Lively, entertaining reviews of, and essays on, old and newer films and everything relating to them, written by professional author William Schoell.

Thursday, March 6, 2014

SOME GIRLS DO

James Villiers co-stars along with Daliah Lavi's cleavage
SOME GIRLS DO (1969). Director: Ralph Thomas.

In this sequel to Deadlier Than the Male, insurance man Hugh Drummond (Richard Johnson) is up against more female assassins, this time a bevy of sociopathic beauties whose brains have been programmed to murder. Drummond dallies with a nasty baroness named Helga (Daliah Lavi of The Whip and The Body) and matches wits with a foppish villain named Petersen (James Villiers of The Nanny) who employs a destructive infra-sound device, and whose main goal seems to be to destroy the prototype of a supersonic airliner. Robert Morley is some kind of cooking instructor known as "Miss Mary," Sydne Rome is an annoying would-be agent who follows Drummond around, and Ronnie Stevens is a nerdy agent named Peregrine Carruthers. There's one fairly good scene when Drummond's parachute fails to open, but Some Girls Do is vastly inferior to the first film, hastily slapped together, with a bad script and production values that are far below the James Bond level. Lavi's smoky, sexy voice has been dubbed for inexplicable reasons. When it develops that many of the female killers have been outfitted with robot brains and surely must have been kidnapped and worse, no one registers any dismay, but then that's how mindless this movie is. Camp is one thing, but Some Girls Do is so stupid and ultimately dull that it's pretty much an effort to sit through.

Verdict: Watch a real Bond movie instead. *1/2.

No comments: