Let's back up first to 1964....."Goldfinger" with Sean Connery, the 3rd James Bond film, takes the entire movie world by storm and the suave secret agent becomes a world wide fad, a cinematic hula-hoop that everyone haS to have a piece of. American filmmakers quickly started their own faux-Bond franchises, such James Coburn's 'Our Man Flint' and Dean Martin's Matt Helm series. But nobody jumped on the Bond-Wagon with more fervor and sheer quantity than the Italian Grade C producers. They flooded the world market with an avalanche of wanna-be 007s....loading up the movies with the requisite karate chops,car chases, bikini babes and diabolical arch-villains seeking world domination with secret radio-active whatever weapons. (It was really these movies that Mike Meyers targeted in his "Austin Powers" trilogy.)
The carbon copy secret agents in these films were often played by washed up, down-on-their-luck American actors, wandering over to Italy in search of work. Doing these movies kept them one step away from winding up in dinner theatre productions of "South Pacific." or signing autographs at Auto shows. But the imitation-Bond roles in these movies mostly fell to obscure European actors whose names would show up as 'Americanized' in the films' credits .....(Fictitious Example: someone named Enzio Linguini would tranform into 'Martin Blake'......BQ's own fave was a spaghetti western actor who dubbed himself 'Montgomery Wood' Now there's hero for you!) The quality of the 'Eurospy' movies varies wildly from 'not bad' to 'okay' to 'acceptably tolerable' to 'hilariously awful'. Most of them suffered from threadbare budgets, wobbly cinematography, laughable special effects, arthritic stunts and acting that ranged from painful to non-existent......but for fans of way-off-the-beaten-track cinema, that didn't make them any less fun to watch....personally, we couldn't get enough of the blaring 60's jazzy scores that wailed all through these films, some of them even composed by master Maestro Ennio Morricone.
The Eurospy movies had little or no playdates in American theatres.....bunches of them turned up on local TV stations, the rest of them remained strictly unseen Stateside.. And in even with the onset of VHS and DVD, few of the 'Eurospies' made it to homevideo compared with the onslaught of their brethren, the Italian westerns and 'Giallo' horror films that flooded the markets. (Which is why we deeply admire the authors of "The Eurospy Guide" for their superhuman diligence in tracking these films down for a viewing....God only knows where they found them....maybe bobbing along in the Venetian canals....)
As of now, you can indulge yourself in the sheer crappy madness of Eurospy films on YouTube, where mass quantities of them have come to rest......the streaming quality varies on these, but you can mix your Martinis, strap on your shoulder holster and wallow in epics like "Agent 353-Passport To Hell", "Lightning Bolt", "Mission Bloody Mary", and "OSS-117-From Tokyo With Love".....and don't forget to keep your copy of "The Eurospy Guide" handy, since we're targeting it with 5 Stars*****, easily a FIND OF FINDS. Very cool, baby...
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