O.K. CONNERY - "Operation Kid Brother" (1967)

 

Tonight we've got the ultimate spy spoof for you as a Saturday Night Special!, "O.K. Connery," or as you can also see, "Operation Kid Brother!" This time around, both titles make as much sense as anything else!

"O.K. Connery" is a truly fantastic movie, but unfortunately that doesn't exactly translate into good, but utterly fascinating, no doubt!

I'm not quite sure where to start or what to try and explain, you just need to see it for yourself to understand! It's a spoof, but it's not funny at all, and they play it very straight, and the story is a convoluted mess never referring to James Bond by name, because the world's best secret agent is named Connery, not Bond, but it's him just the same!

But just like in all James Bond movies, there's lots of gadgets, women, and action! This TV set looks odd, because it's being projected onto the backside of a beautiful gal in the lair of the diabolical  Mr. Thai!

Well, here he is, Sean Connery's little brother, Neil as who else, Dr. Neil Connery! This was Neil's first role, and he's not really a bad actor at all! With all the bullshit he probably had to put up with, you can't hardly blame him for quitting the business after 2 movies, and 8 TV shows!

So how far over the top were the makers of this movie willing to go? All the way!!! Yep, your eyes don't deceive you, it's Bernard Lee also known as M, and Lois Maxwell, better known as Miss Moneypenny, only their names are now Commander Cunningham, and Max, and they are out to recruit the unwilling Doctor Connery to help them stop some nefarious evil! At one point, they suggest that Neil shave off his beard to look more like his brother, but he resolutely declines!

Dr. Connery is also an archer of the highest caliber! You'll understand why this is important by the time it gets to the end!

Shot from this angle, Neil does look remarkably like brother Sean!

 

Here's a tricky gadget that gets used more than once! It looks like a simple knife, but the blade shoots out like a bullet, and the victim is always taken off guard!!

Mildred's sense of fashion is otherworldly! Mildred was played by Agata (How To Kill 400 Duponts) Flori! This is also a good spot to tell you that the music in "O.K. Connery" was created by the two biggest names in Italian movie music, Ennio Morricone and Bruno Nicolai!! The title song was sung by Christy, and was as 007 as they could make it! I chose to give you a sample of something a little different, from that pink wig scene where you see those guys walking around with guitars at the airport! Here's a little 1960's Italian Pop music!

There sure isn't anything the least bit suspicious looking about a group of beautiful can-can dancers out in the middle of absolutely nowhere!

Then the whole scene transposes into one big rolling cat-house that looks like some reject float from a country fair parade celebration in Las Vegas!

The guys who have plans to take over the world this time, have a cute little secret! They only employ blind people in their factory! Dr. Connery feigns blindness in an attempt to enter the premises and get to the bottom of things!

What he finds out is, the material they are using to weave rugs with is filled with radioactivity! The blind guys couldn't see it, they just couldn't figure out why they were all breaking out with these horrible lesions! Dr. Connery informs one of the workers, and a full-fledged riot breaks out!

Here's the guy pulling all the strings on the bad side! Once again, who did they use for a villain in this movie? One of the always memorable James Bond baddies, Adolfo Celi, as Largo in "Thunderball" from a year earlier, was the go to guy! They went to all the time to set up this shot, I just had to use it!

Adolfo's character is Mr Thai, or "Beta" which means he's number two to a guy named Alpha, so when Alpha assumes Beta has screwed up, they have a ritual get together where they poison somebody, and Beta's number is up, but of course he took some anti-poison stuff, and triggers a statue to shoot another bloody knife across the boardroom table and into Alpha's heart, at which point, Beta takes over the meeting!

So where else are they going to set up shop, except in an underground lair reached through this woodshed, on the outskirts of this castle, out in the middle of nowhere in Germany someplace? It was the first thing that came to my mind too!

I just had to show you this shot of Beta and his boys in all their fancy matching outfits down in the underground headquarters!

Okay, now you know why it was important to know that Dr. Connery was also a master bowman!  He has a lot of archer buddies he brought along on this journey because he knew he would need them! It's too much when you first see them ride up on horses, way too much!!

And of course there's the final hoedown showdown between Beta, who also happens to be a master bowman, and the good Doctor!

"O.K. Connery" is a weird movie in more than one way for sure! You can find it streaming on Amazon Prime for free if you have one of those accounts, and you can give yourself a concussion, or come to your own conclusion, whichever happens first!