CineBad!!!

Ah so! Ancient cult of Death velly evil! This movie velly cheesy! Secret Agent man Mr. Drake save Japanese fishing village by browing up secret mountain lair of evil!

The movie begins with a crowded Tokyo street. We see a woman run into her apartment building. When she gets inside, she runs to a pot of flowers. But this is no ordinary pot of flowers! The red rose contains an antenna! The pot has hidden buttons and switches! one of the other flowers has a microphone. Secret Agent Nakamura reporting! Tragically, however, before she can finish her report, one of the flowers belches forth a nerve toxin, and she collapses on the floor.

Enter Mizzah Drake-san (McGoohan.) The British Government are hot on the trail of a secret sect in Japan, a revival of an ancient Death-worshipping cult. It’s never explained why this particular cult poses a risk to international security, but that’s OK. Mr. Drake must nonetheless infiltrate and destroy this cult. And he must do it… secretly!

Mr Drake impersonates “Sharp,” a British electronics genius who is selling secret radio-wave decoding technology to the Kiroshi cult. He has very few leads, so he has to navigate a complex path of informers and secret handshakes to get where he’s going. There’s a fragment of a puzzle, and a weird lady who hangs out all day in a bar working on a perpetually incomplete puzzle. When the pieces are assembled, it’s yet another clue! Now Drake must go to an island somewhere and have a long, drawn-out conversation with a weird English guy who has an annoying way of speaking… THIS leads him to the “Murdered Island,” for generations the home of pearl fishermen. When an ancient prophesy (involving the deaths of the heads of three pearl-diving families) is fulfilled, the islanders all leave for the mainland, where they have very little income. It’s all because the Koroshi cult have chosen this particular island, and its hollow volcano, to set up their base of super-secret death-worshipping espionage stuff.

Exhausted yet? Yes, a single five minutes of Koroshi has more plot twists that any James Bond film. Partially, it’s because Koroshi was originally planned as the first four episodes of the British TV show, “Danger Man,” before Patrick McGoohan quit the show to do “The Prisoner.” In fact, Patrick McGoohan was approached about playing James Bond… twice!

Anyway, back to our story. Now Drake must infiltrate the Evil Mountain and save the Japanese fishermen! Will he do it in time? Or, will he be blown to bits by the cult leader’s personal desktop machine gun?

This is a funny, racist movie with lots of slanty-eyed bit characters and silly accents. There’s also a Kabuki version of Hamlet which helps us understand the “poetry of Death.” Hi- tech gadgetry and secret agentry abounds. In fact, as the double- agent taxi driver slurs, “I am een your service… your seclet service.” The plot also merits a high cheese rating, since you’re never quite sure what’s going on. Fortunately for us, they spread the camp extra-thick on this one.