DEATH RAY 2000 (1981)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, psychological*

This telefilm would seem to have two strikes against it from the outset. First, someone thought it would be cute to give it a name reminiscent of the 1975 Corman movie DEATH RACE 2000. Second, though RAY was executed by the team of director Lee Katzin and writer/producer Cliff Gould as a pilot for the 1979 spy-series A MAN CALLED SLOANE, the pilot-film didn't air on TV until after SLOANE's had been cancelled in 1980 after just one season. This delay almost certainly came about because TV executive Fred Silverman recast the actor originally playing hero "T.R. Sloane," casting out RAY's star in favor of former WILD WILD WEST star Robert Conrad. 

Now, maybe it's because over the past few years I've seen a lot of crummy superspy films-- not least the recently reviewed BLACK SAMURAI-- but I liked RAY more in this re-viewing than I had the first time. The basic situation sounds like a million other superspy films: mad millionaire with weird fetishes gets hold of a death ray device and super-sexy secret agent must stop the madman. But RAY has one thing going for it that I don't see in dozens of other Bond-knockoffs: a secret agent who actually has to follow clues and expose enemy agents to beat the evildoer.

RAY begins with a bizarre heist a la GOLDFINGER: a bunch of female thieves dressed as nuns gain access to a scientific installation. With the help of a big Black guy with a metal hand, name of Torque (Ju-Ti Cumbuka), the thieves rip off a device that the U.S. government intended to use for weather manipulation. In the hands of Torque's boss Eric Clawson (Clive Revill), though, the device can be used to emit a ray that evaporates water irresistibly, and therefore functions as a de facto death ray. Just so there's no question of Clawson's perfidy, he tests his new weapon out on his own allies, the phony nuns.

The director of the counter-intelligence agency UNIT knows there's just one agent who can suss out the evildoer: T.R. Sloane III (Robert Logan), who's the descendant of a previous super-agent. Sloane's only clue to the mastermind's identity rests with the theory that one of the three scientists at the installation aided in the theft. One's an older man, and the other two are sexy young women, Sabina (Ann Turkel) and Chrissie (Maggie Cooper). Can you say "potential Good Girl" and "potential Bad Girl?"

I don't want to oversell RAY as a rigorous detective-story. Thanks to his inside agent, Clawson finds out about Sloane's investigation. Instead of letting the agent spin his wheels, Clawson-- who also has intel on Sloane's daddy-- decides to invite Sloane and his suspects to his palacial estate for a party on a thin pretext. This is Super-Villainy 101, in which the master plotter is so pleased with his genius that he has a deep need to show off in front of a worthy opponent. But at least Gould gives Clawson the tics suggestive of an obsessed egotist, like keeping both snakes and spiders on the premises. Sloane and Clawson literally play games with weapons to show dominance, but it doesn't take Clawson long to tire of the game and announce his true intentions. Sloane and the two women have to escape the tender mercies of Clawson's menagerie. and Clawson gets away too, to set up his first official use of the death ray. However, the incident isn't purely pro forma as it would be in most superspy-flicks, since Sloane does ferret out the inside agent thanks to the events at the estate.

I'll leave the rest of the film undescribed, because it does have a couple more surprises in store, though the fact that one of the women is another U.S. agent is not a big reveal. (It does allow for a little female kung-fu fighting in one brief scene, though.) What I want to make clear is that though Gould is definitely offering up all the standard tropes of the superspy subgenre, he does make an effort to giving them more panache than most of the "James Bland" films in this category. One trope is that Sloane is instantly mesmerizing to every hot female in sight, and even the director's feminine-voiced computer (Michele Carey) goes gaga over the hero. While Robert Logan is no Sean Connery, at least he projects an air of cool composure while being ogled. Sloane has two fights with the hulking Torque, and though neither is a great bout, both are at least diverting and given touches of humor.

Neither Gould not Katzin-- most of whose credits are in series-TV-- were associated with the Robert Conrad SLOANE series. I can't do a full review of that series given that I've not screened it for many years, but my memory is that it was subpar MAN FROM UNCLE spy-jinks. In addition, whatever charms Conrad had displayed during the 1960s WILD WILD WEST-- when the actor had just turned thirty-- had largely evaporated for SLOANE, where the forty-something performer came off as more smarmy than sexy. An additional debit was that the character of Torque, again played by Cumbuka, was changed into a good guy and added to the show as Sloane's sidekick, but he and his metal hand didn't strike any sparks for viewers, so to speak.

I don't say this to make any claims of missed opportunities. Probably a SLOANE series with Logan would have been just as mediocre, partly because the subgenre had fallen on hard times in the late seventies. But RAY is a good basic formula-flick if one's expectations are reasonable.