'THE SILENCERS'.........YEAH, BABY......THE ORIGINAL FRICKIN' LASER BEAMS........

The Silencers (1966)    Much as we'd prefer to say otherwise, this one definitely falls into that curious category of films we've mused about before.........

              Movies that are fun to recall, fun to think about, fun to discuss......

              But watching them?    Oh boy........pretty much unfit for human consumption.  (Prime examples......"Barbarella", the all star 1967 "Casino Royale"......and this film.)

              In 1966, the worldwide obsession with James Bond was still in full flower.......so out rolled the imitators.......some of them so idiotically silly that decades later, they provided Mike Meyers with more than enough inspiration (and satiric ammunition)  to create the Austin Powers trilogy.......

              Personally, of the the 60's wanna-be Bonds, we dug James Coburn's Derek Flint the most.......with his wolfish grin and limber physicality, he at least approached the role fully engaged. He kept his sardonic, wink-wink approach to the ludicrous material at a manageable level......he was in on the joke but maintained a serious actor's commitment to the role.......

              Which is more than you could say for everyone's favorite fake-drunk Vegas lounge lizard, Dean Martin......

               Martin's secret agent Matt Helm was nothing more than Martin's carefully constructed public persona........the crooning, boozing, skirt-chasing wastrel. (Pure artifice.....Martin in real life was no more this character than Jerry Lewis was the sweet, whiny-voiced lovable clown)......

               Incredibly, Martin got to wander through four Matt Helm adventures, barely looking at the other actors, his attention span lasting as long as it took to sip his last martini........as far as we could tell, the only acting discipline he exercised throughout this series was not constantly checking his watch to see when he could go home........(which we did frequently while watching "The Silencers.")

                Martin's boredom and casual detachment from everything and everyone around him makes the movie lethally inert.  And that's bad new for a movie that's supposed to be mostly funny.

               Almost all the film's scenes lay dead on arrival.........the obligatory action sequences come out even worse, done with sped-up Charlie Chaplin camerawork. It resembles one of those indifferently rehearsed "Saturday Night Live" skits where all the jokes don't land, filled with uncomfortable silences.

              In pure desperation, the movie allows Stella Stevens to turn her hapless bimbo role (hey remember, this was the '60's) into a dopey mixture of Shirley MacClaine and Jerry Lewis.......performing a full array of slapstick pratfalls, careening into furniture and mud puddles.

              To qualify for his paycheck, Martin duly musters up enough energy to wield a machine gun as he wipes out the HQ of  the evil "Big O" organization.......which resembles an elementary school pageant version of Ken Adams' sets for "Dr.No".......complete with genuine Austin Powers frickin' laser beams, humming and melting the styrofoam underground cave walls.

                We know.........we're making this sound way more fun than it actually it is. And that's always the danger we face when posting about movies like this one and the Woody Allen/Peter Sellers/Orson Welles "Casino Royale".   We can make ourselves positively giddy describing all the lunatic sequences in such movies.......

                 ........and forget that sitting down for a couple of hours and devoting your full attention to them can make you slip into a coma......

                 It's a testament to how infatuated the world became, once upon a time, with James Bond and all his various imitators.  We couldn't get our fill.......so much so that we'd even accept Dean Martin as an espionage hero,  lazily singing lame offscreen song parodies and making his best effort to stay awake while ogling girls with character names like Lovey Kravezit.

                  Yeah, baby......the 60's didn't get any 60-ier than this......."The Silencers" would probably be better off displayed in the Smithsonian.....1 & 1/2 stars (* 1/2)