan. He was going to have the Professor do the surgery and use the guy’s daughter’s brain. You have to think that he went out doing what he loved.

Supposedly, Devilman is Giovanni Cianfriglia, or as we knew him in America Ken Wood, or as I know him, Superargo. That may or may not be true. As you can imagine, the only person that cares about the factual details of forgotten 1960’s Italian James Bond ripoffs is probably the one writing this right now. Me. That’s who.

This 1967 Spanish/Italian/French film was directed by Alfonso Balcazar (A Pistol from Ringo) in an experimental 70mm 3D filming technique.

A criminal organization — led by Electra One (Daniele Vargas, Eyeball, The Arena) — has created an aggression serum that they plan on using to hold the world hostage. The Americans and the Soviets join forces to stop them.

George Martin, who appears in The Three Supermen films, is Gary, the hero of this movie. Rosalba Neri is also in this. You should know her for her body — pun intended — of bonkers erotic horror films. She’s in everything from Franco’s 99 Women to Amuck!, The Seducers, French Sex Murders, The Devil’s Wedding Night and Lady Frankenstein.

You can watch this on YouTube:

From Batman to Manimal, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, The Misadventures of Sheriff Lobo, Love American Style, Mission: Impossible and movies like The Rescue of Gilligan’s Island and Batman: The Movie, if something needed  to be directed for TV, Leslie H. Martinson was your guy.

Fathom is based on a series of books by Larry Forrester. It was made thanks to the success of Modesty Blaise. It was written by Lorenzo Semple Jr., who had teamed with Martinson on Batman on the quick and cheap.

The main selling point? Racquel Welch.

In this movie, she plays skydiver Fathom Harvill, a beautiful skydiver who is abducted by H.A.D.E.S. (Headquarters Allied Defences, Espionage, and Security) agents and asked to be part of a team that is looking for a lost nuclear weapon. That same weapon — hidden inside a Fire Dragon figurine — is being hunted down by the Communist agent Serapkin.

In his December 13, 1967 review of this film, Roger Ebert said, “So anyway, if she had been Italian, her voice would have been dubbed for the American market. So we would have seen this beautiful broad with a great figure and really first-class cheekbones. And when she talked, we would have heard another voice, a voice belonging to some girl in a studio somewhere with a low, sexy tone and a certain amount of acting ability. And we would have flipped, I guess, because anyone looking like that and able to read her dialog would have been — well, nice. But the trouble is, Raquel Welch is not Italian, She’s American, which would still be OK, except that she uses her own voice in her movies, and she talks wrong for the way she looks. This is the big problem with her.”

This should be an exciting spy film but it isn’t. And that’s kind of sad, because it has great posters and plenty of potential. That said, it does have Anthony Franciosa (Tenebre) in it, so it has that going for it.

This movie was a Italian, French and West German co-production. It was released in France as Au Diable les Anges (To Hell With the Angels) and Germany as Die Abenteuer des Kardinal Braun (The Adventure of Cardinal Brown). It’s also an unofficial sequel to Operazione San Gennaro, a heist-comedy film that Dino Risi directed.

This one is directed by Lucio Fulci, not yet the Godfather of Gore.

Napoleon has big plans for being such a small-time crook. He’s accidentally released from prison by a villain named the Baron and his henchmen, who were on their way to rob a bank vault. Despite how well-dressed they are, they’re broke. Napoleon takes over the gang and they move to Rome, where they joing up with a used car selling gigolo named Cajella.

While the rest of the gang steals money from tourists, Cajella falls for a gangster’s moll named Samantha. Her man ends up being Joe Ventura (Edward G. Robinson!), a big league American gangster. They both get involved when the gang steals the Pieta, one of the most famous statues in the world.

As they say, all manner of shenanigans ensure. It’s interesting to see Fulci’s early comedies knowing the sheer insanity he had inside him and was ready to unlease   in a decade or so.

You can watch this on YouTube.

When a government-built flying saucer — yes, really — is hijacked by Jose Ortega (Albert Salmi, Inspector Sturgess from Superstition), Matt Helm (Dean Martin, who else?) must work with the ship’s former pilot Sheila Sommers (Janice Rule, The Swimmer) to recover it.

Originally known as The Devastators, this was the first Matt Helm movie I ever heard of, thanks to the Medved’s The Fifty Worst Films of All Time. I think by now we’ve all learned just how off those guys were about movies. When doing my research on this I also found a Judith Crist review that called it, “the nadir of witlessness, smirky sexiness and bad taste.” And Janice Rule said that she regretted appearing in this film, saying that it was the worst movie she was ever in.

You know that I loved this movie, right?

Matt Helm is sent to the ICE (Intelligence and Counter Espionage) Training Headquarters to uncover a traitor and meet the aforementioned Sheila Sommers, a test pilot who is the only person that can fly that stolen saucer. After all, its electo-magnetic power means that only a woman is able to fly it, because men are killed by all the energy it shoots off.

This was Beverly Adams’s final appearance as Matt’s secretary, Lovey Kravezit.

One of the Slaygirls in the film is Annabella Incontrera, who is also in Crimes of the Black Cat; So Sweet, So Dead; The Case of the Bloody Iris and Black Belly of the Tarantula, a movie packed with Eurospy women. Don’t believe me? Just check out our list of “Bond Girls in Giallo Films.”

Look — this isn’t the best movie ever. But I love it. I love that Dean’s stumbling his way through it, singing and drinking and winking at the camera. It’s perfect for what I need to watch right now. I don’t care what TV Guide’s greatest critic Judith Crist has to say.

Between None But the Lonely Spy, FX 18 Secret Agent, three appearances as Agent 077 Dick Malloy (Agent 077: Mission Bloody Mary, Agent 077: From the Orient with Fury and Special Mission Lady Chaplin) and this movie, Ken Clark is really the John Carradine of Eurospy films.

Here, he stars in a co-production between Italy, France and West Germany about Dick Hallan, a journalist who gets mixed up in the spy game.

Clark’s co-star is Irina Demick, who was one of Darryl F. Zanuck’s European mistresses who he tried to transform into leading ladies. She’s also in the giallo Naked Girl Killed in the Park.

Loredana Nusciak, who was the girlfriend of Diabolikus in Superargo contro Diabolikus, as well as the Django’s lover Maria, is Madame Tiffany, who is so important to the plot that she’s in the title.

The Tiffany Memorandum was directed by Sergio Grieco, who also was behind the Agent 077 films. Despite how ridiculous and meandering it gets — as most Eurospy films sometimes do — it does have a wonderful Riz Ortolani soundtrack.

Lady Lister (Margaret Lee, Our Agent Tiger, Agent 077: From the Orient with Fury, Kiss the Girls and Make Them Die, Secret Agent Super Dragon, Psycho Circus, Slaughter Hotel, Venus In Furs…I could and will go on) has brought together five of the world’s best nuclear scientists and locked them up in her underground base. She’s followed the lyrics of a Gossip song and begun to turn coal into diamonds. But instead of her fists, like Beth Ditto, she’s using a controlled nuclear explosion.

If only there were a secret agent to save us all. Oh, there is. Special Agent 2.007 Dick Smart (Richard Wyler, who was TV’s The Man from Interpol). He has plenty of gadgets and lives in a time when getting rid of a veneral disease just meant a prescription.

He’s assisted by secretary Jeanine Stafford (Rosana Tapajós, who is also in Kiss the Girls and Make Them Die), who hides her beauty behind thick glasses and pinned up hair, but you know how that goes. She looks just like Stella Stevens in the Matt Helm movie The Silencers and also like how Sharon Tate would look in The Wrecking Crew two days later, so the strange notion of collective intelligence has made me dwell on this movie perhaps longer than I should.

Lister also works with another villain in a wheelchair named McDiamond. I can see why the dude wants more jewels with a nom de plume like that. He also has a voice box, because nothing is scarier than someone with two handicaps coming after you. He and Lister aren’t a team for long and he’s soon torturing her, which means our playboy protagonist must save her.

Have you ever seen a movie where the hero has an LBW? That’s a Locator of Beautiful Women, which beeps whenever a good looking woman walks by. I have no idea why a vagabond fake Bond would need such a thing or the maniac who would make it.

This movie was directed by Franco Prosperi, who started as an assistant to Mario Bava, and eventually made The Throne of Fire, one of my favorite Italian Conan ripoffs ever.

Want to watch it? Good news. I posted the YouTube link for you.