Absolutely fascinating in a car-wreck sort-of way, the clumsily titled Licensed to Love and Kill is the United Kingdom’s parody of its own James Bond.

Not 007, No. 1 is Britain’s top secret agent (Gareth Hunt, Bloodbath at the House of Death). In the opening scene, he says via narration, “I ask myself, ‘What am I doing?’” One wonders if this line was scripted or merely Hunt’s personal assessment of his role in this stinker, and either director Lindsay Shonteff (Devil Doll) didn’t have the budget to edit it out or just didn’t care.

The plot has No. 1 assigned to retrieve lost American diplomat Lord Dangerfield (Noel Johnson, Frenzy). Before jetting off to the U.S., he visits this flick’s version of Q for the requisite cool gadgets and supplies. This Q has little more to offer than the knock-your-socks-off technology of magnetic ball bearings.

Dangerfield is being blackmailed by the evil Sen. Lucifer Orchid (Gary Hope, Romeo Is Bleeding), who has commissioned a No. 1 doppelgänger to further his devious plan, exactly whatever that may be. Apparently, Orchid is trying to compensate for being saddled with such a girlie last name, because here’s how flat-out mean he is:
• He shoots skeet out on the beach using real, live human beings.
• He flame-broils his whip-slinging midget sidekick (who looks like an Indian Roger Ebert) for no apparent reason, leaving only his Kenney shoes.
• He knowingly allows one of his mansion whores to take a swim in a pool of acid.
• He even keeps a cageful of hussies out back, whom he fancies poking with sticks.
• He is aided by Jensen Fury (Nick Tate, TV’s Space: 1999), a throaty henchman with pointy metal fingernails.

When Orchid sends an all-purpose, leather-masked bad guy out to chase No. 1 on a motorcycle, our secret-agent man calmly reacts by using his car’s giant retractable saw blade to cut the fellow’s chopper in half. It is here where I call Shonteff’s morals into question: He’ll allow an innocent girl to have all the flesh stripped off her in a chemical plunge, but he shies away from dissecting an unlikable thick-necked tuffie?

No. 1 seems more interesting in bedding the various oft-topless women waltzing in and out of this picture (it doesn’t bear the alternate title of The Man from S.E.X. for nothing!), like the car rental clerk who wears (to use the term lightly) a short, tight T-shirt reading “RENT ME.”

And all the above is just the first 45 minutes. No. 1 is a steaming, must-see lump of No. 2. —Rod Lott

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If remembered at all today, Loose Shoes is done so not for the nudity of Hill Street Blues‘ Betty Thomas (trust me), but for marking the screen debut of Bill Murray. A scrappy, Kentucky Fried Movie-style comedy of faux coming attractions, it’s the very definition of “mixed bag,” which means it’s not without some laughs.

One of them arrives with the first trailer out of the gate, for a biopic of a Howard Hughes-like character; intones the narrator, “But his hobby … was watching planes fuck.” Blue humor reigns throughout, with such bits as The Invasion of the Penis Snatchers, 2069: A Space Orgy, The Bad News Bears in Getting Laid and the African-American musical Dark Town After Dark, featuring a catchy number whose chorus celebrates “tight pussy, loose shoes and a warm place to shit.”

The longer segments tend not to work as well. These include the prison drama Three Cheers for Lefty!, in which Murray’s death-row inmate incites a riot over quiche; Scuffed Shoes, a ballet-set murder mystery; and Billy Jerk Goes to Oz. In the latter, a snake bite sends the Billy Jack-esque rebel to the wonderful world; how many of today’s young viewers would know who Billy Jack is?

Other targets of parody are Woody Allen, nature documentaries, Walt Disney family films, the Ma & Pa Kettle and Francis the Talking Mule franchises, Charlie Chaplin, spaghetti Westerns, Macon County Line, concession-stand commercials and Star Wars, which is rendered as a Jewish space opera with laser-shooting menorah. If Mel Brooks didn’t steal this idea from director/co-writer Ira Miller for History of the World: Part I, then … well, he totally stole it. —Rod Lott

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Director Michael Anderson’s career had come a long way since he was nominated for a Best Director Oscar for 1956’s Around the World in Eighty Days; unfortunately, it was mostly in the wrong direction. The ’70s hadn’t been kind to him. Logan’s Run had been a hit, but it had been preceded and followed by the famous flops Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze and Orca.

By the ’80s, he was reduced to working on Canadian tax shelter movies (1982’s Murder by Phone and 1986’s Separate Vacations) and the Australian sex comedy Second Time Lucky, which was produced by Roger Corman’s closest non-union Down Under equivalent, Tony Ginnane.

Originally planned as a full-length comedic look at the story of Adam and Eve, Second Time Lucky eventually morphed into an epoch-crossing episodic film detailing the battle of good and evil waged between God and the Devil as fought through one of the dudes from Porky’s and the woman you instantly will recognize as the French foreign exchange student John Cusack ended up with in Better Off Dead.

Ultimately, it is this young woman (Diane Franklin) who ends up giving the movie its only reason to exist. Indifferently directed by Anderson on an Australian sex-comedy budget, Second Time Lucky is less a cohesive narrative than a good excuse to see a very attractive lady-person in some state of undress every 10 minutes.

Such is the devotion and precision with which it unclothes Franklin that it borders on being the cinematic equivalent of an obsessive-compulsive disorder. And as a strategy to get 98 minutes to fly by, it’s not a bad plan. Franklin is almost pathologically adorable and does the naked thing very well. Enough so that it’s easy to forgive how utterly terrible everything else is around her.

And — make no mistake — everything around her is pretty goddamn terrible. British character actor Robert Morley clearly filmed his entire role as God in one day without ever leaving his chair, and although famed Aussie dancer Robert Helpmann once portrayed one of moviedom’s scariest villains as the Child Catcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, he fails to do much besides camp it up in all the wrong ways as Satan.

As an excuse to see Franklin naked a lot and to witness the heights from which mighty directors can fall, Second Time Lucky is probably worth a view. I know I’ve personally watched worse movie for worse reasons, but those who hold themselves to much higher standards can be forgiven for giving it a miss. —Allan Mott

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‘Tis with a fiery passion that I detest comedy writer Steve Oedekerk’s many thumb-based parody shorts, which include Thumbtanic, Bat Thumb and Thumb Wars: The Phantom Cuticle. They’re simply fucking stupid. I dislike them so much that I half-wish he would lose those two digits in an accident, in a bizarre twist of irony.

So I fully expected to despise his chopsocky parody, Kung Pow! Enter the Fist, with a passion. But other than an instantly dated Matrix bit, a lame gopher gag and the inane talking-tongue business (thus replacing the thumb), I really, really, really enjoyed it.

And to this day, I’m pretty embarrassed to admit it.

For the movie, Oedekerk removed the soundtrack from Hong Kong’s 1976 Jimmy Wang Yu vehicle Tiger and Crane Fist, and dubbed most all the voices himself. Using blue-screen technology, he also stars in the movie as the Chosen One, a martial-arts master seeking revenge for the murder of his parents at the hands of evil guy Master Pain, who now calls himself Betty.

All the conventions of the kung fu film are sent up with a mix of mindless Airplane!-style humor and good-natured Farrelly brothers raunch. But it most resembles a solid episode of TV’s Mystery Science Theater 3000, minus the silhouettes. Repeat value is strong with this one. —Rod Lott

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To say professor Percy Corly (Robert Wood, She-Devils on Wheels) knows nothing about women is an understatement: “Could it be,” he asks himself, “that girls are better than textbooks?”

Eff yes they are. Well, the sexy ones, at least.

In the harmless How to Make a Doll, one of Herschell Gordon Lewis’ more obscure pictures, the 32-year-old Corly lives with his henpecking mother (Elizabeth Davis, The Gruesome Twosome) who looks not unlike Cruella De Vil and pesters her son about the opposite sex to the point where he snaps, “I’m not queer, y’know!”

There’s hope for Corly’s virginity yet, when colleague Dr. West (Jim Vance, Scream Baby Scream) shows him his latest invention: a supercomputer that sometimes makes fart noises and speaks with a stereotypical Asian accent. Oh, but it also spits out hot-to-trot honeys in swimwear. For Corly, it’s a blonde in an orange bikini complete with camel toe; for West, a brunette made of “acres of warm, bouncing flesh.”

Much making out ensues, but Doll proceeds no further than first base. Perhaps that’s because Lewis’ precursor to John Hughes’ Weird Science suggests that such a machine would not be all it’s cracked up to be. That’s bullshit, Herschell — I still want one.  —Rod Lott

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