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Webomatica

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Movie Notes: Octopussy

Started by webomatica · 3 months ago

Moving through the James Bond films, Octopussy is the second-to-last one starring Roger Moore (the last being A View To A Kill. In this oddly named adventure, he's older and looks more than a bit tired. Overall, the film is decent with a fair number of definite thrills, but a few minor o ... Continue reading »

3 comments

  • women overpowering men, while one girl SMASHES a guard in the balls w/ a tambourine!
  • does anyone know what ever happend to the octopussy girls? I'm looking for Camella Donner(Nelson), she was the black girl that was part of the womens guard.
    thanks
  • Almost immediately, the quality control on Roger Moore’s Bond movies got the speed-wobbles, vacillating wildly between drama and ‘comedy’. This one cautiously continued the low-key feel of his previous effort ‘For Your Eyes Only’, but the forces of farce were massing for an all-out attack of the sillies (see ‘A View To A Kill’). They do make a couple of sorties into ‘Octopussy’, most notably when Bond swings on a jungle vine and Johnny Weismuller’s long familiar ‘Tarzan yell’ plays on the soundtrack. There is also an impossible ‘quick-change’ moment when Bond exits a gorilla costume in the time it takes for Gobinda to turn around. Yeahyeahyeah, so far so whatever. However, what really holes this one below the waterline is poor casting (Maud Adams as the titular character was a bore, Magda looked a bit fish-like, Vijay was a lump of wood dressed as a human and watch out for the scenery, lest the guy who played General Orlov start to chew it up) and a well-nigh unfathomable plotline. We’re in India, but there’s something about fake Faberge eggs, nuclear bombs, a travelling circus, and some sort of secret society composed entirely of attractive women in brightly-coloured leotards. There’s a big all-in mass punch-up near the end, and Bond defuses a nuclear bomb whilst dressed as a clown (now there’s an extremely effective age-disguising use of cosmetics. They should have utilised the technique on Moore for the entirety of ‘A View To A Kill’) but by then I’d long given up trying to follow the meandering storyline. Sir Roger wasn’t trying very hard this time and neither was anybody else, so why should we.

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