Le mur des espions

I saw this movie back in the summer of 1968 when I was eleven years old and it scared the pants off me and my friends. We never spoke once for nearly ninety minutes it was so absorbing. And that was unusual for us as we used to lark about a lot in those days - you know?

As I recall, the plot revolves around a group of evil men who have developed a gun which fires little pellets containing a virulent designer fungus, which firstly knocks the victim cold and then consumes his entire body within a matter of hours. One minute you have a living guy - next he's just a mass of green, gungy stuff. Yuk! Horrible.

I think the reason we found it so disturbing was the implied biological warfare element. In other words it could have been possible at that particular point in history, and certainly nowadays in the twenty-first century. So I guess it's still relevant.

I'd love to see this movie again sometime and I give it ten out of ten on the scary scale.

Let's say you're a refugee scientist from some foreigny country, hiding in Southern California working on antidote to some killer spore virus that's going to be sprayed on America's crops, to be baked into apple pies. Would you let a smug, fifty-ish, cardigan-wearing, skill-less "secret agent" into your home, to sleep next to you and your sexy, sexy, sexy neice? I wouldn't.

Anyway, Peter Mark Richman, who you may remember from "Friday the 13th part VIII: Jason Takes Manhatten", IS Adam Chance, Agent for H.A.R.M. He answers to one- except Wendell Corey, as the head of H.A.R.M. Here, Wendell is as drunk as he was in "Women of the Prehistoric Planet" but not as drunk as he was in "Astro-Zombies".

Enjoy!

This is a "must see" movie for nostalgic science fiction fans. Mark Richman and Wendell Cory deliver plenty of action and suspense. Gerd Oswald, the director, is known for his work on the original "OUTER LIMITS". The entire plot is a combination of action, science fiction and horror.

As with many cinematic stinkers, I never would have encountered this one if it hadn't been for MST3K. Perhaps in editing the movie for the show the producers had to cut out the part of the flick that explained what H.A.R.M. stood for, if such an explanation was ever given at all.

One could tell this was going to blow chunks from the tone set by the opening scene, with the elderly dude and his assistant fleeing through a culvert, being chased by a lone Soviet soldier armed with an American battle rifle (seeing as how the credits so kindly thanked Colt Firearms for the weapons used in the film, I guess I'll have to overlook that faux pas, seeing as how the mini pistol carried by the 'Agent for H.A.R.M. was so non-descript as to leave me guessing who might have manufactured it).

The rest of the movie was quite unintentionally funny, from the drunk sounding spymaster to the evil henchman who resembled Prince, to the much maligned cardigan worn by our hero Adam Chance. Although at his age, bones chill more easily, so I can understand his choice of such a sensible garment, although he could have picked a better color than that gawdawful yellow. The one shining spot in this whole mess was Eva, who, despite being a dirty commie spy, was pretty hot. I sure miss the Cold War, don't you?

fail. Yes the hero in this one will get no medal for his work in this one. The movie is trying to be a Bond movie, but when you only have a camera, 25 dollars, and one weekend to shoot...you may want to rethink that idea. The movie is about an agent protecting a scientist and his hot neice. He does this by hanging around their house for the weekend. Meanwhile, the villains including Prince and a bunch of other lugs are developing a biological weapon that turns people into fungus. The hero offs a couple of people once strangling a guy with a coat hanger and the second time by frying a person with a tv and of course he flirts endlessly with this gal who is young enough to be his daughter. He also reports to his boss who seems to be drunk. By the end of the movie our hero finally leaves the one location and then we find out why he so wanted to stay there because he really screws up big time away from it.