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.

There's not much left to say about this movie...it was bad, the characters were lousy, there were maybe three locations in the whole film, and it was less devoid of action than "The Starfighters". Adam Chance is an old, feeble man. Correction, an old, feeble, CRADLE ROBBING man! He has more skill at taking apart televisions and being repulsive than he does fighting crime. Thank God that we have the FBI and CIA and what not, instead of HARM (Huge Angular Red Marshmallows). I like how the only one who can save the day is the "elderly, wounded scientist" (in Crow's words). One of my absolute favorite lines in the whole movie is, "The combination of the pocket wound and the spaz chop was just too much for the old man." I think either Crow or Tom say it, but it doesn't matter. The only, repeat ONLY! redeeming factor of the movie is that the Russian woman is very attractive. I think it's her hair, she has hair like my girlfriend...who is Russian...hmmmm....maybe I should go buy a Cardigan....or not.

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!

A paunchy, fiftyish sleazeball is...agent for H.A.R.M! He hits on girls young enough to be his daughter! And cops a feel while he's got his hands on them! He's smug, ineffectual, pompous and smarmy. The only reason he half way succeeds in his mission is because the bad guys are so lame. And he still managed to botch the case. That's what he gets for leaving that one location! And for some reason, his yellow cardigan didn't protect him. That must be the reason why he wore it for six straight days in a row, right? I must say-I've never seen a secret agent who wore a CARDIGAN before. Only grandfathers wear cardigans. Couldn't they have gotten a better wardrobe person for this movie? I mean, they saved all that money on the location scouting, they could have afforded to hire someone who wouldn't have put grandpa secret agent in a yellow cardigan!

Here we have the epic adventures of a super-swinging spy from the '60s, complete with loads of gorgeous women, fantastic gadgets, and awe-inspiring adventure set pieces...

Actually, no we don't.

What we have instead is a painfully low-budget, underwritten, generally icky movie filled with token attempts at the girls, gadgets, and adventures of our pal double-oh-seven, but all falling faaaar short of that goal. Think of it as the movie you and your friends might make one Saturday afternoon if you tried to make a Bond movie with community theater actors and a camcorder. Only without the comedy.

Buh-duh DAH-duuuuuh!