Like
any good spy, American Bob Fleming is about to get intimate with a curvy
redhead when the phone rings. It is his boss with orders to come in. He bids
the frustrated woman a "you had your chance" farewell. He has a liking for
long tapered legs and pretty much anything in skirts. Two Russian scientists
have defected with microfilm that the Russians are trying to retrieve by
hook or by poisoned blow darts from a pipe. The boss tells him he has permission
to kill but more importantly no limits on how much he can spend. You won't
hear the US Government saying that very often.
Fleming is played by Richard Harrison in
this Euro-Spy film. Harrison was another American who left for Europe very
early on in his Hollywood career to appear in Peplum films. It seems like
every American with pectoral muscles found their way over to Italy and then
other genres. Harrison is especially interesting because he ended up doing
all these Ninja and martial arts films for Godfrey Ho during the 1980s. By
1991 he was in a film titled Nudist Colony of the Dead. That I think was
a sign that your career had seen better days. He begins in Paris where one
of the defectors has been killed in a café with that pipe based weapon.
Fleming has a few gadgets of his own - aspirin that when dissolved in your
stomach allows you to track the person and a mini-laser beam. He and the
Russkies continue to bump into each other wherever they are. Maybe they all
took aspirins.
Next up is Hamburg, sin city of Germany
with a Red Light district larger than most towns. Fleming and the Russians
end up in a classy club mid-afternoon where women wrestle on stage and other
well-dressed women sit at tables waiting for a phone call from another table.
Discreet. Then one more clue sends all of them off to Beirut, one of
the favorite locations of Euro-Spy films for some reason - financial I expect
but also a very cinematic city. In this one though they stay away from the
usual historic spots and spend it in the streets or outside of Beirut. Two
women show up - one a deadly blonde, the other a demure brunette. The film
is fairly typical for one of these films but moves quickly, has a few good
slugfests and has some interesting characters.
