THE FAT SPY (1966) 1/2* Anyone waxing nostalgic for the '60s should be reminded that some people were acting like this. Well, some people were behaving even more badly, but even among those who weren't Republicans or militarists some people were acting like this. It's just unbelievably bad, vacant, bereft of any redeeming value. It's ok not to have a plot, but there must be compensation of some sort, even entropic cleverness. It's ok to have bad acting, but you at least to have some totem of interest. As I said, there's nothing here. Definitive proof that you can't make a decent film just by making fun of the government and military, and showing lots of young people at beautiful Florida locations in swim suits. The scene where the very dumbest guy is walking out into the sea to meet a mermaid is very funny though, the problem being that it only lasts like twenty seconds. I also like the jagged- and multi-shaped cuts, of the sort that Murray Golden & associates perfected in the "Batman" tv series. It might have had potential as a drive-in flick, if they hadn't so repeatedly interrupted things with such horrible music. Honestly, I'm not sure that anything from even the bowels of '80s MTV (except for Depeche Mode and Tears For Fears, obviously) was nearly as bad as this stuff. Flock of Seagulls and the Smiths were definitely better, which I think says it all. It's enough to invoke Sylvia Plath. Jayne Mansfield is grotesque, horrid, repugnant, putrid, the foundation of a creature feature too detestable to view. Something to be buried like catshit, lest aliens or future generations know what came to pass and judge us harshly. I feel sincere sympathy and concern for anyone whose fetishism is so pathological as to lead to this. Incompetence and idiocy are often entertaining, but there is neither solace nor salvation in ubiquitous recalcitrance to quality.
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