DANGER!! DEATH RAY (1967)

Prof. Carmichael is giving a demonstration of his new invention to a group of NATO officials. He was researching uses of radiation for medicine but accidentally discovered a death ray that can not only kill but also blast through the hardest material. After the demo, two men sitting in the back of the room, Frank and Jerry, jump up and spray the room with knockout gas. The machine self-destructs and Jerry is caught in sliding metal doors and killed but Frank kidnaps Carmichael in a helicopter and forces him to build a new ray at his spy organization's hideout in Barcelona. But wait! Secret agent Bart Fargo is called away from his vacation with a couple of loose women to find Carmichael. Thus begins another 60s era Eurospy flick in the James Bond tradition, but with a lower budget, lesser acting talent, some awkward fisticuffs and a weaker script. Still, with a proper lowering of expectations, this sort of works. Gordon Scott plays Bart Fargo (a great name!). Scott was a second-tier action lead in some pretty good Tarzan movies in the 1950s and in some Italian muscleman films in the 60s. Here, at the age of 40, he still had his looks—still almost boyish—and his build (though sadly he only gets one very brief shirtless scene). He plays it a little too straight, lacking the slightly snarky or campy edge that other Eurospy leads had, but he's the main reason for sticking with this. (The other reason is a great Eurojazz score.) Like Bond, he has a flirty relationship with his boss's secretary, but in the course of action, he sleeps with two possible femme fatales: Lucille (Delfi Mauro), a bohemian artist who likes to paint topless, and Mrs. Carver (Sylvia Solar) who turns out to be the wife of a bad guy. 

Nello Pazzafini (as Frank) is a more brutal looking bad guy than Alberto Dalbes (Carver), but the best plot twist here is that Frank's bad guy buddy Al (the handsome cleancut Max Dean, aka Massimo Righi) is saved from death by Bart and flips to his side, and just in the nick of time. There appear to be two Massimo Righis out there, and IMDb gets the info on this guy wrong, saying he was born in 1907 which would make him 60 here, and this guy is nowhere near 60. There is apparently another Massimo Righi with a birth year of 1935 which seems right. In any case, Al is really the most interesting character in the movie and we come to care about his outcome. Spoiler: In a nicely done scene near the end, it looks like Al has flipped back to Frank's side, but it's a fakeout. Sadly, Al is killed off saving Bart's life, just before the finale. Bart gets trapped in Carver's villa which is equipped with remote control mini-machine guns in every room, and then Carver actually tries to use the death ray. There's another fakeout scene earlier when two sexy women sneak up on a sleeping Bart, about to do him harm, but actually they're quite friendly. The best scene might be when a goon attacks Bart in his hotel room and accidentally goes flying out the window to his death—it made me both gasp and laugh. The dubbing is not great, and Scott's performance would have been better if he hadn’t been dubbed. The miniature special effects are just terrible—when a car goes tumbling into the ocean, it's clearly a toy car thrown into a bathtub; same with a toy submarine seen earlier in the film. But obviously my affection for this genre allows me to enjoy this movie despite its faults. An Alaskan pop-punk band from the 2000s took this movie's title for its name. Pictured are Dean and Scott. [YouTube]