The Vengeance of Dr Mabuse (1972)

Jess Franco’s The Vengeance of Dr Mabuse, released in 1972, was the last Dr Mabuse film. Purists might argue that it’s not a proper Dr Mabuse film but considering the vast differences between the three Fritz Lang Mabuse movies (made over a period of almost 40 years) and the 1960s CCC Mabuse films there really isn’t any such thing as a proper Mabuse film. It was never a rigidly structured franchise. Franco’s movie has a Mabuse vibe and that’s good enough for me.

This movie exists in two different versions. The Kino Cult Blu-Ray offers us the longer German cut, released with the title Dr. M schlägt zu. The much shorter Spanish cut included most of the same footage but totally rearranged.

The movie was shot in Germany and Spain but is set in the United States, somewhere close to the Mexican border.

Even more than most Franco films this is a movie that it going to bring out all the smarmy sneering snarkiness in reviewers with mainstream tastes. The Vengeance of Dr Mabuse is so far removed from conventional Hollywood filmmaking as to inhabit an entirely different cinematic galaxy.

As usual Franco had no money, and as usual he didn’t care. He wanted to create a particular feel in this film and he does just that and does it brilliantly. Everything is too cramped. Scenes look like they were shot inside closets. The framing is too tight. The camera is too close. He uses fisheye lenses when he shouldn’t. Everything is weirdly off-balance. Then there’s the red tint to everything.

Everything is wrong, and it’s all absolutely deliberate. The result is a feeling of paranoia and madness spinning out of control. Franco isn’t interested in being polished - he wants that swirling maelstrom of craziness feel. And it works.

And this is a fine example of one of Franco’s greatest assets as a director - the ability to find bizarre locations that work perfectly and that allow striking disturbing visuals without spending any money at all.

Jack Taylor is odd casting as Mabuse but he’s terrific - he’s a total madman who has no idea just how insane and doomed to failure his madcap scheme is. He’s never specifically referred to as Mabuse, but the German title Dr. M schlägt zu makes it fairly obvious that he is Dr Mabuse. And apparently in the Spanish version he is definitely stated to be Dr Mabuse.

What his scheme is doesn’t matter. It’s a total McGuffin.

Having Mabuse in America, and having him come up against a laidback cowboy sheriff (played in a nicely subtle tongue-in-cheek way by Fred Willliams) adds to the nuttiness.

And there’s the monster, Andros, one of several references to Franco’s early Dr Orloff movies. And yes, there’s a Professor Orloff in this one.

There’s a sinister sexy sadistic kinky female. There’s a stripper. There’s the cowboy sheriff’s girlfriend. There are kidnappings, and murders, and break-ins at secure facilities. The plot makes no real sense, and that’s a good thing. What matters is that things are crazy and they get crazier and everybody is paranoid and they get more paranoid. Dr M and his crew have completely control of events.

And of course there’s a kinky nightclub dancing scene.

It’s quite fitting that the final Dr Mabuse movies should have been made by Jess Franco, given that Fritz Lang was an admirer of Franco’s work.

The Vengeance of Dr Mabuse is not quite like any other Jess Franco movie except that it’s weird and offbeat. Which of course means it’s very Jess Franco indeed. He could make movies that were weird and offbeat in lots of different ways. In this case there’s an odd mistiness to everything and the brutalist architecture is perfect for a Dr Mabuse movie.

I enjoyed this one. Highly recommended.

The Kino Cult Blu-Ray looks nice and there’s an audio commentary by Nathaniel Thompson and Troy Howarth.

OSS 117 Double Agent (1968)

Pas de roses pour OSS 117 (OSS 117 Double Agent, OSS 117 Murder for Sale) was the sixth of the eight French eurospy movies made between 1956 and 1971 based on the popular novels of Jean Bruce.

For this movie John Gavin took over the role of Agent OSS 117. CIA Agent OSS 117 is Hubert Bonisseur de La Bath, of French descent but American-born.

A shadowy organisation has been masterminding political assassinations. OSS 117 has to infiltrate the organisation by posing as a notorious hitman named Chandler. He does so successfully. The given him another new identity, James Mulligan. To avoid confusion I’ll just refer to him as OSS 117 throughout.

The leader of the assassination organisation, the Major (Curd Jürgens), gives him a tough assignment to prove his mettle and his loyalty. He has to kill a United Nations official Heinrich Van Dyck who is brokering a peace deal between two warring factions in the Middle East. The assassination will wreck the peace deal and this will benefit the powerful interests who are behind the Major.

It starts slowly and at first it’s all a bit predictable. Secret agents posing as assassins is a familiar enough spy/crime trope.

It gets more interesting when OSS 117 meets the girl. Of course there’s a girl and of course she’s beautiful. Her name is Aïcha Melik (Margaret Lee). She’s the daughter of a rich banker. It doesn’t take much to get OSS 117 interested in pretty girls and he gets even more interested when for some inexplicable reason the bad guys instruct him to keep away from her.

Of course you never know if beautiful girls will turn out to be delightful companions or evil lady super-spies. That’s what makes beautiful girls so enticing.

The vaccine he is given is one of the nicest touches in the movie. It’s a time-lapse killer vaccine. If he isn’t given the antidote regularly he’ll drop dead. It’s a good way to keep new employees in line. It allows for the introduction of another villain, a sinister doctor.

A couple of goons have been tailing the girl. They could be working for the Major or for some other faction or could even be good guys. It doesn’t matter. It gives OSS 117 the chance to do the protective hero thing. Chicks always go for that. Pretty soon Aïcha thinks OSS 117 is a total dreamboat.

Thee are double-crosses going on and there’s the Major’s vicious henchman Karas to worry about. Karas took an immediate and intense dislike to OSS 117.

There’s nothing terribly wrong with the plot. It just doesn’t have quite enough twists and quite enough interest. It’s a bit too routine.

The fight scenes are done well but it needed at least one reasonably cool action set-piece and sadly it never eventuates. It’s like an aircraft that taxies along the runway but never quite manages to get airborne.

This movie has the cosmopolitan feel of so many 1960s/70s European genre movies. It’s a French movie with an American leading man, an English leading lady, a German actor as the villain and several Italian supporting players. John Gavin is quite OK. Margaret Lee is adorable and charming and is really the best thing in the movie. Curd Jürgens was a great actor and should have made a terrific super-villain but the Major never becomes the colourful larger-than-life presence that was needed. Look out for Rosalba Neri and Luciana Paluzzi in small roles.

Eurospy movies could not match the budgets or the spectacles of the Bond movies. The best of them, such as Special Mission Lady Chaplin (1966) and Kiss Kiss, Kill Kill (1966), make up for this by adding inspired craziness, surreal touches and lots of style. OSS 117 Double Agent by comparison is too straightforward which means that you notice the limited budget.

It’s all pretty tame. No nudity. Very restrained violence.

OSS 117 Double Agent is perfectly decent entertainment but for me it’s one of the weaker entries in the series. It’s still worth a watch if you buy the five-movie Kino Lorber boxed set (on both Blu-Ray and DVD) and if you’re a eurospy fan you simply must buy it. The transfers are excellent. It’s a real treat to see such movies decently presented in their correct aspect ratios and looking so good.

I’ve also reviewed the really excellent OSS 117: Mission for a Killer (1965) and OSS 117: Mission to Tokyo (1966).

Black Tight Killers (1966)

Yasuharu Hasebe’s Black Tight Killers was released in 1966 and it’s one of those movies that is perfectly in tune with the zeitgeist. The Swinging 60s were underway. London wasn’t the only place that was swinging. Tokyo was definitely swinging as well. Black Tight Killers is a wild crazy Pop Art-infused thriller that includes everything you could possibly desire in a 60s movie.

Daisuke Hondo (Akira Kobayashi) is a globe-trotting photojournalist who always manages to be in the thick of the action and the danger. On his return flight to Tokyo he meets a very pretty stewardess, Yoriko Sawanouchi (Chieko Matsubara). They’re hitting it off really well until Yoriko is kidnapped. There’s a gang led by a hoodlum named Lopez after her but the beautiful girl ninjas are after her as well. Of course you can never be sure if girl ninjas will turn out to be evil girl ninjas or good girl ninjas.

It all seems to have something to do with Yoriko’s father and the disappearance of a huge stash of gold during the war.

From this point on there’s non-stop mayhem. Fortunately Hondo can handle himself pretty well and he’s spent time at the Momoko Ninja Research Station so he knows a few ninja tricks himself. Although the ninja chewing gum bullet trick does come as a surprise to him.

Yoriko keeps falling into the hands of assorted bad guys. Hondo is still trying to figure out which side the girl ninjas are on. They do seem inclined to offer him at least a temporary alliance.

Yasuharu Hasebe has been an assistant to Seijun Suzuki and that’s significant. This was the very year in which Suzuki made his crazed masterpiece Tokyo Drifter. It’s clear that Suzuki and Hasebe were working along very similar lines, with plot coherence taking a back seat to energy, very cool visuals, Pop Art style, wild use of colour and major flirtations with surrealism. Black Tight Killers, like Tokyo Drifter, takes place in its own universe. Realism pretty much goes out the window. And both films display an obsessive interest in the use of colour to undermine realism. There’s an obvious comic-book influence. And there are hints of the psychedelic freak-out elements which were becoming increasing a feature of late 60s movie.

There’s also go-go dancing.

I love the fact that some of the supposedly exterior shots were deliberately done in the studio and that in the frequent driving scenes the rear projection is obviously intended to look as artificial as possible.

The sets are cool but they’re made to look a lot cooler with very nifty lighting effects.

There are some odd tonal shifts. Mostly the emphasis is on super-charged hyper-kinetic action fun but then there are periodic dark tragic gut-punch moments.

There are also some cynical moments.

Akira Kobayashi is a serviceable action hero. Chieko Matsubara is cute and likeable.

The action scenes have plenty of energy.

The movie is as sexy as you could get away with in 1966, with some very brief glimpses of nudity.

Black Tight Killers was clearly much in tune with international trends in pop cinema. The Bond movies obviously, but it’s closer in feel to eurospy movies like the wonderful French Fantomas (1964) and the amazing Italian heist movie Seven Golden Men (1965), the thoroughly enjoyable Lightning Bolt (1966) and one of the best of all the eurospy films, Special Mission Lady Chaplin (1966). And the German Kommissar X series kicked off in 1966 as well, with Kiss Kiss, Kill Kill.

And let’s face it - you can’t make a bad movie with beautiful girl ninjas.

Black Tight Killers has so much energy, so much fun and so much style. This is pure pop cinema. Highly recommended.

The Radiance Blu-Ray looks lovely. There are some decent extras.

Yasuharu Hasebe went on to direct several of the wonderful Stray Cat Rock movies - Stray Cat Rock: Delinquent Girl Boss (1970), Stray Cat Rock: Sex Hunter (1970) and Stray Cat Rock: Machine Animal (1970). These three movies are all quite different in tone but they’re all very enjoyable.

Black Cat (1991)

Black Cat is a 1991 Hong Kong action movie although it was actually a Hong Kong-Canada co-production. It was shot in Canada, Hong Kong and Japan. Stephen Shin directed.

This is very very obviously a rip-off of Luc Besson’s La Femme Nikita (1990). The premise is identical. Besson’s is the better movie but Black Cat is not without its virtues.

In a roadside diner somewhere in the U.S. a Chinese girl named Catherine (Jade Leung) has a run-in with a trucker. Catherine explodes into extreme violence and mayhem ensues. The cops arrive but taking Catherine into custody involves more mayhem and leaves a cop dead.

A very big very butch female guard at the local lock-up decides to give Catherine a beating. Catherine beats the daylights out of her. Catherine makes a daring escape which involves the expenditure of hundreds of rounds of small-arms ammunition before she is finally gunned down.

But Catherine isn’t dead. She’s been rescued. By the C.I.A.. They have a use for her. She’s an ultra-violent uncontrollable vicious sociopath but she’s a formidable killing machine. All they have to do is put a chip in her head so they can control her and they’ll have a super-assassin.

C.I.A. agent Brian (Simon Yam) will train her and be her controller. Her name is now Erica. Her code-name is Black Cat.

So yes, so far it’s a direct copy of La Femme Nikita.

Erica has been saved from what would have been about 80 years in prison but she is now a puppet. She’s an efficient assassin but in the past she has aways killed in the heat of the moment. In the heat of battle so to speak. Killing in cold blood isn’t quite so easy. But she learns how to do it.

The C.I.A. are very much the bad guys. As in real life most of their activities are in fact criminal. They’re like an organised crime syndicate but with fewer ethical scruples.

Then Erica falls in love. She had almost forgotten that she was a woman. But having a relationship is awkward when you’re a professional killer, especially for an outfit as sinister as the C.I.A.

Her early missions go smoothly. Then something goes wrong. Maybe it was bad luck. Maybe there was a leak. Maybe she was set up. Maybe it’s all part of a hopelessly complicated C.I.A. operation. In this world of paranoia you can never tell if you’re betrayed or not.

And while Erica gets lied to she does her share of lying as well.

There are some rough edges. The early scenes are supposed to be in America and everyone speaks English but the English dialogue was clearly written by someone who was not a native English speaker. It all just sounds bizarrely wrong.

The uneasy relationship between Erica and Brian lacks some of the subtlety and complexity of the equivalent relationship in La Femme Nikita.

The action scenes are superb. They’re wildly unrealistic. On her first mission Erica is up against about 140 bodyguards armed with machineguns. Naturally they don’t have a chance against one girl with a handgun. When she is pursued by the cops early on the cops are just wildly spraying gunfire in her general direction with no concern at all that dozens of innocent bystanders could get hit. But this is Hong Kong action cinema so you just accept it.

What matters is that the action scenes have hyper-kinetic energy and a real sense of urgency. Overall the visuals are impressive, creating the right mood of twistedness and paranoia.

Jade Leung does a fine job. Erica is a strange girl and she gets that across.

Simon Yam is very good also. From the start he’s a bit sinister but we’re not quite sure just how sinister he might turn out to be.

Compared to La Femme Nikita this movie is much more cyberpunk. It’s not the high-tech stuff (we never find out what the chip in her head actually does) but it’s more of a cyberpunk feel.

Black Cat isn’t as good as La Femme Nikita but it’s exciting and action-packed and it’s highly recommended.

The 88 Films Blu-Ray looks great and includes a bunch of extras.

Here's the review I did of La Femme Nikita a while back.

Red Heat (1985)

Red Heat is a 1985 women-in-prison movie starring Linda Blair. I have to be upfront about this - I’m a major Linda Blair fan. If it’s a sleazy, violent, scuzzy 80s exploitation flick and she’s in it I will watch it.

Red Heat is also a very dark spy thriller. The CIA is undertaking a major espionage operation in Germany involving a female East German scientist who has turned traitor and is selling secrets to the West. The CIA, being the CIA, make an unholy mess of the operation which ends in complete failure and with both the lady scientist and an innocent bystander sentenced to long terms of imprisonment in a horrific East German prison.

The innocent bystander is American college student Christine Carlson (Linda Blair). She has zero interest in politics and was not involved in the operation at all. She was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Christine’s boyfriend is an American soldier, Mike (William Ostrander). In his innocence he assumes. That the US Government will try to rescue his girlfriend. He soon finds out the truth. The CIA doesn’t give a damn about Christine. They’re too busy covering their own asses and trying to cover up their failure.

As a spy movie this belongs the dark gritty cynical school of spy movies. The East Germans are the bad guys, but the CIA are the bad guys as well. There are no good guys in the worlds of espionage and international politics.

This is a women-in-prison movie so of course there are lesbians. At this point I should perhaps say that if you’re the type of person who expects 80s movies to conform to 2020s political ideologies or if you’re a sensitive soul you are going to hate this movie and you’re going to be upset by it. In which case you should watch some other movie.

Firstly there’s the sadistic lesbian chief warder. There’s also Sofia (Sylvia Kristel). Sofia is serving a life sentence and she’s the queen bee. She shares the lesbian chief warder’s bed and she and her lesbian gang exercise a reign of terror over the other prisoners.

That lady spy mentioned earlier is in the same prison. The East Germans want Christine to befriend her to get her secrets out of her.

Sofia sees Christine as a threat. Christine is a sweet innocent girl but she does have an underlying strength of character that Sofia senses, and that makes Sofia determined to destroy her. Somehow Christine will have to survive, and with only the vaguest hope of eventually, maybe, getting out alive.

Christine’s boyfriend wants to find her but he has no idea where she is and the CIA absolutely refuse to help. It all seems hopeless but he really loves Christine and he’s not going to give up.

This movie starts as a spy thriller. Then for most of its running time it’s a very dark women-in-prison movie. And then at the end it becomes an action thriller. The action scenes come as a relief after the relentless grimness.

There is not a hint of camp to this movie. The spy thriller element is cynical, the prison scenes are harrowing and the climactic action scenes are bloody. This is a tough movie.

This is the sort of thing Linda Blair did so well - playing a nice girl who is pushed too far and learns to become a tough chick avenging angel. Blair had a knack for doing this in a totally convincing way.

One thing I love about Blair is that she didn’t look like a movie star. She was attractive, but in a girl-next-door kind of way rather than a glamorous movie star kind of way. And she could be sexy in a tough-but-sensitive way, and sexy in the way that a regular woman is sexy rather than in a glamourised supermodel or movie star way. She has to convince us that Christine really is a very ordinary girl who learns to do what she has to do in order to survive. Blair does this successfully.

I have heard it suggested that Sylvia Kristel was miscast as Sofia. I totally disagree. She was a fine actress and playing a sadistic psycho bitch was something she was quite capable of doing and she does an excellent job here.

In order to work this movie needed two actresses with charisma, but with the right sort of slightly unconventional charisma. Blair and Kristel work perfectly together. You know that when these two chicks have their final showdown it will be memorable.

It’s a somber film but it’s well-paced and the tension is built up effectively and relentlessly. It’s gripping and it’s entertaining. A must-see for Linda Blair fans, and I’d say it’s a must-see for Sylvia Kristel fans as well as a demonstration of her considerable versatility as an actress. Red Heat is highly recommended.

Red Heat is included in a Women in Prison Triple Feature DVD set. The DVD transfer for Red Heat is rather dark but I suspect that that is actually how the movie was shot. I like the dark scuzzy look the film has.

Red Heat was a follow-up to the excellent 1983 Linda Blair women-in-prison movie Chained Heat. They’re both delightfully sleazy but with a subtly different vibe. Maybe Chained Heat is slightly the better film but both are worth seeing.

La Femme Nikita (1990)

La Femme Nikita (the original French title is simply Nikita) is a 1990 spy thriller written and directed by Luc Besson but there’s a whole lot more going on in this movie.

Nikita (Anne Parillaud) runs with a street gang. They’re violent murderous thugs. Nikita is vicious and she’s a mess. After a robbery goes wrong she’s facing a life sentence for murder. Then she gets a second chance. She’s a dangerous psychotic but she’s good at killing people and she kills with hesitation or remorse. The government can always use people like that. She is given the chance to work for a government intelligence agency as an assassin.

She isn’t really given a choice.

The idea is far from original. It’s the basis for the greatest TV spy series of all time, Callan. Callan is the world’s worst soldier but he’s very good at killing. He is recruited as an assassin for the British Government. Like Nikita he accepts because he has no other options.

A great movie does not have to be based on an original idea. The best stories are very rarely original. The trick to making a great movie (and La Femme Nikita is a great movie) is to take an old idea and tell it well and give it some fresh twists. That’s what Besson does here.

Bob (Tchéky Karyo) has the job of training Nikita. It’s a challenge. Nikita does not like being told what to do. She has plenty of potential. She’s a natural killer. Eventually she is ready for a mission.

The movie follows her on several missions. This is a movie that can be approached as an action thriller and on that level it’s very good indeed. It has plenty of adrenalin-rush action scenes. It has plenty of suspense.

This is also however the story of a woman. A complicated woman. She becomes more complicated. While she’s learning to be an agent she is also learning to be a woman. She is learning to enjoy being a woman.

She is also learning that she wants things that other women want. She falls in love. Marco (Jean-Hugues Anglade) is a seriously nice guy. They would like to get married.

The problem is whether Nikita can have a normal life with a normal relationship with a man while also earning her living killing people. It’s not just the practical difficulties of keeping her two lives separate. She also has to deal with the fact that she kills people she has never met, people she has nothing against, simply because the government orders her to to do so. The government has turned her into a killing machine but human beings are not machines.

There are very obvious echoes of A Clockwork Orange. The government dealing with people who are seen as social problems by re-engineering their personalities.

And there is the same moral ambiguity. We come to feel sympathy for Alex in A Clockwork Orange but he is a vicious thug. Does that mean he no longer has the right to be himself? Does that give the government the right to change his personality? We come to feel sympathy for Nikita, but she was a vicious killer.

At the start of the movie Nikita is a 19-year-old juvenile delinquent who kills by instinct. She is not much more than a wild animal. It’s doubtful that she has ever given a second’s thought to this. Now she is a woman. She has grown up. But is murdering people for the government more moral than just murdering by instinct? Perhaps it is worse. Nikita has become a killer who is capable of thinking about what she does.

I like the fact that she is not a perfect killing machine. She cannot function that way. As a killing machine she develops malfunctions. At one point when things go wrong on a mission she just curls up in a corner sobbing. She has not only developed feelings, she has come to value her own life. She is now capable of experiencing fear, and panic.

Anne Parillaud is extraordinary. She manages, quite subtly, to get across to us that Nikita is not a whole new person. She now dresses exquisitely but she is not really a super-confident sophisticated woman of the world. This is just a mask that she wears. She is not really an ice-cold professional killer. This is just another mask that she wears. The messed-up juvenile delinquent is still there underneath. And the frightened confused little girl that she once was is still there underneath as well. So we’re seeing an actress playing a woman who is herself like an actress playing a part.

Jean-Hugues Anglade is extremely well. Bob is a swine who manipulates Nikita but he is perhaps not entirely a machine either. He may feel some emotional attachment to Nikita. We’re not quite sure. Perhaps he is not sure either. A spy’s life is based on lies and deception. Sometimes they can no longer separate the lies from the reality and can no longer distinguish between the masks they wear and the person underneath.

Luc Besson was associated with the so-called “Cinéma du look” movement. Any accusation that Besson favours style over substance can be dismissed in the case of La Femme Nikita. It has plenty of style and plenty of substance. It’s a superior thriller but it’s also a complex look at the life of a complex woman. Very highly recommended.

Night of Open Sex (1983)

Night of Open Sex (La noche de los sexos abiertos) is a 1983 Jess Franco movie that springs a few surprises. It’s not quite what it initially appears to be.

This is one of the movies Jess Franco made for Golden Films. This was both the worst and the best part of his career. It was his worst period in the sense that Golden Films turned out to be totally incompetent when it came to securing foreign distribution for his movies. These movies remained entirely unseen and unknown outside of Spain.

On the other hand it was his happiest period because Golden Films offered him an unprecedented level of creative control. He could do absolutely anything he wanted to do. And nothing mattered more to Franco than creative control.

Even when Franco’s cult following later started to build these movies continued to be almost totally unseen and unknown to his fans outside of Spain. This finally started to change some years back and these movies are now available, in subtitled form (they were never dubbed into English) and in remarkably good transfers, on DVD and Blu-Ray.

Their initially very poor reputation among eurocult fans has gradually grown but they are still far too often overlooked.

Night of Open Sex introduces us to erotic dancer Moira (Lina Romay). Through the rather sleazy Vickers (Miguel Ángel Aristu) she has become mixed up in some sort of espionage plot. Her job is to take the place of another girl, Tina Klaus (Juana de la Morena), and deliver a secret message to the General. Vickers has kidnapped Tina and she has been forced to reveal the plan concerning the message.

Al Crosby (Antonio Mayans) appears on the scene. The name suggests that he is going to be another variation on the Al Pereira character who pops up in so many Franco films, usually in the guise of a hardboiled private eye.

Whatever deal is going down, Al wants in on it. He wants Moira to accept him as a partner.

He also wants to sleep with Moira. He has to be very forcefully persuasive at first but Moira seems delighted with the outcome.

Al and Moira have a problem. They have the message but it’s in code and they have no idea what it’s all about. Al figures there’s money involved.

There’s still the problem of Vickers, and there’s another couple who want a piece of this action. There’s plenty of potential here for violence and double-crosses.

It all leads up to a totally unexpected ending which I absolutely loved.

There’s a staggering amount of sex and nudity. Lina Romay is nude for the majority of the film’s running time and you won’t be surprised to see a lot of shots of the most intimate parts of her anatomy. The other actresses spend a lot of time naked as well. The sex scenes are softcore but very raunchy.

The highlight of any Franco movie is likely to be the nightclub act scenes and Moira’s act has to be seen to be believed. When you’ve seen it you still won’t believe it. The things she does with those magazines. And the car. She’s a very imaginative lady.

At some point in this movie you’re going to have one of those “I don’t think we’re in Kansas any more Toto” moments. It’s not that anything supernatural or paranormal or science fictional, or impossible, happens. You just know that this is not reality. Maybe part of it is reality. Or maybe none of it. You start to realise that the plot is following dream logic rather than ordinary logic. Characters suddenly do wildly unexpected out-of-character things. It’s clear that this is not a flaw in the script. This is intentional. Uncle Jess is playing with our heads.

Stephen Thrower has suggested that the entire movie is an extended sexual fantasy (or series of sexual fantasies). I think he’s probably spot on. It’s a sexual fantasy rather than a dream or a hallucination or an exercise in surrealism.

Which raises lots of interesting questions. Are we supposed to believe that these people have any actual existence? Is this Jess Franco’s sexual fantasy which he’s inviting us to share? Is it to any extent Moira’s fantasy? And given the close collaboration between Franco and Lina Romay and the fact there was apparently quite a bit of improvising going on, are there any elements that might be Lina’s fantasy? Or a fantasy shared by Jess and Lina?

There is one genuinely shocking scene, but of course if this really is supposed to be taken as a fantasy then that scene becomes much less disturbing. Other mildly disturbing scenes become not disturbing at all.

The sex scenes are very passionate but they’re also just a little jokey. They’re mostly good-natured. You have to love the way Moira starts yelling “Oh Tarzan” as her sexual frenzy increases and in one encounter she gives an actual Tarzan jungle call when she comes. It’s one of the things that is so engaging about this movie - these sudden goofy moments.

The final sex scene is priceless. It may be the culmination of Franco’s career as a filmmaker. It’s not that it’s graphic, it isn’t, but the context is delightfully surprising.

Night of Open Sex is crazy, but it’s crazy in a subtle way. The craziness creeps up on the viewer. I liked it a lot. Highly recommended.

Severin have provided a great transfer with some very desirable extras. As always the pick of the extras is Stephen Thrower’s perceptive video essay.

OSS 117: Mission to Tokyo (1966)

OSS 117: Mission to Tokyo (AKA Terror in Tokyo, original title Atout coeur à Tokyo pour OSS 117), is a 1966 French eurospy movie directed by Michel Boisrond and starring Frederick Stafford. This was the fourth of the 1960s OSS 117 movies, based on Jean Bruce’s novels featuring secret agent Hubert Bonisseur de La Bath, codenamed OSS 117.

A mystery organisation claim to have invented a super-weapon which they will use unless governments pay them a hundred million dollars. Military bases will be their targets.

CIA agent OSS 117 is assigned to the case. The best lead is a woman in Tokyo who is being blackmailed by the mystery organisation into providing them with the information they need to target those bases.

The woman is Eva Wilson (Marina Vlady). The plan is for Eva to make contact with the bad guys. Hubert will pretend to be her husband (her actual husband is in Washington).

Hubert and Eva decide that it’s important to make Hubert’s masquerade as her husband convincing so they sleep together.

There’s a meet in a girlie bar where Hubert encounters a pretty Japanese girl, Tetsuko (Jitsuko Yoshimura). Tetsuko might be able to provide a further lead but even if she can’t Hubert doesn’t mind. He doesn’t really need a reason to pursue pretty girls.

Hubert’s problem is that he is now involved with two women and he can’t be sure if he can trust either of them. Maybe he’ll have a better idea of that after he’s slept with both of them.

Hubert’s bigger problem is to find the villains’ secret headquarters, and their super-weapon. He has to deal with lots of heavies who want to do him harm.

This was Frederick Stafford’s second and final appearance as OSS 117. He looks like the kind of guy who might be a secret agent, he’s good in the action scenes and he’s likeable and charming. Hubert is a skirt-chaser, but he only chases girls who like to be chased.

Marina Vlady and Jitsuko Yoshimura are fine as the two women mixed up in the case. Jitsuko Yoshimura in particular is bubbly and cute.

Perhaps the villains could have been more colourful.

The plot is a pretty standard eurospy plot but it’s serviceable enough. The movie moves along fairly briskly. The fight scenes are reasonably good.

The bad guys’ secret lair doesn’t compare to anything from a Bond movie but it’s OK.

Director Michel Boisrond doesn’t try anything fancy but he’s quite competent.

There’s a decent mix of action and romance. Perhaps surprisingly it’s all played very very straight with no comic interludes.

The action finale is fairly exciting. Obviously a lot less spectacular than a Bond movie but for a modestly budgeted movie perfectly satisfactory.

OSS 117: Mission to Tokyo doesn’t quite have as much eurospy craziness as I would have liked.

On the whole this is a thoroughly enjoyable rather lighthearted spy thriller and it’s highly recommended.

I’ve reviewed the two previous OSS 117 movies, OSS 117 Is Unleashed (1963) and Panic in Bangkok. They’re worth seeing.

Mission Bloody Mary (1965)

Mission Bloody Mary, released in 1965, was the first of a series of three eurospy movies featuring Ken Clark as American secret agent Dick Malloy, Agent 077. It was an Italian-French-Spanish co-production. It was followed by From the Orient with Fury (Agente 077 dall'oriente con furore) and Special Mission Lady Chaplin (Missione speciale Lady Chaplin).

Confusingly it appears that Agent 077 was named Jack Clifton in the European versions but renamed Dick Malloy in the English dubbed versions.

Mission Bloody Mary begins in a typical eurospy way. Someone has been causing US military aircraft to crash and they have stolen a new super H-bomb nicknamed the Bloody Mary.

It’s obviously a case for the CIA’s top agent Dick Malloy, if they can tear him away from the case he’s working on at the moment. That case happens to be a beautiful blonde. Agent 077 hates leaving a job unfinished but he promises the blonde that he’ll be back to finish the job.

Agent 077 finds his contact and of course she’s a glamorous female, Dr Elsa Freeman (Helga Liné). There’s another glamorous female who seems likely to be more dangerous, a Chinese stripper named Kuan (played by Mitsouko).

The bodies slowly start to accumulate. And people are trying to kill Dick Malloy, so he must be getting close to something.

The CIA can’t provide Dick with much information. They know the Black Lily is involved, but they don’t know whether the Black Lily is an organisation or a person, or whether it refers to a man or a woman. The Black Lily might be operating independently, or on behalf of the Chinese or the Soviets. And that bomb could be hidden anywhere.

There will of course be double-crosses. This is after all a spy story. The script provides plenty of twists. Some of them you’ll see coming but some of them you won’t.

There are glamorous women and poor Malloy has no idea which of them he can trust. He gets into plenty of tight corners but he’s a tough guy and he can slug or shoot his way out of most situations.

Ken Clark was one of those American actors who realised that they weren’t going to reach the top in Hollywood but might do a lot better in Italy. He made peplums, spaghetti western, eurospy and action movies. He was the ruggedly handsome American type who prospered in 60s eurocult movies. He makes a more than adequate square-jawed wise-cracking hero.

Helga Liné and Mitsouko add some glamour. The other cast members are all perfectly competent.

The major difference between the Bond movies and eurospy movies was of course money. The makers of eurospy movies did not have the budgets for elaborate sets, fancy gadgetry and spectacular action set-pieces. They had to rely on more conventional action scenes. A lot depended on just how good a director was at staging such scenes. In this case Sergio Grieco proves to be very competent. The action scenes are excellent.

And there are plenty of them. Pacing is crucial to the success of these kinds of movies. The lower the budget of the movie the less forgiving the audience is going to be of slow patches. This movie has no slow patches. It just keeps powering along.

Director Sergio Grieco had a fairly typical career for an Italian genre director. He made peplums, swashbucklers and quite a few eurospy movies. Later he dabbled in poliziotteschi and sex comedies.

This was 1965 so there’s no nudity but there are some witty sexy moments. A good place for a woman to hide a secret message is in her bra, especially if she can be sure that the man for whom the message is intended will get the chance to look inside her bra. And Mitsouko gets to do a strip-tease routine.

At one point Malloy has to make sure that a female agent is not an imposter. To do so he will have to make a careful examination of her left breast. Fortunately one of Malloy’s secret agent skills is persuading young ladies to remove their clothing.

The violence isn’t graphic but the fight scenes are quite full-blooded.

Mission Bloody Mary has relatively few of the outrageous and fantastic elements that populate a lot of eurospy movies, in fact it has almost none, but it manages to provide plenty of excitement, and it’s stylish enough in a slightly gritty sort of way. On the whole this is a top-notch eurospy offering and it’s highly recommended.

The German Pidax Jack Clifton Agent 077 DVD boxed set includes all three 077 movies, with the English soundtracks as well. The transfers are fine.

I’ve reviewed the other two Agent 077 movies, From the Orient with Fury (1965) and the superb Special Mission Lady Chaplin (1966).

Never Say Never Again (1983)

Never Say Never Again, released in 1983, is the movie that saw Sean Connery back in the rôle of James Bond twelve years after Diamonds Are Forever. The story of how this movie came about is more interesting than the movie itself but we’ll get to that later.

This is of course a remake of Thunderball which had been the most comercially successful of all the Bond films.

SPECTRE have hatched a plot to steal two American thermonuclear warheads. They naturally intend to use the warheads to blackmail the governments of just about every country on the planet.

Bond meanwhile has been sent to a health farm. There’s a new M in charge of the Secret Service and he’s a health nut. He also disapproves of the unconventional methods of the Double-0 section. Bond witnesses an odd scene at the health farm - one of the female nurses beating up a make patient.

By now SPECTRE’s threat has forced M to recall Bond to duty and send him to the Bahamas. I confess I wasn’t clear why the Bahamas was chosen as his destination.

Bond encounters a beautiful glamorous young woman improbably named Fatima Blush (Barbara Carrera). They go scuba diving together, they have sex and she tries to kill him. The audience already knows she’s an assassin working for Maximillian Largo (Klaus Maria Brandauer). Largo is the SPECTRE agent in charge of the nuclear plot.

Bond meets another beautiful young woman, Domino (Kim Basinger in the rôle that made her a star). There’s a curious connection between Domino and that odd incident Bond witnessed at the health farm. Domino is Largo’s mistress. Largo has a huge yacht on which he keeps his many valuable and beautiful possessions and he certainly regards Domino as a possession. Largo is not pleased when he sees Domino being kissed by Bond and obviously enjoying it.

Largo’s yacht is one of the keys to the solution of the puzzle of the present whereabouts of those warheads. Domino is another. Fatima Blush makes numerous attempts to kill Bond. The story builds to an action finale in a series of desert caverns.

The story of this film starts in 1958 when Ian Fleming wrote a screenplay in collaboration with several other writers, most notably Kevin McClory. The screenplay failed to attract any interest so Fleming turned it into a novel with the title Thunderball. And as a result was sued by Kevin McClory. The rather complicated legal settlement allowed McClory to act as producer on the film version of Thunderball but it also allowed him to make further film adaptations of the novel after ten years had elapsed.

By the late 70s McClory had managed to interest Sean Connery in starring in a new film version, which would become Never Say Never Again. This resulted in more legal battles with Eon Films (the makers of all the other Bond films) determined to prevent the making of a rival Bond film which they believed would damage the box office prospects of their own Bond films. They had Octopussy scheduled for release in 1983 so their concern was understandable. The upshot of the court battles was that Never Say Never Again could be made quite legally, but only under certain conditions. It had to be based directly on the Nobel and could not utilise any ideas from the 1965 Thunderball movie. That caused lots of problems when it came to writing a screenplay and many different writers worked on that screenplay. Eventually a workable script was prepared and shooting began.

The script is not the problem with Never Say Never Again, but it’s a movie that does have a lot of problems.

First off, the music by Michel Legrand is awful and the title song is instantly forgettable. The second problem is Connery. Connery was far and away the best screen Bond because he brought a real edge to his performances that no other actor has even come close to achieving and combined this with a subtly tongue-in-cheek approach. Unfortunately in Never Say Never Again that edge is missing. Connery’s performance, surprisingly, is rather lifeless. He also looks too old. He was actually slightly younger than Roger Moore but he looks older. Connery was 52 but at times he looks 62.

The third problem was studio cost-cutting. Director Irvin Kershner had a couple of very cool gadgets planned for the movie, most notably the flying motorcycle. The studio decided that was too expensive. That’s unfortunate because we get this huge buildup to the unveiling of the secret weapon Bond has stored in a crate but when it’s uncrated it’s basically just an ordinary common and garden motorcycle. The flying rocket platforms are a major letdown as well. The gadgets in this movie are truly lame.

It would have been better to do what was done in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and dispense with gadgets altogether and rely on spectacular stunts. That worked in OHMSS because the action scenes in that movie were superb. The action scenes in Never Say Never Again are rather feeble. OK, the underwater sequence with the sharks is pretty good.

Irvin Kershner claimed that he wanted to focus on the characters rather than action. That’s a valid approach for a spy movie, but in order for it to work you need some interesting divided loyalties and some potential betrayals. There’s none of that here.

The one real plus is Barbara Carrera. She’s sexy and deadly and sadistic and huge amounts of fun.

Kim Basinger looks very pretty. Klaus Maria Brandauer is an OK villain. Edward Fox is amusing as M. Rowan Atkinson adds comic relief as a bumbling Foreign Office flunkey.

Overall Never Say Never Again just never catches fire. It’s not a terrible movie but it’s no more than a very average spy thriller and people expect a lot more from a Bond movie. Maybe worth a look if you’re a Bond completist.