The Million Eyes Of Sumuru (1967) Oh how we wish we could tell you we'd found the Holy Grail of 1960's EuroTrash.....a movie that promised to be the most bonkers, most unintentionally funny, most shameful guilty pleasure of all the guilty pleasure we've covered on this blog.......
Deep sigh........not even close......
Yet everything's in place for this mad, mad goulash thrown together by American International Pictures and the neverending producer-writer of pulp Euro-sludge, the inevitable Harry Alan Towers.
From AIP's 'Beach Party' stable, comes the unctuous, way-too-hyper Frankie Avalon and a couple of bikini girls left over from his surf musicals.....
From Harry Alan Towers comes everything else, a global, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink mish-mash of Bond ripoffs and Towers' own campy Christopher Lee Fu Manchu movies.
Crazy? Yes. Cheesy? To the max. Post-synched soundtrack that makes everyone sound like they're stuffed inside somebody's bathroom together? You know it.
So why isn't this stupid thing more fun? It just kind of lays there, flopping around like a half-dead fish newly hauled on to a boat.
True, there's plenty of unintentional laughs from the movie's sweaty, strenuous efforts to cast itself as a tongue-in-cheek spoof.......with the dialogue loaded up with the most groan-worthy gag lines imaginable.
Most of the so-called snappy patter falls to the movie's official 007 wanna-be unsecret agent. He's played by George Nader, one of the many young Hollywood hunks who wandered over to Europe to become junk movie leading men....(Nader flourished as FBI guy Jerry Cotton in a slew of West German movies)..
With the obnoxious Avalon as a tag-along, Nader must thwart the world domination schemes of the nefarious Sumuru ("Goldfinger" golden girl Shirley Eaton).
The gorgeous, imperious Eaton deploys, naturally, an entire army of hot babe assassin warriors to take out world leaders and replace them with women. She's even got an especially muscular minion who, like "Goldeneye"s Xena Onatopp, crushes guys with her formidable thighs'
Sumuru's latest target is mythical kingdom playboy President Boong, played by the prolific international madman Klaus Kinski.. (The sight of the already weird Kinski campiing it up as an bubbly bon-vivant almost helps the film reach its potential for utter looniness.)
So it's up to Avalon and Nader, spewing out dead-on-arrival wisecracks like machine gun fire, to raid Eaton's lair with what looks like the entire Hong Kong police force. Listless carnage ensues, with cops and babes collapsing and dying as if suddenly sedated.
We found it ironic that this film came out the same year as 20th Century Fox's much higher profile '"In Like Flint". That one featured James Coburn, reprising his 'Our Man Flint' superspy, taking on an all-female organization who replaced the U.S. President with an idiot actor. (See our post of 3/24/17.....)
Needless to say, in both these 1967 films, the women were thwarted and the Patriarch survived......and as anyone can see from the everyday headlines, the battle still rages on. (Sumuru may have gone down to defeat, but at least we now have Gal Gadot, Elizabeth Olsen, Zoe Kravitz, Scarlett Johannson leading a whole host of women warriors)
But sorry to say, "The Million Eyes Of Sumuru" never really delivers the goofy fun it implies you'd get by watching it.......1 & 1/2 stars (*1/2)....suitable only for completists and curators of the lowest grade '60's cinema.
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