Is he still there?

You must be joking.

007 on an island populated exclusively by women.

We won't see him till dawn.

Okay. I'd like to interrogate this joke for a second.

Oh, oh, let's...

Is the joke here that James Bond is so prolific at fucking that it's only going to take him 24 hours, or 12 hours, or is the joke that he is so bad at it that it's only going to take him 12 hours?

Wow.

I don't know. I mean, honestly...

Or only at nighttime during daylight hours, he comes out.

He's a sex vampire, super spy.

He belongs with Catherine Deneuve and David Bowie in The Hunger. Wow.

Possibly.

You know, Paul...

I had not interrogated that quote as deeply as you. Why would you? No.

You have a life. You have things to care about. You're not like me.

But, you know, you pose a very intriguing, provocative...

It's an almost existential dilemma, isn't it, Paul? Yeah.

And I don't know that we ever got an accurate head count of the population of the floating palace.

The other possibility is that he's just going to fuck all the women at once, and then it's only going to take two... I don't know. I don't understand that joke at all.

But Q gets it. Q knows what's going on.

No, Q knows what's going on, because Q built the equipment, if you know what I'm saying. Paul Alvarado-Dykstra, we are talking about the 1983 James Bond film, Octopussy, and I would be remiss if I didn't mention that today. You are the story captain. You're leading us to the film. We've decided to alternate these roles so as to avoid friction. And I really apologize to you that this is the one you got. But now, producer Brad, I have a question for you. Should we just hit the theme and then start talking about James Bond and its bigger role in our lives, or should we do that before the theme? Format-wise, I'm a little...

We've got to do our theme. Introduce yourselves.

Well, you know what? Before we dig into the just... To use a word from Paul, phantasmagoria of ecstasy, that is Octopussy, I'd like to say I'm Javier Grillo-Marxuach.

And I'm Paul Alvarado-Dykstra.

And this is...

Multiplex Overthruster Summer of 83.

And Javi, if I may offer just a subtle and slight correction, I think you meant to say, phantasmagoria of tentacular ecstasy.

Paul, before we get into the actual nuts and bolts of Octopussy.

Of which there are many?

There is nut and there is bolt, I believe, if you talk about this film. You know, Paul, I grew up with Roger Moore. Roger Moore was my James Bond. The way that Tom Baker was my doctor and Christopher Reeve is my Superman, and Jean-Luc Picard is, well, Captain Kirk is my captain, you know. All through my childhood, my father would always say, that's not James Bond. That's not James Bond. Then one day, Dr. No was shown in Puerto Rican television, and my father sat us all down and said, you guys are going to find out who James Bond really is now. We watched Dr. No and I said, who is that thug? James Bond isn't like that. James Bond is a vaguely queer-quoted man who smiles at a lot of inappropriate moments. That's not James Bond. Who is this thug? As I saw this movie, I kept thinking, look, I'm not going to say that he's queer-quoted.

You already did.

Yeah, I did. I totally did, and I'm going to stand by that. But not queer-quoted like that. It's queer-quoted in the same way that Professor Henry Higgins and Colonel Pickering were queer-quoted.

Let's just say maybe he sort of foreshadowed metrosexualism.

Confirmed old bachelors who just happened to be roommates and wore a lot of dressing gowns. That's what I'm talking about here, right? That kind of old English, you know. But this film is, Paul, this film is insane in a way that no other James Bond movie is insane. You know, this is supposed to be the course correction into tough masculinity after The Excesses of Moonraker. And it's coming on the heels of For Your Eyes Only, which was, I mean, I don't even know my memory at this point. I don't even trust my memory because I used to think this movie was entertaining. I used to have a soft spot for Octopussy until 12 hours ago.

There are sequences that are entertaining. Sure.

I think. I mean, I...

Amid the broad expanse of...

But, but, of what? Paul, but, but, you know, there's two things this movie brings me to. One of them is this movie reminded me of all things of Megaforce, in that much as Ace Hunter, I found myself asking whose idea of masculinity is this? And in what way is this supposed to, like, appeal to the kind of men who would have liked Sean Connery as James Bond, or, or later on Daniel Craig? I mean, that's not even, that's not even the same universe. But the other one is, Paul, I mean, this movie plays like a Judith Kranz miniseries from another planet. Like, this is like a romantic melodrama that stars Roger Moore as somebody named, I mean, what is this movie, Paul? Help me!

There are so many dimensions of this film that are utterly and aggressively perplexing.

Insane, right?

And somehow the film manages to extend beyond two hours for no good justification.

For no good reason, no.

And the first half or so of the film, or it feels like it anyway, you're just wondering, why do I care? What is this mission? What is he?

Who is this guy?

Why does he care about the stolen, forged Fabergé egg?

Why do women like him for no reason?

Yeah.

It's very puzzling and strange, but it has these little bursts of, oh, here's a cool sequence, but I'll tell you one thing that struck me. And I found it to be a valuable barometer in terms of the efficacy of a particular Bond film is how inspired is John Berry, the composer? And this, frankly, and I love John Berry and I love John Berry Bond scores, this feels like maybe his least inspired Bond score.

You know, it's interesting. We all agree John Berry is a genius and a titan of film scoring. You know, a man who's literally his worst crime or his worst sin or his worst fault is that Monty Norman came up with the actual tune for the James Bond theme, okay?

No.

Well, Monty Norman came up with ding, digga, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, because...

He didn't come up with it.

Yes, he did. No, yet. No, Monty Norman didn't come up with it. Ta-da, ta-da. Monty Norman wrote a musical about people in Trinidad, and that melody is actually in one of the songs in the musical.

Yes, which he appropriated.

Oh, for shit's sake. Okay, I'm not going to get it.

From an existing... Yes.

Never mind. The point being, John Barry, there's some turkeys in his filmography, okay? And beyond that, he's a great, whatever. And sometimes you get the score for, you know... Fuck, sometimes you get the overture from A Black Hole, which is a great piece of music.

Yes.

And sometimes you get the soundtrack from Star Crash. And it just depends on, was he happy that... You know, I mean, I get it. Anyway.

Yeah.

Yeah. Wow. Sorry. That was a tangent, but you're...

You're ready to ring the bell?

Please.

Here we go.

Ding, ding.

So we buried an important lead. Javi?

The plot of this movie.

Anything. We can't...

I mean...

Well, no. First and foremost, just as we recently tackled our first and probably only Star Wars film, Yes, indeed. the Multiplex Overthruster, Uvra, Yes. we have finally found ourselves witnessing our first Bond movie on the podcast. So this is going to inevitably be an expansive, as it already has been, discussion given that. But sadly, we kind of drew the short straw of Bond movies.

Boy, did we ever. And by the way, a movie that I had deluded myself into thinking was actually entertaining for this long, until August 2 years ago.

For years, you've talked about how you love this.

Because it's true. It's true. Look, producer Brad and I went to see a James Bond marathon at the Michigan Theatre. We have sat through Bond movies for like 18 hours. I mean, a cornerstone of our friendship is James Bond. So we're going to have a lot to talk about that. But let me just say one thing before we... I did learn one very important lesson about James Bond in this film. And it is that James Bond is less a series of films than it is a kabuki. And by that, I mean that much as in the forms of Canley in Dune, in which the forms must be observed, James Bond movies are about a checklist. And the checklist is Opening Gambit, Mission, a scene at a gambling parlor, sacrificial, ethnic, a vaguely ethnic sacrificial lamb character who's murdered halfway through the movie to make sure that you know that the bad guy means business. You know, like, there's a checklist of things. And it's a kabuki. And when you watch this movie, you realize all the forms are obeyed in this film, but they appear to have been obeyed by some, by like some sort of like romance novelist on acid. And so everything that makes a James Bond movie is here. But and like, look, Moonraker is an inane, stupid movie, but at least it's about science fiction-ish. So it kind of reads like a spy movie. But what the fuck? Right.

I mean, at least Moonraker is a big swing. If a crass response to Star Wars.

Yes.

But Octopussy, you really feel like the well or in this case, the aquarium is starting to run a little dry.

I don't even know if it's dry. I think it's just sort of like, like it's like, it's like they haven't, they haven't cleaned the aquarium lately.

Like it's kind of murky. The waters are getting murky.

Okay. And yet there's one more Roger Moore movie to come after this.

Which you and I, Brad saw at Fox Village theaters as always.

Yes. And honestly, I, I wish we were doing that one, but maybe one.

God no, no, by the way, no, no.

Oh, yes.

Oh, yes.

Do you seriously believe Udra Kill is a better movie than this? Because if you don't kill, Roger Moore is 139 years old. And there was no Viagra back then. I mean, it's a, it's a swing.

In terms of entertainment value, I'll take Christopher Walken and Greg, Grace Jones any day over, over, over Louis Jordan and Maude Adams. I'm sorry.

Okay. Paul, you know what? Can you just tell us what this movie is about so our audience can kind of get involved with the program?

I'm going to attempt to. So 009 has been killed, and 007 has put on the case, and it involves a potentially Soviet-backed plot to forge priceless jewels and artifacts like a Fabergé egg to help finance their military operation. But toward what end? And so Bond embarks on a globetrotting mission to track down this plot and reveals its intersection with the vast tentacles of the mysterious Octopussy, who runs a all-female crime syndicate of smuggling and gambling and many other things and circuses.

And so it's resorts, cruise ships, and circuses.

Yes, yes, quite a diversified portfolio.

Very Disney-like.

Very Disney-like. And just when you think the plot is utterly pointless, there is the reveal that there's actually a nuclear gambit plot, because there are two opposing generals in the Soviet Politburo, one of whom is trying to move toward peace and reconciliation and detente with the West. The other is convinced that Mike makes right and that he has a plan to dismantle NATO into submission by a fake, a false flag, a fake nuclear missile accident.

So what we find out is that rogue Soviet general Orlov is selling off the treasures of the Kremlin, replacing them with forgeries to raise cash in order to plant a bomb in West Germany so that people think it was an American bomb that went off.

But it doesn't make any sense.

Why does he need the money?

He's got access to the nuke. He doesn't seem to have any problem. It's like these two plots that kind of are vaguely like, oh, yeah, trust us, they're connected. It makes no goddamn sense.

Because the entire plot is based on the idea that if a bomb goes off in West Germany, the United States will be forced into unilateral disarmament and then Orlov, can you sell his money to invade Europe?

Well, no, his plot is that the Europeans, that the NATO countries in Europe, are going to demand disarmament in Europe. And that will leave Europe defenseless for them, the Soviets, to just kind of mow them down.

Yes, yes, yes.

Very sketchy.

So sketchy, but by the way, but by the way, the original, what's the original Casino Royale about? It is literally a terrorist is in trouble, he's going to go bankrupt and be in hock to all of the terrorists that he's been banking for. So James Bond is sent to play a game of high stakes poker to drive him bankrupt.

Yes.

And thus compromise him and make him into a British asset, right?

Yes.

That's the plot of the novel, or the short story, what the fuck Casino Royale was, right? So that's kind of a serviceable John Le Carre plot in its own weird way. And frankly, the Soviets are counterfeiting some of their own treasures in order to raise cash for military operation. That's not a bad spy plot as far as I mean, right?

I mean, there are elements here that could be utilized in any number of more effective ways.

Sadly, they're attached to this film.

But they struggle to even approach the remote reach of coherence.

So Paul, shall we just launch into it?

So we get the obligatory Bond opening sequence, kind of a little mini adventure where we are-

In which James Bond saves Han Solo from Jabba the Hutt.

Yes. Yes. We're apparently in something vaguely resembling Cuba. There seems to be a Castro stand-in at this equestrian.

Everyone is Castro. They all have beards. Although they're all men who look like Castro, they're just- It's Castro land.

But there seem to be many well-dressed Westerners there attending some equestrian event that is inexplicably held at a military base.

At a Cuban military base.

And James Bond, 007, is infiltrating said base and assumes the disguise and persona of a Colonel Luis Toro.

Toro sounds like a load of bull to me. See, because Toro means bull in Spanish, so it's a joke.

Yeah, yeah. This is one of the least engaging opening sequences until- Until. Until we get arguably the highlight of the entire film.

Oh my God, Becky, so good.

Which is that, you know, there's a chase, he's going in, he's going to set a bomb in the radar cone of a jet. It doesn't matter, whatever. He's caught, he's busted. But then he gets away and he's got this lovely Latina woman who is his accomplice, who I don't know-

A hot, spicy Latina number.

Is named?

As Sean Conner would say.

Who helps, but yet he gets captured. He, there's a great escape where he is in the back of like a jeep and there are these two guards who, for some reason, are wearing parachutes.

Yeah, for some reason are wearing parachutes.

And so he, like, while they're distracted by his compatriot, he pulls the ripcord cords, the parachutes then loft them off the back of the jeep.

Paul, and the wonder of the scene and the wonder of bad action cinema from the 80s, of which this film fits full, well, actually, this movie is bad action cinema from the 70s, and that's part of the problem. When he pulls the ripcords and the two guards fly off, they are so obviously a pair of mannequins, like, literally full-on medium shot of their blank, featureless faces as they fly off. And, like, so many times in this movie, you're like, that stunt person is either a dummy or looks nothing like Roger Moore, and they just play it. They don't give a fuck.

And this is a precursor to me of a later sequence that feels like it is in a time travel conversation with the Mission Impossible films.

Yes, indeed.

In terms of a study in compare and contrast of different approaches to action sequences and stuff.

And approaches between filmmakers who give a fuck and filmmakers who do not. And when you those are two very distinct categories of film. Let us proceed.

There's a spectrum of degrees of fuckgivory.

This one lies very much in the lower end.

I would not say that it's a strict binary anyway. But then, but then he joins his spicy Latina spy friend in the car, then unhitches this trailer that has conspicuously been shown to carry what appears to be a horse.

But in fact, it's a cube branch fake horse ass.

But it's a fake horse ass.

A mechanical fake horse ass.

That has a pneumatic lifting mechanism to then reveal probably, I think, the early contender, and make a note, as I'm sure producer Brad will, of the one prop or thing we would covet and choose from any movie in the summer of 83, the mini jet from Octopussy.

I believe you mean the BAIDE.

Aero Star.

Mini jet, yes.

Which is just a thing of aeronautical beauty.

It is every child's dream of a jet airplane. It is less than 10 feet long. It has a powerful jet engine, and it's a one person thing, and it's got nice stripes on it, too.

It does, and here's another thing, and it's sort of jumping ahead, because a lot of the plot of the film has to do with this priceless Faberge egg that everyone covet. Yes, it does. A dilemma is that once we see this little mini jet, I don't give a shit about a Faberge egg. I want the mini jet.

I want the mini jet. I want a movie about mini jets.

And I fear that this is a gross miscalculation on the filmmaker's part in terms of how invested are we going to be in this jewel of Faberge egg once we've been tantalized by the far more evocative prize that is all your own private mini jet.

But I'm about to blow your mind. Ready? It is not the one vehicle from this movie that I covet most.

Ooh.

And I think you know which one it is, but we're not going to reveal it yet. Please don't reveal it yet. Because I will not. But you know which one it is, don't you?

I have a guess. Okay. There are actually three contenders that come to my mind.

Ooh, well, let's get on with it.

So anyway, so Bond gets in the mini-jet as the Castro legions of doom are approaching.

It is weird because in this film, there's literally, they're either the whitest Cubans you've ever seen, or the whitest Cubans you've ever seen. They are like, I've never seen Cubans this white. I mean, there are white Cubans, but it's like across the board, they all just, they look kind of like British stage actors, don't they, Paul?

It brings to mind, and I'm going to do a buzz marketing for someone I was not anticipating I would do. There is a remarkably talented, very energetic Latin American drummer named Sunfire on the very socials. I follow her on Instagram, and I think she's from Costa Rica, and she has a whole thing about, and actually has merch for pale-skinned Hispanics, as a pale-skinned Hispanic club.

How did somebody beat us to this?

I know, and I've been meaning to share this with you. But I feel like most of the extras and the people in this scene, this whole sequence, warrant such attire.

I think there's two brown people in this. One of them is the guy who fires the missile, goes, he's in a jet or whatever, and the woman who's with James Bond and everybody else, including Toro, all the Castros, they all just look like white people with weird beards attached to them. It's so odd.

And fake mustaches. Yeah, so Bond is in the mini jet. He is facing down in a game of chicken, this oncoming phalanx of jeeps with guns. And of course, he takes off just in time, and then they fire a missile after him. That kind of looks a little janky in its flight pattern.

Not the best heat-seeking missile out there.

But still, we get some energetic aerial acrobatics and a cool sequence where then of course, the iconic trailer moment of Bond diving the mini-jet into the hangar as they're trying to close the doors.

To close the doors on him, yeah.

And then of course, he sneaks through at the last moment, but yet with the missile behind him, then blows up the hangar very satisfyingly, including all the fighters inside of it.

Including the jets and all the casters inside of it, as everyone said.

Paul, Paul.

Then he's running out of gas on the plane, and he flies over the Cuban to Florida land border.

Apparently, something.

What?

Somewhere.

Yeah.

It's very, very strange. And yeah, and we do get the Achilles heel of the little microjet is that apparently it has a very short range with a very small fuel tank.

But long enough to get us past the land border between Florida and Cuba.

Yeah.

So he makes a highway or not even a highway, a little like road landing, sputters to a stop perfectly in front of a rustic retro vintage gas station.

Which kind of like Superman 2. Remember how Houston and Superman 2 was populated by British actors in overalls?

Yes.

Same thing here.

Yes. This kind of old codger gets up off of his porch chair and Bond requests filler up. Then we cut to an obligatory Maurice Binder title sequence with one of my least favorite Bond songs of all time.

So I have a question here, Paul. And this is Paul and producer Brad. I don't think producer Brad and I have ever gotten into this. So here's my question. Maurice Binder, genius or menace? Discuss.

The two are by no means mutually exclusive.

The thing, the title sequence for this reminds me is how much Bond, as much as Bond may have been trendsetting in 1962, by this moment, Bond is just chasing trends, you know? So of course, this title sequence has like a laser.

Yes.

You know, because lasers were very big in the early 80s, right?

With smoke to pick up the laser, yes.

Exactly. And it is so just not in any way erotic or interesting or anything, right?

Again, this is an alarm going off. Both the song and the title sequence kind of feeling like, oh, the bloom has come off the rose a bit.

One of the things about it is that, for your eyes only, was such a step in the right direction, you know?

Yes.

In spite of Roger Moore still looking kind of long in the tooth and the girls who were lusting after being a little too young and they're being a little bit of cornyness to the movie, like Heim Topol as the ally, John Glover as Julian Glover as the villain, General Veers as the villain, you know? That movie actually had some hard edges to it and you started to think, you know, we might be onto something. Of course.

It's a solid Bond movie.

Sheena Easton singing For Your Eyes Only and she's the first time that one of the singers appeared.

Yeah.

I mean, that title sequence is actually kind of great.

I mean, Sheena Easton who still echoes in my dreams from that.

And that song, but Rita Coolidge, All Time High, what a mediocre song. Holy shit.

I find it painful personally.

But the good news is you have Sheena Easton, Rita Coolidge, I think, but for Rita Coolidge, you may not have had Duran Duran.

Because Rita Coolidge was so bad that they felt they needed to chase the new age.

They had to go back to something more modern like Sheena Easton.

Right. Right.

Yeah. And again, I will take Duran Duran over Rita Coolidge. I'm sorry.

I'm not going to send Rita Coolidge a muffin basket for that any day soon. Like, thank you, Rita. Your service is duly noted.

But I got to say, I kind of like it, only because I had a James Bond tape with all the theme songs, and this was the last one. And so I listened to this a lot as a kid.

OK.

Now, guys, because James Bond is an important artifact in all our youths. Favorite Bond theme?

Speed round.

I mean, Goldfinger. It's got to be Shirley Bassey. There's nothing that beats Shirley Bassey.

I actually it's it's I love it. I acknowledge its greatness. And I know that my favorite is not the best one because that's the best one. But that's not my favorite producer.

Brad? Do you mean stand alone song to listen to or use in the film?

Don't overthink it.

The one you like best.

I like Spiral Love Me. I like Live and Let Die. I like Goldfinger.

I got to say, Nobody Does It Better is a really good song. That Carly Simon song. But my favorite one is Thunderball. So.

So we're in East Berlin and we have an anti opening sequence. We have what is effectively the end of an alternate Bond movie following who will discover is Agent 009 whose fate is soon sealed by these twin circus knife throwers that are pursuing him.

I call them the Murder Hindus, but it turns out they're Cossacks. So I was because I know this movie was set in India later, so I thought they were Kamal Khan's men. So I was calling them the Murder Hindus, but it turns out they're murder Cossacks because they're actually Russian. So I apologize to all of the races I've just been talking about.

I was going to say, just expand as wide a net of ethnic offenses as you possibly can, Javi.

That's our blurb for this podcast.

You go on. I look forward to your inbox on Blue Sky. So we're in East Berlin, yes, 009 in a clown disguise, is fleeing a circus, gets knifed in the back, tumbles into a river, and somehow makes it up onto the bank across into West Berlin, and stumbles into the British Embassy crashing through a window, and then a Fabergé egg rolls out of his dying hand.

This embassy is only slightly better protected than the one in The Soldier. There's a real problem with security contractors in Berlin, I'm telling you.

I was gonna say, what a devious double feature it would be to force people to watch The Soldier and Octopussy back to back.

Oh my god.

Because they exist in a weird kind of pseudo shared parallel universes.

They both share in that they exploit the dumbest parts of our individual national stereotypes. The Soldier is a meatball, a dumbass, ultra violent American who doesn't seem to have a thought in his head. And James Bond is probably the most... This movie is so classist in a very odd way. We'll get into that, but let's keep going, let's keep going.

Back in London, Bond arrives in the antechamber of M's office, exchanging pleasantries with Moneypenny. And there is a young Moneypenny protege named Penelope Smallbone.

Penelope Smallbone.

Who we can only surmise was a seed planted as a potential successor to Moneypenny to maybe, I don't know, but we never see her again. And Moneypenny has warned her off of Bond's charms.

My favorite line in this scene is when the woman says, is when Smallbone says, thank you Commander Bond and Roger Moore's, I'm not even gonna call him James Bond. Roger Moore says, oh, do you know me? And she says, well, Moneypenny has told me all about you. Moneypenny goes, in nauseating detail.

Yes. Yes.

Oh, it's so in the, do go on, Paul.

Do you know who plays Penelope Smallbone?

I meant to make a note, but please illuminate us.

Michaela Clavel, daughter of James Clavel, executive producer of Shogun last year.

Really?

Yeah.

Interesting.

Amazing. So she is still with us, is still active. I will-

Best redemption story ever.

So then we get the obligatory briefing scene in Em's office. It turns out that the Fabergé egg is a forgery. The priceless real one is going on auction. At this point, Javi, I feel the loudest voice in my head yelling, who cares?

Why do we care?

What is this?

This is a Bond movie. Why do we care?

But also, it's just like Bond is got to be going after higher stakes than like, who cares that there's a forgery Fabergé egg going on auction? It is not suitably explained other than, oh, it's a Russian effort to raise currency. I'm like, this is what Bond has been reduced to?

Yeah. Financial crimes. Now, and the thing is, because there's no relationship between 009 and 007, okay, in GoldenEye, right? 007 and that 009, by the way, but apparently 009 is not the destination he was.

I thought Shambin was 006. 006.

Is that what he was? I don't fuck it.

If you take six and you turn it upside down, it's a nine, fuck it. Anyway, so if you had a relationship with 009, maybe I'd buy this as a revenge movie, but they don't even get near that.

No, and that feels like a missed opportunity. But anyway, so many. But so he's assigned to go deal with this, and we do get a little passing reference to the property of a lady.

The short story that this is allegedly based on.

Yes, by Ian Fleming. Then we get, on the heels of the War Games, Norad War Room, we get the one beautiful new set.

The nicest Russian war room ever, isn't it?

The Soviet war room, where a presumably stand-in for Brezhnev.

Yes, presumably. The eyebrows alone, I mean, it's like, holy crap.

I think they got their own credit.

Getting briefed in this, I love this set design, which has a rotating circular platform, where-

For the big wigs, all their chairs and desks are in a circular rotating platform.

Everyone is conveniently arranged in a half-circle seating arrangement to camera. But when they need to view a different screen, they just rotate the entire platform, so they can view, look at the other big screen.

You know how these guys spraining their necks, turning their heads? Come on, man.

I just find that hilarious. And then we meet the two critical characters.

And one of whom has been in Bond movies since the 60s.

Yes, so we get General Gogol, played by Walter Gotel.

Walter Gotel!

Who's fantastic, kind of the personification of the iconic Bond adversary, Soviet general.

What I love about General Gogol is that over the years, you know, like as with all of these things, even though the Russians and the Brits are on the opposite side, there's a weird respect that builds up between him and Bond. And I thought the end of For Your Eyes Only, when Bond has the MacGuffin box, right? And General Gogol is looking at him, and Bond's got the box, and Bond just, and it's a box that he can use to turn on all the nukes in the world or some shit like that. He throws her over the cliff, the box is destroyed, and Bond looks at him and says, you don't have it, and we don't have it. And they look at each other grudgingly, and you get the sense that that is the essence of gentlemanly detente.

Yes.

You know? So Gogol, so we kind of like Gogol a little bit.

Yes.

Gogol is level-headed.

Yes.

He sees the strategic advantages of detente. Yes.

He's an old school gentleman like Bond.

Yeah. And he does, yeah, have a healthy respect for his adversaries, and he seems to be a thoughtful, intellectual strategist.

Yes.

But countering his recommendations is the more hot-headed militant General Orloff played by Stephen...

Oh, his name was Orloff? I thought his name was Where the fuck is my accent from? General, where the fuck is my accent from? That's a Russian name, isn't it?

Yes.

Oh, sorry.

Yeah.

I fleetingly thought, imagine if it had been Count Orloch instead.

Yes.

Oh, my God. Like Nosferatu. That would have been so much. I get it. Yeah. Right there with you.

He spoke like this.

Yeah. Then the movie would be about four hours long.

Yeah. Again. Again. A missed time travel opportunity. Paul. Orloff, again, as we mentioned earlier, has this whole scheme to destabilize the West and create an opportunity for Soviet expansion and domination because he is convinced the West-

He's a hawk.

He's a hawk. Is decadent and divided. And soft. Yes. But Brezhnev insists that world socialism will be achieved peaceably.

Peaceably. Now, Paul, here's a question. It's really interesting because you have all these movies shot in England and we talked about a bunch of them. Stephen Berkoff, who plays General, what the fuck is my accent? Orlov. Orlov, yes. Now, we also know him as Victor Maitland from the Beverly Hills Cop, the first Beverly Hills Cop movie, right?

Yes.

He is one of these actors who came to the States, like much as these American actors went to England, like John Ratzenberger and whoever, and played a bunch of Americans in every British movie ever. This is a guy who came from England and played a bunch of bad guys in American movies. This guy is a titan of the Avant-Garde Theater in England, okay?

Yes.

I have, I literally, his metamorphosis is, his staging of Kafka's Metamorphosis is a fucking masterpiece. I saw him in 89 doing Salome, and he did it in slow motion, which was really bizarre. I mean, this guy is like an actual artist.

Yeah.

But we know him as general, where the fuck is my accent from?

Yes.

It's really odd when you realize the different careers these, I mean, this guy was like the wild man of British theater.

Yeah. And here he is relegated to sort of scenery-chewing, over-the-topness, just dripping with conniving villainy.

But in his defense, he's not leaving anything off the table. I mean, this guy, he came to play.

Yes, yes. Definitely came to play. And we follow him as he goes to play at the Soviet art repository, which boggles the mind what treasures we may find within. But where he learns that the forged Vadrige egg has been lost and is going up for auction at Sotheby's. Where then we find Bond in his Universal Exports kind of cover, there to observe and to intervene.

He's there with MI7's art expert, Flanders or Flingington, or Flanderington.

Yes. Is that Jeremy Bullock?

No, he's Smithers in India.

That's right. I want to make sure we don't miss it.

We'll get into that.

Yeah. Of course, we're set up with the essential position at the top that, oh, well, the estimate for this is 250 to 300,000 pounds.

Oh, you'd be crazy to pay more than 300,000 pounds for this egg.

Now, first of all, granted, it's 1983. But still, I'm just like, that's it. Like, this priceless thing is only worth a quarter of a million pounds.

I mean, money's worth a lot less now. Like, now these things sell for 100 million dollars. This is worth Bond's time?

It's so annoying to me.

Did you run a conversion?

I did not. I don't. I just, I couldn't be bothered and I don't care. I did for something else later.

Do go on.

Then we see Louis Jourdan arrive.

Louis Jourdan.

Who's playing, problematically, Kamal Khan.

Yes.

And he arrives accompanied-

Problematically because he gives such a bad performance, right?

Among other-

Sorry.

Among other things. And he's accompanied by the Elegant Beauty that is Magda, played by Christina Wayborne, and starts late at the bidding, starts swooping in to try to bid it. And Bond is very suspicious of this, so he, of course, takes it upon himself to see how badly he wants it and proceeds to bid it up to 500,000.

Much to the shock of Flandersen, Flandersen, who's like, Bond, are you insane? How are we going to pay for this? He's kind of the C-3PO of the scene, isn't he?

Yeah, and clearly annoys Kamal Khan, that he's going to have to pay an extra 150,000 or something, whatever, for it. Anyway, so Khan wins the auction, gets the egg, Bond has them tailed, and back at M's office, M is pissed off at Bond even though it all worked out, and Bond reveals, and we kind of knew this if we were paying attention because he does not do this in any subtle way. Again-

He's so, his sleight of hand is so clumsy, he literally goes-

In stark-

Let me put this under the table so I can look at it better. Oh, here it is back, here it goes.

In stark contrast to the truly magical Hayley Atwell as Grace in the last two Mission Impossible films as the thief Pickpocket, who's a sleight of hand sorceress, Bond casually takes the Fabergé egg underneath the table, then covers it with his auction program, and then reveals it back, gives hands it back to the auctioneer, assistant, whatever. Yeah, like that's fine. Like he'd get it right.

That's okay. Can we look at your lap, Oscar? No, but anyway. So he reveals he's got it.

He has swapped the real Fabergé egg for the forgery that 009 had, you know, brought to the British Embassy and ha ha ha. And so it's all a plan to smoke out Khan once he realizes that he bought a forgery. So Bond is then sent to New Delhi. So we know it's New Delhi because we get a sweeping shot of the Taj Mahal.

And also because suddenly John Barry is playing like the sitar. Well, you get all of the Orientalist bullshit.

Yes, yes.

Just in one 30-second burst, you know?

And then we get an example of, as producer Brad, I believe, illuminated last season on our show.

Oh, my God.

Oh, my God. Of a example of diagenic music of our character's theme being played to him.

Yes.

VJ, a local agent, is undercover as a snake charmer. And to signal Bond, he plays the Bond theme.

Do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do.

Right. And Bond drops a couple of rupees in his basket and goes, Charming tune.

It's so stupid.

It's dumb as a fucking stump.

It's kind of delightful. But again, it opens this can of worms of like, wait a minute, Bond is aware of the Bond theme.

Yes. Now, now here's a question for you, okay? Now, VJ is played by VJ Armithraaj.

Yes.

VJ Armithraaj was a tennis pro before this, and there's a lot of talk about his tennis playing. And producer Brad, let me, since you're the James Bond expert here, was he that big a sports celebrity that like, all of this talk about him playing tennis was justified? Or is it just an Easter egg for the tennis dance? What is happening here?

I think the key word is James Bond fan, not VJ fan. So I'll have to, I know he was a tennis player. I don't know how successful he was.

But they've run this gag. They're constantly making jokes about like, he's gotten a job as a tennis pro at Kamal Khan's club. He plays a little bit here and there, you know.

And then he also is trained in tennis combat, as we'll see later.

Yes, indeed.

But we then get, instead of...

Paul, Paul, the greatest, the line in this movie that turned this movie from potentially this movie could still be good to were fucked, happens at the end of this sequence in which VJ takes James Bond to his hotel.

Yes, in one of these little scooter cab things.

In one of these rickshaws. Yeah.

Yeah, what they're called.

Motorized rickshaw.

Yes.

And now they're giving Bond, Bond's luggage has been sent to be in front. We've talked with the guy driving the rickshaw as the section chief for New Delhi.

Yes.

VJ is Bond's counterpart, dare we say.

Yeah.

And as Bond is getting off the rickshaw to go to his hotel, he's been asked to hold the snake charming flute. Did you make a note of this line, Paul?

I chose to willfully ignore it.

Oh, my God. OK. But this is for me the moment when I was like, we're fucked. This movie is not going to be good. And the one liners are not going to get better and we're fucked. James Bond hands this bulbous snake charming flute back to VJ and says the following line. Oh, my God. Let me find it because it's so he says, here, you may need this to play with your asp.

Yes.

So literally Bond is handing this man like a two foot long flute with huge round chambers in it and making a joke about him sticking it in his butt. Like, here, my respected counterpart in India, stick this in your butt. This is the moment when you go, this movie, we're fucked. This is not going to get better.

I don't know if it's the moment that announces that, as much as it just further confirms it.

So, let's just keep going with the plot, buddy.

Yeah, so Bond then arrives after this briefing and route about Khan to this opulent resort hotel, of course, because we have to be one. And there, he spies none other than Magda. And also, we catch a glimpse of this octopus flag as foreshadowing. We then conveniently cut to evening. Bond is now in a dinner jacket, goes to the casino. And we see...

Because in every Bond film, you need to have an auction scene.

Yes, so we're checking. We're going through the checklist.

Or a casino.

Just checklist.

Casino scene.

And there, we see Khan cheating at Bat Gammon.

In the most obvious... He literally, like, always takes his dice, puts them under the table, squeezes them, and then weirdly, he gets a double six every time.

Yeah, that's just amazing how he could possibly have such luck.

Yeah, great luck. And he's playing against Colonel Blumbert from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, apparently, right?

A British major who's stationed in India, just to remind us of the whole imperialist element. And so Bond is observing this, then he briefly chats up Magda at the bar. Then he steps in to the game for the major.

Because the major cannot, because Kamal Khan, even though Kamal Khan appears to have been put in a corner, he insists on raising the stakes to 200,000 rupees. And the major says, I can't possibly do that, not with your luck. And then James Bond steps in to make sure that imperialism takes the day, right, Paul?

Yes, and dramatically reveals, when asked, does he have enough cash to cover the wager? He says, will this do or something to that effect?

And he takes out the Fabergé egg.

And reveals the authentic Fabergé egg.

Which Kamal Khan knows to be the real egg, because he's been told it's a whole thing.

Yes, and then has the startling, incisive thought to use Khan's own dice.

He evokes players' privilege.

Exactly.

Yes, yes.

And rolls a double six without even looking, knows that he's won, and Khan, of course, is just brewing with incest.

Just stewing.

Yeah, yeah. And it's awful. And then they bring his checkbook, and then...

Kamal Khan has lost. Luis Jordan has done his best sort of... Whenever Luis Jordan is disgusted in this film, his face just sort of looks like he smelled a fart. You know, it's that kind of like... You know, so Luis Jordan snaps his fingers and his sidekick Govinda, who is one of my favorite sidekicks of all time, and who is literally... I literally made this pastiche of this character a character in The Middleman, because I think he's just the worst, most stereotypical Sahib villain ever.

Yes, played by Kabir Bedi.

Yes, but who apparently was a huge star in India. And... But here's the thing. So Kamal Khan is going to write James Bond a check. And he starts writing the check, and it's not until he's about halfway done with the check that Roger Moore turns to him and goes, I prefer cash. And he's such a dick about it.

Yes, because he lets Khan go to the trouble of writing the check.

What a dick!

And do we have this clip?

Yeah, let's hear it.

Let's hear it.

I prefer cash.

Get it cashed for him. Yes, sir. Spend the money quickly, Mr. Bond.

I intend to, Kamal Khan.

Now, in some weird idea of espionage, right? James Bond is here revealing his name and being this flagrant, because he's trying to provoke Kamal Khan into smoking himself out, right?

We are so far past the point at which we delugely question the internal reality of the Bondverse. Everyone knows James Bond. I mean, everyone knows James Bond. Which makes no goddamn sense for a secret super spy. But out of context, if you just listen to that clip, and this is actually a really nice moment of John Mary underscore ominous underscore, it actually sounds like a classic Bond moment and a little, like brewing threat between this and Agnes, but the rest of the film does not measure up to little glimmers.

Look, I think this movie does have a moment here and there that do feel that way, and where you do feel like Roger Moore is actually an enforcer with a license to kill, and we might actually do some badass shit.

The punchline that Gobinda gives us, which is that right after this exchange, Gobinda takes the dice back, clenches them in his fist, squeezes and crushes them to dust while giving Bond a death stare, a glowering death stare.

Here's my thing about Kabir Bedi's performance as Gobinda. Now, Kabir Bedi is somebody who is a star in India in his own right. It's one of these things where like, in the 70s, they have a movie and they put Jackie Chan in it, because they knew that the movie had to be big in Asia or whatever.

Yes.

We didn't know, well, you might have because you're a bigger fan of the movies.

We certainly didn't know at the time.

It's like Jackie Chan being in Cannibal Run, it's clearly because the Shaw brothers, some of their shell companies are funding this, they're going to release it in and they need an Asian star in it. So Kabir Bhatti is in this as the resident actual Indian actor, who's an actual Indian star. Yes. You can tell this guy is a leading man in his own movies, right?

Yeah.

He plays every beat in this movie, like he's vaguely annoyed that he has to go along with it.

Yeah.

Like every time James Bond is hiding from him, the way Kabir Bhatti looks at the screen, it's like, I know he's hiding. I'm an Indian actor in this stupid British movie and I got to pretend I don't see him. And just so you know, I'm pissed.

Yeah.

And I'm not pissed as my character. I'm pissed as Kabir Bhatti having to play along with this shit.

Yeah. Yeah.

And I kind of want justice for Gobinda, or at least for Kabir Bhatti, because I do feel this character certainly from his introduction presents an opportunity to potentially be an all-time great Bond villain.

Yeah.

Certainly Bond villain henchman.

Yeah.

But the script and the film does not afford him that opportunity.

And the fact that both him and Kamal, like he's always in this turban. He looks like Sahib from Little Orphan Annie, you know, and he's always in a turban and an Nehru jacket. And I get it, the Nehru jacket is shorthand for, but what the fuck? You know? And by the way, if I may, Paul, they get out of the club and of course, Kamal Khan sends his henchpeople. Yes. Led by Gobinda. Yes. And Gobinda takes out his weapon, and it's this old-timey shotgun with like a trombone horn. But it has like a trombone horn at the end of it. It's the most stereotypical quote, Indian unquote shotgun ever. And then later on, he's fighting with a scimitar. It's like, guys, this movie makes Temple of Doom look like Richard Attenborough's Gandhi in terms of respect for Indian tradition.

So you've set the table perfectly for what is this interesting dichotomy of this chase sequence. Which on one level is a really energetic and well-staged and kind of cool chase scene. I mean, compared to what we've been given in the film, it's like the first really cool...

It's the first actual action sequence in the film, yeah.

Action sequence. And of course, Bond is like loaded up with cash. He's shared winnings with VJ and the other guy. Then we get this cab chase and then there's also the jeep that comes in and attacks. VJ starts defending them with his tennis racket that apparently just keeps handy.

And making tennis just like, hey, game, set and match, you know? Yeah, whatever.

But throughout this chase, through the tiny little roads and markets of Delhi, we kind of go through a checklist of every Indian stereotype.

Stereotype.

Oh my God. And you're born into it. So first, like, it's a little innocuous, like, oh, there's a VJ pulls a ramp jump. And then there's this this cutaway to a camel that is that is observing.

And by the way, that's that's just a James Bond staple in every Bond movie. There has to be an animal reaction shot. That's the thing. Yes. Checklist. You know, yeah.

And and I and I'm OK with that because I'm like, OK, you know, it's a camel. But yeah, sure, I buy that.

But then we every time VJ hit somebody with his tennis racket, they cut to a crowd of women who are like literally their their necks going back and forth like it's a tennis match.

Yes.

And the sound effect is the tennis ball on a racket. It's not a racket on the head.

Paul, let's get into the checklist.

But the checklist, we go through a bed of nails, a flame juggler, a sword swallower, a firewalker, not just a bed of nails.

When Bond throws a guy on the bed of nails, the guy who the fakir who's supposed to be in the bed of nails shouts, get off my bed.

Yes, and he borrows a sword from the sword swallower.

Which he takes from the sword swallower's mouth.

Out of his throat to dispatch an assassin and then gives it back and then makes some-

He says, you'll have to stick this back in yourself.

Something like that. And yeah, it's just-

Also, the really interesting thing about this chase scene is also, by the way, I have quoted in my own work, the part where he throws the money into the crowd at least once. I don't know if they ripped it off of Raiders, an earlier movie where Indiana Jones was the same thing. He throws money at a crowd of third-worlders to get them to distract them. By the way, compare this, but here's the thing. Talk about modern or transitional to modern action cinema versus 1960s, 70s action cinema. Compare this chase with the bizarre chase in Raiders. Not entirely analogous, but literally in terms of realism, the bizarre race in Raiders looks like a Jason Bourne movie compared to this. I mean, a lot of the sequence feels like it was shot on a stage. It looks like one of those forests from a Hammer movie, where you can tell that half of the shit is a painted backdrop. It's so stagy and so not realistic, it's bizarre.

Yeah, it's kind of bizarre in a bizarre. They do have a cool escape, yes. As you mentioned, the colonialist-y problematic smoke screen of throwing cash at the lower class.

At the poor.

God, it's so offensive.

The British imperialist doing that. But then there's this cool escape where he just, he pulls like a Batman and he drives the...

They drive through a billboard.

Through a billboard, a fake wall.

Like a poster on a solid wall, yeah.

And then a duplicate replacement poster immediately falls into place like with a...

Begging the question, how many duplicate sliding down walls do they have? For how many of these... Like are there five? They're like, Bond, look, if you get in a script, you can drive through this wall and a duplicate will fall down. You can only do it five times. We only have so many versions. What is it?

Yes. And also, it seems to be presumably not the primary entrance, but an entrance to...

Checklist item number 37 of a James Bond movie.

Our secret base in Delhi. And lo and behold, who's there but our beloved Q.

There are always two scenes that have to be in a James Bond movie. He goes to Q Branch and we see a bunch of British people trying gadgets that don't quite work very well. And in between them, they sneak in stuff that will actually be in the movie. Or Bond goes to the bad guy's enclave and there's people training in kung fu. And we have both of those in this movie.

And also Q has to express his disdain for Bond, which he does in his opening line, when he says, Oh, they missed you. What a pity. And Bond has survived. And Desmond Llewellyn, God bless them.

An international treasure, a global treasure. Desmond Llewellyn literally showed up in Dr. No as Major Boothroyd, who was supposed to just give... No, he wasn't in Dr. No. He was in... He didn't show up until the next one, until From Russia With Love, right? So in Dr. No, it's just some dude who gives him a Walter. And then in From Russia With Love, he just kind of has for about a second and a half, showing him how they've hidden gold sovereigns in a suitcase, big spy tech, and gives him a beeper.

Yes.

Gives him a pager. And then he sort of turned that into like a whole cottage industry of being Q. I mean, what a wonderful career for this guy.

Yes. And soon enough, after a demonstration of an experimental rope climbing thing that goes awry, Bond makes a penis choke at Q.'s expense. There's the kind of death door thing. But then...

Then that one's being run by Boba Fett. The actor playing Smithers, who's running the remote control that runs the door that will kill you if you knock on the door. I don't know what spy use that's for. Is Jeremy Bullock, also known as...

Boba Fett?

Yes.

Boba Fett? Where?

Who is? Exactly.

But then we get the sequence where, oh, OK, they're going to put a homing device slash eavesdropping bug in the Fabergé egg.

Because they know that Kamal Khan is going to send people to get it, to kill Bond and get it.

Exactly. And so this is all going to be a clever ruse. And then also bestow upon Bond a pen that has a tracking device and an earpiece, as well as an acid dispenser.

A pen that shoots acid, yes.

Yeah, a very multipurpose pen.

And also a Casio Seiko flat screen LCD TV watch, which Bond, of course, immediately grabs the video camera they're using for a feed and does what?

Looks at...

Zooms in on the comely assistant's boobs. Yeah.

Yes, yes. We get a cleavage close up.

Yeah. And of course, Q says, I've had enough of these adolescent antics. And frankly, I agree.

Yeah, at this point. And again, given Bond's rapidly advancing age, I was going to say visibly advancing age.

Well, he ages like 10 years in this movie because that's how long it takes to watch the movie. He starts the movie at 55 and ends it at 78.

I mean, it's just this. These don't land like they should. I do love the geekily. And again, it's 1983. Q describing the latest liquid crystal television.

Yes, of course, which is great.

Doesn't use the abbreviation. We're then back to the resort and Bond has dinner with Magda.

And this is Magda has gotten a table and put it on his tab. Bond has a reservation. I don't have a reservation. No, right this way, sir. Yes. And he's already he's apparently she's reserving on his name and put it on his tab because she's mercenary.

And I love I kind of love this scene. It's sort of even if it's throwback kind of ground that's been tread many times before in other Bond movies of this flirtation and subtext and whatever.

One of the things I will say about, you know, not one of the things I'll say many, many more things, Paul, you know, again, I will continue to say that this movie to me plays like a Judith Krantz miniseries from 1980 that is somehow set in the James Bond universe. And one of the things about those, you know, who was the king of the miniseries? I'm sorry to keep harping on this. And it's not, I mean, it's...

You're fixated.

The king of the miniseries in the 1980s was... James Clenell. Who was the star of Shogun and the Thornburns?

Richard Chamberlain.

Who was later out at his gay, right?

Yes.

Now, Richard Chamberlain always played this very suave, very debonair and very manly in that very specific way of being very dapper and all of that. And I think one of the reasons why I keep going back to this sort of dandified idea of James Bond as Colonel Pickering, as Henry Higgins, is how much of his... He's supposed to be devastatingly attractive to this woman. They're having back and forth banter.

To all women.

To all women. And he's such a lech, by the way. That's the other thing is that he's a total lech, but you don't buy it. You just think he's doing it because it's in the script. But he's such... He's always looking at people's breasts and mentioning their clothing and shit like that. But it seems more like... It's very queen-y. It's very like, you know. I imagine Ian McKellen saying those lines as Magneto, you know. Keeping the British end up here. Having trouble keeping it up here. You know, it's like it's also... If this is Richard Chamberlain and Noel Coward play written by a high schooler, you know, it just feels like it feels like it's rote. It feels like Kabuki. It feels like this actor. And I know Roger Moore is a heterosexual. I know he was a gentleman and no flies on Roger Moore. I actually do love the guy. But it plays like they are just obeying the forms. It doesn't. It plays like if this had been Sean Connery, he'd be doing the same dialogue. It plays so much differently. If this had been Timothy Dalton, same thing, very differently. But because it's he sort of plays it like Charles Nelson Riley pretending to be James Bond. It's very odd to me. You have nothing to say about this, do you?

No, I think those are interesting and incisive observations.

Are they realistic or is this just me or is this to be dealing with my own latent closeted sexuality or is this real? I mean, am I reading this the wrong way? Because it really does read like a romance novel from the 80s played by closeted people.

Yes, it definitely is such a huge tonal shift, really swing from the Connery portrayal.

For guys only even, you know?

Yeah, and even from that. But yeah, it does seem to speak in a really weird, interesting way to the period and the time, while also coexisting with the hyper-masculinity of the 80s, as evidenced by things like Rocky and other films we've seen.

A type of masculinity that had its own constellation of homoerotic overtones.

Well, exactly, like the beach romp in Rocky III.

Yes, in the belly shirts, yeah.

So yeah, it is a fascinating puzzle that I don't know that we will ever solve.

So let's keep going with the plot. I'm done talking about it.

I can add to this. This year in 83, Never Say Never Again came out as well.

That's right.

Yes.

In the New York Times, Broccoli stressed concern that that would damage the brand because it was an aging middle-age Bond. He stressed that his formula was targeted to 12-22 year olds. So these films are meant for a very young audience, strangely, an adolescent audience.

Interesting.

Yeah. So it's this cartoonish version of-

Of masculinity, of violence, of espionage.

Who's still making these adolescent, prurient jokes. It's very strange, but so-

One of my favorite couplets, and I believe that you singled it out for clipsmanship here, Paul. Let's hear it.

I was going to set it up. Because Bond is presuming that Magda is there as a representative of Khan to negotiate terms for the return of the real Faberge egg that Khan won at auction, but Bond switched with the replica. And Magda offers these terms.

So does he have a proposition for me or do you?

He suggests the trade, the egg, for your life.

I'd heard the price of eggs was going up just a little high.

I mean, again, how's that not a Charles Nelson Riley line? Oh, I heard the price of eggs was going up.

I mean, I mean, he says it very suavely, but by the way, 1983, a dozen eggs, 89 cents.

Oh, by the way, 350,000 pounds in 1983 is 1,500,000 pounds in 2025.

Excellent. In 2025, I think 89 cents is about 268 or something.

Wow. We've blown. This is about as much math as I can handle. Let's keep going.

We have taken a brief digression into an economics podcast.

Oh, can I just say one thing? Because we did bring up Rocky III, and it just pains me that we never talk about the Frank factor.

Hmm.

The Frank factor.

It's gotta be motivated. It's gotta... What? There's... You can't just...

Okay.

You can't just summon the Frank Factor out of the blue. You brought up Rocky III. But no, that's not enough.

Okay, okay, okay, let's keep going.

It has to...

Bond and Magda, of course, Bond seduces Magda. She goes to his room.

I will spend the rest of this episode searching for an opportunity to cohesively summon...

The Frank Factor.

The Frank Factor appropriately. Okay. If the opportunity persists.

But yes.

Now we have the cliched, we have the cliched, now he takes her back to her room, they fuck.

Yeah.

And they have the cliched shot of literally following the clothing all the way to the bed, you know?

Yeah, yeah.

It's very elegant and evocative in a cheesy 80s Bond movie way. But yeah, it's answering sort of the question he posed at the top of that clip, which is that, which is again, this cheesy, great layered line of, you know, you have this kind of a proposition from here to you. And he follows through on that with her. He spots a mysterious tattoo on Magda and inquires as to what it is. And we go from the relatively sublime exchange we've just heard to...

Yes.

She says, oh...

That's my little...

That's my little Octopussy.

Oh, God.

Now, I have a question about this. Christina Wayborne, the actress who played Magda, right? Yes. Gorgeous woman.

Yes.

Very much a 1980s model of, early 80s model of beauty, coming back from, like, just the way she's dressed, the way she's made up and all that. Is Christina Wayborne from the same country as Franck, from the five years ago, from the five years ago, from the father of the Bride films? Because I don't know where her accent is from. She talks like this. I am Mr. Bond. Where is she from? She's like a Martin Short character. What?

Where is she from? It is mysteriously vague, but as we know, it is insensitive to make such inquiries of people of unknown, I don't know.

We wouldn't want to offend the white people, would we?

Yes, yes. The exotic ethnic white woman playing Magda. Meanwhile, Khan has deployed Gobinda, his trusty henchman, and then we've cut to after their bedtime events.

I don't even think that they... I mean, literally, they wake up and Bond is in a very neatly pressed blue dressing gown.

Well, yes.

He looks like David Niven in a Pink Panther movie.

Magda has apparently risen early and getting dressed in the most conspicuous fashion.

Steals the egg.

Steals the egg back.

She might as well be holding it in front of him because she literally...

Yeah, and then we get maybe my favorite stunt in the film, which is...

Escape, sorry.

Yes, so she has this wrap, this dress with this long stretch of fabric, and as she's kissing Bond and they're saying their farewells, she's leaned up against the balcony. She's tying the fabric and end of it to the railing, and then she backflips and basically repunzels off the balcony. Ah, this is, I love this.

It's actually kind of, you know, it's beautifully done.

It's a beautiful stunt. Yeah. So elegantly done.

And the way she ties it, and unlike how she stole the egg, which is completely obvious, she sort of ties it very whatever, and then she just, and just the shot of it is kind of, you know what it reminds me of? Do you want to see the shot in The Princess Bride when Buttercup is falling from the ramparts of Prince Huperdick's castle? It's very beautifully done. And Kamal Khan steps out of a Bentley and gives her a robe because he's ready.

Yes.

And that weirdly, as much as this is Judith Krantz, this is kind of the good Judith Krantz, I think.

It kind of is this weird romance fantasy novel. Yeah. But also, you're, I'm watching this and I'm thinking, not just the actor, really the stunt woman, but I'm thinking in the universe of the film.

Yes.

How many times, how long has Magda trained and practiced this particular escape move?

Yes.

And how excited is she that she gets to deploy it in this moment and nails it, like sticks the landing to a perfect 10, to even the East German judges?

Yeah. Can you imagine the meeting before this where Kamal Khan is like, yes, and you will seduce him and then Magda, I think he will do the escape sari. She's like, oh, I get to do the escape sari? This time, yes. Yes.

You get to repel off the balcony railing with your dress.

All this shit that happens in this movie has to have been agreed to in a meeting between the bad guys or the good guys in terms of their strategy.

It's not, there's no way it can be improvised. It all has to be meticulously planned.

So then Bond, who is not going to chase after Magda because he's counting on her to take the egg to Kamal Khan so he can eavesdrop, turns her out to go back into the room and he gets knocked out by Gobinda.

Right, right.

Who's been hiding.

Yes, yes.

And then?

He gets knocked out by a karate chop, which is a Roger Moore staple. In every film, he does like a single karate chop to the back of the neck and knocks people.

Yes, yes.

And finally he gets a karate chop and knocked out.

Yes.

He knocks out with the Cuban guy at the beginning of it. He knocks out a Cuban guy literally by just like a flat hand, flat back hand right to the back to like the nape of the neck. Boom, that guy's out, karate chop, yeah.

Yes.

And so then we cut to him arriving by boat, crewed entirely by beautiful women.

And we're rowing, by the way, to the sounds of another woman going in, out, in, out. I'm sure this will not come up again as an innuendo ever, right, Paul? Never.

Innuendo or Paul foreshadowing?

The whole. So Bond arrives, captured, to Paradise Island, basically, the floating palace populated by the Legion of Octopussy.

Where we see Octopussy's private army training.

Yes. And Khan is there, has brought him as a prize, along with the egg, which he delivers finally to a pretty unseen, still shrouded mystery.

We just hear from the back shrouded mystery.

His. Maud Adams. And we're 48 minutes into the movie. That's called Octopussy.

Yep.

And we still have not seen Octopussy, but now we're finally hearing her and catching glimpses of her. He briefs her on Bond. She tells him to bring. Oh, I'm sorry. I messed this up.

No, they're going to bond.

Bond has not has not been brought yet. Khan arrives on the island in the boat crewed by beautiful women. I'm sorry I messed that up to deliver the egg to Octopussy.

And Bond is taken to the Monsoon Palace.

To the Mountain Castle, yes. Yes, that's Khan's. And so Octopussy instructs Khan to bring Bond to her against his...

He wants to interrogate Bond and kill him. And she wants him brought to him. Now, Paul, I'd like to bring something up here. Now, in Casino Royale, famously, the first Daniel Craig Bond movie, right? Daniel Craig has information that LaShifra wants to know, right?

Yes.

So LaShifra kidnaps James Bond, cuts his clothes off, straps him to a chair, and beats him in the testicles with a rope.

I was going to say, you left out an important detail. A seatless wicker chair.

A seatless wicker chair, and then proceeds to beat him merciless, beat his testicles mercilessly with a rope.

Yes.

In a really grueling interrogation.

Yes. Javi, why on earth would you want to remind us of this?

Because in this film, like, again, this is, again, this is Kabuki. This is like class. This is a thing about class and about-

Yes.

Instead, in this film, Khan invites him to dinner.

No, no, not just to dinner. He puts him in a suite guarded by a single shemp who falls asleep promptly. Giving, and he has a closet full of clothes that fit James Bond, including a dinner jacket.

Impeccably.

Impeccably. And a safari outfit that he wears later in the movie.

Yes. It's very sharp.

He invites Bond for dinner.

Yes, with him and Magda.

Yeah, and then tells him, tomorrow morning, I'm gonna go ahead and poison you with curare and LSD to make sure I get all the information I want from you. But until then, go to your suite and put on some nice clothing that I've laid out for you, while I go meet with the Russian general who just happens to be surreptitiously meeting me by helicopter today.

Yes.

Now, Paul, if you were plotting World War III with a rogue Russian general, and some weird British dude had information you wanted, would you tie him to a chair, strip him naked, and beat his nuts until he told you? Or would you give him a nice hotel suite and a wardrobe, and then tell him your plans and let him sleep it off until you killed him? A or B? Which one sounds to you like actual contemporary spycraft?

So Khan is unavoidably a dumbass. In the scene, by necessity of the plot. So the worst torture that he does to Bond in this dinner scene is serve stuffed sheep's head. Yes. That does not appeal to Bond at all, but we see Khan chewing on an eyeball. That's clearly not an eyeball, but some-

A boiled egg.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, a hard boiled egg. And, but yeah, why? So he goes through this whole thing about, oh, Bond is like, are you gonna torture me? Are you gonna use sodium? Oh, he's like, oh, no, we're more sophisticated than that. Oh, well, then sodium bendethol. No, no, no, no, no, they were more advanced. And then he-

He heard a curare and a hallucinogenic compound, yeah.

Which we are told will result in permanent brain damage. So it's like, oh, this is a real threat, but does he deploy that? It's like, oh, well, no, this can wait until tomorrow.

Was it in the champagne? Is it in the sauce for the sheephead? No.

What are we waiting for? Why are we opening this door of possibilities so Bond can escape in four-year plans by revealing? Again, it makes no sense, and it is one of the most frustrating things in all of cinema going, is when the plot is dependent on the stupidity of a main character.

But it's also played out. But I think one of the things about that, and the reason why I think it plays out this way, and it's not, obviously, the plotting is really stupid, but I also think that there's a real element of class here. And here's how it, people go to these movies, I think, especially in the 80s, which was the peak of the lifestyles of the rich. I'm Robin Leach, welcome to Lifestyles of the Rich. That was a show on television about this kind of luxury, very ostentatious Donald Trumpian kind of luxury. And I feel like a big part of what we're seeing here is kind of giving these 12 year olds that Brad is talking about a sense of, this is high class.

It's fantasy escapism. It's extravagant exoticism.

It's exoticism and wealth porn.

Yes, so dinner concludes, and Bond is escorted upstairs along with Magda by Gobinda. And they stop at Magda's door, and Bond offers to come in for a nightcap. Offers a nightcap and is stopped in his tracks by Gobinda.

And I gotta say, this next bit is kind of funny.

I love the next bit, because then Gobinda escorts him to Bond to his room, and Bond says, I don't suppose you'd care for a nightcap?

And Gobinda kind of shakes his head like, Stone-faced. No response. Gobinda's like, I'm a star in my country, Mr. Moore. I'm an action star in my country, and I actually kick real ass in these movies.

Yeah, and Bond immediately just kind of punctuates it with, no, I guess, whatever. But it's a delightful little moment. But then he immediately now gets out the secret multi-tool pen for the acid, to take the bars.

Because, no, wait a second. James Bond was captured in a blue linen dressing gown, aka a robe, for us Americans, right? Now, he gets knocked out.

Wakes up fully clothed in the castle.

Presumably, they've dressed him, they've got a whole wardrobe for him in there, right? Or maybe they brought his stuff with them. I don't know. The point being, clearly, I can't imagine that James Bond's special acid pen was in the pocket of his dressing gown.

Right.

How did the pen get there unless they literally repacked all of James Bond's clothing, which had been famously unpacked by the assistants at the hotel?

Yes.

Brought it, I don't, anyway.

And on top of that, knowing that this is James Bond and that Khan knows what that, all that that entails, and because he is, we've just watched him give a briefing to Octopussy about James Bond, why on earth would they not confiscate any items?

Any items.

That he carried.

Like a pen is not a pen, a cigar is not a cigar. Do not trust this man with any household objects. Yeah. This guy literally used to travel with an exploding alarm clock, guaranteed to never wake anyone up who uses it. Nothing this guy has in his person, especially his liquid crystal display homing beacon watch, why did they leave that on him? Why was he wearing it when he was fucking Maud Adams? Nobody knows.

Because the plot of the film.

Not Maud Adams, I'm sorry, Christina Wayborne.

So, he uses the acid to get, because of course he's not just in the guest suite, it's a prison guest suite, a very fancy one with bars on the windows, which he removes too of with the acid, so we can get out onto the precarious ledge and shimmy his way to the next room, which conveniently is Magnus. And so, he surreptitiously goes into her room as he sees a helicopter land at the castle.

What a coinkiding, jinkies!

Deploying, dun dun dun, General Orlov himself.

Now, I have a note about General Orlov's physicality here, which is that Orlov is kind of like General Tony Manero. I mean, he has this weird strut that he does when he's walking, you know, where he's like, I mean, what is that about?

Yeah.

I mean, Steven Berkov is just in Cloud Cuckoo Land with this character. I mean, he's not Russian. He's not a British street thug. We don't know what the hell he is, but he walks and he talks and he's from his own world.

He is himself.

Yeah.

My favorite thing in this movie is Kamchatka. I only spent years after this movie going, Kamchatka. I don't know why. It just goes the way he says it.

That explains a lot of games of risk with you, Javi.

The Kamchatka Gambit. So Magda Note spawned Escaping, but doesn't do anything.

Paul, that was a very elegant callback to last week's episode. Thank you.

Thank you.

Where I was, yeah, very nice. I'm touched by that.

He then using his trusty, did I say Seiko?

Seiko, yes, Seiko.

Tracks the egg to basically the dungeon, because it's a castle. They've got to have a dungeon. Listens in on Khan and Orlov conspiring. But, alas, Magda has an extravagant head of hair, which must be blow-dried at this particular moment, which causes electrical interference of his surveillance.

Did you get the sense, though, that as he's sneaking out of his room, Magda kind of looks out her door, and you get the sense that he gave her such good dick that she's giving him a gimme and not calling it out. Because she's very clearly kind of implied that she spots him escaping his room, and she kind of goes, Hello, James!

Yes. Yes.

Magda will, I think, revealed herself to have unexpected death.

Divided loyalties, did he say? Yes.

Yes. But then we do hear Orloff ordering Khan to kill Bond, and also destroys-

Like that's going to do any good?

Yes, exactly. Like no one's ever tried or thought to do that before. And then very emphatically destroys the fake Fabergé egg, which then reveals the bug that Khan finds.

Which, by the way, Kamal Khan has the best- like this man does not need reading glasses. This microchip is like half the size of a housefly, if that, because it's been literally stuck inside of the miniature of the ceremonial imperial carriage inside of the egg. Kamal Khan smashes the egg with a shoe or a hammer or something, and out of all of the debris, the one thing he spots is the microchip. So, Kamal Khan, you know, misses his category, misses Drew Calling as a microfiche reader.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, no, Orloff shatters it with his gun.

That's right, the gun, yeah.

Then, oh boy, Orloff leaves with a big container of stuff that we'll see later. What is being what he's carting off with. And then Bond engineers a daring, devious escape in a body bag because he finds these weird, random victims, these dead bodies in the dungeon.

A typical Bond villain thing where Orloff says, you're two henchmen, can you guarantee their silence? And Kamal Khan says, of course I can. And then you find them dead, dead hanging from a meat hook.

Yes.

Bond hides in the body bag for one of them.

Yes.

And Kamal Khan realizes he's escaped the Monsoon Palace.

Yeah. So we're in some massive manhood and you think we think, oh, we're going to get the most dangerous game now.

Once again, once again, spy kabuki, okay? Bond has escaped in the middle of the night. It's day for night, but it is heavily implied it is the middle of the night. Kamal Khan is informed that the incredibly dangerous British adventurer he's been trying to murder for the last hour and a half of screen time has escaped. And he very casually says, we'll track him. And then the next morning, like I mean, presumably goes off and has a nice night's sleep. The next morning, it's literally like Lord Grantham from Downton Abbey is throwing a hunting party. There are elephants with balconies attached to their backs. There are people in turbans and flamboyant Indian costumes.

It's a big to do.

And there's like, there's like people with like, I mean, it's insane, but it literally looks like one of those fox hunts from Downton Abbey, you know? And at that point, and then Kamal Khan says, let the sport commence. And you're like, dude, take his clothes off, strike time to a chair, beat his nuts until he tells you, what are you doing? Don't take the elephants out.

Fucking get a couple of really, what the fuck?

Anyway, so just as Bond has been carted out of the castle to be disposed of with the other body of the dead henchmen, he surprises these poor superstitious lot of Indians by rising from the dead to spook them, and then goes on the run into the jungle, is spotted, and then we get the most dangerous game for this next sequence, which also has its own checklist of jungle.

Okay, so first of all, to go back to Return of the Jedi, he swings on a vine. That's how he escapes part of it.

Well, we're gonna get to that.

Because I made the checklist. Yes, my checklist goes, it goes, Spiders, cobwebs, spiders, and giant spiders. Yes.

A tiger, who he commandingly instructs to sit, and somehow it complies.

The tiger does, right?

Because he's that badass. Of course, they're-

But when you go sit, it sounds like Julie Andrews as Mary Poppins. There's nothing intimidating.

Of course, there are the elephants, then there's a snake as he's hiding, the snake crawls over him. And then we get, as producer Brad foreshadowed during Return of the Jedi.

Yes.

Who could have imagined the cosmic forces that would conspire to give us not one, but two inexplicable-

Johnny Weissmuller callbacks.

Yes.

Where James Bond starts swinging across multiple vines.

Yes. Well, he's that good.

Doing the Tarzan yell. Yeah.

Now, here's my question. Is he doing the Tarzan yell or is the Tarzan yell a joke? Okay. So look, famously at the beginning of Unher Majesty Secret Service, the girl runs away from George Lazenby. George Lazenby looks at the screen and says, this never happened to the other guy. Now, there's only two ways of interpreting that. One of them is he's fully aware that there was another guy who was James Bond 007 before him. James Bond and 007 are a designation. James Bond is a code name. That's why it's funny.

Well, it's funny because it's the actor who knows he's been replacing.

Well, that's the thing. Or is it just a blatant breaking of the fourth wall or is he just making a joke to the audience?

Yes.

So my question to you, producer Brad and Paul Alvarado-Dykstra, is this the filmmakers gang? Yeah, fuck it. We're just going to make this joke with you. Or is James Bond actually emitting the scream?

Oh, Bond is doing this. I think Bond has dreamed of this moment since childhood. And he is finally, finally, finally sees a bunch of vines and is like, oh, my God, that was my moment. I've been waiting. I've been training my whole life. I've been waiting. At long last, I get to fulfill the boyhood ambition of being, because he is supposed to return to the Jedi, where it makes no goddamn sense, because there's no Tarzan in the Star Wars universe. In the Bond universe, there is and there was. And presumably young James Bond watched the Johnny Rice Mueller Tarzan movies. And those were formative impressions on his soul that helped move him, nudge him, into the direction of adventuredom that would manifest as 007. And now it's come full circle in this moment that is existentially meaningful for our hero. But no, it's just a dumb joke.

And by the way, audience, I know we're an hour and 40 minutes into the podcast. And trust me, this movie gets so fucking tedious in the last half hour. We're going to blow by it with extreme prejudice. Don't worry. You're going to get home in time for dinner. Go on, Bernie Zabrat.

There is someone you can blame, not for this appearing in the film, but maybe for not stopping it. Alan Hume was the DP both in Return of the Jedi and Octopussy.

Wow.

He was present both times.

He could have said, guys, this is insanity. Stop it. And he didn't.

Wow.

Whichever one came first, yeah.

He knew the other movie was doing it.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, no, totally.

All right. But he may not have because, again, the swing of the line thing is one thing, but the Tarzan yell in both cases presumably was done in post.

Paul, my note on this moment is, not on this moment, but just this entire set piece, is this makes Raiders of the Lost Ark look like a Ken Loach movie.

But then we get a leech, then we get a crocodile, and then he makes this daring escape by swimming to a very conveniently nearby tour boat.

By the way, even though it's completely out of place, it is a genuinely very funny line, and his delivery is spot on. It's one of the few places in this movie where his aristocratic British delivery totally works, I think.

But yes, so he's pulled up out of the- By the tourists. By these American tourists, by their accents, and they're just stereotypical tourists, and they're just like, are you okay? And then one of them asks, are you with our tour group?

And he says, Ma'am, I'm with the economy tour. No, madam, I'm with the economy tour.

It's so great. We immediately then are back at our Convenient Secret Base, where finally Bond is, oh yeah, by the way, there's this Octopussy person. And her see Island of Women and whatever. And then we get the iconic...

The greatest, the vehicle I want even more than the Bidare Star Jet, my friends. What is it, Paul?

The one-man crocodile submersible.

It is a submarine in the shape of a crocodile that James Bond is inside the crocodile. And that's how he sneaks into Octopussy's paws.

It's sublime.

And the crocodile's mouth opens.

And there's a little crocodile windshield behind the crocodile teeth.

Yes. So Bond can peek out and see where he's going.

Oh, it's poetry.

It is great. And then he stealthily sneaks past all the beautiful women guards on what I'm just calling Paradise Island. And of course, Octopussy is observing him on the security monitors. And at over an hour, an hour and eight minutes into the film, finally, we finally meet Maud Adams as Octopussy, who says, Good evening. I wondered when you might arrive. She's been waiting for him as we have been waiting.

And so did the audience.

Yeah, this whole time.

Much like the audience. I've been waiting.

And then, I couldn't even follow this because I bet then there's this exposition dump of backstory of her connection to Bond, going back to her father. But you fill us in on this.

OK, so it turns out Octopussy's father was an MI6, MI7 one of the M's. She was an agent. And she and her father actually turned bad and stole a bunch of gold from the crown. And he was finally tracked down. And the man sent to kill him was James Bond. But instead of killing him, James Bond let him commit suicide honorably. And Octopussy has been waiting all this time to run into this British spy, not so she could kill him in revenge, but so that she could thank him for giving him an honorable way out. Which once again is part of the parallel universe Judith Kranz bullshit of this thing. How does that make sense? It's like, and I've been waiting to meet you all this time. So you could kill me? No. To thank you for giving him an honorable out is like, what?

It is so out of the fucking blue.

Yeah, like, it doesn't.

But it explains why she hasn't killed him. She hasn't, you know, why she has kept telling Kamal Khan not to kill him. So that makes sense.

It definitely makes her a more intriguing character.

Well, I have a question for you about this because, you know, we go in this now. She has her whole army of they're all circus performers. You know, he had all these acrobatic paramilitary women who wear red spandex with an octopus crest on their chest. So she has her private army and her circus performance and all that shit.

Not enough Octopussy cosplay in the world with that look.

Paul, I have a question for you.

OK.

Was this someone's misbegotten attempt at feminism? Like the way that perhaps Snyder, what's his name, the director of Wonder Woman, what's his fucking name? Snyder, Snyder, the Snyder Cut. What's his name?

Zack.

Steve Snyder, Dan Snyder, Snyder, Snyder?

He did not direct Wonder Woman.

No, but in the same way that Zack Snyder might have thought in the incredible stew of toxic masculinity that Ayn Rand put in his mind, that sucker punch was a feminist empowerment statement. Do you think that this was someone's idea of feminism? We've got this very strong woman who runs an octopus cult of women, who are all self-possessed, perfectly capable to handle weapons. Was this someone's idea of feminism? What is this, Paul? Help me. I'm in a k-hole here. I don't know who I am anymore.

I mean, not that I would presume to speak for the four male screenwriters of this film.

The four white men screenwriters?

White men screenwriters and directors and producers and everybody else involved. It does echo the prior kind of male semi-feminist fantasy espoused by William Moulton, the creator of Wonder Woman, of Paradise Island. I feel you can draw a direct line from one to the other. It seems like a remix of that idea and concept. At this point, the Wonder Woman TV show has existed in popular culture.

That is true. Yes, that is true.

So, it just seems like those are dots that...

The thing is, I can just imagine Coby Broccoli and Michael Wilson and the other three white guys sitting in an office, smoking cigars going, you know what this movie needs? It needs some feminism. That's right. That's really big. They have the ERA and of course, nobody was like, dude, that was like in 1976.

Well, it also, arguably, and we've avoided touching this with a 10-foot tentacle, but the-

So let's do it.

The title of this film is the most shamelessly misogynist, puerile, like just indefensible anti-feminist title.

Yes, and we do, in fact, we, in fact, find out that her name is Octopussy, not because of the gross possibility that she has eight vaginas, but because it was her father's pet name for her, which, ew!

Ew!

If I started calling my daughter Octopussy, my wife would divorce me and have Child Protective Services-

What is this, Paul? Help me.

I can, I, you know, again, as has been mentioned before, the Frank Herbert dude quote of Truth Suffering from Too Much Analysis, I resist the urge to look at this too closely because I worry it'll, like the sun, it would, it would burn us straight through the retinas. And, and, and Fry might do permanent brain damage like the, the torture that, that Khan was threatening Bond with. But I wonder if this was some ham-fisted attempt to reconcile the dilemma of the movie is called Octopussy. We have for, you know, a while now, two decades been hammered with criticism of our portrayal of women. And we're not going to hear the end of it with the title of this movie. So here's the thing. Here's what we're going to do. I got this bright idea. Why don't we make, we do a twist and we have these empowered badass women and do all this stuff and whatever. But then at the same time, they're thinking, oh, it's a good idea. How are you explain the name Octopussy of where that would come from and why she would be okay with calling herself that or letting other people call her that?

But also an expert in marine biology who loved Dr. Pi.

Exactly. That's a whole other thing. And she has a blue ringed exotic little tiny octopus in her aquarium that we keep getting cutaway shots to and that's replicated on the back of her robe and in the tattoos of her minions. It does, again, it makes no goddamn sense. It's like they just could, there's no way you can square that circle or vice versa. And I feel like they just, they tried too many things that just should, they should just not have gone near.

But it just, it is.

I don't know, crazy idea for 1983. But what if they had had a woman involved in this production in any way, shape or form?

Shut your whore mouth.

In the writing or producing or whatever.

Yeah, but all that being said.

Do go on.

Maude Adams comports herself with elegant majesty.

Yes, she's quite good in this movie.

As much as possible, especially when having to process and dispense all this exposition of backstory. And then just so we can move on, Khan then arrives...

Can we pause on the name one more second?

Oh, please.

Obviously, there was controversy at the time. And in 1982, there was concern. So Albert Brockley had a study done to see how the name would fare. And the results were 37% of women said they would not want to see the film. 4% said they would not want to see a James Bond film with that title. So Brockley said he had a 96% approval rating because 96% of women would see a Bond film titled Octopussy.

Yeah, sure, sure, that's like, that's like, that's like when AI paints somebody with eight arms. You're like, I mean, it's sort of the prompt.

I mean, whatever, whatever helps you sleep at night, Cubby. Oh my God.

Okay. Anyway, look, Kamal Khan shows up and says, he says, my favorite line, he says, you have a nasty habit of surviving.

Yes, because Khan, who we have recently established, is a dumbass, has no idea that the escaped Bond is already arrived and be going to Octopussy and they're hanging out and chilling. And I'm surprised in this moment because when Bond first enters, I hate to even use the word and have to keep saying Octopussy, her inner sanctum, he has the drop on her with his Walther PPK. And then she disarms him with exposition in terms of the fact, like her intention is not to kill him. When Khan arrives, I expect Bond to get the drop on him. But no, he is only, he's only wielding a bottle, I mean, a glass of champagne.

They're too sophisticated. It's a fucking Noel Coward play. It's literally like, Oh, hello, miss. Oh, you have a nasty habit of, yes, I do.

It's like, yes.

So Khan is emasculated in the scene, is dismissed by Octopussy for this more superior.

Can I say something while this is going on?

Yes.

While this is going on, VJ and Q are taking turns being the lookout for James Bond and their cover, very clever cover, is as men who fish for 12 hours at a time off this pier.

Yes.

So Lily, I'm going to be here for 12 hours pretending to fish, then you come in, you take the fishing pole, the same fishing pole, and you pretend. One of us is an Indian guy in like a long white tunic, and the other one is an old British man in a safari costume.

Yes.

But our cover is so brilliant because we're fishing.

Yes. I love this. Presumably, they're at the pier where they launch the crocodile sub-throat.

Yes.

But from that distance, they can't really see anything that's happening. At the island palace of whatever. But they're there waiting for Bond to return presumably, or for explosions.

And Kamal Khan leaves the scene and he goes and does something very naughty. Paul, can you tell us what that is?

He hires assassins to kill Bond because he's clearly jealous, but also he's been ordered by Count Orlok to murder Bond. So kill two birds with one stone. And we get the first demonstration of the buzzsaw yo-yo.

Yes, we have the buzzsaw yo-yo killer, yes.

Yeah, wow.

Exotic shirtless Indian man who fights with a buzzsaw that is attached to a yo-yo-like mechanism that allows him to lower the spinning buzzsaw from a...

But it's only...

It's a very specific weapon.

Yes, because it only seems to be effective...

If he's above you.

If he can reach, like, you know, Obi-Wan, the high ground.

The high ground, yeah.

But if... Absent that, it seems to be fairly useless. And also, I'm just thinking it's a circular buzzsaw.

Yeah, however...

How are you wielding that or holding it without just slicing your hand to... Again, I can't overthink it.

Now, Paul, they get to the pier, they kill Vijay with it.

It's very cool. This is... This is the tragedy of the film. We do get in between that. I'll be real quick. There's a walk and talk. She talks about reviving this octopus cult as a cover for her smuggling operation, which she's diversified.

And her circus.

It's a circus and shipping and resorts and all this other stuff.

Take her ships, cable channels, you know.

Did you guys, when you were on her island, with all of her henchwomen in those red outfits, think Greatest American Hero?

Not once, but thank you.

Every time I looked at them, I kept thinking they were wearing the same outfit.

I mean, probably, you know... A little bit.

Also, little Incredibles. It is...

Oh, that's right, that's all sort of...

I mean, they were wearing capes. I would have gone there more. But I get what you're saying. But it turns out that... Maud Adams, I'm just... I'm not going to say...

Don't say Octopus, just say Maud Adams.

Has been harboring this dream, this ambition for this man who gave her troubled father, who was... Yeah, who betrayed Crown and Country, Grace, that they're destined to team up. And so she has a proposition for him to basically join her in, let's say, not the dark side, but the gray side. And he can make a lot of money. There's a lot of opportunity for someone of his skills. And of course, because he's Bond, regardless of her feminine wiles, he is a loyal agent of the Crown. He's a servant of the kingdom. So he refuses and is not for sale. So this...

She gets in a snitch. She's just really upset about this.

She's such a...

Storms out. He goes after her and borderline assaults her by forcing a kiss on her.

But it turns out, of course, because his kisses are so virile.

But also that's what she wants. That's what she wants. Clearly, her ambition.

And then, like Ayn Rand, her ambition is not to be powerful over a man, but to be overpowered by a man and thus being able to finally surrender to her true femininity.

Yes, because she didn't storm out of her office just anywhere. She stormed into her bedroom where she took a very strange pause.

She literally was just standing next to the bed with her back turned to him.

Well, and not just any bed, Javi. A magisterial octopus bed.

Heart-shaped octopus bed with like silver satin sheets and...

It is a sight of splendor, the likes of which we have not beheld.

So they fuck.

Yes, presumably. But then there's a little interlude afterwards where he's rummaging through drawers and stuff, and he finds a flyer for the Octopussy Circus that was in wherever 009 was.

In Berlin, where 009 got killed.

And with the image of a clown, the same looking uncannily like the disguise that 009 died wearing. So he is connecting these dots that despite her assertions that she knows nothing of this conspiracy and what happened to the egg and 009 or whatever, he's like, the plot thins. But yes, then back VJ's tragically on 50, although I think it's fair to say VJ effectively saves Q's life, because if it had been, if they had been on alternating shifts, it could have easily been Q who we lost, but VJ tragically is killed by the buzzsaw yo-yo assassin.

VJ holding up the time-honored James Bond tradition of the ethnic sacrificial lamb.

Exactly.

There's always a local ethnic person who is likable and helpful and sometimes perhaps even more competent than Mr. Bond as we see with his rickshaw driving skills.

Could be worthy of his own spinoff or movie, but no. He has to be. He will never fulfill.

And to add insult to injury, after Boss Saw Guys shows up at Octopussy's castle and they have a big fight, right? And which we're going to, I'm sure, go into. Q reveals that VJ actually survived all the way until Q showed up several hours later and was able to give him the incredibly vital piece of information of Kamal Khan did this.

Yes.

Why make VJ survive but with a bust out through his chest for that long?

Also, also thank you for reminding me of this. To do it off screen. To not give the actor a death scene, to impart this critical information to Q, and also to give Q a scene.

Look, give that little one a little sugar, give him a little something to play, other than telling James Bond an asshole. Which is legit, but whatever.

Yeah, that's the biggest omission of this 2-hour, 11-minute film. It did need that. The Assassins infiltrate, attack the castle.

A scintillating fight scene ensues.

The combat ensues. Bond saves Maud Adams repeatedly from the buzzsaw yo-yo guy, but then gets into a brawl, plummets out a window into the water where there is a crocodile that eats buzzsaw yo-yo guy.

He uses buzzsaw guy as a human shield.

Yes.

Crocodile eats buzzsaw guy, giving Bond the time to escape into his. Give it to me, Paul.

Crocodile submarine.

Yes!

We should actually check if crocodilesubmarine.com is available at other assorted social media platform handles. But poor Maud Adams thinks that Bond has tragically been lost as well, because he does not emerge from the waters, because he has escaped unbeknownst to her in his...

Here's my next note on this thing. I know that this is not a big skip forward. Bond finds the body of VJ and doesn't make a joke about love meaning nothing to a tennis player.

Is that bad?

Well, I guess it was finally faulty love, VJ.

Oh my god.

Anyway, my next note is Roger Moore only seems slightly less masculine than John Waters here.

So we're off to Berlin after after Bond returns to Q and gets that end of whatever.

They're going to talk to Pussy Circus. I guess that's the end game is going to be an Octopussy Circus somehow, yeah.

But then he is asked by M who has arrived in Berlin and they're talking in a car and he's asked why would... And Bond is updating him.

They still don't know what the plot is.

Yes, we still don't know the plot. And as asked why would General Orloff participate in a jewelry caper to which Bond, of course, surmises this is only the tip of the tentacle.

But he said it is in the most lecherous way possible. He goes, I think this is only the tip of the tentacle. And you're just like, what is this? Why stop? Have a movie. Anyway, do go on.

So we don't necessarily get a movie, but we get the circus because the circus is now in East Berlin. Conveniently, we are reintroduced to, they're credited as the twins.

They're actually Grisha and Misha, the knife-throwing Russian twins.

Yeah, I had them as Mishka and Shichka. But whatever.

Shichka and Chanka? Whatever.

Whatever they are. And so they're still part of the circus and demonstrating their knife-throwing skills and the whole circus thing.

Which they're quite good at it, by the way, aren't they?

They're highly skilled. And Khan and Orlov and Gobinda and Octopussy are all there at the circus.

Weirdly, these international criminals watch the circus together with the dignitaries. It's them and a couple of Russian, including General Orlov, who's shown up to watch the circus in Karl-Marx-Stadt. And then Octopussy and international criminal Kamal Khan are all sitting in the sort of owner's booth watching. It's insane. It makes no goddamn sense.

It's very conspicuous. We also get, there's a demonstration of the human cannonball, which I feel is a setup without a sufficient payoff in the film. But then we cut to, the plot actually-

Thins, even more.

Thickening slightly. General Gogol has turned into Hercule Poirot and is on the case in the Soviet art repository- Right.

Oh, Gogol, that's right. He shows up and realizes, yes, the Romanovs-

And he finds fake jewels.

And he's starting to connect the dots on the trail of, I'm just calling him Count Orlok.

Count Orlok, yeah, whatever.

As they were back-

I'm so checked out at this point, buddy. It's like you call me, it's like-

Those scenes remind me of Monty Python and the Holy Grail when the police are tracking all the side scenes.

Yes.

Right.

Yeah, so Bond infiltrates the circus. He does a little Cape Fear underneath the train. And then we see that the Soviets have this sinister plot where they're switching the train cars-

I don't understand any of this here.

What?

So they're in one car with the jewels, and then there's another car that's the circus car. They stop the circus car with the jewels to take the jewels out and put the bomb in, right?

Yes.

And then they weld the bomb into the cannon because Octopussy doesn't know there's a bomb involved. She just thinks she's sneaking the jewels into West Germany, right?

Yes.

So when Gogol left in the helicopter, he was given this canister, and that now we've seen is this canister full of purloined jewels, this treasure trove, and it is being stashed for smuggling by way of the circus in a secret compartment in the base of the human cannonball cannon. But unbeknownst to Octopussy, there is a clone of this circus train car where a nuclear device, like you do, that's the exact same size as the jewelry canister is in that human cannonball base and being locked into it because their plan is they're going to switch them. And so Orlok is intercepting the jewels, putting them in the trunk of his Mercedes, and switching the train cars in a tunnel so that he is going to…

So Orlok has the real jewels in his car.

Yes.

The fake jewels are going to the west, are being smuggled into the west so that the good guys are selling the fake jewels.

Oh, no. The fake jewels are already in the… It doesn't matter. Who gives a shit? Yeah, whatever. They got the real jewels.

I don't understand any of it. A lot of trains.

But he swaps the jewel stash for this nuke, a thermonuclear bomb…

As one does.

that is then being put in, again, hidden in the base of the human cannonball cannon.

I like the human cannonball. That's a good nickname for the people who wrote this film. Jesus Christ.

Because the next stop for the circus is none other than the US base in West Germany.

Now, look, presumably, the American servicemen needed entertainment just like anybody else. And who better to entertain General Buck Turgensen of the US Armed Forces than Octopussy Circus, right? I think.

Exactly. Alright, cool. So Bond is observing this very fortuitously and infiltrates then the train car and takes out twin number one, the first knife thrower, and then gets his clothes, briefly captures Orloff who reveals his plan.

And by the way, Orloff says, who are you? And what does Bond says? British secret intelligence. You're like, cover much, Bond? Yes.

Because he's presumably arresting Orloff.

Yes. Well, maybe they're just being gentlemen. I don't know some version of that.

Nuclear terrorism or attempted thereof. But Orloff reveals his plan to fool the West into thinking that this is an American nuke that goes off accidentally at on the American base to trigger European disarmament, to then allow the Soviets to then pull over Europe.

Isn't it every bit as good a plot that like, why didn't he nuke Karl Markshtad, blame the Americans and then invade Europe like he wanted to at the beginning in his PowerPoint presentation? Like he literally is going to set off a bomb in the West to make it look like this American so the Americans, so that NATO will disarm unilaterally. How long is that going to take? I mean, does he dying slower than the rest of us? Because that's not a short-term plan, my friend.

He wants to avoid triggering a Western NATO nuclear retaliation.

Right. So what I'm saying is if he'd blown up a Soviet city with that nuke, right?

He did the US base because US has bombs there. His bomb is covered by the US bombs. The US doesn't have bombs. Oh, that's right.

Because his bomb looks like a US bomb.

Yes.

Whatever. And he doesn't want to kill his own countrymen, his own like Soviet. Yeah, he wants to take out a bunch of Americans while he's at it.

Anyway. How small is this bomb? Yes.

When Peter Sellers does his cameo as the Russian atomic scientist who arms the bomb, he explains he wants to be at least 20 miles away from it. Not kilometers, miles.

Yes.

Yes.

Which actually sets off my favorite gag in this entire movie.

Yes. So Orlov then escapes because those other Soviets come in. Bond goes after the nuclear train in Orlov's Mercedes that he steals, that has the jewels in the trunk. The tires get blown as he's escaping the base because of the whatever. And that's convenient for Bond because then he's able to use just the actual tire rims that are perfectly spaced.

Yes. To drive the Mercedes Benz on the train tracks.

Exactly. So he drives the Mercedes on the train tracks in pursuit of the circus train.

Would you like to hear my note on this beat in the movie?

I have been waiting my whole life for this.

What is this? Fucking Mr. Bean? He's on a Mercedes Benz on the train.

What the hell?

It's a cartoon. It's just this movie's...

This one is a cartoon, yeah.

It's a cartoon.

But somehow Bond winds up back in the train and now Gobinda and the surviving murder brother, his murder twin is there, right?

This is actually a really cool stunt. So we get a cool stunt sequence as he is approaching the train in a parallel track because someone sees him coming and shifts him to a parallel track.

Yeah.

But this is actually good because it allows Bond to then jump out through the skylight, whatever, of the Mercedes.

I believe it's called a sunroof, yes.

Sunroof. Thank you. I'm thinking of a house.

You're thinking of a better movie.

Yes.

Using the handy umbrella to like hold the accelerator down.

Again, Mr. Bean, he literally uses the umbrella. Yeah.

It's absurd. The whole thing is absurd. But he jumps from the car onto the train, and then the car is catapulted into the river as it's struck by an oncoming train. So he escapes in the nick of time.

And so we get this extended train sequence and stunts that, again, in retrospect, you can't help but think of the previous Mission Impossible, Dead Reckoning, which was part one, but then not. But in this case, it's clearly we're intercutting between re-projection shots of Moore and then actual stunt person and on and on.

Look, I think there are two set pieces in this film that are very evocative of Mission Impossible set pieces. There's this one in the train. Yes. And then there's also the very end of it, which is a fight on top of an airplane.

Yes.

Which is something, you know, and as you said, the contrast between, I can tell the stuntman isn't Roger Moore. Roger Moore in the most obvious re-projection shots. There's a part where he's trying to come to the trainer. It's very clear that he's just kneeling just off camera. Like, you know, it's just the upper part of his body, but the rest of him is kneeling and he's trying to climb into the train. But then they cut to the stuntman, who's actually, you know, hanging from the train. None of the physicality matches. None of it works. It's awful.

No. Yeah. Meanwhile, Hair Q Po Rho, I mean, General Gogol, arrives as they're recovering the Mercedes out of the river and recovers, finds the jewels in the trunk of Count Orlok's car. Bond has now somehow found the time to change into a gorilla suit.

It's the weirdest thing. So Bond is in this cart and Gobinda and the murder twin that's left are searching the car, doing something in the car. Gobinda thinks James Bond is there in the... James Bond, oh no, it's the border guard is checking the car. And Bond has magically gotten into a gorilla suit in which he hides.

Yes.

And he gets in it in about two seconds of screen time. And then Gobinda, after the border guards leave, Gobinda sees something weird with the gorilla suit, hits it with a sword, but by then James Bond has gotten out of the gorilla suit and he's on top of the train, which leads into an interminable train chase. Holy Toledo, Paul!

Yes, it goes on for a while.

I thought I was on the event horizon of a black hole and that time had lost all meaning and relevance because holy shit!

Yes, a black hole of a very long train tunnel that they go into for an extended search.

And they fight on top of the train, they kick each other.

Prior to that, a very important cool moment because Orloff is chasing not just Bond, but his treasure trove of jewels in the trunk of his car. And he sees that Bond knows he's on the train that is crossing the border, that he is not allowed to cross. But he is so consumed by revenge and avarice that he races through the, across the border as Golgo arrives in pursuit of him. And what happens, but Orloff is shot to death as he is chasing Bond in the car in vain and his treasure leave. And then Golgo, while we didn't get the dying words between VJ and Q, we do get them between Orloff in a disgusted... Golgo. Golgo just looks down at the dying Orloff as you're a common, you're just a common thief, a disgrace to the uniform.

And Orloff says.

Orloff dies.

Yes, but tomorrow I will be a hero of the Soviet Union.

And much like Khan, in last summer's Star Trek II.

He dies thinking he won.

Who's setting off the Genesis device. Orloff thinks he's won because he set the timer to the nuclear bomb that cannot be stopped and will not be found in time.

Now, Bond has fallen off the train. Yeah, perilously. Murder Twin has gone after him. They wind up in this weird shack where Murder Twin literally pins Bond to the wall using knives that pin Bond's silk shirt to the wall. And Bond cannot escape from a silk shirt.

But first, who does he mistake Bond for?

I don't know.

His brother. Because he's wearing the same classic outfit. And then when he sees it's Bond, he realizes Bond has killed his brother.

Yeah, I don't know. Anyway, so the guy says, this is for my brother. And then Bond, I don't know, he does something that's supposed to be cool, grabs a knife, points a killing murder to it, and says, and that's for 009. Which is supposed to be a badass moment, but it's not. Bond then manages to get into West Germany, where he is felled by a number of issues like, he's trying to hitchhike to get to the base, and it's a bunch of kids in a car who punk him.

They slow down, and Bond runs away.

In a very cool car, by the way. You're like, ooh, that's a car worthy of Bond, that he could maybe kick the kids out of, but no, no.

Bond winds up in a Volkswagen with a bunch of fat Germans who keep trying to offer him sausage.

Again, fulfilling the extreme stereotypes of offering him bratwurst and beer.

Like Jason Bourne wouldn't kick these two people out of the car, get in the car and drive to save the world. Bond is literally stuck in the car with these two sausage-eating Germans. Then he finally gets to a payphone, and he tries to get to the payphone, but some woman gets in before him. Does he open the door and rip her off to call NATO to stop the nuclear? But no, he waits for her to make her call, and he's literally outside the phone booth pointing to his watch. He steals the woman's car. I mean, this is inane.

He finally loses patience and notice that she has a particularly sporty Renault.

Yes, yes.

I believe.

I think it's an Alfa Romeo. Maybe it's an Alfa Romeo.

Okay, you're probably correct.

Yeah.

And obscons with it.

Yes.

It's much to her horror, and then she notifies the nearby police, oh, he's stealing my car, and of course, they're looking at the police face. So now Bond is driving, as Bond is racing to try to get into the American base.

Then there's a bunch of incredibly tedious, you know, German cops, American servicemen are looking for James Bond.

Meanwhile, he passes Khan and Gobinda, who are escaping, having now set the timer for the nuke, and they've got to get 20 miles away.

But the best part of it, now this is this, Paul, God, I hate myself for this. I gotta, I gotta roll you back a little bit here.

Real quick, it's a Renault 4F4.

I knew it.

You know, you win. Kamelkhan have been in the owner's box with General Buck Turgetson and the other guy from Strange Love, you know, the other two stereotypical of it, and the guy from War Games and Octopussy, they're watching the circus, right, because they watch it with dignitaries. Kamelkhan says, oh, we have to go handle some business. They get in Kamelkhan's car, because Kamelkhan knows when the bomb is going to go off.

Yes.

Govinda is driving the car. He puts the key in the ignition and the car doesn't start.

Yes.

And we know they got to get 20 miles away. They had like 10 minutes to do it.

Yes.

And this is the best acting Luiz Jordan does in the whole movie. He kind of gives Kamelkhan this look like, really? Yeah. Yeah. Really.

Are you fucking kidding? Are you fucking kidding right now? Yeah.

Then the car starts and they go, okay, so anyway.

Arguably, the most suspenseful scene in the moment in the movie. But also, Khan, asshole, leaves Octopussy and Belinda, what's her name?

Magda.

Magda, yeah. To the deaths. Yeah.

So Paul.

What an asshole.

Now, what a dick. I don't know, Ace Hunter level of asshole or just asshole? Oh. He's just an asshole.

Way up there.

No one's any, I mean, only James Bond might be as big an asshole as Ace Hunter, but we'll get into that. Paul, James Bond shows that he can put on face paint as rapidly as he can get in and out of a gorilla suit, because as he's being chased by the German police, he goes into a caravan and he comes out in the exact same clown costume as 009 with the exact same face paint that he seems to put on flawlessly within less than 30 seconds.

It's uncanny.

Now, Paul, I will say that this may be the one time in ever in a James Bond movie that I actually thought James Bond might not get out of it, because he's in a clown costume trying to convince Buck Turgetson that there's a bomb in the cannon.

Yes.

Is this suspense?

Also, I didn't clock it, but at one point we're told there are 90 seconds left, and there's no way.

It's about 15 minutes of screen time.

There's no way that they aren't all dead. But he is frantically in this clown costume being pursued by police and military for stealing a car and breaking into the base. Everyone's on the lookout for him, and he gets into the circus, the main ring or whatever of the circus, and the audience thinks it's an act because he bumps into the human cannonball guy because he knows where the bomb is. It's in the base of the cannonball, and that's what's next up in the Circus Act, and the cannonball guy, like this is a big bomb and he doesn't want anyone stealing his thunder, much less nuclear thunder. But then Bond goes to the kind of VIP box area to plead with the US. General, who does not believe him because he's a clown, but he then pleads with the Vaught Addams, who's recognizing that, oh dear Lord, it's Bond, he's alive, why is he a clown? We don't know, but then, but it's just mayhem, it's just crazy, and then he is trying to get to break open, because it's locked, the case that the nuke is in, he cannot open it, he is detained, it is Octopussy, who then grabs a fire axe, no, then a gun, I think.

A general's gun, she grabs the general's gun from his holster, yeah.

And then shoots the lock open, revealing the nuclear bomb that is perilously close to counting down. I mean, to nuclear armageddon for them. Nine seconds, which again, is crazy. How is he possibly going to defuse it? The general says, let Bond go, because at this point, no one can do anything, it's a Hail Mary, to let this clown, literally, that they are just going to trust, to try to disable the bomb in time. And all he does is he like, rotates it and pulls out the thing.

He pulls out the arming button.

To like one second, Javi, I know this has been done before, and probably since.

Why didn't it stop at 007, like in Goldfinger? Thank you, thank you.

We're already in-

That's what we came for, this is what we came for, and we're not getting it. Now the countdown starts at 009, the dead agent, you'd think it would end at 007, nope.

Yes, but we're already in Cartoon Crazy Town version of Bond, like you might as well commit and go all the way. But anyway, Bond and Octopussy in Tana-

Save the Day together.

Save the Day, and amazing. But is the movie over? No.

Oh, God, no, there's still like two hours left.

Khan and Gobinda have gone back to their mountain palace, and he is destroying evidence, but Octopussy-

And stealing his forgery, money forgery plate, so he can print his own money.

Yes, so they'll be set to life whatever they're going to do. Who knows that they had this whole forgery operation? Why were they bothering with anything else?

Octopussy's women are using circus techniques to break into the castle. They're like using gymnastics and trapeze artistry. So Mod Adams walks into the office. She seems to have the drop on Gobinda and Kamal Khan, but Kamal Khan-

Gaslighter.

Gaslighter? Oh no, I was just coming to bring you these plates so we can make our own money and start all over.

Orloff betrayed us. I knew nothing of the bomb. Like, Bob, I was like, you asshole. But then the henchman, Gobinda, sees the invaders coming.

Karate Chopped Mod Adams.

Fighting ensues. We get this big fight scene. Octopussy is captured, taken prisoner by Khan and Gobinda as they attempt to escape. And then, what glorious sight do we behold? Arriving out of the blue, literally.

Famously, the end of the opening gambit for Spy Who Loved Me was the wonderful, cathartic moment where he falls off a cliff, his parachute opens, it's the Union Jack, and then that great Swing and Dick James Bond theme starts playing, right? So we got to outdo that. So him and Q show up in a hot air balloon that has the Union Jack all over it.

It is the Union Jack. It is a giant Union Jack hot air balloon, piloted by Q, multi-skilled, and Bond swings into action from the balloon. And then we also get the iconic trailer moment of him sliding down the rail of the staircase.

Oh, shooting a machine gun, right?

And shooting out the perilously positioned, I don't know, pineapple, like whatever, at the foot of the rail to save his crotch.

And they used a James Bond guitar riff for this, which sort of ruins it, ruins the riff.

This movie almost, I mean, honestly, I used to think this movie was good. And I don't know who I was that thought that anymore. I have lost, yeah, I get it. Was I, yeah, I don't know. All of this leads to Kamal Khan and Govinda get on horses. They fly, they ride out to an airstrip where Kamal Khan has his two engine air. Oh God, oh God, there's more. No, please, please.

If this, if I've ever.

Do go on, do go on, all right.

Ever in the past, present or future of Multiplex Overthruster, been possessed to pause our proceedings for something worthy. This is arguably the most worthy.

What is it?

Jesus Christ. Makes chase on horseback to Khan, Gobinda and the captured, now unconfined, Octopussy. A bunch of Octopussy circus squadron.

The paramilitary, feminist paramilitary.

Are cornered by a henchman who's about to mow them down, but who is still there at the command of.

And that's a shocking amount of control of the, of the, of the, of its vehicle, of this vehicle.

Of the Union Jack hot air balloon and just masterfully careens it into the unsuspecting evil doer henchman.

Knocking him down with a wicker basket. Yeah, it's amazing.

Saving all these women from certain death who, and then he, he lands, disembarks, is showered with their lusty gratitude in this perfect, maybe greatest Q moment of all time. What are you doing? Yeah, I'll cut it out.

I haven't time for that.

Later, perhaps.

I have no time for that.

Having no time for that. Later, perhaps. Javi.

Desmond Llewellyn, Q has finally revealed as having a libido.

The mind boggles of what?

The bond mingles. I don't know.

Of what wondrous rewards of fleshly delight awaits Q.

You imagine Desmond Llewellyn in a toga being fed grapes?

I just want to cherish this image.

Let's stop for a moment.

This moment and just in fond, wistful, reverie, picture, Q surrounded by these grateful, beautiful women, to whom they owe their life.

And in true James Bond fashion, they will reward him carnally, dare we say. Yeah, the mind reels. Then there's an interminable airplane. But the Bond's not over, but yes. God please end it.

The bad guys escape, take off on a plane. Bond is desperately trying to catch it. He does. And as in, was it Rogue Nation or was it Fallout?

It's Rogue Nation. It's Rogue Nation and also Final Reckoning where he's on, yeah.

Well, yeah, it kind of combines them. Where first he gets on the side of the plane, is clinging onto dear life as it takes off. And then, so it's a kind of a combination of both of these Mission Impossible sequences. And then is on the top and then Khan is trying to toss him off because he knows he's on there.

He sends Gobinda out there?

He fails to do that. He sends Gobinda outside. Now, they're aloft. They're flying this twin engine prop.

But James Bond is stopping the engines with his hands.

Yes. Well, he disables one of the two engines, putting them all at risk. And Khan is like, oh, he's a mad man. He's going to kill us all.

Go out there and get him.

Gobinda out, Octopussy wakes, tries to stop him, gets slapped into submission as Gobinda then. And then we get this fight between Bond and Gobinda on the exterior of a plane in flight. That is insane.

And literally this makes, this makes like, oh, I can't even get into it. It's horrible.

But what weapon does Bond deploy to dispatch the overwhelming threat of the looming Gobinda?

Oh my god, yes, that's right. Bond grabs the antenna for the plane, which is flexible. Right, and he winds it back. And then he literally lets it go. It hits Gobinda straight between the eyes.

Boing!

And Gobinda flies off.

With sufficient force to slap Gobinda off the fuselage of the plane.

And you can barely see the stuntman's parachute when he does that.

Into the air to fall to his certain doom and demise. It's so ridiculously absurd. Bond then enters the plane as Khan is attempting to land with the disabled engine. And Bond also at a certain point is like using his feet to like stop him from using the flaps. Yeah, something like whatever. Then he grabs Maud Adams. They leap out of the plane just as the plane careens off of a cliff and then crashes killing our villain.

And Louis Jourdan gives about the least credible scream, the side of the Wilhelm scream, when he dies. He's like, Ahhhhhhh!

It likes so many things in this film that should be deeply satisfying.

Is not.

Is not.

It is in no way. It's not even shallowly. Not even. It's, it's, it's, yeah, it's.

I mean, Paul.

OK, so anyway, so then.

We do get, we do get, I think, a somewhat satisfied. And then they have a horrifying meeting of Gogol.

Gogol and the minister.

Yes. And where things are said and unsaid between them of their mutual respect and the solemn duty they have to maintain a peaceful detente.

And I love how Gogol says, of course, we categorically deny all knowledge of this incident. But we would respectfully ask the return of our national treasurer. Because Bond has pocketed the Romanov star. And then of course the minister says, well, as soon as we can get in touch with James Bond, because he's still recovering from his injuries.

Yes, he's very injured, seriously injured and must recuperate.

Cut to Octopussy's barge being piloted, being rowed by women whose coach is yelling, in, out, in, out.

But Bond is laid up in bed, you know, with apparently multiple fractures and sprains and whatever.

His leg is up on a satin, like, a thing, and a pulley, you know.

And Sweet Maud Adams, who's nursing him, is wishfully, you know, saying, oh, I wish you weren't in such a weakened condition, to which Bond reveals he's perfectly fine and rolls her over, and we get the obligatory, oh, James.

Yes. Oh, James. By the way, why would you fake an injury to seduce a woman who already wants to fuck you?

It seems like it would be necessary a lot of work and deployment of props and state-

Is that just the same kind of practicing his spycraft, his guile?

I don't know. But it's a gag that doesn't make any sense if you think about it too much, but that's kind of the whole film.

That's kind of the whole film. Paul, producer Brad. Producer Brad, was this movie success in the box office? What happened with this movie, dare I say, when it escaped into the world? Because I can't imagine anybody releasing this film.

I can't believe we went longer than the actual film talking about this.

But producer Brad, tell us, how did we do?

Well, first of all, did you watch it all the way through the credits?

James Bond will return.

Really?

Right, but I'm not that I paid attention to all the credits, but the credits end and then there's another 20 seconds of the theme song. It just goes to black and then once the song ends, the UA logo and the MGM lion come up. I've never seen that before. They just let the song go. I take it you haven't either. Okay.

You know what? Did Nick Fury show up to recruit Rita Coolidge?

I don't, I don't care.

Yeah, no. At this point, at this point, and Brad, and producer Brad, I got to tell you, I was stoned out of my gourd at this point. I started smoking weed when the movie started and I didn't stop. This was the only way I could continue. And even in my, even in my stoned lack of momentum, even in my almost cement-like stuckness to my chair, couch-lock, I had to stop the movie at this point. I couldn't, I couldn't, yeah.

Well, let's work our way to the end of this and to the next episode. So, Octopussy, open on June 10th, 1983. It was the number two film for the weekend behind Return of the Jedi, it was 8.9 million.

Of course.

Trading Places, the other new film was number three. For the year, Octopussy was number six behind Return of the Jedi, Tootsie, Flashdance, Trading Places and War Games. All time, it ranks 1,336, one slot behind Killers of the Flower Moon from 2023 and just ahead of Outbreak from 1996.

You know, shocking because Killers of the Flower Moon was such a knee-slapping good time.

And an even longer film. Producer Brad, I don't mean to put you on the spot for a question that I should have had the decency to prepare you for. Do you happen to know how it ranks among the Bond films?

Actually, I am prepared for that. It is the 11th highest grossing Bond of the 25 Bond films, totaling $67.9 million. And in 1983, as we mentioned, Never Say Never Again came out, which opened in October of 83, and that earned $55.5 million. So this outdid that one.

Yes. Yeah, no surprise.

Producer Brad, what's opening next week, please?

All right, so next week we're going to June 17th, and there is only one movie opening. Only one.

Oh, no.

You are right to worry. We'll see. It is...

Oh, God!

Superman III. Now, if this doesn't... If you're not willing to sit through this, we can go through the charts and see what else is playing.

Well, what else is playing?

Let's find out.

We also have Fanny and Alexander by...

Wait, I can't wait to hear our scintillating insights on this film. It just says...

Trading Places is still playing?

Yes.

Psycho II?

No, no.

Flashdance?

No, no.

Space Hunter? Adventures in the Forbidden Zone?

I will say I have gotten a request from a listener for Space Hunter.

Well, I mean, look, that means we have a listener.

I just want to acknowledge that for the record.

We also have Blue Thunder, Man with Two Brains, Tootsie, Breathless, Richard Gere, Cheech and Chong, Still Smoking, My Tutor, Valley Girl, The Man from Snowy River.

We're in Hell. We've entered Hell.

La Traviata, Baby, It's You, and that's it.

You know, Paul, because you've had a request...

Well, I'm not ready to go there yet.

Which one do you want to watch?

I don't know. I think we need to talk through this. I don't want to jump too quickly, even though we were longer than we should be. This poses a multi-dimensional dilemma.

All right. So what are you thinking?

Well, I just want to assess the situation a little bit. So it's already a tragedy that of all the Bond films, that we finally get to experience and re-experience, that we were saddled with the one we were, to then follow it up with, of all the Superman films, to be saddled with Superman III.

You know, I've seen that movie way too recently, I think, to sit through it again, to be honest with you.

That's a rough movie to sit through. Although, you know, as we're recording this, there is a new Superman film on the horizon, so there is a context to consider there, but there's really only one good scene in Superman III. I think everyone is-

There's a good scene in that movie?

Universally agreed. Yes, where Clark Kent and Superman split.

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

And they fight each other, and then like that, that's the iconic scene. But that movie is-

That movie is grim.

It's a pile of hard garbage. And it is-

And it's depressing, honestly. I haven't seen it recently. The thing about that movie is that it's just-

Yes.

Octopussy is at least fun to make fun of. Superman III is just depressing.

Yes. And it is- We would be doing a disservice. We would not be honoring the legacy of Superman and certainly of Christopher Reeve. Yeah. Of having that be the film that we examine.

Yep.

As much as I feel some obligation, I also have a stronger aversion to-

Yeah, no, no.

To subject ourselves- So Trading Places. Trading Places. I'm very happy. I haven't seen in decades. I'd be very happy to re-examine that at some point, whether now is the time. I don't know because I don't know what else is ahead of us.

I'll just point out Space Hunter is in the theaters June 10th. Weekend of June 17th, it is not in major release. So this is the last week and you probably are able to watch it. So if this is on your list, this is the weekend to watch it. These other films will still be around.

It might hit the Dollar Theater maybe. I don't know. Can we go fly through these again because there's another one.

Blue Thunder.

Right. Yeah.

Blue Thunder might be the only other one. Or we could do Flashdance and it's just another one like, I don't know what this movie is about. Who are these people? Are they fucking? What is this?

Yeah. I think it's Trading Places or Blue Thunder. I mean, maybe Space Hunter is a wild card.

Because I remember watching Space Hunter and there's no there there. Okay. It's not even the soldier level of like-

Not even fun. Okay. I trust you.

So which one do you want to do?

Trading Places or Blue Thunder? I don't know. Producer Brad, if you-

We've already done a John Badham movie. I think arguably Trading Places, Jamie Lee Curtis still around, Eddie Murphy still around, Dan Aykroyd kind of still around.

Yes.

John Land is very checkered fingerprint on cinema. I think there's probably a lot more to discuss there, you know?

However, when we get to August, Trading Places is a big hit, will still be there. Blue Thunder will not. So if you watch Trading Places now, you're limiting yourself in August.

Call it, Captain.

Blue Thunder.

Okay.

Also known as True Wonder.

Are you okay with that, Paul?

Yes. I am conflicted, but in a way that I think will serve the episode well. I only dimly remember Blue Thunder because I am a child of Airwolf.

Oh, we got a lot to talk about that.

So I think that's going to be a lot of our discussion. But I think, yes, let's save Trading Places.

I think it's pretty interesting that John Badham had two films three weeks apart.

Yeah. And I think that's worth examining. And also, I mean, and that only one of them was good. Yeah. You know, I both made money. Yeah. Yes. Yes. So next week, Blue Thunder it is.

All right. So until then, ladies and gentlemen, we will see you in line at the Multiplex. Catch you later.