HELLO DARE!.......GOODBYE DARE TO "THE LAST OF THE SECRET AGENTS?"

The Last Of The Secret Agents? (1966)     You can always sense when a once white-hot genre starts to burn out........

                 In come the comedians......armed with jokes and dangerous......

                 The James Bond/Secret Agent craze burned like a Supernova around the world for a couple of years......(I'd put its Golden Years from about '64 to '67)......

                  But spoofing the genre seemed like a waste of time and effort.......the Bond films themselves maintained a healthy tongue-in-cheek attitude and their many imitators already careened closer and closer to outright mockery.......

                   Not that it didn't stop anyone from trying........which brings us to this woeful little footnote of a movie.......

                The so-called comedy of team of Steve Rossi and Marty Allen was kind of an exhausted carbon copy of the Dean Martin-Jerry Lewis pairing......with Rossi being the tall handsome Italian crooner and the short pudgy Allen, with his helmet of tangled black curls, serving clown duty.

                As the supposed funny half of the duo, Marty Allen's complete comic repertoire consisted of bugging his eyes out as if undergoing a perpetual prostate exam and shouting out "Hello Dare!" to one and all........so if you watched him for 30 seconds, you'd seen everything he had to offer.......

                 .......uh....this movie runs almost 90 minutes, which gives you an idea of what a punishment it is........

               A few nice surprises though.......the opening minutes have some sick fun at the expense of that well-worn secret agent movie trope......agents murderously turning on each other after passing along their secrets......(the sound crew goes crazy here dubbing in their agonized death screams....)

               And all along the way, the writers take some early stabs at self-referential meta spoofery....the kind of wink-wink gags that would come to full flowering in the "Airplane" and "Naked Gun" movies......

                  But BQ wouldn't want to give anyone the impression that this movie's really funny......or even barely watchable.  For the most part, it's neither.

                  1 star (*).....strictly for secret agent completists and any surviving members of Allen & Rossi's immediate families. Also starring Nancy Sinatra as the requisite sex object.....she applies her monotone, barely-in-tune singing voice to the bouncy title song here......and irony of ironies, one year later would equally gasp her way through the title song of "You Only Live Twice".......hey, Nancy, Hello and Goodbye Dare.......