Actuakers
One of my all time favorites.
Geraldine
The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.
Jerrie
It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...
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.
Witchfinder General 666
"Deadlier Than Male" of 1967 is a stylish and highly amusing spy/adventure flick that was clearly inspired by the popularity of the 60s James Bond films. None other than Quentin Tarantino is reported to love this film, and if that rumor is true, I can see why. My personal main-reason to watch the film was the ravishing Elke Sommer, of whom I've been a fan ever since I saw her in Mario Bava's brilliant Gothic flicks "Lisa And The Devil" and "Baron Blood". And while Elke Sommer, and fellow eye-candy Silvia Koschina ("Lisa And The Devil", "La Mala Ordina",...) as well as the rest of the sexy female cast are not the only reason to see this film, they are definitely the most convincing one. Bikini-clad babes, Bondish villains and a great, macabre sense of humor - this is what "Deadlier Tan Male" is all about. A promising premise, in my opinion. While this film is clearly a Bond-knockoff it re-invented a detective character of earlier decades. The character of Hugh 'Bulldog' Drummond was popularized in the 20s and 30s and a kind of English pendant to the private eyes in American hard-boiled detective novels and films. I have not seen any of the old Bulldog Drummond films so far, but I sure am going to. The Bulldog Drummond in this film is a very James Bond-ish rich playboy and spy. He is played by Richard Johnson, who was once intended to play the role of Bond in "Dr. No". After several people are killed by sexy female assassins, and by rather unusual methods, Drummond investigates in order to find the one who pulls the strings behind these murders. The film's most ravishing quality are Elke Sommer and Sylva Koschina, who play the constantly quarreling duo of sexy female assassins Irma (Sommer) and Penelope (Koschina). The cast furthermore includes Nigel Green ("The Masque Of The Red Death", "The Face Of Fu Manchu",...), and Milton Reid ("Dr Phibes Rises Again"). The relationship between Bulldog Drummond and his slightly annoying nephew is only remotely funny, but the constant dark humor, especially when people are being assassinated, is hilarious. Overall "Deadlier Than Male" is no must-see, but definitely a highly amusing flick that cult-cinema fans should enjoy.
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?
DEREKFLINT
I never cared for the title of this film, although it's a fitting description of the circumstances that bring Richard Johnson, as accident insurance investigator Drummond, onto the case. Elke Sommer and Sylvia Koscina provide ample "eye candy" as villian Nigel Green's "hit girls" (no "hit persons", thank you - this is before political correctness) and Richard Johnson is perfect as the suave Bond-inspired update of the 1930's character, Bulldog Drummond. The finale on a giant mechanical chess board is a highlight!
