Over at Jaime Weinman's blog I learned that the four Dean Martin-as-Matt-Helm movies are going to be released on DVD. As all fans of Matt Helm know, these movies bear absolutely no resemblance to the novels they're supposedly based on. They are, in fact, pretty awful. It's frightening to think that they're about to be released to an unsuspecting public. (The suspecting public will be careful to avoid them.)
4 comments:
No shit they're awful. I only tried one of them and left after twenty minutes. I wanted to apologize to Donald Hamilton, one of my all-time favorite writers, on behalf of the entire human race. I just never got Dean Martin. I guess. He smirked his way through everything as if he was superior to the material and wanted to make sure the audience knew it. Ed Gorman
Heh! I found the movies cheesily amusing, in that venerable category known as "So Bad It's Fun". But then, I never was that huge a fan of the Matt Helm books. Didn't hate them, just never got into them. I was a Destroyer fan, though. And Nick Carter: Killmaster.
I love the Destroyer books, and of course I am Nick Carter.
I seem to recall that they were supposed to be secret agent spoofs, at a time when spoofs were big business in Hollywood to th point where they were actually calles spoofs instead of satires. The only tryouble is that James Coburn's Flint series were so much better.
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