Merolliv
I really wanted to like this movie. I feel terribly cynical trashing it, and that's why I'm giving it a middling 5. Actually, I'm giving it a 5 because there were some superb performances.
chaos-rampant
More famously this one gets credit for predating Inspector Gadget, whether or not it was the actual source of inspiration. Gadget was daft but coasted on technology, often disastrous, stupid luck, and borrowed genius from his friends. Here we have another such private dick wired with all sorts of gizmo that save the day, but is seen more shrewdly within the original context of inspiration: Sherlock Holmes, where all the machinations were cranked out in the mind.Pulp lore tells us Nick Carter actually debuted a year before Sherlock Holmes so could not have been influenced, but historical adherence is hardly the point here. Nick Carter is as much the object of sheer movie enjoyment, as a kind of James Bond test run, as a hodge podge of the suave American movie icon, the private dick, the action star, the movie hunk, as of biting scrutiny. This is never more obvious than in his overt reliance to eccentric gadgetry to see him through. It's his fat, bumpy, Czech colleague, his Dr. Watson as it were, who finally brings Moriarty down, by sheer street-wise craftsmanship and a good mark.It helps to know as background on what this is, that this is by the same filmmaker behind the anti-capitalist western farce Lemonade Joe.Otherwise, it's as you know Czech comedy; a broadly surreal imagination centered nowhere, with no deeper, cultural identity other than visual, worked out in terms of representational theater or ballroom jazz. Lovely energy, but loud structure. Flowery visual gaudiness.Example of this here is the business with mirrored selves. The bookish maid turns out to be the sultry cabaret dancer, seducing behind a cat mask. Our mysterious evil nemesis is the world's biggest crook. Nick Carter dresses up his Dr. Watson as himself, and appears a third time in the end as the dreamy lover.What a more erudite filmmaker could do, say, is that he could center each of these shifting selves within a shifting part of the world, so that each new swirl with each new guise revealed a part that we didn't know before. This is merely a papier-mache costume party, kind of fun on the spot, but you had to be there.
dbborroughs
Nick Carter goes to Prague to help the police with a missing persons case and promptly runs afoul of an evil botanist with a man eating plant.I remember thirty years ago when this movie came out in the US seeing reviews on the local TV station that made me want to see this film. The limited release it got prevented me from doing so, as did the complete disappearance from TV and video. Still the idea of that hungry plant had haunted me for three decades while many other "must see" movies came and went. Thanks to stupid luck I stumbled upon a copy of the film and I have to say that I was not disappointed.This is a jokey send up of the pulp thrillers from the turn of the twentieth century. It takes one of its greatest heroes, Nick Carter and plays with everything that makes the pulps so much fun. Here Carter is called into action and using a variety of wild inventions he takes on a villain that is very much of the "boo hiss" Snidley Whiplash, mustache twirling variety. Its just a fun movie done in the style of stories that haven't been in vogue in a century. No big belly laughs but lots of chuckles and plenty of smiles.If you want to see a good little film, thats probably all but forgotten now, you'll need to search it out. Its not going to be the be all and end all but its a neat little gem to add to you list of film treasures.
