KOKUSAI HIMITSU KEISATSU: ZETTAI ZETSUMEI (1967)
aka The Killing Bottle
Article 5402 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 3-23-2017
Directed by Senkichi Taniguchi
Featuring Tatsuya Mihashi, Nick Adams, Makoto Sato
Country: Japan / USA
What it is: Spy antics

Two agents of the International Secret Police must prevent a crime organization from assassinating the President of Buddabai and his General.

This movie almost ended up on my “ones that got away” list, but I found a copy just before it was about to fall into it. From what I gather, it was the fifth in a series of movies about the International Secret Police; I believe one of the movies in the series provided the footage for Woody Allen’s WHAT’S UP, TIGER LILY? This was the third movie Nick Adams made in Japan during the sixties, and is the most obscure of the three. The fantastic content consists of the title method of assassination, a bottle of killer foam that expands and suffocates anyone in an enclosed space, though I think there might be a robot/cyborg involved in the mix as well. From the music and other clues, it appears to be comic in tone. I can’t say a whole lot about it because my copy is in Japanese without English subtitles, but it has a few interesting scenes, such as the one where a woman fends off attackers by using long-playing records as missile weapons. I did make one other observation; after all the jokes I’ve heard over the years over how badly Japanese movies were dubbed into English, it appears the reverse was true as well – the Japanese dubbing of Nick Adams doesn’t always follow the movement of his mouth, and there is a noticeable shift in background noise in some scenes when one person stops talking and another begins.