DVD Review: Espionage In Tangiers/Assassination In Rome

Review: Espionage In Tangiers/Assassination In Rome

Dark Sky’s "Drive-In Double Feature" DVD of Espionage In Tangiers and Assassination In Rome elevates two so-so Eurospy titles into a must-buy package by giving them an excellent presentation. Everything about the disc is classy, from the two top-notch widescreen transfers–both sourced from pristine-looking prints–to the creative "virtual drive-in" programming. Dark Sky is hardly the first company to hit on this concept (Something Weird’s been doing it for years through Image), but the inclusion of vintage trailers, advertisements and concession jingles really spruces up a double feature disc. No, they’re not featurettes exclusively relating to the movies at hand, but using public domain material to recreate an evening at a drive-in circa 1966 is a relatively cheap way to make the viewing experience a lot more fun.

From the main menu you can only select to play the whole double-feature, but if you return to the menu after selecting that option you’ll have the choice of watching either movie on its own. If you’ve got the time, though, I recommend opting for the whole experience. You’ll start out with some decidedly non-mouthwatering shots of hamburgers and hotdogs, originally intended to pique your appetite for over-priced concessions, then get some trailers (roughly period-appropriate, but chosen more to advertise other Dark Sky discs) for Hellfire Club (with Peter Cushing!), Frankenstein vs. the Space Monster and The Horror of Party Beach. Then comes the first feature, Espionage In Tangiers.

Espionage In Tangiers (1965)

This version runs over one hour and thirty minutes, which means that it’s considerably longer than the roughly sixty minute version reviewed in The Eurospy Guide. So if you have an old gray market copy, you might want to upgrade and see whatever it is you’ve been missing.

Espionage In Tangiers is a typical, low-budget Bond wannabe (along the lines of Secret Agent Super Dragon), starring a typical, low-budget Connery wannabe (Luis Davila) as secret agent Mike Murphy. It’s got a good whistled theme, but not enough music in general. Long segments seem even longer without a catchy score to accompany them. And a catchy score can go a long, long way in a Eurospy movie! Espionage In Tangiers certainly could have used more.

For the Macguffin, a brilliant scientist has invented a ray (yep, rays again!) that can disintegrate anything. At least we’re told it can disintegrate anything; all we ever actually see it disintegrate is a car and a fireplace. (Yep, a fireplace. Not even the whole hearth!) Before he can deliver it to the UN, who will supposedly use it for world peace, it is stolen. In an elaborate opening sequence, each party involved in the theft is eliminated by their higher-up until the ray gun gets to a mysterious figure, leaving a trail of corpses behind.

We then meet our hero in a Bond-like introduction, making out (rather poorly, from the looks of it) with a beautiful girl. (He is wearing a decidedly un-glamorous white undershirt.) He’s summoned to a briefing, and soon turns up late in the kind of suit Connery used to wear. Whatever spy agency he works for, they can’t afford a Moneypenny, so he barges right into his boss’s office, which consists of three rather flimsy-looking walls, a table, and a particularly lumpy map whose continents seem rather misshapen and whose borders aren’t defined, which you’d think would be essential for a secret service. (It looks as if the art director drew this map from memory.)

Soon Murphy’s off on his mission to recover the disintegration ray, and look out, stewardesses! I feel sorry for stewardesses in the Sixties, constantly being hit on by all these cheesy Eurospy types. It must have been really annoying. At least Mike Murphy isn’t as sleazy as Joe Walker!
The flight takes him to Tangiers, where, true to the title, we do indeed get some espionage. Right off the bat someone shoots him in the heart at the airport. Wow! How did he survive? You brace yourself for some cool gadget or amazing trick, but it turns out he just happened to have a Bible in his chest pocket. (And he really doesn’t strike me as a Bible-thumping kind of guy.) It’s really quite disappointing, but it helps you readjust your expectations for the movie. They’re not out to break any new ground here, just to tread the old ground in a fairly competent, low-budget manner. This means some decent fights, but no real action. When the bad guys speed away in a car, Murphy spots a convenient motorcycle. Does that mean we’re in for a chase? Nope. In this movie, a motorcycle is just a means of getting from A to B, not for doing stunts. We cut to Murphy arriving at B on the bike, presumably having followed them without incident.

At least we get a pretty cool fight at B. Murphy enters a warehouse full of coffins, and bad guys start emerging from them! It’s a nice, Avengers-ish moment, though it doesn’t take too long for him to beat the crap out of them all. He snoops around Tangiers some more, giving us some very nice location photography, all the more stunning thanks to the high quality of the print. Unfortunately, the mystery villain seems to specialize in killing his own men, so every time Murphy gets ahold of one, he dies before he can tell him anything useful in advancing the plot. When he finally does manage to capture a baddie, our hero reveals himself as something of a proto-Bauer, happily torturing the information out of him. The information in question leads Murphy and his espionage out of Tangiers just halfway through the film, and into Nice, another beautiful location.

In Nice we do get an actual car chase, and it’s well-shot if not overly exciting. We also get some beautiful women, but the banter never rises above "you’re the sexiest spy I know!" Murphy’s proclivities for aggressive information-seeking extend to the fairer sex as well, and some slapping turns into foreplay as the "sexiest spy" succumbs to his rather... subtle charms.

Ultimately, if I followed the plot correctly, the mission turns out to be pretty pointless in the end, with very little accomplished. That’s how the whole movie feels as well. The most memorable setpiece finds Murphy trapped in a chamber slowly filling up with water, but the villains change their minds at the last minute and he doesn’t even have to escape it himself. Again, what was the point? Other memorable moments include a surprisingly brutal (for the time) torture scene in which a wire garotte is tightened around a man’s belly, and a good fight at the end on a rocky beach location reminiscent of a better Eurospy movie, Special Mission Lady Chaplin. Ultimately, though, neither scene served too much purpose. The whole movie was perfectly decent to watch, and even occasionally entertaining, but very low on nutrients, like a tolerable appetizer that leaves you still hungry for more. And luckily, that’s exactly what it is, because there is more: a whole second feature still to come!

Assassination In Rome (1965)

True to drive-in form, we get some more previews before Assassination In Rome gets underway, including one for Mario Bava’s Kill, Baby, Kill!, which Dark Sky was supposed to release this month, but has apparently been cancelled or postponed. Then the main feature starts up, and it’s once again a beautiful print (until the last couple of reels, at least, which have a few brief problems).

Assassination In Rome stars Hugh O'Brian (cut from the same cloth as Rod Taylor) as an intrepid American reporter based in Rome and Cyd Charisse (kind of wooden, but perfectly acceptable in a role that demands very little) as his old flame whose husband has gone missing. The spy element only comes into play in the third act, and even then it’s minor. The hero works for a newspaper, not a government agency (which fortunately means he doesn’t have to be a sleazy James Bond clone), and the story has a lot more in common with early giallo films, like Bava’s The Girl Who Knew Too Much, than with any contemporary Eurospy films. Like most gialli, it takes a lot of inspiration from Hitchcock, and also from the first-rate Hitchcock imitator, Charade (Stanley Donen, 1963). It does, however, deliver the same great locations (Rome and Venice), fancy cars (Alpha Romeo), treachery and duplicity and even, eventually, gunplay we expect of a Eurospy feature, all to the beat of a superior score by Armando Trovajoli.

Unlike the first feature, Assassination In Rome has an actual plot that moves forward and makes sense, even if it sometimes drags a bit. The colorful and well-shot footage of Rome is enough to recommend it to Europhiles, and some of the characters (like an exiled Mafia don) are just as colorful. The costumes are interesting, to say the least. I can’t write about this film without noting some truly bizarre hats, especially one worn by the mysterious Lorena towards the end.

Overall, your enjoyment of Assassination In Rome is likely to depend on how much of a giallo fan you are. The conclusion is pure giallo, and features several elements that will come to be clearly identified with that genre a few years later. There’s one of those chases up an endless staircase, and a masked killer whose true identity turns out to be very much a giallo convention.
I enjoyed the second feature a bit more than the first, but neither leaves a real lasting impression. The overall presentation, however, does. Dark Sky have put together a very nice package with excellent transfers of two obscure movies and a fun gimmick holding them together. I hope they choose to revisit the Eurospy genre in future "Drive-In DVD" releases. Budget-priced at under $12, they certainly provide good value for your dollar. And, despite my criticisms, if you're at all a fan of Sixties European thrillers, you'll eat this stuff up.

I do have one question, though: Espionage In Tangiers is supposed to be George Lazenby's first movie, and he's even credited on the back of the box (though not in the movie). I know his part is tiny, but I never spotted him, even for an instant! Does anyone know where he turns up?

Review: DEATH IS NIMBLE, DEATH IS QUICK (1966)

Review: Death Is Nimble, Death Is Quick (1966)
Ah, best for last! At least it comes last on Retromedia’s double-sided Kommissar X triple feature disc, although there seems to be some confusion over the production order of these movies. Even the normally unassailable Eurospy Guide contains conflicting information. Whatever position it occupies in the series, though, Death Is Nimble, Death Is Quick is the stuff Eurospy dreams are made of. I recommend saving it for last, though, so that you’ll already be accustomed to the heroes’ appalling sexist antics and jerky behavior, and better able to savor all the well-staged, well-shot and well-directed action it has to offer instead of dwelling on that. And instead of me dwelling on the plot, I’ll just refer you back to my overall Kommissar X plot description in my last review, and move onto said action, which this time around takes place in gorgeous Sri Lanka (or Ceylon as it was then known).

Much credit has to go to Brad Harris, who serves as fight coordinator as well as co-star. He performs a breathtaking chase across a beautiful seaside hotel rooftop, running down a buff, bald karate killer. The chase culminates in each actor (no doubles here ) leaping off the roof into a tall palm tree, then letting their momentum bend the tree down to the ground and jumping out! It’s a great scene that wouldn’t feel out of place in a Bond movie. No sooner has it ended than we get another exciting chase, in which a Jeep driving in the surf keeps pace with a train on a parallel track, shooting at a fugitive running along the tops of its cars! Great stuff.

Joe and Tom suffer the usual elaborate assassination attempts, which naturally fail, but one particularly creative dirty trick snares a bad guy instead. He gets himself under a shower meant for Joe, and instead of spraying water, it sprays “a new kind of chemical that destroys body cells. It acts like bacteria.” It also leaves the man a bloody mess in the bathtub. That chemical (and it’s creator, the usual brilliant professor type) serves as the Macguffin for this movie as well.

Another overly elaborate (but especially tense) assassination attempt finds a sniper aiming for a bottle of nitroglycerin his cohorts have surreptitiously deposited on Tom and Joe’s patio table. They’re saved only by the smart intervention of a particularly capable (for this series) and especially beautiful woman, Michelle.

There’s a rather effective scene in which a greedy traitor dies alone and silently screaming in the soundproof, airtight backseat of a partitioned car, clutching his purloined millions as deadly gas leaks in. Tom later finds himself in the same predicament, and the scene generates some good suspense, even though you know he’ll get out of it.

In a definite improvement over the previous entries in the series, most of the shots are cut together in a manner that, surprisingly enough, makes sense and tells a story! The cinematography is even worth noting (not that it’s bad in the other movies), with some beautiful golden hour shots on a beach.

So are there any criticisms? Well, sure. This is a Kommissar X movie, after all. That means we’re subjected to the usual smugness, smirking and terrible banter from Joe. For instance, when the professor’s very proper daughter asks him outright if he’s a Golden Cat (the name of the villainous organization in this one), he replies, “No, I’m often called a Tomcat, though.”

Luckily, such moments are countered by a good score, great settings and some setpieces that actually qualify as “spectacular.” (Within their limited budget, at least.) The villain’s base is in the middle of a foreboding place called “Death Lake.” Filled with stumps and dead trees protruding from the still, algae-filled water, and aided by an effectively creepy score, it certainly lives up to its name. Furthermore, Death Lake is protected by a horrifying monster that breathes fire and crushes trees, scaring away the locals. Yes, someone’s clearly been watching Dr. No again. But the rip-off “dragon” is actually at least as impressive as the real thing. It’s an armored trimaran with a bulbous, eye-like cockpit and front-mounted flame thrower, capable of gliding right over the stumps in the lake, and incinerating them.

Indicating a higher-than-average budget for this outing, there are lots of pyrotechnics in the third act (well, lots of fire, anyway), as Joe and Michelle escape the flame-spitting monster in a Zodiac. The special effects do become a little dodgy, though, when the trimaran apparently blows itself up. Obviously the craft was borrowed, because we don’t actually see it destroyed. Instead we see Joe’s reaction, then cut back to some fire where the monster just was. Oh well.

Luckily, the money the producers saved by not exploding their trimaran turns up on screen in the finale, for which they’ve constructed a truly awesome, fairly gigantic set. Tom’s final showdown with his worthy karate adversary, King (the one he chased along the roof at the beginning) takes place in the Temple of the Golden Cats, an ornate, cavernous sanctuary big enough to hold a bunch of onlooking worshipers and three huge, golden cat heads, whose mouths serve as oversize doors. The fight itself is again well-choreographed, and exciting. Surprisingly (and mercifully!), Tom even manages to keep his shirt on while he fights! (It does get a little torn, though...) This duel leads to an even bigger concluding setpiece outdoors involving a jeep, an airplane, a herd of elephants (actual elephants, not stock footage!), and the explosive combination thereof.

Then, after things have been going so well, just because they can’t help themselves, they bring things back down to a typical Kommissar X level by ending on a really bad, typically chauvinist joke. As one elephant charges away (with good reason, it turns out), the hunter who’s been minding the herd yells, “Wait! Stop! It’s acting mad!” Tom asks, “Is it a female?” When the hunter dubiously confirms his suspicion, Tom states, “Well, that explains it!” And they both have a hearty chuckle. Mystery solved!

Overall, though, Death Is Nimble, Death Is Quick is good enough that it withstands all of these kinds of remarks, all of Joe’s perpetual smarm, and even all of his “hmm”s. (Tony Kendall says “hmm” a lot. He uses it to punctuate any scene, be it with a woman, an adversary, or with Tom.) This is not only the best movie on The Kommissar X Collection; it’s one of the better Eurospy movies I’ve seen, and one of the best 007 knock-offs. Highly recommended!

DVD Review: So Darling, So Deadly

Review: So Darling, So Deadly

After watching three Kommissar X movies, I feel fairly qualified to take a guess and suppose the following description pretty much sums up the plot of all of them: Joe and Tom arrive in a foreign location to protect a professor who has invented some sort of device. Joe woos the professor’s beautiful daughter (and any other woman who happens to walk on camera), and generally behaves like a jerk, much to Tom’s annoyance. Joe and Tom tangle with the minions of a mysterious villain, which inevitably includes at least two beautiful female assassins. They get into some brawls, perform some impressive stunts, Joe smirks, Tom takes his shirt off, they raid an underground lair where the villain’s true identity is revealed, stuff blows up, and Joe goes off with a minimum of two girls.

All that’s certainly the case in So Darling, So Deadly, and the device this time (not that it matters), is a gizmo that can shut down the engine of any vehicle within a hundred miles, including airplanes. Now that the plot’s out of the way, I can move on to all the things that actually matter in this kind of movie.

We begin with a typically sexist exchange, just to remind everyone they’re watching a Kommissar X flick:

A voluptuous blond Eurospy babe (above) sashays up to Joe and Tom.

Blonde (in a Marilyn Monroe voice): “I don’t need brains, do I, Joe? A girl can use other things. I’ll see you around ”

Tom: “She’s got all it takes ”

Joe: “Too bad I can’t bring that on the trip to Singapore! I don’t suppose Apollo would pay for excess baggage like that ”

Yes, he emphasizes “that” twice. The camera helpfully zeroes in on the lady's well-defined derriere as she slinks away.

And with that, we’re off to Singapore, accompanied by an Oriental-tinged reprise of “I Love You, Joe Walker,” from the first movie. I’m not sure if it’s really Singapore (the only thing to make me assume otherwise is the distinct lack of actual Asian actors), but this movie was definitely shot on location somewhere pretty. (The impressive Tiger Balm Gardens from the finale of Ring Around the World is again put to good use.) The scenery is typically breathtaking, one of the real highlights of the Kommissar X movies. They shot around the world in great locations, and didn’t rely on Rome to double for every city on Earth the way other, lower budget Eurospy movies were sometimes known to.

Despite their mission, Joe and Tom decide to just hang out, Joe by the pool and Tom waterskiing. This leads to a little too much of Tony Kendall in his bathing suit, flopping around in the water, and a lot too much of Brad Harris shirtless.

Let me take a moment here to address Brad Harris’s physique, since the producers make sure we see it at least once in every movie. There’s no question that Harris is in good shape (he’s clearly an athlete, and a veteran of peplum movies), but he has very weird muscles. Particularly his abs. They’re not a six-pack per se, but more of a five pack, with a single big, lumpy muscle across the top. And it occupies a space where no muscle is meant to be, smack in the middle of his torso. It’s fascinating.

Anyway, while he’s waterskiing, Tom comes under attack by another bearded henchman... or maybe it’s the same one from Kiss Kiss, Kill Kill. Yep, same one. Guiseppe Mattei, in a different bearded hench-role. Luckily, it turns out Tom keeps a pistol in a plastic bag on him when he goes waterskiing in just his swim trunks Where was that hidden? (Now I can really see what he meant a few minutes earlier when he declared that “guns cramp my style.”) I like the detail that it’s in a plastic bag. Some movies might ask us to believe that a wet gun won’t misfire (no matter where it’s been hidden), but Kommissar X actually provides this single touch of realism amidst all its utterly ludicrous pseudo-science. It’s a nice touch.

The boys recover from their respective assassination attempts (Joe with the aid of a bullet-proof suitcase), and decide to discover what it’s all about. Joe meets with the professor’s daughter, Sybille, and states, “All I know about your father is that he’s a physicist who’s experimenting with certain rays.” Uh-oh I’ve seen enough Eurospy movies to know that rays always mean trouble. Always. No exceptions. Sure enough, this ray business leads to further assassination attempts, several conducted by blond assassin sisters, one of whom (Stella) has a particular, fashion-forward penchant for midriff-baring shirts.

Joe and Tom escape one of these situations by using the old “set the whole pier on fire” diversion (and then gleefully spraying down Stella with a firehose!), and another by dressing in traditional women’s clothes to evade a whole slew of enemies unseen. This pains the ever-macho Joe, who whines, “I’d rather fight than do this ”

Joe shows his soft side again when a pretty girl in a nightclub informs him that two people are trying to murder her. Even though he has every reason to believe she’s telling the truth, he chooses to just smile and dance (you gotta see Tony Kendall’s moves!) and force her to keep dancing with him until she does, indeed, get shot. Then he runs away. One is reminded of what Pamela said about him in Kiss Kiss, Kill Kill: “He’s the most charming man I’ve ever met! Charming!” (Perhaps she led a very sheltered life.)

The bad guy’s underground lair this time appears to be in a sewer, and has to be accessed by dressing in frogman suits and swimming under the city. We later learn that it also has a front door. Joe is of course captured and told that “Beautiful women will have you torn to pieces. They are the claws of the Golden Dragon.” His response? “That sounds very nice.” Knowing Joe, I doubt he’s being glib.

He escapes, of course (again due to his irresistible charms and Stella’s susceptibility to them), and meets up with Tom for a rather sub-standard punch-up in a muddy, low-rent waterfront location. Not one of the best Kommissar X finales.

Overall, So Darling, So Deadly isn’t bad, and it’s still plenty of fun, but it’s not as enjoyable as the other two Kommissar X movies in this collection, and for once it doesn’t offer any standout setpieces.

Warner Spy DVDs

Representatives from Warner Home Video recently did a chat on the Home Theater Forum, as they graciously do several times a year, and, as always, The Digital Bits has posted the transcript. There’s a lot to wade through, but a few spy-related nuggets stand out.

If you’re one of the five people out there (like me) who would like to see a director’s cut of the ‘98 Avengers movie, you’re (not surprisingly) out of luck. Warner have "no plans to revisit The Avengers," they declared in response to a question on the subject. Too bad. As terrible as the movie turned out, there may actually be a better version out there. The script was actually pretty good, and it’s clear from the trailers that they shot a lot of the scenes that didn’t make it into the final release cut. It would at least be interesting to see what might have been, and good to have as a curiosity for Avengers completists. Of course, no amount of new scenes could correct Uma Thurman’s uncharacteristically awful performance!

Fans of that other Sixties TV staple The Saint are in better luck, however. WHV plans to release the original black and white Saint mystery movies (starring Louis Hayward, George Sanders and Hugh Sinclair as Simon Templar) in 2008. Judging from the excellent job they’ve done with other genre box sets from that era (like The Thin Man or Tarzan), this is definitely something to look forward to!

Finally, Elke Sommer fans have something to look forward to, too. (And who’s not an Elke fan? I sure am!) Her 1963 spy movie with Paul Newman, The Prize, is finally slated for release in 2008 as well. Writer Ernest Lehman shamelessly rips off his own script for North By Northwest in this lightweight Stockholm-set thriller co-starring Edward G. Robinson. Instead of a biplane, Paul Newman outruns a... truck. (Um, yeah. Not as exciting.) Instead of rudely interrupting an auction to evade the baddies by getting himself arrested, he rudely interrupts a nudist meeting for the same reason. It’s not a great movie, but it’s entertaining and it’s got Elke, and that’s all that really matters. And it gives me an excuse to post another picture of her, which I should do more often anyway!

Review: Kiss Kiss, Kill Kill

Review: Kiss Kiss, Kill Kill

The Kommissar X movies sort of have one foot in the Krimi genre (German mystery/crime films, especially popular in the late Fifties and early Sixties) and one in the Eurospy genre (which took over everything after Goldfinger hit). Walker and Rowland are detectives who get involved in globetrotting espionage cases. Walker’s a private eye (supposedly the best in the world), and Rowland is a New York City Police Captain who is for some reason assigned to cases all over the world.
When we meet Joe Walker (accompanied by his catchy theme music, "I Love You, Joe Walker"), he’s... somewhere, and he’s taken a case to do... something. Neither is entirely clear. Soon he meets someone else, who’s dressed very similarly to him, confusing matters, and they fight, because, as I mentioned before, Walker likes to punch people. It turns out this other man is none other than Captain Tom Rowland, and the two are best friends. A group of people who I at first thought were milkmen, but then realized were supposed to be policemen, cheer and clap. Meanwhile Joan, a blond assassin, blows someone up in an exploding outhouse. (Yes, exploding outhouse! That’s definitely creative enough to make up for naming your assassin "Joan.") Later, she and another woman both hire Walker to find a missing physicist, and soon he and Rowland are working the same murder/missing person case.

You’ll be no less confused watching the movie.

Additionally, every male character wears a red shirt at some point, which later also turns out to be the uniform of the villain’s henchmen, so events are somewhat difficult to follow.

Walker drives a nifty convertible Porsche (a red one) which sadly isn’t equipped with an ejector seat. Walker makes do, though, by pulling the unwelcome passenger’s seatbelt release, then stopping suddenly so he jerks forward, then punching him so that he flies out the back of the car. Not graceful, but effective. Who needs Q? Tipping their hat to Bond, the car does have a homing beacon very similar to 007's, and Walker (evidently something of an interior design buff) says of the villain’s house, "This place is done up in early Ian Fleming." If only! But it’s close enough.

Walker also gets a Geiger counter, something Bond uses a lot in his first few adventures. "What do you expect to find with that Geiger counter?" inquires Rowland. "Unfortunately, not girls," cracks Walker, revealing what’s always on his mind. And he manages to find plenty of them even without the help of a Geiger counter.

In fact, he soon encounters a whole army of robotic blondes clad in black leather. They kidnap him and all pile into the back of a battered El Camino (glamorous, I know), with Joe in the middle. He looks positively delighted, and promises, "I’m not going to escape from this!" "I Love You, Joe Walker" kicks in again on the soundtrack, and the women drive Joe to the villain’s underground base. Not content with ripping off only one Bond movie, the lair is a low-rent combination of two famous Ken Adam sets: Dr. No’s nuclear facility and Goldfinger’s Fort Knox. The villain, Oberon, has been stockpiling gold to... irradiate, I guess? I’m not quite sure what he gains by irradiating his own gold; Goldfinger’s plan was to irradiate the United States’ gold reserves, for the benefit of China. I guess Oberon wasn’t paying careful attention. Who cares? Neither should you, here; just go with it. Whatever the plan was, apparently it would have been good, because Oberon exclaims to the meddling Walker: "You have just destroyed my dream of becoming the most powerful man on Earth!"

So, to recap: Gold + Radiation = Power

It certainly seems like a feasible equation; I’m just not convinced Oberon had actually worked out the optimal way to combine those assets.

He was similarly short-sighted in building his army of robotized women. They require a fresh injection every 24 hours to keep them drugged into doing his bidding; without it they become instantly susceptible to Walker’s, er, charms. Luckily, Oberon also has a loyal male henchman, but he’s not really that big or anything. (In fact, his only "scary" factor seems to be that he has a beard.) Still: gold, nukes, fetishized robot women, a beard and an underground lair are more than enough to react with Joe Walker and form a highly satisfying, explosive (obviously!) finale.

Things turn out the way they usually do in this sort of situation, and the guys each end up with some girls. One of Joe’s girls, though, is the jealous type, and she does what we’ve all wanted to do the entire movie and uses a judo movie to throw him into the water. Everyone else, including Tom, laughs at him. So do we. It’s cathartic.

Kiss Kiss, Kill Kill only really contracts a plot about halfway through, but once it does it’s impossible to turn away. If you happened to catch it on TV during the second half, you’d probably think you’d just discovered a really GREAT Sixties spy title, and might even list it as one of your favorites. Unfortunately, if you'd turned it on during the first half, you probably would have turned it off.

But you would have missed out on a whole lot of fun.

Random Intelligence Dispatches

Dandy In Aspic Region 2 DVD
DVDActive reports that Sony will release the 1968 Laurence Harvey/Tom Courtenay spy movie A Dandy In Aspic on Region 2 DVD in the UK on March 5. I’ve never seen this one, but long wanted to. As a rule, I like Tom Courtenay spy flicks. I hope this one’s no exception. I also hope that a Region 1 release isn’t far behind.

Robert McGinnis Documentary
Fox’s upcoming private eye box set The Michael Shayne Mysteries: Vol. 1 includes a 7 ½ minute featurette on frequent spy artist Robert McGinnis, as well as a gallery of some of McGinnis’s paperback covers. McGinnis created some of the most iconic James Bond art, including classic poster images for Thunderball, Casino Royale (‘67) and Live and Let Die, and the You Only Live Twice LP cover. The featurette doesn’t address McGinnis’s Bond work, but instead (naturally) focuses on his famous Mike Shayne covers and some of his poster work for Fox, like How To Steal A Million. Even though the movies included in this set come from the Forties, McGinnis’s Sixties era artwork is also used for the slimpack DVD covers. The movies, starring Lloyd Nolan, are very nicely restored. One of them, Blue, White and Perfect, contains spy elements in the plot.

Mission: Impossible Sequels Direct To DVD?

Dark Horizons reports that Mission: Impossible is among the feature film franchises that Paramount is considering making direct-to-DVD sequels to. Other studios have found success with this model, producing profitable low-budget follow-ups to American Pie, Behind Enemy Lines and Walking Tall, among others. The studio certainly hasn't greenlit a DVD sequel to M:I; it's merely among the franchises they're considering, along with such diverse titles as Top Gun, Tomb Raider, The Italian Job and Mean Girls. What this would mean for the future of the Tom Cruise theatrical series is unknown. With the rift between Cruise and Paramount, however, coupled with the disappointing box office of the excellent third installment, things look dark for further theatrical adventures of Ethan Hunt already... Still, I don't think a DVD spin-off focusing on a different IMF agent would necessarily rule out subsequent cinematic outings.

Casino Royale DVD Exclusives At Best Buy & Walmart
When the Region 1 DVD of Casino Royale (‘06) streets on March 13, certain retailers will offer it bundled with various exclusives. Commanderbond.net reports that Walmart will offer an exclusive version that comes with cards and poker chips.

Best Buy usually has some sort of exclusive, too (it was an extra disc of further bonus features for Die Another Day), and it looks like Casino Royale is no exception. They will offer a Corgi Aston Martin DBS free with purchase, which is a pretty cool throw-in! (Especially given how hard the cars are to come by in the US.)

Movie Review: Breach (2007)

Review: Breach

Breach tells the true story of the FBI's investigation and capture of Robert Hanssen, the most damaging mole in the Bureau's history. I don't know that much about Hanssen, so I'm not sure how true it is or how many liberties they take, but Eric O'Neill, the actual would-be agent who was assigned to get close to him as his assistant (played here by Ryan Philippe) is credited as a technical advisor on the movie, so that would seem to lend at least some credibility.

Aalthough it pays lip service to the conventions of the spy movie (the realistic spy movie, that is), Breach is more of a character study about a man who chooses to spy than a thriller. And Hanssen proves an absolutely fascinating character to study, especially in the capable hands of Chris Cooper, who has by this point appeared in so many spy movies that he's almost a "convention of the genre" unto himself! Luckily, he's also one of America's finest actors, and he turns in a tour-de-force performance as Hanssen. It's the kind of performance that, had this movie come out two months ago instead of now, would have generated plentiful Oscar buzz. As it stands, though, it will be long-forgotten by next year's awards season, as are all movies that come out in February anytime before October!

Hanssen is a man of deep, seemingly contradictory convictions. He's deeply religious (which factors heavily in the film), yet also what Laura Linney's character calls "a sexual deviant" with an unhealthy obsession with Catherine Zeta Jones. He's a jerk and a chauvinist, yet he seems to deeply love his wife and family. And he's fiercely patriotic with strong right wing political views--yet he spied for Communist Russia!

Cooper manages to pull off these contradictions mainly because he convinces us that Hanssen, above all else, is smart. "He's smarter than all of us," Linney confesses, and we believe it because we see it in Cooper's eyes. O'Neill sees it too, and comes to respect him as a mentor before being clued in to the full extent of his nefarious activities.

I've never been a huge fan of Philippe's, but he does a good job with his part, particularly once his character realizes where he stands, and is forced to constantly outwit a naturally suspicious boss who's not only smarter than him, but more cunning, dangerous, and ultimately unbalanced. At this point the movie veers into Silence of the Lambs territory, telling the story of a young FBI agent (or hopeful agent) being drawn in by a dangerous, sociopathic mentor while trying desperately to maintain his distance. Like Clarice Starling, O'Neill reveals too much of himself to his learned adversary, and soon Hanssen is playing Hell with his personal life, causing O'Neill to question what he believes in and his wife (abley played by Wonderfalls' Caroline Dhavernas) to question their marriage.

The relationship between Hanssen and O'Neill forms the core of the movie, culminating in a tense, crucial scene in which O'Neill has to convince a drunk, armed Hanssen that he can still trust him. The approach he takes is surprising and revealing: rather than piling more lies upon lies, he tells the truth. (Or most of it.) The scene demands great performances from both actors, and Philippe actually holds his own nicely with Cooper.

Ultimately, Breach doesn't offer an explanation from Hanssen. The closest he comes is in speculating to his arresting agent (24's Dennis Haysbert--and no, that's not a spoiler; the movie begins after Hanssen has already been caught and then flashes back) on why notorious CIA traitor Aldrich Ames may have betrayed his country. His speculation is certainly telling, but far from definitive. Cooper crafts such a believable enigma that we don't expect that kind of revelation from the character, and were it to happen it would cheapen the movie and the performance. The performance is so strong that it tells us everything we need to know about the character, and Breach doesn't require any tacky, last minute exposition.

Double Or Die Gets A US Release Date

The Young Bond Dossier has another great scoop today: Charlie Higson's third Young Bond novel, Double Or Die, will receive US publication on June 25, via Random House. (Miramax Books published the first two stateside.) Hopefully they'll give it the push it needs for the franchise to catch on here to the extent it has in the UK, where the book spent several weeks atop the Childrens' Bestseller lists. Like the others, Double Or Die will initially be available in hardcover in the States. (In England they're all paperback originals.) I haven't been able to verify this publication date myself, but hopefully it's true...

Now if only someone would announce an American publication date for The Moneypenny Diaries!

Alan Arkin Gets Smart

Fresh off his Little Miss Sunshine Oscar win this weekend, Alan Arkin has signed on to play the Chief in the Get Smart movie. He'll be Smart's boss at CONTROL. It's another inspired casting choice for a movie that's already accumulated Steve Carell as Maxwell Smart, Anne Hathaway as Agent 99, The Rock as their fellow agent and the great Terrence Stamp as the evil leader of KAOS. Get Smart is set for release in Summer 2008. I've said it before and I'll say it again; I can't wait for this movie!

DVD Review: The Kommissar X Collection

DVD Review: The Kommissar X Collection

I had long heard of Kommissar X, and been entranced by the evocative posters, but I’d never seen one of the movies until now. Boy, am I glad that Retromedia put these out on DVD! They’re certainly not the peak of the genre, not by a long shot, but they’re extremely fun Eurospy movies for both the right and wrong reasons.

I’ve already mentioned the Eurospy trend toward "loathsome heroes" (a term I’ve stolen from the website Chefelf, talking about ‘80s barbarian movies, to which it equally applies). I think it’s just what happens when writers try to duplicate James Bond without fully grasping the character, and when actors without the effortless charm of Sean Connery or James Coburn occupy the parts. Kommissar X (who, rather disappointingly, is a private detective and not any sort of Kommissar at all, X or otherwise), aka Joe Walker (Tony Kendall), has to be the most loathsome Eurospy hero I’ve encountered yet. Which is not really a criticism of the films, merely an observation. It’s not a criticism because his loathsomeness doesn’t hamper the viewer’s enjoyment of the movie; in fact, it enhances it. Eurospy is a peculiar genre that’s more about the trappings than the characters, and it’s often just as much fun to watch a hero you hate as one you love. Such is the case here.

What does Joe do that makes him so annoying? Well, for starters he’s always punching people, whether they’re his friends or enemies, and always doing it with a smirk. Not a smirk that says, "oh, brother, now I’ve gotta punch you," but a smirk that says, "boy, I sure love punching people who are weaker than me." For another thing, he’s always kissing beautiful women. I know, I know, that’s what spies do! But Joe doesn’t just kiss the ones who like him; he kisses all of them, from stewardesses waiting on him to pretty girls he passes in the street, whether they want it or not. (He assumes they do, but from the looks they sometimes give him afterwards it’s clear that he’s not really that good a judge of character.) Finally, Joe’s just plain irresponsible. Not in a likable, Mel-Gibson-in-Lethal-Weapon sort of way; in a sociopathic sort of way. He seems totally oblivious to the needs or wishes of anyone but himself, and doesn’t think twice about setting a whole pier on fire to make his getaway.

Luckily his partner and (for some reason) friend Captain Tom Rowland (Brad Harris) is always around to, literally, put out his fires. "You might burn down the entire city," he has to explain to Walker, as one would to a four-year-old playing with matches. Walker gets the idea and starts to help out by unspooling an extra fire hose, but he loses interest in dousing the flames as soon as he discovers how much fun it is to spray women with the hose. After he knocks one down with the spray, he just keeps blasting her with the water, cackling gleefully. (See what I mean? Total sociopath!) Granted, she is an assassin, but she’s helpless while he’s spraying her, and that doesn’t excuse his utter delight at watching her wriggle around on the dock, soaked. (And it doesn’t stop her from hooking up with him later, either!)

As you might gather from Joe’s behavior, the Kommissar X movies are about the most chauvinist of any of all Eurospy titles, and that’s saying a lot. They make the Sixties Bond movies look like they were written by Susan Faludi. But surely that’s part of the joke, right? Right...?

Maybe it is and maybe it isn’t, but it’s easy to laugh at today. As are all of the movies’ weaknesses, but their strengths are just as much fun. They’re often shot in exotic locations, and the sets may not be Ken Adam, but they’re decent knock-offs. The women are all quite beautiful, and the villains delightfully villainous. Each movie features at least a few good fights and exciting chases (some very impressive indeed), and the music is exactly what you want from a Eurospy movie, with an infectious (if obnoxious) theme song called "I Love You, Joe Walker." And, above all, Harris and Kendall have a good rapport together and are undeniably fun to watch on screen, even if one of them is a total prat.

Retromedia’s triple-feature DVD is presented full-screen, which is a pity, because these movies are obviously cropped. I assume this is because all they had access to were 16mm prints, probably made for TV broadcast. The prints themselves are not restored at all. They’re blurry and sometimes out of focus. So Darling, So Deadly is in the worst shape. Whole chunks of the print appear to be missing, and what’s there is badly faded, particularly at the beginning of each reel, when it’s almost entirely red. There’s even a botched reel change at one point, preserved for all time on the DVD transfer! It’s a shame that Retromedia didn’t have access to better elements, but I certainly can’t fault them for failing to do a full-scale restoration. I can’t imagine it would be cost-effective for the niche market this disc appeals to. These movies are a joy to view, and I’d much rather they be released with sub-par prints than not released at all, which are probably the only options.

As it stands, I really hope every spy fan out there buys a copy and they sell enough to warrant a second collection containing the remaining four Kommissar X movies. Despite the print quality, and despite featuring a deplorable hero, these movies are tons of fun. Death Is Nimble, Death Is Quick, in particular, is an exemplary Eurospy title, boasting breathtaking scenery, impressive stunts, and exciting setpieces that manage to look much higher-budget than they are. (Although I imagine they are substantially higher budgeted than many Eurospy films.) This is an absolutely essential DVD for any spy collection.

For full reviews of each individual title, please see:

Kiss Kiss, Kill Kill

So Darling, So Deadly

Death Is Nimble, Death Is Quick

New Spy DVDs

There are a couple of notable new spy-related DVDs out today. BBC's conspiracy thriller The State Within, a six hour mini-series that just finished airing this past weekend on BBC America, stars Jason Isaacs (Lucius Malfoy to Harry Potter fans) as a British ambassador caught up in Washington intrigue. It's been compared to MI-5 and 24, and the production values are certainly there, though it's premise seems a bit preposterous. I'll have a full review up soon. For anyone who hasn't already amassed all the individual sets, or bought the previous megaset, A&E delivers a new Secret Agent collection with the lofty title Secret Agent aka Danger Man: The Complete Collection. This new box collects both the hour-long series (previously released as Secret Agent) and the original half-hour series (previously released as Danger Man) together for the forst time. On 18 slimcase discs, you get every episode ever made of this fantastic Patrick McGoohan show, including the final two color episodes. (All the rest were black and white.) Before he was The Prisoner, McGoohan starred as John Drake in this, one of the all-time classic spy programs, and source of the famous Johnny Rivers theme song, "Secret Agent Man" (which was recorded for the American credits sequence, and appears here as a bonus feature).

Bond Is Back!

...as the trailers used to say. But this time, in comic form! The latest release in Titan's ongoing series of James Bond newspaper strip reprints is in stores now. The Phoenix Project (not expected in stock at Amazon until May 1) reprints several Bond strips from the mid Seventies. Unlike the first eight volumes in the series, The Phoenix Project, like the last two (The Golden Ghost and Trouble Spot), is of particular note to 007 completists because instead of adaptations of the novels, it presents original Bond adventures by writer Jim Lawrence. Artist Yaroslav Horak again provides the illustrations. Flipping through the book, what stands out immediately is the copious female nudity. There were glimpses in the last volume, but in this one it seems like there are breasts on every page. I guess by 1974 British newspapers were a lot more liberal than American ones about what could appear in their comic strips! It seems kind of strange that the strips would be so adult-oriented just as the movies, at the height of the Moore era, were becoming increasingly more kid-friendly.

In addition to the title story, this volume reprints The Black Ruby Caper, Till Death Do Us Part and The Torch-Time Affair. It's also got an introduction by Bond girl Tania Mallet (Tilly Masterson in Goldfinger), which proves among the more interesting and better-written of the Bond girl introductions to these books (but still has little to do with the comics), and more informative individual introductions to each story. In the back of the book, Titan touts Nightbird as being the next title in the series, which would make sense chronologically. But Amazon has a listing for Death Wing instead, using the same cover image! That would mean skipping a few stories, but there is precedent for that when Titan couldn't locate original strips in good enough clarity to reproduce.

Titan's Bond volumes, along with their Modesty Blaise collections, are essential reading for spy fans.

Moneypenny Diaries Paperback Cover

The Young Bond Dossier points out that the paperback cover art for Samantha Weinberg's Secret Servant: The Moneypenny Diaries Vol. 2 has been revealed on Amazon.co.uk. Weinberg is again credited only by her pen name, Kate Westbrook. (Who is actually a character in the novel.) Like the hardcover and the paperback of the first Moneypenny Diaries book, Guardian Angel, the art is again way too girlie (more likely to put off potential male readers, who are actually the more likely audience for this James Bond continuation novel, than attract new female readers, I fear), but I do like the style. It's certainly something we haven't seen before for a James Bond cover, that I can remember. Unfortunately they still don't mention "James Bond" on the cover, which is really weird because it IS a Bond novel, even though it's told from a different perspective and 007 is only a secondary character. I think that the presence of James Bond is definitely the strongest selling point for this book, so it's almost criminal that they don't mention it on front if they want to generate sales. There is still no US publication date for either Moneypenny Diary. A third and final volume is planned for fall release in the UK. Additionally, Weinberg also penned two Moneypenny short stories (in Tatler and The Spectator) which saw publication around the release of Casino Royale in theatres. The paperback of Guardian Angel is due out July 12 in England.

UPDATE: Young Bond Dossier is now reporting that this is not the final cover artwork, so despite the Amazon listing, it's possible it could still change.

Casino Royale DVD Busstop Posters

Driving around LA this morning, I was surprised to see Daniel Craig on busstop ads again! The giant Casino Royale posters had come down months ago to make way for Pursuit of Happyness posters, which in turn made way for Ghost Rider... only to return to Bond. It's pretty rare to see a DVD advertised at busstops in this city, so I'd say this is probably the beginning of what will no doubt be a fairly major campaign on Sony's part. The poster itself again features the same shot of Daniel Craig walking, with tie undone and Walther at his side, that we saw on the theatrical poster. Only instead of the casino steps, it's Venice in the background, and there's a picture of the DVD and Blue Ray in the lower left-hand corner.

Review: The Amazing Screw-On Head

How do you characterize Lionsgate’s DVD of The Amazing Screw-On Head? Is it a historical spy thing? Well, it is about a secret agent who works for Abraham Lincoln in 1862, but then there’s also the little matter of him being a robot. So is it sci-fi/spy? Yeah, kind of, but then there’s the zombie and the werewolf. So is it historical horror/sci-fi/spy? Getting closer, but you can’t really label The Amazing Screw-On Head as anything. It’s unclassifiable. But it does have a secret agent hero, so it definitely deserves a review here.

The Amazing Screw-On Head is a twenty-two minute TV pilot that failed to get a series pick-up on SciFi Channel, yet still managed a DVD release. It’s a real oddity, and a bit of a masterpiece.

Based on Hellboy creator Mike Mignola’s brilliant, absurdist one-shot comic book, writer Bryan Fuller (Wonderfalls) delivers a surreal cartoon that captures the spirit of its source material, expands on it, and sets it up as the basis for a series. The plot adheres fairly close to the comic, and there’s barely enough of one to fill the scant twenty-two minute runtime. But there are enough cool characters, gadgets and situations that you definitely want to spend more time with them.

Screw-On Head, voiced by Paul Giamatti, is a robotic secret agent whose head can be screwed onto any number of strange, Victorian mechanical bodies. When the evil Emperor Zombie (David Hyde Pierce) steals a tome from the Museum of Dangerous Books and Paper–and kidnaps the only man capable of translating it–President Lincoln sends Screw-On Head to investigate. The strange trail takes him to Marrakesh (by rocket) to the Mississippi, and brings him into contact with an old lover (Molly Shannon), whom Emperor Zombie has turned into a vampire. Emperor Zombie’s dastardly plot involves freeing a demonic demi-god from a turnip, and then using it to take over the world. Needless to say, Screw-On head foils the plot (with the aid of his trusty valet, Mr. Groin, voiced by Patton Oswalt), but that’s almost inconsequential to the zaniness transpiring onscreen.

Where Fuller has fleshed out the story from the comic, it’s barely noticeable. Everything still feels very Mike Mignola, and it was a good idea to flesh out some characters Mignola only mentioned ("two horrible old ladies and a monkey with a gun") and turn them into additional villains. Where he stumbles slightly is in adding backstory to Screw-On Head and Emperor Zombie, and creating a love triangle between them and the vampire woman. From a character standpoint it works, but in providing any sort of explanation, it diminishes some of the comic’s utter absurdity slightly. Still, it makes for exciting and rewarding viewing.

The animation itself is based directly on Mignola’s artwork, and does a great job of translating his unique, shadowy style. It’s not perfect, but it’s enough to make me really want to see a Hellboy cartoon done like this, even though Tad Stones & Co. recently pulled off an amazing Hellboy animated movie in their own style. (Mignola contractually forbade them to use his look.)

For such a short running time, The Amazing Screw-On Head provides a surprising amount of bonus content. There’s a short storyboard/animatic/finished product comparison, and a behind the scenes documentary that’s as long as the show itself. The featurette covers all aspects of creating the show, and does it really well, even if it misrepresents a few participants’ viewpoints. There’s also an informative commentary track by Brian Fuller and director Chris Prynoski.

Most interesting of all, there’s a sixteen page booklet of production art by Mignola and Concept Artist Guy Davis. There are some great designs here, wonderful additions to Screw-On Head’s world that really make me with the series had continued. In addition to several intriguing alternate bodies for the title character (like "unicycle body" and "cannon body" and "suit of many hands"), there is an enigmatic villain with a potted flower for a face. Only Mignola can pull that off and have it be as spooky as it is funny. He says in his notes that this character would have been a Moriarty-like smooth-talking criminal genius. Ah, what might have been! Perhaps if the DVD sells well enough, there's still a chance of the series being picked up by Cartoon Network or Comedy Central or something...

At the bargain price of $9.99, The Amazing Screw-On Head is a great value. The additional materials ensure that you really get your money’s worth despite the brevity of the main attraction. Fans of the more surreal side of spying, like The Avengers or, particularly, Wild Wild West (or Lucifer Box!) would be well-served to check this out.

More M:I On DVD!

TVShowsOnDVD reports that Paramount will release Mission: Impossible Season 2 on DVD on June 5! The set includes all 25 episodes of the 1967-68 season, which introduced Peter Graves as Jim Phelps. (The team leader in the first season was Dan Briggs, played by Steven Hill.)

The Week In Spies

The new spy movie Breach, based on the Robert Hanssen spy case, opens tonight in the United States to generally positive reviews. Stalwart genre staple (and fine actor) Chris Cooper plays Hanssen. John Hurt previously played the part in Master Spy, a 2002 TV movie scripted by Norman Mailer.

Retromedia released their eagerly-awaited (by me, at least) Eurospy triple-feature The Kommissar X Collection this week, too, touting it as "James Bond, German Style!" No, I still have no explanation for the porn-style cover art, and can't really see how it will help sales. Especially when the movies all had some pretty cool original poster artwork. But the obscure movies are on DVD at last, and that's cause for celebration. It's one double-sided disc, with Kiss Kiss, Kill Kill (1966) on Side A and Death Is Nimble, Death Is Quick (1966) and So Darling, So Deadly (also '66) on Side B. The movies are in full-frame, presumably because they're taken from 16mm TV prints. The prints don't look great, but they're certainly watchable and definitely better than nothing! I hope to have a full review up next week.

Nick Fury in Captain America

I originally wrote this post sometime back before Christmas, but for some reason never got around to putting it up. Due to Marvel’s wacky scheduling and delays resulting from the "Civil War" storyline, though, I don’t think there’s been a new issue of Captain America since then, so it’s still fairly relevant and I’ll post it now:

Despite being "underground" throughout the events of Marvel’s big, stupid "Civil War" event, Nick Fury still manages to play a key role in Ed Brubaker’s Captain America series. Even without being physically present, the eye-patched super-spy has dominated the last several issues (#22-24) and appeared as a hologram and as a robot of himself, which he controls from afar. Yes, the Marvel Universe is still a sillier place than even 007's realm, but Brubaker plays it all straight. His run on Captain America has been stellar, and his approach has been to turn the comic into a spy series. With all the dangerous politicking going on behind the scenes at S.H.I.E.L.D., Bru’s actually doing a better job with the "Queen & Country with superheroes" concept than Q&C creator (and former Brubaker co-writer on Gotham Central) Greg Rucka is with his CheckMate at DC. Of course, thanks to introducing Nick Fury and SHIELD back in the Sixties to cash in on the Bond fad, Marvel’s got a richer spy lore to play with than DC.

Brubaker’s even transformed sometime Captain America girlfriend and SHIELD agent Sharon Carter (aka Agent 13) from a supporting player to a plucky, Tara Chace-ish heroine in her own right. If you like spy comics but don’t normally venture into superhero territory, I’d really recommend picking up Brubaker’s Cap run in trade paperbacks. Despite the costume, it’s much more of a Tom Clancy style espionage series than a crime-fighting tights and capes series.

In other news for Nick Fury fans, shortly after I complained about the relative lack of Nick Fury toys (compared to other Marvel heroes), my friend gave me a tiny Fury figure that comes as part of some sort of Marvel dice game. I have no idea how the game works, but the little figure’s pretty cool, like a miniature version of the Marvel Legends figure from a few years ago, complete with jetpack.

Kim Possible Returns

Disney Channel began broadcasting the fourth season of their animated teen spy series Kim Possible this past weekend. Now, I know what you’re thinking: Alex Rider, Young Bond... enough with the kiddie spies already! But the truth is, like those others, Kim Possible is by no means limited to kids. In fact, while they’ll enjoy the adventures and the typical cartoon comedy, a lot of the jokes will go over their heads.

The brainchild of creators Bob Schooley and Mark McCorkle, Kim Possible is one of the sharpest, smartest James Bond parodies ever. It often deals with the myriad problems of being a Bond-type villain, from the overhead costs of maintaining elaborate underground or underwater bases, to the perfect real estate for said lairs, to the difficulty in finding good help. (Turns out that standard-issue henchmen are provided by an entrepreneur named Jack Hench who runs a large staffing agency.) And it does so even better than the Austin Powers movies ever did, calling out the cliches and turning them over on themselves. At the same time, the love and reverence for the material they’re spoofing is also evident everywhere, from the clearly Ken Adam-influenced designs to the music to the Bond-inspired title sequence of the Kim Possible movie, So the Drama.

Disney Channel cartoons usually run 65 episodes and a few direct-to-DVD movies before being cancelled, victim’s of Disney’s mandatory euthanasia. But so popular was Kim Possible that it was brought back from the land of cancellation, the channel’s first cartoon since DuckTales (I think) to exceed that self-imposed limit. And since things had been pretty thoroughly wrapped up in the movie (which served as the finale to the original run), the new season breaks another unwritten cartoon rule and ages the characters (slightly). They’re still in high school, but Kim and her sidekick Ron Stoppable are now seniors. And their main adversary, Dr. Drakken (voiced brilliantly by Futurama’s Bender, John Di Maggio), is surprisingly still in jail. Luckily, the show has a reliable repertoire of equally amusing villains, and some of the second stringers stepped to the fore-front in the season’s first four episodes, which were broadcast Saturday night. Even after two years off the air, Kim Possible has lost none of its charm or humor, and is well worth checking out for any spy fan with a sense of humor–especially one who also appreciates good animation.

New episodes air Saturday nights at 8 on the Disney Channel; reruns air weekday afternoons. There are unfortunately no season sets, but there are several good "best of" DVDs available (I recommend starting with The Villain Files), and two DVD movies. You can also watch episodes online on Disney's site, or download some from iTunes. And to read a good interview with Schooley and McCorkle, in which they discuss what to expect in Season 4, head over to Newsarama.

For more information on Kim Possible, you can brave Disney's noisy homepage for the show, but consider yourself warned.

Tiffany Memorandum DVD Update

Dorado Films have updated their website with a new blog entry on the progress of their upcoming Eurospy DVDs. They've checked their prints for the Ken Clark films Tiffany Memorandum and Fuller Report, and found a lot of scenes to be missing. They're hoping to track down some complete prints from labs around the world, saving them the trouble of painstakingly re-inserting the missing elements (all of which they do, happily, possess). If they can't locate an uncut original negative, they'll be forced to assemble one themselves and presumably that will take more time. There is no timeframe either way indicated in their update.

I certainly hope that they're able to find a full print and proceed quickly, but I'm willing to wait if they need to take time with their own restoration. All of the Dorado Eurospy titles so far have been well worth the wait, especially the excellent Special Mission Lady Chaplin, which they released last year after a number of unforseeable delays.

They seem to be in the midst of a complete overhaul of their website, and are updating more often, so it's worth stopping by if you haven't visited in a while. For one thing, they now have a must-see "trailers" section with previews for movies they haven't yet released, including the wild spy/superhero hybrid The Fantastic Argoman. You've gotta check that one out!

Review: Double Or Die

007 continuation authors have historically always had trouble with Book Number Three, if they made it that far. John Gardner produced the convoluted Icebreaker. Wedged between two very strong entries, Raymond Benson faltered with High Time To Kill. So how does Charlie Higson fare with his third Young Bond novel?

Double or Die* is structured like Fleming’s Moonraker, in three parts, here representing three consecutive days (although the first part contains considerable flashbacks, making the story actually play out over weeks rather than days). The action is limited to England, shifting from Eton to Cambridge to London.

James (as he is referred to in this series, rather than "Bond" as Fleming and his successors always identify the adult 007) and his roommate Pritpal receive a coded letter from a kidnaped Eton teacher, mathematician Alexis Fairburn. They have just a few days in which to decipher seven clues and figure out Fairburn’s whereabouts before he is spirited out of the country–or worse. Echoing The Da Vinci Code, the clues take James and his allies from landmark to landmark, encountering various eccentrics and villains along the way. As in Dan Brown’s book, this device keeps things moving along at an exhilarating pace and gives the reader lots of puzzles to work out, which he or she inevitably will long before the characters do (excepting the few that would be impossible because they don’t really work, given too much thought). Luckily, Higson is handier with prose than Brown, and he tells a good story as well as providing brain teasers. Double or Die may cash in on a successful formula, but it never feels like a rip-off.

Higson’s real gift, as in his two previous Young Bond novels, lies in his solid understanding of the character. Once again, despite the fact that this is ostensibly a children’s book, that it’s set before WWII, and that the hero is just fourteen years old, it feels like a Bond book. And James feels like Bond. While the basic conceit of the series (that Bond had incredible adventures as a child, long before he joined Her Majesty’s Secret Service) remains a bit difficult to swallow, I never doubted that I was reading about the same character that Ian Fleming wrote, albeit at a different age. That’s a feat that John Gardner never managed to completely pull off writing about the adult Bond! (Although, to his credit, he did write some great adventures for his own version of 007.)

Unlike the Bond of film, Higson’s Bond is even prone to the same fits of melancholy that Fleming’s frequently endures (often while flying, when his fate is totally out of his hands), and we witness the beginnings of Bond’s grim obsession with mortality. There is a sequence where Young Bond comes upon a fresh corpse and ponders the sudden finality of death, the absence of a soul that differentiates a living, breathing man from a mere husk, that nicely prefigures his similar meditation after killing the Mexican hitman in the first chapter of Goldfinger. Death is a subject that the adult James Bond probably dwells on too much for a man whose profession is killing people, but then that’s probably what keeps him human. Higson continues to develop this fixation throughout Double or Die, particularly during a visit to the Royal College of Surgeons, where James encounters an array of preserved body parts. James isn’t just a generic boy adventure hero, or Alex Rider clone; this really is the person who grows up to face Blofeld and Goldfinger, and Higson shows his personality forming, which is something no previous continuation authors have had the opportunity to do.

The most famous and oft-quoted criticism of Fleming, which accused him of peddling "sex, snobbery and sadism," also summed up the original books’ primary appeal, for better or worse. While you won’t find the sex (the obligatory "Bond girl" in this one isn’t introduced until the book’s final third, and though Higson delights in manipulating her and James into slightly risque situations, the young Bond remains frustratingly disinterested), you will get a touch of Fleming’s snobbery and a whole heap of sadism. Though current mores prevent even a benign kiss for the teenage Bond (the publishers claim that young male readers wouldn’t be interested, though I recall being plenty interested in girls in middle school!), there seems to be no limit to the amount of violence a young reader brought up on first-person shooter video games can be exposed to. (Not that I’m objecting, mind you, merely surprised.)

Like SilverFin and Blood Fever, Double Or Die is full of gruesome deaths, and once more James endures ghastly torture and bodily damage. It seems like Higson ups the ante in that department with each book, and here we have a henchman who comes out of each encounter with James missing another body part. Although it makes a nice running gag, the humor in these situations is so dark that he actually gives Fleming a run for his money in sadism. And all this in a young adult novel! (Not that there isn’t precedent. After all, You Only Live Twice screenwriter Roald Dahl created situations aplenty in his children’s books far more sadistic than anything Fleming ever concocted.)

Despite the violence, I still think Higson’s young spy series offers more benefits for young adult readers than Anthony Horowitz’s. For one thing, you learn a lot reading his Young Bond novels. Like Ian Fleming, Higson has a talent for lecturing the reader while entertaining at the same time. While Fleming’s best lectures tended to be about cars, cards, food and drink, Higson covers a wide variety of topics in Double or Die. In the course of James’s whirlwind journey, you’ll pick up nifty nuggets of information on neuroscience, crossword puzzles, early computers, Alan Turing, the impoverished living conditions of pre-war London’s East Side and, yes, cards and drinks. As often happens in Fleming’s novels, James first encounters a possible villain over a game of cards. In this case, it’s Hearts. Fleming had a special talent for writing gambling sequences that were exciting even to non-card-players, but I suspect it’s impossible to duplicate. Like Fleming, Higson does a good job of explaining the rules of the game, but has trouble sustaining its momentum over a chapter and a half. And he’s not entirely successful at lecturing about drink either, because his is a Lecture with a capital L.

Throughout the series the author has found ways to make subtle references to James Bond’s famous bad habits without encouraging them. In one, James decided that he would never smoke. That worked because it set a good example for younger readers, but rewarded older ones with a level of irony, as we all know Bond eventually goes on to consume an appalling three packs a day. This time he tries the same trick with alcohol, and it doesn’t really work. The villains torture James with gin, pouring it down his throat until he’s drunk in an attempt to kill him with alcohol poisoning. This leaves him with a massive, cautionary hangover for the final third of the book, which works fine from the perspective of modern kid readers, but not so well for adults. I suppose Higson is trying to show the roots of an amazing tolerance, but having experienced my share of hangovers bad enough to put me off certain drinks for good, I can’t really see anyone ever wanting to drink gin (or any alcohol) again after what James goes through. (And, yes, Bond does sometimes drink gin martinis in Fleming’s novels, despite being famous for preferring vodka. It's even an ingredient in the famous "Vesper!")

Other than that quibble, though, I thoroughly believe that Higson’s character could grow up to be Fleming’s. Higson’s Bond already dreads boredom–accidie, Fleming called it, a spiritual term literally meaning "absence of caring"–more than anything, partially explaining his compulsion to seek adventure wherever he can find it, even at a young age. Readers bear no risk of succumbing to accidie, though; there are no boring moments in Double or Die. If you’re a fan of Fleming’s Bond or the continuation novels, but you’ve been holding off on this latest series because it sounds like a bad idea, do yourself a favor and give it a try. The writer and the publishers are very reverential to the original source material, and these books are some of James Bond’s best post-Fleming adventures in any medium. Happily, Higson even avoids the Third Book Curse. Double or Die doesn’t quite achieve the heights of his last book, Blood Fever, but it certainly comes close, and makes a worthy addition to the Bond canon.

There is still no publication date for Double or Die in the United States, but it can currently be ordered from Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.ca.


*Double Or Die, a title voted by readers, sounds vaguely Bondian but doesn’t end up fitting the book as well as the other choices (The Deadlock Cipher, N.E.M.E.S.I.S.) would have. I admit, I voted for it, but I think it’s proof that people who haven’t read the story shouldn’t choose book titles! The most appropriate title of all would have been the one Higson was bandying about as a working title, "Shoot the Moon." Oh well. C’est la guerre.

Good Shepherd DVD

Universal will release The Good Shepherd on April 3, not in March as previously rumored. The only confirmed extra so far is sixteen minutes of deleted scenes. Writer Eric Roth had previously said that a much longer cut of the film would be available on DVD with up to an hour more footage. Obviously, that isn't the case with this edition, so presumably Universal is planning a second DVD down the road. The film's original trailer showed a lot more violence than was actually shown in the movie, and that stuff may make up the sixteen minutes on this release. DVDActive has the artwork.

Get Smart Delayed

Bad news! The Get Smart movie, starring Steve Carrell, has been delayed until 2008! June 20, 2008, to be precise. The date actually indicates a strong belief in the movie (or its rapidly rising star) on the part of Warner Brothers, positioning in the heat of the summer blockbuster season. (I believe it was formerly scheduled for either late summer or fall of this year.) That means it will compete against Batman: The Dark Knight, Iron Man and others in next summer's crowded line-up, and join 007 as a spy to look forward to in '08. (But it was one of the ones I was most looking forward to in '07!) It also means that fans who haven't seen the original TV show will have more time to catch up, since it becomes widely available on DVD in fall of this year. (It's currently just a TimeLife exclusive.) Get Smart (the movie) also stars Anne Hathaway, The Rock and Terrence Stamp.

TV's Mrs. Smith Cast

Jordanna Brewster, who to me will always be the hottie from the otherwise forgettable The Faculty, has been cast in the Angelina Jolie role of Jane Smith in the TV version of Mr. & Mrs. Smith, according to the Hollywood Reporter.

The TV pilot is written by Simon Kinberg and directed by Doug Liman, the same team behind the 2005 film version. Says the Reporter: "It revolves around John and Jane Smith, a married couple who are spies.Brewster will play Jane, who is as cool, tough and smart as she is gorgeous and can disarm a horde of thugs without breaking a sweat. Kinberg penned the script and is executive producing with Liman and Dave Bartis." The TV series reportedly picks up six months after the events of the movie.

It's certainly debatable whether or not Mr. & Mrs. Smith is technically a spy movie, since the characters were assassins, not agents, and worked for no obvious government agencies. The Reporter article, however, clearly says "spies." So are they spies now, working for governments? And if so, the same one or rivals? Whatever the case, the movie was great--a whole lot of over-the-top fun--and clearly had enough tropes of the genre to qualify as "spy" for me.

Jordana Brewster is beautiful, sexy and talented, and on top of all that, she kind of looks like Jolie. I think this is an inspired bit of casting, and combined with the fact that the primary creative forces behind the movie are also behind the show, I'm definitely giving it the benefit of the doubt for now. I just hope that they find a good surrogate for Brad Pitt, and, most importantly, maintain the gonzo, cartoonish OTT style and attitude of the film.

Ms. Brewster's other roles include The Fast And the Furious (the first one, with Vin), Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning, D.E.B.S. and the guilty pleasure TV mini-series The Sixties (which I'm absolutely shocked, shocked(!) to see that Amazon sellers are now getting upwards of a hundred bucks for. And here I was too ashamed to admit I owned it!)