Movie Review: Matt Helm Four-in-One

Sony has out a four-in-one package featuring the Dean Martin/Matt Helm spy comedies on two DVDs.  It's titled the Matt Helm Lounge.

The set includes The Silencers with Stella Stevens and an exotic Daliah Lavi, Murderers' Row with Ann-Margaret, The Ambushers with Janice Rule and bad girl Senta Berger, and The Wrecking Crew with Sharon Tate, defector Tina Louise who's much sexier in her brief presence than as Ginger on Gilligan's island, and bad girls Elke Sommer and Nancy Kwan.

The girls are great, Martin seemed to be having a good time, and you'be got a nice selection of villains including Victor Buono as a Dr. No-type, Karl Malden, Albert Salmi, and Nigel Greene.

Just to spice things up, The Wrecking Crew includes fight scenes choreographed by Bruce Lee who got a young Chuck Norris a job as one of the bad guy's muscle guys.

The plots are almost superfluous as anyone who knows the Matt Helm movies can tell you.  It isn't the plot you watch the movie for.  The style reproduces Dean Martin's patented routine from his then-popular TV comedy-variety show on NBC:  his suggestive jokes and ribbing of fellow Rat Packer Frank Sinatra, backed up by Hollywood's great babes and a large number of great character actors.

For the record, in The Silencers, photographer Helm is called up by ICE to investigate a plot to start World War III by a Chinese agent who gains control of missiles at White Sands.  Naturally, Helm starts at a strip club.

In Murderers' Row, he checks out the death of an ICE agent and winds up bodyguarding Ann-Margaret (good taste prevents me from making obvious remarks), which leads him into a plot to vaporize Washington DC.

The Ambushers involves an investigation of the disappearance of a saucer-shaped experimental spacecraft that somehow winds up in the hands of a right-winger in Mexico.

The Wrecking Crew has to do with Helm trying to recover a massive amount of gold stolen by an international crime gang, aided by a clumsy on-scene assistant.