Monday, June 06, 2005

The Greatest DVD Box Set Ever

It's finally coming.

Which is the best of the Matt Helm tetralogy? The Silencers, with its coruscating inside look at the lack of trust that pervades the lounge-lizard culture? Murderer's Row, a study of the plight of go-go dancers with exploding dresses? The Ambushers, combining a study of the space race and the feminist movement in its tale of a spacecraft that can only be flown by women because it kills any man who tries to operate it? Or The Wrecking Crew, a magnificent epic about the infusion of Eurasian culture into the world of international train robbing, punctuated by the deeply spiritual music of Hugo Montenegro: who can forget the theme song with the choral refrain "Ah, so, velly velly nice?"

When the DVD set comes out we will all have time to mull over the myriad profundities of these films.

Addendum: and, yes, these films are an insult, a slap in the face and a spit in the eye to Donald Hamilton. But in all fairness, the post-1960s Bond films have little more to do with Ian Fleming's books than the Helm movies have to do with Hamilton's.


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