[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWQir3sL72Q]
The opening of Diamonds Are Forever finds a vengeful Bond hot on the trail of SPECTRE’s Ernst Stavro Blofeld, tracking the villain from Japan to Cairo to an exotic and unnamed beach, where he coaxes a beautiful woman out of her bikini top and then chokes her with it.
Blofeld, meanwhile, is holed up in some kind of subterranean cave-cum-plastic surgery clinic, where he’s creating an army of body doubles using a “plastic transformation” procedure that for some reason involves immersing them in a vat of green goo.
Bond infiltrates Blofeld’s team of doctors (those surgical masks come in handy) only to be ambushed by the man lying in the vat of goo — whom Bond believes to be Blofeld until the real Blofeld arrives with two goons wearing castoff Star Wars uniforms. It seems to be all over for 007, until one goon goes to retrieve his gun and falls for the old “mousetrap in the breast pocket” trick, one that the Bond screenwriters have apparently lifted from an old Tom and Jerry routine. Bond throws a series of tiny scalpels at the second henchman, which we assume kills him eventually, and finally sends Blofeld flying on a gurney directly into a bubbling, seething pool of death goo. “Welcome to hell, Blofeld!” Bond sneers.
There are so many disturbing things in this introduction it’s difficult to know where to begin. Much as we can take the misogyny of the early Bond films as read, was choking Bikini Girl really necessary? Why did the man in the vat of goo happen to have a revolver in there with him? Why was Bond able to kill him by turning on the spigot, even though the guy had been lying in the stuff for presumably hours with no ill effects? A mousetrap?
GRADE: C