Customer Reviews

Matt Helm Gift Set [The Wrecking Crew & The Silencers] [VHS]

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A great many of us will be familiar with the image of Hugh Hefner (Founder and Publisher of Playboy magazine) at one of his famous parties. We can picture in our mind's eye Hef walking around Playboy Mansion in his robe and pajamas, cocktail in one hand, cigarette in the other. (Actually, Hef usually smoked a pipe. But for the sake of argument, we'll say it was a cigarette.) He's smiling. He's mingling. He's making small talk, with amusing bon mots and double entendres.

Now imagine that, instead of a robe and pajamas, Hef is decked out in attire that would have been fashionably casual for an affluent male in the 1960s. And while keeping everything else the same (the cigarette, the cocktail, the utterly casual attitude), imagine Hef in the underground lair of an evil Arch-Villain who is ready to visit death and destruction across the globe. Oh, and make Hef a James Bond-esque spy.

You now have the basic feel for the four Matt Helm movies, of which "The Silencers" (1966) was the first and "The Wrecking Crew" was the fourth (and last). (The others were "Murderer's Row" and "The Ambushers.")

The Matt Helm movies were made as star vehicles for Dean Martin. By the mid-60s, Dino had cemented his reputation as a boozing playboy, and the Matt Helm role was written with this in mind. In the movies, Matt Helm is a boozing, affable, world-famous photographer of beautiful women who works for "Slaymate" magazine (which fits in nicely with the Hugh Hefner analogy...). BUT THAT'S JUST A COVER! Helm is REALLY a boozing, affable super-competent secret agent for the Intelligence Counter Espionage (ICE) organization. And in all four movies, he casually wanders his way through whatever the bad guys have to throw at him as though he were looking for the nearest bar.

I should point out that the Matt Helm movies are all pretty bad. But they're wonderfully bad, and they're great, cheezy, campy fun. I tend to speak glowingly of the Matt Helm movies because I enjoy them for their over-the-top campiness, but more serious-minded viewers will probably be turned off.