It quickly becomes clear that our visit to Curtain Guy’s office is for the purpose of a little pregame exposition, which is all pure 1960s spy movie boilerplate: A kidnapped scientist; a new kind of atomic device that could “destroy all human life” if it should fall into “the wrong hands”; a one week window to recover the device before those wrong hands that it’s fallen into start touching all over it; a clandestine atomic laboratory — perhaps located beneath the Mediterranean Sea — that needs to be located before it’s too late. The superior then outlines for the attendant anonymous functionary those attributes that the agent assigned to the job must possess: “Perfect understanding of Italian, French, and a complete understanding of nuclear science. And the man must also be an expert sailor.”

Even though the cast and crew are making a lark of a movie, Hasebe never lets it collapse under the weight of its own self-awareness. He understands that the best spoof of the campy spy film of the 1960s also has to be a very enjoyable spy film, and Black Tight Killers doesn’t forget to entertain. Kobayashi, as usual, throws himself into the role’s physical aspects with gusto, and he and the girls who make up the black tight squad get to have frequent fights with fists, feet, guns, bamboo bazookas, and of course more mundane weapons like killer albums and ninja chewing gum. The whole thing is light, frothy, and totally ridiculous. Black Tight Killers looks like some scamp replaced the crew’s cameras with kaleidoscopes

Larry Buchanan is no stranger here at Teleport City. Not too many years ago, the B-Masters Cabal dedicated a round table theme to the film maker, celebrating his ability to take a small budget and amateur actors and turn them into a movie that looks like it had an even smaller budget and actors who were even worse than amateurs. The reason we know him, for the most part, is because in the 1960s, American International Pictures needed some quick and dirty filler for some open broadcast television slots. They hired Larry Buchanan to crank out a bunch of color remakes of famous old AIP movies. Thus we get movies like Zontar, The Thing from Venus, a remake of AIP’s earlier It Conquered the World.

So, yes, if you’ve seen a James Bond movie, you know exactly what tropes Altin Cocuk holds in store. But the film nonetheless offers distinct pleasures in the course of watching them unfold. When sour-faced Goksel Arsoy and the unnamed woman don their scuba gear and prepare to make their descent down to the evil genius’s lair, the thrill we feel is like a muscle memory, coming almost in spite of the fact that we know full well that we’re not going to see events play out on the scale we imagine. The fact is that, by this point, Altin Cocuk has demonstrated enough of a good faith effort that we’re willing to sign on, buy in, and perhaps fill in the gaps ourselves when necessary.

Alongside all of its surface froth, Who Wants to Kill Jessie carries a simple political message that’s pretty hard to miss – that authority’s attempts to suppress the dreams of its subjects have a tendency to force those dreams into the world of action, and that, once made manifest, those dreams tend to be a genie that’s pretty hard to get back into the bottle. There is also a statement being made about the importance of fantasy as a precursor to invention and positive change. All of this becomes especially poignant in light of the force that would be brought to bear upon the dreams of the Czech people within just a of couple of years of Jessie’s release.

Most of the success of Django can be attributed to Franco Nero’s world-weary portrayal of Django. Django is laid-back, almost lazy, until it comes time for some killing. The shot of Django waiting patiently on his coffin for 48 gunfighters to arrive is riveting; as the saloon owner and the prostitutes are shown scurrying around in fear, Django calmly awaits his chance to whip open his coffin and surprise the gang. Through the whole movie, Django is shown to be slow to anger, but when the time for action comes, ready to shoot down four or five men with lightning-quick speed. In the final scene, where Django works his trigger housing off with his teeth, Nero seethes with anger. As Jackson taunts him, you can feel the hatred burning off Nero as he waits to avenge his wife.

An obscurity like Love and Murder probably isn’t on the top of anyone’s list of films to hunt down and restore, but it’s nice to dream. The movie’s tale of an innocent trapped in a den of scoundrels is told with enough style and effectiveness to show that, despite its poverty row roots, a considerable amount of care went into its making. To my mind, it would be nice to see that care rewarded with a little retroactive TLC. Until then, we’ll just have to use our imaginations to fill in Love and Murder‘s gaps, while trying to get the most out of what there is left of it to enjoy.

In the hands of someone who knew what the hell they were doing, Manos would never have achieved the air of total strangeness that makes it such an entrancing work of…art? Sure, why not? The out-of-focus camera work, the terrible editing, the silent scenes of people standing around waiting for their queues…these things never would have happened with a real editor on the crew, and Manos would have been worse off because of it. It would have been merely terrible. But Hal Warren, bless him, had no clue what the hell he was doing, and by lucky happenstance, his incompetence elevates Manos to a transcendental plane of existence. It is the sort of out-of-its-mind experience that we jaded filmgoers spend years looking for, and like the mole, when we finally see it, we are blinded by its brilliance.

Godzilla vs. the Sea Monster began life as Operation Robinson Crusoe: King Kong vs. Ebirah, a rejected script for a proposed co-production between Toho and America’s Rankin/Bass Productions. That fabulous bit of synergy finally saw fruit with 1967′s wonderful King Kong Escapes, but before that transpired, Godzilla producer Tomoyuki Tanaka determined the need for a new Godzilla film for the upcoming 1966 holiday season, and further decreed that said entry should be oriented toward a teen audience and feature a South Seas theme. In response, the Operation Robinson Crusoe script was hastily retooled — primarily, it seems, by crossing out the name “King Kong” wherever it appeared and penciling in “Godzilla” in its place.

By the time filming on The Sons of Great Bear was nearing its end, Gojko Mitic, who considered the film a one-off effort on his part, had had it. The actor would later admit to some churlish onset behavior brought on by homesickness and impatience. Given that, it was probably a “good news/bad news” situation for him when the film went on to meet with a success that was far beyond the expectations of anyone involved in it. Overnight, Mitic had become the most popular film star in East Germany, and the East German Indianerfilm DEFA’s most in-demand genre. Eleven more such films would follow, all starring Mitic in roles very similar to the one he portrayed in Great Bear, ending with 1983′s Der Scout.

The thing that I love most about Superargo vs. Diabolicus is how, completely unlike lucha movies — in which no one reacts in the least to the fact that the hero, whether he be wrestling a mummy or standing in a bank line, is wearing a colorful head-enveloping mask — absolutely everyone reacts to the fact that Superargo is wearing one. Even Diabolicus has an opinion — and, remember, we’re talking about the guy in the octopus emblazoned spacesuit here. At one point the supervillain and his mistress have Superargo unconscious and strapped to a table, and they start to speculate about why exactly our hero sees the need to conceal his face in this manner. Maybe he’s disfigured, ventures the mistress. Overcome by curiosity, Diabolicus removes the mask, looks, and then shrugs, saying, basically, “I still don’t get it.”

I’m going to say that I like The Witches, but just barely. And even though I liked it, I don’t like it enough to recommend it to anyone else. Similar Hammer productions revolving around supernatural mysteries in remote corners of England — Plague of Zombies, for example — are much better. The cast is able, the direction solid, and the script is great when it’s good but horribly dull when it’s not. I suppose you’d file it under the heading of “interesting failure.” I would have loved to see Hammer create a Devil Rides Out style film for an older female protagonist, but sadly, this one misses the mark.