First up Thunderbirds Are Go, a 1966 SuperMartionation movie written by Gerry and Sylvia Anderson. It was directed by David Lane who had worked on the Thunderbirds TV series and would go onto work on more of the Anderson's shows. I was a fan of those programs when I was a kid but wasn't such a one as an adult. I had seen the movie before, a long time ago, and I had forgotten most of the story details. I'm pretty sure I had a bootleg copy back in the 1980's. I copied everything I rented and recorded many movies from various cable channels. Tapes were expensive back then and most of what went on them was recorded at the slow speed. I remember being excited in finding a source for $10 T-120 VHS tapes and thinking that they were a bargin. A lot of those EP speed (6 Hours on a T-120) tapes were pretty poor looking and they were discarded during one purge or another.
So we all were sort of interested in Thunderbirds Are Go, and we put that on. Right from the start we've got an unattractive title which is followed by a quarter of an hour of spaceship launch porn. They assemble that blue spaceship, the Zero X, on the field before launch. There's a complicated dance, with lot's of moving parts, as the main body, the two flight wings, the cockpit module and the shiny, really pointy, nose cone all merge together, very slowly. I thought, with the Zero X's bulky shape and minimal curves, it would translate into LEGO fairly well. I doubt I will build one. After the launch we, the viewers, find there is a spy on board. He gets his foot stuck in the hydralics which causes the planned trip to Mars to be aborted in favor of crashing the ship into the ocean with a big oily splash and a great ball of fire. The spy got away by jumping out a hatch before the ship crashed.
The movie started in 2065 and two years later the new Zero X is readying to launch. The commander of the base asks International Rescue to step in with their fancy flying craft and make sure the flight to Mars is a success. International Rescue is the brain child of Mr. Tracey and he's got 5 sons and 5 vehicles to save the day. Everyone gets a job to do except poor Alan who's stuck at home with dad. There isn't any undersea work planned.
Lady Penelope and her man-servant Parker show up in the Fab-1. She's posing as a reporter and she slips each of the Mars crew a medal. It's helps spot the spy the morning of the launch. It's the evil Hood from the series. He runs off and Parker blasts his ship out of the sky. The launch is successful, the ship is off to Mars, and the boys all go with Lady Penelope to a night club called the Swinging Star. Poor Alan is jealous and he goes to bed so upset he has a rather suggestive dream. That's Alan in his rainbow tux and silver top hat next to Lady Penelope. That's an ugly suit, huh. In the dream the Swinging Star is in space and Alan is taken there by a flying Fab-1. That's it, on the right below, covered with Cliff Richard and The Shadows. The dream turns into a music video when they get to the club. Eventually the dream is over and Alan falls off the nightclub and plummets back the island base he calls home. He falls out of bed. It's all pretty awful.
On Mars the crew finds some weird rock formations. They blow one up. Turns out the formations are coiled up rock snakes that shoot flaming balls out of their mouths. The crew kills off as many of the rock beasts as they can and head back to earth. The Zero X has suffered some damage and they can't land. They will need some rescuing. Call for International Rescue. Alan gets to be the point man this time. He's fired out of Thunderbird 2 and using a big magnet he sticks to the bottom of the Zero X where he manages to rewire the stuck escape pod. The crew escape and Lady Penelope takes Alan out to the real Swinging Star.
TAG was somewhat entertaining to me but I didn't enjoy it as much as I probably did when it was new. I'm betting I went to the theater to see the movie in it's original release. Mom used to give my brother and I a buck or two and we'd go downtown to the movies a couple of times a month. Before we watched it tonight I had a faint memory of not caring much for the movie. That must have been why I didn't bother to replace the old EP copy when I ditched that and now that I've seen it again I don't think I will need to go out and get a copy. The story is weak and disjointed. The dialog isn't very interesting at times, poor occasionally, and Brain only has 3 lines in the whole movie. The villian disappears a third of the way into the movie and never returns. The puppets never walk about. We keep hoping but in the future everyone seems to have moving chairs and couches that get them where they want to go. Even in the nightclub scene everyone, even the band, is sitting or standing, never moving, The model work is pretty good, most of the time, and most of the special effects are fairly good for the time. Occasionally it all fails and you have to cringe or laugh. According to the Wikipedia the movie didn't do too well at the box office. Hoping it was a fluke they made a second film that did not do very well. They didn't do anymore films and the second season was cut to 6 episodes. The company moved on to Captain Scarlet. We moved on to Turkey for our next selection.
Our second feature was Yilmayan Seytan, a 1973 Turkish movie called The Deathless Devil here in the USA. It was part of a two pack that Mondo Macabro put out a while ago. You can't find it new on Amazon anymore. YS is a remake of the Mysterious Doctor Satan, a 1940 serial. A rich guy is funding the Professor's remote control invention. The Professor has a daughter and the rich guy has a son. The rich guy tells his son Tekin that he's adopted. His real dad was a costumed super hero named Copperhead who died fighting crime. The rich guy gives Tekin his dad's mask and tells him his real dad was murdered by Doctor 
Seytan. Tekin leaves his step dad and while he's gone who should show up but a minion of Doctor Seytan. The guy kills the secretary and then Tekin's step dad. Tekin returns to his step dad's office, interupts the minion, and beats his ass. That was one whacky fight scene. They toss each other around until they disappear off the right hand side of the screen and in a cut wind up on the roof of a building. You don't see how that happens. They punch each other out of the left hand side of the film and land right back into the office. Amazing! The minion is over powered. When he talks Doctor Seytan blows him up with his remote control bomb belt.
That Doctor Seytan is one mean son of a bitch and he's pretty ugly too. Having a big droopy mustache like Doctor Fu Manchu doesn't make you as cool as Doctor Fu Manchu. Tekin is often hindered by his side kick Bitik, a very stupid comic relief machine who wears a plaid Sherlock Holmes kind of outfit for nearly the whole movie. What a numb nuts that guy is. Who would have a pal like that? I have been watching the Bowery Boys and let me tell you having Satch for a pal would wear thin fast and he'd have to get a new pal right soon.
There's a bit of topless scene when that bikini lady seduces Tekin. Like the serial it's based on YS has someone getting caught every few minutes and there's a lot of escaping or getting rescued. There's a fight before and after someone gets kidnapped or escapes and not one of them is very good. The guys jump and tumble about, occasionally someone gets knocked out. Mostly it's Bitik. There's double crossing on both sides and the double crossers get theirs. After the Professor is kidnapped he bribes a guard to help him escape. It doesn't work and the guard is crushed by Doctor Seytan's 
robot. I love that robot, it's so goofy. Doctor Seytan wants to raise an army of those robots to take over the world. Who wouldn't want that? The Professor's remote control device is just what he needs to better control his tin can army. YS is no great piece of work but it's entertaining enough to watch once or twice for a laugh. There's as much over acting as there is no acting. The film stock isn't even close to being color corrected. It's a poorly made film in just about every way. Very much like some of the poorer serials it emulates. Still, we got a laugh or two. It's fun to see stuff like this. While out scavaging images I found these truck and car pictures. That's how the movie looks much of the time. The truck picture came from the Internet Movie Cars Database. Who knew.