#i want that glamorous evil woman to rail me

[witchofthemidlands]

i want madeline usher to do unspeakable things to me.

[mst3kproject]

504: Secret Agent Super Dragon

Let’s move on to another oft-overlooked subset of MST3K – the Budget Bond films.  These are always very bad, but often a lot of fun if you’re in the right kind of mood.

Brian Cooper is Super Dragon, pulled out of retirement to find out who’s distributing poisoned chewing gum to co-eds!  Boy, if that doesn’t sound like the setup for a thrilling spy caper, nothing does!  The plot seems to revolve around a Dutch student named Christine Bruder, so Cooper goes to Amsterdam looking for her.  There, in between fucking his female colleagues and flirting with every woman he sees, he learns that Bruder was part of a plot to smuggle deadly drugs into the United States, hidden in fake Ming vases.  An evil conspiracy is planning to dope the free world on a chemical that will cause us to violently attack one another, and then… uh, I don’t know what happens after that, but it’s probably safe to assume it’ll end in the bad guys ruling the world.  That’s always the goal.

What’s with that spy movie cliché about the glamorous secret agent who sleeps with every woman he meets?  Friends, enemies, co-workers, random waitresses… our suave hero loses no chance to insert Tab A into Slot B.  He can’t walk down the street without having women throw themselves at him.  This trope has been parodied to hell and back in everything from Austin Powers to The Million Eyes of Sumuru and it’s actually sort of weird to see it played straight, as it is here.  As a PSA to my readers: never sleep with a glamorous secret agent.  He probably has like nine venereal diseases.

The weirdest thing in the movie is a facet of this trope: it’s the bit where Cooper and Agent Farrell are busily smooching when a man breaks into her apartment and tries to kill them.  They fight him off, and he commits suicide so they can’t question him.  Cooper then throws his body out the window, turns the soundtrack back on, and the couple just pick up where they left off!  Maybe it’s because I’m not a glamorous secret agent but I gotta agree with Tom Servo on this one: I don’t think I could have sex in the same room where I just watched a guy kill himself. It wouldn’t be right, you know?

I will say that this indifference towards death bothers me less here than it did in Master Ninja I, but the characters in Secret Agent Super Dragon have presumably have years of both physical training to kill and psychological coaching to deal with the consequences. Even so, just getting right back to the makeout session before the body’s even had a chance to cool seems unnecessarily callous.

The other trope I notice a lot of in Secret Agent Super Dragon is the death trap. Our hero’s life is threatened repeatedly but always in some contrived way that allows him a chance to escape. The first time he’s tied to a rail so some machine can come along and roll over his head.  He gets out in the nick of time and it crushes a can of red paint instead.  The second time he’s nailed into a coffin and thrown into the river.  He holds his breath and inflates a flotation device. The third time, he’s trapped in a building rigged to explode.  His buddy flies in with a helicopter.  Why doesn’t anybody just shoot this guy? Villains that stupid don’t deserve to take over the world!

Yet another thing that stands out as remarkably dumb is the cause the charity auction is supposed to support – ‘an International Hospital for Babies with Malnutrition’.  Okay, so, imagine you’re somebody whose child is starving, which probably means you’re dirt poor.  Instead of sending food to you, these people expect you to bring the baby to a hospital, which may be in another country, so that they can feed the kid there. Is the complete impracticality of this supposed to be our clue that it’s a scam?  The script never references that, though.  Did somebody just pick a bunch of charitable-sounding words?  Was it a bad translation of something that actually made sense in the original language?  Are the writers just that stupid?  We’ll probably never know.

Beyond that… it’s honestly really hard to say anything deeper about Secret Agent Super Dragon, because this is another movie that’s not very ambitious. It has some vague themes about drugs as the downfall of western civilization, but its characters don’t have appreciable arcs and there’s not much by way of symbolism for me to analyze. All it wants is to keep us mindlessly entertained for an hour and a half – and there’s nothing wrong with that, honestly, but Super Dragon isn’t even any good at it.  Trying to watch without Joel and the bots I found myself drifting repeatedly.  There’s the charming super-spy, the parade of blandly beautiful women, the evil mastermind with a vague plan to take over the world, the easily-escaped death traps… we’ve done this all before, and Super Dragon doesn’t even use the stereotypes in skillful or interesting ways.

The thing about spy movie tropes is they’re so easy to parody, and have been parodied so many times, that even somebody who doesn’t actually watch spy movies can spot them because we all absorb them through pop-culture osmosis.  Playing them straight therefore runs a very serious risk of boring the audience.  Of course Agent Farrell is working for the bad guys, because in a story like this, a character like her does – and of course she falls in love with Cooper and betrays her bosses for him.  None of this stuff is even really foreshadowed (except that Farrell dyes her hair – can’t trust those unnatural redheads!) but we still know it’s coming because we’ve seen the same shit in fifty other movies. The bad guy wants to cleanse the world so it can be made anew?  Been there. The movie wallows in misogyny but in all the same old ways, so I’ve got nothing new to say about it.

Throughout the film people talk about the ‘legendary Super Dragon’ but I don’t think we ever get a reason why Cooper’s so great.  Bond films begin with a breathtaking action setpiece to show us that our hero has nifty gadgets and balls of steel – Secret Agent Super Dragon begins with Cooper playing dead by the pool.  His most remarkable ability seems to be holding his breath for a really long time, and his gadgeteer, the kleptomaniacal Babyface, makes most of his gadgets out of literal toys.  I think this might be a joke about the obvious miniatures some of these movies use… but I’m not sure.  All I’m sure of is when that dinosaur waddled into the room I was halfway expecting it to demand the return of the Golden Ninja Warrior.

About the only place where the movie seems to accidentally brush by a real statement is in a moment that resembles a historical reference.  Cooper has infiltrated a conspiracy meeting (by wearing a half-mask that leaves his rather distinctive chin fully visible) at which the Big Bad, Mr. Lamas, is delivering an expository monologue: their factory in India is in full production of the drug, which will be shipped to America in phony Ming vases and bring the world to its knees!  If you’re going to talk about drugs making and breaking empires, China and India are where it happened.

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the East India Company fostered opium addiction in China because they wanted cheap tea and because the British government had vague plans, which never came anywhere close to fruition, to add China to their empire.  The opium to feed this addiction was grown in India, often by farmers who would rather have been growing actual food but owed too much money to the EIC. This all led to the Opium Wars and a lot of other unpleasantness in which the British Empire came out looking even more like assholes than they usually did.  In a story about conquering the world through drug addiction, then, having the drugs created in India and slipped into something Chinese looks like a reference to history repeating itself.

It may also mean something else.  Secret Agent Super Dragon is relentlessly white, set mostly in a city in northwestern Europe, where conspiracies of middle-aged white guys drink booze and decide the fate of nations.  The actual work that makes this possible, however, is being done by people of colour in the east.  Not only does this seem to reference how western nations use other countries as battlegrounds and bargaining chips in their own power struggles, it can also serve as a reminder of something we frequently forget: a lot of what makes our comfortable lives possible comes from other countries, made by people who could never afford to buy it.  My eyeglasses, the sweater I’m wearing, and the chair I’m sitting on were all made in China.  Our entire economy depends on cheap foreign labor, and I wonder sometimes how much longer that can last before the whole thing falls apart.

Is any of this the movie’s intentional theme or message?  I doubt it. The historical reference seems to be just a ‘hey, look how clever we are!’ moment and the rest probably goes no deeper than ‘oh, no, our children are doing drugs!’, which has been on the verge of ending civilization since at least the thirties.  Secret Agent Super Dragon is just a dumb trashy Eurospy movie, and not even a very good one.  I don’t hate it, but mostly because it’s not worth that kind of effort.  The MST3K treatment renders it infinitely more enjoyable, especially when Tom and Crow do Jazz.

Agent Cooper was played by actor Ray Danton, who died in 1992, a year before the episode aired.  Probably all for the best.  I doubt he’d have been into all those jokes about how his character is perfectly smooth.