I bought this box set two years ago for $19.99 and it took me that long to get to THE WRECKING CREW and finally finish up the set. (I’ve been on a Nancy Kwan kick lately and that’s what motivated me to finally see this.) I'd seen all four long ago, THE SILENCERS when it first came on TV and the last three all when they were released in theaters. The only one I ever really liked was MURDERERS’ ROW and it certainly held up when I watched the DVD in this set. It’s got the best theme music and the best cast, esp. Karl Malden as a formidable villain and two gorgeous women in Ann-Margret and Camilla Sparv. It’s also got the best jokes in the whole series ("Patti, Maxine and Laverne" "Sorry Frank" "Can you turn off your head?"). The other Helm films are no better than I remembered them—all mediocre. THE WRECKING CREW is the worst. The only things I remembered from seeing it in the theater were two of his song parodies and the laughably incompetent “karate” fight between Tate and Kwan at the end. (Poor Bruce Lee—no wonder he ran off to Hong Kong after this to make movies.) I’d forgotten that WRECKING CREW also has the worst music—by Hugo Montenegro, who ruined so much good music with his album covers of “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.” and THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY. I can’t believe this film was written by William McGivern, who gave us so many great crime novels in the 1950s, like “The Big Heat,” “Rogue Cop,” “Shield for Murder,” and “Odds Against Tomorrow.”
I’m a big fan of Dean Martin, but these films, excepting MURDERERS’ ROW, represent the collapse of the studio system, when a bunch of old men were trying to figure out what was hip to the young moviegoing audience and kept flopping, until some mavericks came along the next year and made EASY RIDER for the same studio that released the Helm films.
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