Leofwine_draca An affectionate alternatively to the popular Sean Connery-starring Bond films of the 1960s, DEADLIER THAN THE MALE takes the literary character Bulldog Drummond and turns him to a suave, handsome British playboy while eliminating the racism that marked the original stories. Indeed this is a film clearly modelled on the Bond template, with a chief villain, some highly memorable henchmen (or henchwomen in this case), exotic and sun-drenched locales, and plenty of action to propel what is a tight, two-fisted narrative.The most surprising thing is that this is actually better than some of the Connery Bonds! It's certainly more entertaining than the likes of the dreary DR NO and the overlong THUNDERBALL and it comes close to reaching the heights of my favourite '60s spy film, the classic GOLDFINGER. It's also fair to say that Richard Johnson (ZOMBIE FLESH EATERS) is a far better actor playing Drummond than Connery was playing Bond, and it's a shame Johnson missed out on the big role. Still, at least we have him here and in this film's sequel, the less successful SOME GIRLS DO.The film looks and feels fun and colourful and a witty and intelligent screenplay from Hammer scribe Jimmy Sangster is responsible for the sparkling dialogue. Despite the fun and hijinks, it also has a dark edge, with some fairly violent moments that usually come courtesy of the (male) assassins sent to dispatch Johnson. A brawl in an underground car park is a highlight (and far better than in the film that ripped it off, TOMORROW NEVER DIES) as are the fights with hulking muscleman Milton Reid.As the title implies, in the end this is a film all about the women – and lovely they are too. Elke Sommer and Sylva Koscina, two Euro-beauties who dominated the screen in the '60s and '70s, have a ball as the pair of intelligent, charming and very beautiful female assassins who you can't help but love even when they're blowing people up with exploding cigars and harpooning the good guys. It helps that they wear very little, too. Hammer starlet Suzanna Leigh (LUST FOR A VAMPIRE) pops up towards the end as another memorable beauty while Nigel Green (THE FACE OF FU MANCHU) has fun playing the bad guy for a change. Add in cameos from Leonard Rossiter, George Pastell, and UK TV actor George Sewell. Comedy director Ralph Thomas isn't the first person you'd pick to helm a film like this, but he turns out to be the perfect choice, providing just the right blend of thrills, spills, camp and smoothness. The excellent idea of having a life-size chess set was later stolen by HARRY POTTER AND THE PHILOSOPHER'S STONE.

MartinHafer I was very surprised by this film. While it is supposed to be a Bulldog Drummond movie, it's really a James Bond type picture...and a pretty good one. While the plot doesn't always make sense, I have to remind myself that plot holes and ridiculously overly complicated murders are also found in just about all the Bond films! So, when in the opening scene a woman plants an exploding cigar on someone and after he's dead she activates a bomb, your brain says 'why didn't they just plant the bomb?'. The same goes for a few other scenes such as having a judo class only a foot away from a balcony ledge? Just turn off your brain and go with it!!So what does the film have going for it? Well, Dick Johnson (nice manly name, huh?) is very good in the lead--reasonably handsome but also quite physical and a decent actor. Also, the plot isn't as insanely BIG as many Bond films as the killings are for profit and the baddie isn't quite a Blofeld in his sensibilities. Overall, well done and well worth seeing.By the way, the version I saw had the German working title 'Heisse Katzen'--literally 'Hot Cats'--most likely a reference to the beautiful women (including Elke Sommer) who are the assassins.

GrandpaBunche Back in the 1960's when the world went nuts over the exploits of James Bond, filmmakers all over the globe flew into action and released a slew of imitators in hope of cashing in on the secret agent zeitgeist. There were seemingly hundreds of Bond imitators unleashed upon an innocent movie-going public and the majority of them sucked out loud, being cloyingly and unfunnily campy at best or downright boring at their worst — the Derek Flint movies, OUR MAN FLINT (1966) and IN LIKE FLINT (1967) being among the best of the lot — so finding a gem amongst that misbegotten subgenre, the so-called "spy spoofs," is a rare occurrence. DEADLIER THAN THE MALE isn't just a rare gem, it's an downright treasure of the genre and it came from out of nowhere to make my list of all-time favorite espionage thrillers.Top oil company executives have been dropping like flies, horribly and creatively done in by a pair of mouth-watering assassins: cold, Teutonic Imma (Elke Sommer) and sunny-but-sadistic nympho/kleptomaniac Penelope (Sylva Koscina). As the body count rises, British secret agent Bulldog Drummond (Richard Johnson, a good ringer for Sean Connery) is called in to investigate and must figure out who the murderesses are and, more importantly, why they're on a killing spree, resulting in Drummond's efforts placing him and his randy nephew, Robert (Steve Carlson), square in the killers' sights. To say any more would give away much of this thoroughly entertaining adventure, so I'll shut up right here and now. Just take my word for it that if you're a fan of Bondish thrills, an enthusiast for "chicks who kick ass" movies, or even a casual observer, you won't go wrong by seeking this one out.DEADLIER THAN THE MALE shamelessly set out to ape what made the earlier Bond films so much fun and possesses all of the elements that we've come to expect from the 007 series, so much so that one could have easily taken an unproduced Bond script, crossed out the words "James Bond," replaced them with "Bulldog Drummond," and no one would have been any the wiser save for noticing Richard Johnson (heh, "Dick Johnson") filling in for Sean Connery. No lie, it's got everything you need to make a decent James Bond flick:* An interesting plot that takes the hero on a globe-trotting adventure.* Hot chicks, this time being much more clever than just about any Bond Girl you can name.* A cool car; Drummond drives a Rolls and puts it to brutal offensive use.* A memorable title song, sung here by the Walker Brothers, the guys who performed the 1966 #1 chart-topper "The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine Anymore."* The hard-to-achieve spot-on balance of thrills and humor; the laughs here are genuine and played totally straight, with Sylva Koscina's kooky and homicidal Penelope stealing the film.* A cool/weird lair for the chief baddie.* Kickass fights; the ass-whuppin' found here is better than anything found in the entire 007 series, with the exceptions of FROM Russia WITH LOVE (1963), ON HER MAJESTY'S SECRET SERVICE (1969), AND CASINO ROYALE (2006).* No over-the-top gadgets that allow the hero to win without really trying, in other words technological superpowers.* Kinky torture.In short, it's all good and I had a big, satisfied smile on my face when the film ended.Other than stumbling across it and reading many reviews touting how good it was, DEADLIER THAN THE MALE further piqued my interest with the presence of Elke Sommer, one of the rare Aryan types who gets me going. Her beauty was compounded by a genuine sense of humor and great comedic chops as proved in A SHOT IN THE DARK (1963), the second and best of the Inspector Clouseau comedies, and she turned up frequently in sixties flicks that required a hot piece of Eurotrash who could actually act, perhaps most notoriously in the howlingly-bad must-see all-star disaster THE Oscar (1966). And as if Elke wasn't enough to get my attention, she's aided by Sylva Koscina, a Croatian cutie probably best known to film goons as Iole in the Steve Reeves peplum classics HERCULES (1958) and HERCULES UNCHAINED (1960), a character I've carried a torch for since I was but a kid.Unlike most of the legion of Bond clones, this one delivers in spades, even as the actual series began to suffer under its perceived need to outdo itself, becoming an excessive self-parody by virtue of sacrificing the plot in favor of spectacle and gadgets while the scripts became more ludicrously fantastic and convoluted. I'd even go so far as to say that DEADLIER THAN THE MALE is actually a hell of a lot better than the two Connery Bond films that came out right before and after its release, namely THUNDERBALL (1965), a slow-moving bloatfest worth seeing mostly for a great villain, and YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE (1967), the first of the insanely over-the-top Bonds that blends spaceships, assault helicopter fights, offensively stereotypical western male fantasies about Japanese women, and — I kid you not — ninjas to form what amounts to a listless travelogue with would-be clever dialog. In every way, DEADLIER THAN THE MALE is the Bond film that should have been a part of the series rather than those two lackluster entries, both of which used to hold a fond place in my younger Bond fan's heart, but now stand revealed in my eyes as nothing more than examples of a franchise operating on autopilot and following the theory of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." Why sit through either those for the umpteenth time when you can add this overlooked classic to your Netflix queue?

Bogmeister MASTER PLAN: expand a corporate empire via simple assassinations. Capt. Hugh 'Bulldog' Drummond, a gentleman who indulged in detective work, was conceived in the 1920's in a series of novels and was in quite a few films in the 1930's and 40's. The last one before this was a 1951 potboiler "Calling Bulldog Drummond," with Walter Pidgeon. This late-in-the-game restart of sorts has Mr. Drummond (not referred to as 'Bulldog' here) as little more than an insurance investigator. However, the character and plot borrow heavily from the popular James Bond formula of the sixties and results in the closest approximation to the actual Bond films during this period, more so than the 'Flint' duo of films and the Matt Helm series of films, which featured American spies. The actor Johnson, as Drummond, even resembles Sean Connery in some shots, with a similar virile approach, a slight grim smirk & tough demeanor, and Johnson is a fine actor, so this isn't just some silly parody; yet, it does capture that same vicious streak of gallows humor. So, yes, the wicked humor is there - I mean, really wicked. The two main femme fatales (played by Sommer & Koscina) are curvaceous assassins and they're outrageously effective (hence, the film's title). They are completely amoral, enjoying their work and behaving as if they're shopping in some high-end store rather than killing people. Some of their scenes, the terminations, actually made me wince a little, probably because I'm not used to seeing such cruelty and callousness on film from females, even if it is comedic in nature and tone. Ironically, the lethal ladies would be copied by the Bond films in "Diamonds Are Forever," where the assassins were gay males rather than female.The plot tends to be fiendishly funny, if you like that dark satire take on things: the head villain is an out-of-control capitalist, moving through the corporate world with a new set of rules and simplistic ruthlessness. If, for example, members of a board vote on a corporate resolution and it's tied 5 to 5, he simply disposes of the member whom he feels is holding up the vote, to change it in his favor. Drummond catches on to this, of course, and becomes the latest target. The best and most intense scene, straight out of the Bond movies and about an hour in, is the requisite 'villain and henchpeople have a last supper with the hero as planned victim' scenario. But, Drummond taunts the villain and provokes the henchman (a burly poor man's Oddjob) into some bad moves. Drummond proves to be fearless - he's surrounded by characters we now know to be very dangerous and ends up mocking them all - it's one of the best Bond scenes and it's not in a Bond movie. Drummond then defies expectations by refusing to partake in the also-requisite 'hero & femme fatale seduction scene,' much to the lady's surprise and anger. And, even though the budget is understandably lower than a typical Bonder (while we're in London in the 1st half, there's barely any spectacle), the filmmakers do manage to throw in that wild, weird chess board later, outdoing many of the grander set-pieces in the Bond films. Since Johnson plays it straight, even straighter than Connery some might say, much of this resembles "Dr.No" and "From Russia With Love," the Bonders which relied mostly on pure espionage. Sommer and actor Nigel Green would reunite in the Matt Helm Bond-spoof "The Wrecking Crew," playing similar characters. Drummond and Johnson would return one more time in "Some Girls Do." Hero:8 Villain:8 Femme Fatales:9 Henchmen:6 Fights:7 Stunts/Chases:6 Gadgets:6 Auto:6 Locations:7 Pace:8 overall:7