No. 1 of the Secret Service (1977)
After submitting to the torture of watching this, we immediately took this vow.......to make this viewing the last time we'll suffer through the abysmal work of director Lindsay Shonteff, the Ed Wood Jr. of Britain.
Shonteff, a jerk of all trades and master of none, specialized in dreadful spoofs of Bond films. (We would direct you to check out our 11/21/24 review of 'Big Zapper', his woeful girl private eye fiasco with Diana Rigg look-alike Linda Marlowe)
'No. 1' appears to be sort of a sequel to his 1965 Bond knock-off, 'The 2nd Best Secret Agent In The Whole Wide World, which featured Tom Adams as secret agent Charles Vine.
Agent Charlie's back, but he's Bind, instead of Vine for some reason and now inhabited by Nicky Henson, playing the character as a glib smartass who already knows the whole film's a lame joke-less farce. (His cranky, impatient 'M' is veteran authority figure Geoffrey Keen, borrowed from Roger Moore's Bonds where he pops in as the Minister of Defense.)
Bind's does get a worthy bad guy to contend with - uppercrust Arthur Loveday (Richard Todd), who enjoys costuming himself as a screaming Hyde Park speechifier, After he harangues the crowds about corrupt power brokers screwing up the world, he then sends out assassins to permanently stop them.
That's as much plot as Shonteff could tolerate since the rest of the movie consists of Loveday sending out one hitman (or woman) after another to rid him of Bind. But our boy's packing more than a ready smirk, he's armed with two massive Magnum 44's that he twirls like Wyatt Earp on meth. (We just can't figure out how those cannons never make so much as a slight bulge when he's wearing his sleek, perfectly tailored suits.
The parade of hit-folk sent out to erase Bind are quite the eclectic bunch......Asian muscle-monster Milton Reid (from the Bond films), a gun-totin' Texas cowboy, a barber, a girl vampire with Halloween shop fangs, and an entire army of commandos led by Britain's favorite creepy weird guy Dudley Sutton. (The Dudster's in charge of a jolly band called K.R.A.S.H. (Killing, Rape, Arson, Slaughter and Hit). (Nobody broke it to these guys that Killing and Hit are the same thing....)
(Too bad Loveday left out Fireman, Astronaut, and Indian Chiefs out of his hit-crew line-up. They should've sued him for equal opportunities.....)
Yet despite these non-stop shootouts and punch-ups, Bind's never at a loss for imitation Connery one-liners and dalliances with his gal Friday. (His primary seduction technique involves squirting her chest with a seltzer bottle, thereby forcing her to 'get out of those wet things'......
Mercifully, this film only takes 91 minutes, but even in that short amount of time, we could feel our brain cells dribbling out of our ears....a medical affliction that clearly affected Lindsay Shonteff as he plowed through his dire career.
Written with crayons and edited with a meat cleaver, watch this only if you're in a Mystery Science Theater 3000 mood to trash a movie as you watch it. Anyone that desperate for a spy spoof can easily find dozens of better ones than this. Start with the 'Austin Powers' trilogy, the 1967 'Casino Royale and work your way up (or down, depending on how badly you want to hurl invective at your TV.....
1 star (*).
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