dave13-1

Goldfinger came out in the summer of 1964 and created a world-wide sensation. For the next five years, movie goers got wannabe 007s from all over the globe, as every cheapjack knock-off house tried to cash in on the trend. A few of these hand me downs found their niche, but most failed. Super Dragon falls into the majority. Spy movies by their nature are highly contrived and artificial, requiring tight plotting and clever legerdemain by the writers to hide the story gimmicks - double-crossing double agents, conveniently timed plot twists, etc. This is a monumental task for masters of the genre, and far beyond the talents of the C- level hacks who scripted the imitators. Super Dragon is one of the worst offenders I can ever recall seeing, less coherent even than that death ray abomination with Gordon Scott that had about eleven different titles outside of Italy. Stuff happens of course, agents go missing and the protagonist agent shows up and starts asking questions. (How often has the set up for Dr. No been ripped off? I wonder.) People start getting dead soon, so he knows he must be onto something, but nothing that happens actually leads anywhere. It's just stuff. A collection of unrelated happenings is not a narrative. Just stuff. Calling Super Dragon hard to follow presumes that it can be followed, which seems optimistic. It does not help that Ray Danton, who made a soft living playing oily villains in TV westerns and crime dramas, was chosen as the hero. Murders go on around him while leaving him unfazed to a degree that feels sociopathic. Contrast that with Margaret Lee and Marisa Mell, who overplay trying to be coy so hard it comes off as just bad acting. Danton wanders around Amsterdam like a tourist, which I suppose fulfills the exciting location quota, but it all looks cheap and hackneyed. Don't be fooled by cheap imitations. Watch From Russia with Love one more time and enjoy the authentic Bond experience.

Would you like to watch the cast of the 1959 Jack Benny parody an early 80s space opera like Flash Gordon or the Star Wars series? With Jack throwing in a few of his trademark catch phrases such as 'Well' or I'm thinking'?

It's a fun idea. Unfortunately, only a dozen or so gags land and this sort of exercise needs a high laugh count to avoid becoming tedious. The bargain basement production values are a distraction too, since an 80s audience was used to better. The result is an unsatisfying answer to a what if question. Better writing might have made the cheap look more forgivable, and alternatively a more polished production might have gotten away with this few chuckles. The cast try hard but there is not a lot of acting business to be done on this low a budget. The fight staging is also distractingly bad, and worse it reminds us that bad action scenes are worse than none. Could the Zucker brothers, fresh off a hit with Top Secret, have been able to pull this idea off? I wish we got a chance to find out.

On old TV shows, a fake movie studio would be named Miracle Pictures and have cheesy tag line, such as 'If you liked it, it's a Miracle!' The very existence of this movie is something of a Miracle. Made by students at the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology - a college of which I was previously unfamiliar, nor would I have suspected that it had a film production department - with money borrowed from relatives and cameras borrowed from the campus, it is an example of what was once called backyard cinema. This means exactly what one might expect, namely a movie made by complete amateurs in someone's backyard. Written, directed by and starring three dudes who never did much else in their careers, it is shockingly inept on every level. The director has no special talent for finding or framing anything of visual interest, the script was written with no knowledge of scene structure or narrative flow, and the performances, if given at an audition for drama club would result in an immediate cry of 'next'! As for production values, there are none. Such luxuries are strictly for people with money. None of this matters.

The mere fact that the boys got enough useable footage to pad things out to eighty minutes, while managing to record the soundtrack intelligibly enough to pick up the name Rowsdower every time it was said keeps me from giving it one star. Enjoy that second star guys, you worked hard for it.