Sergio Grieco must have been bored making the Agent 077 movies, because he went absolutely insane putting this film together. This is a mix of the craziest parts of the fumetti neri and Eurospy films, never completely serious yet never getting so campy that you lose interest. It’s absolute fun and worth watching to take your mind off our increasingly crazier world.
We start in China, where Argoman is about to be executed. Instead, he uses his mental powers to make the firing squad kill one another. Yes, Argoman has no respect for human life and even less for where he makes his money. He takes a jeweled box as payment from the Russians. Another job got him the Mona Lisa that is in his secret base.
Argoman is suspected of stealing London’s crown jewels. But there are bigger things on his mind, like who should he sleep with: Samantha or Regina (Dominique Boschero, All the Colors of the Dark). His manservant Chandra (Eduardo Fajardo, Lisa and the Devil) has really big worries: any time that Argoman gets his banana peeled, he loses his powers for six hours.
It turns out that Regina is really Jenabell, Queen of the World, a super villainess that Argoman can track through his special radioactive cigarettes. Yes, just plain lung cancer wasn’t enough for our hero.
All manner of hijinks ensue, including cloned world leaders plummeting to their deaths, glowing lipstick and Argoman murdering every clone of Regina that comes his way before blowing up her plane and taking the crown jewels for himself.
Jenabell gets major credit here for outfits that progressively get weirder, intricate hats that totally complete her ensembles and for having the most archaic robot I’ve seen in a Eurospy film.
This movie is completely off the rails from the very first minute of screen time. Jess Franco is an acquired taste, but here, he’s tasting like the finest of wine, as jazzy beats play over Eurospy action. This was his first film working with composer Bruno Nicolai and it all works like magic.
Ray Danton plays Lucky, who is very much a gentleman thief. You’ll recognize him from playing Sandokan in two films, as well as spy appearances in Special Agent Super Dragon, Code Name: Jaguar and the abortive Derek Flint TV pilot, Our Man Flint: Dead on Target.
Rosalba Neri is also in this, who has quite the Eurospy resume, appearing in Superseven Calls on Cairo, Two Mafiosi Against Goldfinger,Password: Kill Agent Gordon and OSS 117 – Double Agent. Horror fans would know her better as the titular Lady Frankenstein and as the wife in the giallo Amuck!
Patty Shephard, who is in this movie for only the briefest of moments, would go on to become a Spanish horror queen. She’s in two of my favorites, Slugs and Edge of the Axe, as well as Nachy’s The Werewolf vs. The Vampire Woman.
Keep an eye out of Teresa Gimpera (Hannah, Queen of the Vampires) and Bebe Loncar (Some Girls Do).
There’s some plot about counterfeiting here, but really it’s an excuse for Lucky to run around and romance women. Quite literally, the movie ends the way it does because, as our hero says, “We ran out of money.”
This movie is a blast. Do yourself a favor and hunt it down.
Forced out of retirement, the original James Bond (David Niven) battles Dr. Noah and SMERSH. Living up to the film’s tagline “Casino Royale is too much… for one James Bond!”, this movie ha six others pretending to be 007, including baccarat player Evelyn Tremble (Peter Sellers); millionaire spy Vesper Lynd (first Bond girl Ursula Andress), Bond’s secretary Miss Moneypenny (giallo queen Barbara Bouchet), Bond’s daughter with Mata Hari, Mata Bond (Joanna Pettet) and British agents Coop (Terence Cooper) and The Detainer (Daliah Lavi).
If this sounds like a mess, so is the film, which has direction by Ken Hughes (Night School, Sextette), John Huston (The Treasure of the Sierra Madre), Joseph McGrath (The MagicChristian), Robert Parrish (The Fire DownBelow), Val Guest (Where the Spies Are) and Richard Talmadge.
Woody Allen, Peter Sellers, Val Guest, Ben Hecht, Joseph Heller, Terry Southern, and Billy Wilder all wrote parts of the movie, with Southern writing Sellers dialogue so he would look better than Allen and Orson Welles.
Orson Welles finally appears in a Bond fim as Le Chiffre, who is SMERSH’s financial agent. He’s been embezzling and hopes to gamble back his way into the money he needs to repay the evil spy organization. William Holden shows up as the CIA agent Ransome, George Raft plays himself (he’s also playing Scarface, which is pretty much himself), Charles Boyer is Legrande, John Huston is M, Jacqueline Bisset is Miss Goodthighs, Pete O’Toole and so many more people show up.
Speaking of Bisset, she was surprised when filming her first scene with Sellers, as he fired a gun directly in her face without warning. Though the gun was only loaded with blanks, her face was coveredin burning gunpowder and her face started to bleed.
“First I thought I had been actually shot and then when I realized it had been a blank, I thought I’d been blinded. My face looked like a shower spout of pinpricks leaking blood,” said Bisset. “I was panicked whenever I had a scene with Peter Sellers. To get shot in your first scene with a big star, that is a nightmare.”
This is Anjelica Huston’s first film role, as she was Deborah Kerr’s hands.It’s also the first movie for Dave Prowse as Frankenstein’s Monster, a role he would play in The Horror of Frankenstein and Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell. He would go on to play, of course, Darth Vader.
There was plenty of drama on set between Sellers and Welles, as the British comedian really wanted to play Bond straight and hated the comedy angle. He was also upset that Princess Margaret paid more attention to Welles than himself when she visited the set.
As a result, Sellers disappeared for days or weeks at a time, refused to appear in his scenes with Welles and left the movie before all of his scenes had been shot. The end of the movie had to be rewritten without him in it.
To top off all of Sellers other behavior, he also punched out his friend, director Joseph McGrath, who told him to settle down.
Burt Bacharach contributed the song “The Look of Love,” sung by Dusty Springfield, to this movie. If you ever wondered why Austin Powers loved Bacharach so much, there’s your answer.
This is the only movie where Bond dies. Let’s hope no other film follows suit.
Avenger X was based off the fumetti neri (black comics, a term for a more violent and criminal driven form of comics ) Mister X, which is about a gentleman thief. The character design may be a bit different than the comic, however, with a black color scheme missing the white and red from the printed version of X’s costume.
George Lamarro may look like a normal pharmaceutical CEO, but he’s really pushing hard drugs. His secretary tries to blackmail him for some of the profits — and a wedding ring — so he has her killed and sets up the master criminal known as Mister X (Pier Paolo Capponi, Seven Blood Stained Orchids, The Cat O’Nine Tails).
The real Mister X is a master of golf, disguise and death. Trust me, he isn’t having a pretender take his name.
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 Express, Nightmare 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.
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 fromRingo) 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.
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.
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