Tuesday, January 31, 2006

Another Dick Randall Double Feature from the good folks at Mondo Macabro!

For Y'ur Height Only (1979)

Diminutive Secret Agent 00 (Weng Weng - 2' 9") saves the day! You just gotta love a Bond-clone that can use a pair of fire extinguishers as a jet pack. And I don't think I've ever laughed so hard as when he picks up a bad guy's rifle, shoots it once, and gets knocked back about 3 feet on his ass. (I've never understood why all good guys don't do this. You could shoot forever if you did that, instead of having a magical "infinite ammo" gun). Weng is trying to save a scientist who has created a new bomb, or some such. Its kinda hard to follow at times. For instance, in an early scene a woman is killed. But then some who looks like her in the rest of the movie. And then the bad guys (who are really proud of being evil!) capture Agent 00's girl friend. So the rescue is on, as Weng takes them all on pretty much alone. If I was the Phillipine mob, I'd be embarresed that I had my ass handed to me by a 2' 9" secret agent.

I also note that you can see that some of the women who are supposed to be "attracted" to him are clearly "oocked" out. I mean, honestly, I'm sure he was a nice guy. But at 2' 9", he's shorter than my children. Tough to act romantically attracted to a child (or at least, it ought to be).

The video looked pretty good, but the audio had some problems. Nice extras of a biography of Weng Weng, and an article about Dick Randall in the Phillipines. Good stuff.

Three out of five beers (but watch out for spit spray!)

Challenge of the Tiger (1980)

Another great exploitation field in the late 70's - early 80's was the fake Bruce Lee. Bruce Le was one such actor. He was one of the Clones of Bruce Lee (1977). This particular globe-trotting adventure (I think Randall did that so he could have nice vacations, but hey, its a great gig if you can get it!) pits Bruce against the mob, who have killed a scientist and stolen his formula for a impotency drug (god, there's that concept again!).

Bruce has a partner, played by Richard Harrison, who is there to attract all the women, get them naked, and that's pretty much it. I mean, he can be knocked out by already beat up bad guys. But he can talk women into playing topless tennis, so he does have that going for him. And the final fight scene lasts like the 15 minutes of the movie. It seems to go on forever. But it is that cool old kind of Kung Fu where people were actually fighting, not just wire work and special effects.

This movie too had audio problems, but not enough to be a problem. It's like they cut out words occasionally. I just pretended that it was censored, since it looks like we may be heading that way anyway.

Three beers out of five (and lift a glass to the memory of Dick Randall. There needs to be a lot more like him!)