Gemini 13 - Todesstrahlen auf Kap Canaveral

This movie is a lot of fun with multiple plot twists and a bad guy with a hilarious German accent. If you like SciFi or Eurospy take a little time and enjoy Operation Goldman.

The Plot. A U.S. agent goes undercover as a rich playboy to stop a madman from destroying a NASA moon project. I saw this under the title of Lightning Bolt.

Made in Italy and Spain, this 1966 movie takes it's plot from the James Bond / spy craze of the 60s, with a bit of NASA space work thrown in to make it interesting.

It is by no means a great movie, however I can see how this could be fun as a midnite grind-house screening. It's wide screen and technicolor and there are relatively decent special effects. There's also some fun 60's misogyny.

What brings the experience down a notch is that it seems like the whole movie is dubbed even though they are speaking English. It gives the film a cheaper feeling.

A lot of the sets look very Bond-ish. The acting and directing is a few notches above most cheap-o Italian movies. Although it's a bit slow paced.

Someone is destroying U. S. missiles as they are launched. An intelligence team, headed by agent Harry Sennett (Anthony Eisley), is sent to the Hotel Florida to investigate. The area, Sennett discovers, is a nest of spies, and another important missile launch is sabotaged, despite Sennett's effort to warn authorities.

He tracks the saboteurs to a brewery that fronts a criminal mastermind. His lugubrious adventures also take him to a secret installation located in pressure domes beneath the Atlantic Ocean. He finds super-criminal Rhett (Folco Lulli), who tells him the missiles are test targets for an experimental laser weapon. Rhett intends to take the laser to the moon, where he can blackmail Earth's governments. Unless there was any doubt, Sennett halts this routine world-domination plot.

LIGHTNING BOLT is a slightly dog-eared and low budget spy-sci-fi, Italian- and Spanish-produced mixture. It is nonetheless enormously entertaining due to the tongue-in-cheek attitude of Eisley's agent-hero, who rattles off an seemingly endless series of quips as he goes about saving the world.

Eisley, who is the unsung hero of countless low budget movies, has a stiff male model look that doesn't translate well to these super-agent shenanigans. But that fact only adds to the fun. LIGHTNING BOLT fits somewhere behind those boozy Dean Martin-Matt Helm spy parodies of the 1960s. Abundant newsreel footage of crashing missiles and a lot of miniature model shots are also laughably entertaining.

Shot in Rome,usually known in the English speaking world as "Lightning Bolt"(so like "Thunderball"!),this movie is an especially tacky example of the Euro-Superspy genre of the 1960's.Often these movies starred second string American actors to help US sales-and this has Anthony Eisley(best known as a lead in the TV detective series "Hawaiian Eye"),who spent a lot of his career in such Euro schlock.Handsome,tough looking and businesslike,Eisley was suitable for these kinds of roles,but here he is immersed in a distinctly third rate "Bond" caper.The story has elements from "Dr No"(villain who shoots down US moon rockets-cue the grainy stock footage of Cape Kennedy which fills the movie),but here the tale is clumsily developed and full of absurdities.The villain,vaguely resembles Goldfinger,and is-wait for it-a fiendish beer manufacturer,just like the villain in the Matt Helm movie "The Ambushers"(1967).Eisley's hero "Harry Sennet" at times acts with incredible stupidity.He drives right on to a rocket launch site to try and stop it leaving-just as it blasts off!In another unprofessional moment,Sennet,captured and surrounded by thugs,goes into a rage and tries to attack the gloating villain,when it's obvious he will fail and just gets more battering from the bad guys for his trouble-007 would be appalled!And here is a hero who more than once tries to "buy off" enemies by offering them cheques!(a wonderfully absurd scene has him doing a cheque for a gunman who's ready to shoot him!). The English dubbing is clear but often incongruous(a renowned rocket scientist who speaks in a "Barry Fitzgerald" Irish burr?).To try to make the narrative more coherent,we have Sennet providing a frequently cornball "tough guy" voice-over at certain points.

I did quite like the villainess with an acid squirting gun,and the "underwater city" hideout has a certain threadbare pop art mid 60's charm(with its ice-chamber where the villain stores his frozen victims).The final action and destruction scenes are far better done than the rest of the movie,the director seems more at home with fighting/mayhem than other aspects of film making.

There are a lot of better examples of 60's Eurospy out there,but "Lightning Bolt" is tolerable if you are interested in the genre.

This is one cheesy movie and a lot has been written about it (mostly bad) since it is widely available on the gray market but there are things (mostly bad, again) worth mentioning.

Lightning Bolt features smart-ass hard-boiled narration by Eisley and many moments of unintentionally laughable dialog, the kind that would make Ed Wood proud. Nonsensical situations and actions abound in this movie and the special effects are as to be expected; not very special, like the old yarn-for-the-laser-beam trick made famous in Italy.

Though the movie has a few charms they are outweighed by too much silliness, a weak villain and the sense that one's time is worth more than the budget spent in making it.