ALL SCI-FI

[Bud Brewster]

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Christopher Lee is Fu Man Chewing the scenery in the fourth movie in the series.

Mike Conners shifts gears from Mannix to be in a lively movie which lets him portray a secret agent, with Dorothy Provine doing a delightful job as a real-life “Lady Penelope”, complete with Terry-Thomas as her “Parker-like” chaufer.

~ And finally, an early Steven Spielberg project is a TV movie about Gene Barry visiting L.A. in 2017 by traveling through time.
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Kiss & Kill (1968 Spain/W. Germany/England)

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[Also released as: "Blood of Fu Manchu", "Against All Odds"]

From director Jesse Franco comes number four in the Christopher Lee/Fu Manchu series. Numbers one, two, and three had fair production values and color photography, although each film tended to be a little less worthy than its predecessor.

This one, number four, isn't even in color. Truly desperate Fu fans might find some consolation in the knowledge that a computer-colorized version is available.

The plot involves Fu Manchu's newest sex-related method of assassinating world leaders. Hypnotically programmed women are injected with snake venom and sent out to deliver the "kiss of death" to Fu's enemies.

I'm pretty sure that in real life the lady assassins wouldn't make it to the door, much less to their victims. Just a thought . . .

Richard Greene (British TV's "Robin Hood") fills the role of Nayland Smith from Britain's Home Office. Sexy Shirley Eaton (the gilded beauty in "Goldfinger") is the "black widow". Strangely enough, one year earlier Miss Eaton was cast as a female Fu Manchu in "The Million Eyes of Su-Muru" -- which is pretty bad in its own right.

The Fu Manchu series hit rock bottom with a dull thud in the fifth and final entry, "The Castle of Fu Manchu", which is also in black-and-white.
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Kiss the Girls and Make Them Die (1966 Italy)



This rarely seen Italian production is a lost gem from producer Dino De Laurentiis. Amazingly enough, there are so many American and British actors in the cast that it doesn't look much like an Italian imitation of the James Bond films so popular in the 1960s. In fact, the story has so many clever twists, humorous moments, and gorgeous women that it surpasses several of the lesser Bond movies.

Mike Conners does a top-notch job as a suave and capable America secret agent who teams up with a gorgeous British agent played by Dorothy Provine.



Miss Provine looks absolutely spectacular in ever single scene, and she delivers all her dialog with a lovely English accent (just a little bit forced) -- something few American actors can do.



Add to this the fact that the lovely Miss Provine's character is a magnificent live-action version of Miss Penelope from the Super-Marionation Thunderbirds series -- complete with her own clever, loyal, cultivated chauffeur, played to perfection by the Terry-Thomas, who ferries the gorgeous heroine around in a Rolls Royce loaded with more ingenious gadgets than Bond's Aston Martin DB-5!

And watch for a clever running joke in which Conners grabs bananas from hotel fruit baskets and passing produce trucks to eat as a snack several times throughout the film. This odd gag pays off hysterically during the climax of the movie.

The plot has a solid concept that dates well in view of today's growing concerns about over-population. Raf Vallone plays a crazed millionaire who plans to orbit a satellite armed with a ray that will cause all the men on Earth to loose interest in sex!

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This will cause the Earth's population to decline over the next few decades.

The villain will therefore be in control of all the new births, because they'll come from his own personal stock of beautiful women which he's put into suspended animation. Beverly Adams (Dean Martin's secretary in the Matt Helm series), Margaret Lee, and Marilu Tolo are a few of the lovely ladies the villain stocks his personal harem with.





This movie has a sexy story with a bold plot — and it doesn't look like a cheap production. For example, the sets of the villain's underground laboratory and rocket launch facility are actually quite good. The stunts are very convincing, and the film's stars (Conners and Provine) apparently did most of there character's stunt work themselves!





The movie was filmed on location in sunny Rio De Janeiro and directed by Henry Levin and Dino Maiuri.
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LA 2017 (1971 TV movie)



My how time flies. 2017 sounded so far in the future back in 1971. Now 1971 sounds exactly that far back in the past.

This early Steven Spielberg project is a feature length episode of the popular series "The Name of the Game", in which Gene Barry ("War of the Worlds", "The 27th Day") plays the publisher of a fictitious magazine called "People" (before there was a real one).

The story is a dream sequence in which Barry visits Los Angeles in the year 2017. Pollution has turned the air into a permanent yellow fog, and everybody lives underground.

Philip Wylie penned the screenplay, which effectively makes its point about the consequences of being apathetic towards our environment. Co-starring Barry Sullivan ("Planet of Vampires"), Edmond O'Brien, and Sharon Farrell.
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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)