ALL SCI-FI

[Bud Brewster]

This installment in Dean Martin's "Matt Helm" series involves a stolen American-built flying saucer that can only be flown by women pilots because the anti-gravity engines kill men ( . . . Huh?). Never mind, just remember that a Matt Helm movie is supposed to be "sexy", not sensible. Dean and sexy Janice Rule team up to get the saucer back from the bad guys (Kurt Kasznar and Albert Salmi). Sexy Senta Berger ("When Woman Had Tails") is neither good nor bad, just sexy.

Each Matt Helm movie featured a joke weapon that spoofed the spy craze in general, and some of these were pretty clever. "The Ambushers" had three joke weapons, but they were they were weak jokes at best. One is a "levitation pistol" that moves objects around (the bad guy uses it to pull down the zipper on Janice Rule's miniskirt). The other weapon is a bra with built-in guns (Janice uses it to shot the bad guy who pulls down the zipper of her miniskirt).



The third is a pistol that dissolves metal -- which Matt uses to dissolve the belt buckles of the bad guys, making their pants fall down.

It also features an inflatable shelter which Dean pulls from the trunk of his car, complete with inflatable funriture, inflatable bed, inflatable bar, etc. The fight between Dean and a bad guy in a beer brewery is right out of a Marx brothers' movie. Beverly Adams returns as Dean's sexy secretary, Lovy Cravesit, but she only gets two short scenes, both as short as the skirt she's wearing. Directed by Henry Levin.

Loyal fans of 1950s sci-fi films will notice a few things that are borrowed from another Columbia film, "Earth vs. the Flying Saucers": the sound the saucer makes and the sound of the device that deactivates the engines.
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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)

[Krel]

I haven't seen this movie in decades, and it is the only Matt Helm movie I saw in the theater, because...IT HAS A FLYING SAUCER!!! Hey, I was nine at the time.

I think this movie is the first film to have exo-skeletons. I recognized them from "The Twenty-First Century" tv show.

David.

[Bud Brewster]

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I found a sexy trailer for this move!

I also found this rather uneventful clip in which Janice Rule rides in the flying saucer atop a railroad flatcar while Dean Martin rides a motorcycle alongside the tracks. He saves Janice (who is wearing a very short slip and boots) using his anti-gravity pistol, levitating her off the flatcar and placing her onto his motorcycle.

Ho-hum. Watch this dull clip if you don't anything better to do.
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___________________ The Ambushers - trailer


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________________ The Ambushers 1967 - clip


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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)

[scotpens]

There's some nice scenery in the location footage shot at Acapulco's Las Brisas Hotel, but this low point in the Matt Helm series is really only for die-hard Dean Martin fans.

The flying saucer also appeared in episodes of Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie.

[Bud Brewster]

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IMDB has one interesting trivia item for this production.
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~ To keep their budget low, the producers of this film used items already on the lot. The 'flying saucer" was used in the Star Trek episode "The Alternative Factor" as Lazarus' time jumping ship, and the central control console at the ICE headquarters in the early scene was used as the control console for the Romulan spaceship in the episode "Balance of Terror."

Note from me: The claim about the saucer is dead wrong, of course. The prop from TOS bears no resemblance in size or shape to the saucer in the Matt Helm movie — which looks like a VW version of Supercar.

Compare it to the third picture below, which is the saucer from The Ambushers. How could anybody mistaken these two as the same prop?


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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)