Murderers' Row (1966)

Matt Helm (Dean Martin) has just finished a photo shoot with Miss January and plans to relax while he awaits the next model.  To his mild surprise, he finds January in his bed.  How nice.  However, he no sooner joins her than she tries to escape the bed and the plotted assassination for which she was bait!  Is this the end of Matt Helm?  Oddly enough, this faked assassination pre-dates the same thing from You Only Live Twice (1967) in the James Bond series.  Who is stealing from whom?

The same villainous organization from The Silencers is back and have now kidnapped a scientist on the French Riviera.  The scientist has developed a ray that can incinerate a city.  To prevent interference with their plans, Ironhead (Tom Reese) was dispatched to kill top agents around the world, including Matt Helm.  Ironhead thinks he has succeeded in every case.  Using the alias of Jim Peters, Helm arrives in Cannes to locate Dr. Solaris, the missing scientist.  However, he finds that his contact has been murdered and thus he instead teams with Suzie (Ann-Margret), a seemingly ditzy hippy girl who loves to dance and wear stylish clothes.  She also happens to be Dr. Solaris' daughter and is likewise searching for him.  Julian Wall (Karl Malden) knows there is something fishy about this Jim Peters and is particularly curious when he finds the man snooping around his operation.

Ironhead is bald but part of his scalp is metal.  Helm learns after one hit that it isn't just for show.  The guy really has an iron head.  This is humorous when Helm uses a giant magnet to lift Ironhead and take him out of the fight.  Wow, this predates a near identical scene from The Spy Who Loved Me (1977) where James Bond (Roger Moore) used a giant magnet on the steel-toothed Jaws (Richard Kiel).  The Bond spoof inspired the Bond franchise.  How funny.

Karl Malden makes for an odd bad guy.  Playing to the comic nature of the show, he switches accents from time to time.  James Gregory returns as ICE Chief MacDonald and Beverly Adams is back as Lovey Kravezit.  Dean Martin's son, Dean Paul Martin, has a cameo along with Desi Arnaz Jr.  The banter between father and son was clever.  As in The Silencers, a dig is made at Frank Sinatra, but it's all in good fun.

There is more campiness in this one than the last.  The freeze gun was the most obvious case of silliness but the bomb that would explode after sufficient shaking was likewise corny.  Too often, the villains had to be stupid in order for Helm to succeed.  Nonetheless, generally entertaining.

Good popcorn fun.

Meteor (1979)

Astronomers have spotted a new comet that is streaking toward the asteroid belt.  Calculations show that it is going to hit Orpheus, a massive asteroid.  NASA redirects the Challenger 2 spaceship (a manned mission to Mars) to observe.  Sure enough, the comet impacts and sends the shards on a course to hit Earth!  Dr. Paul Bradley (Sean Connery), an MIT professor, is hastily brought to NASA.  He had been key in the Hercules program, which was designed for exactly this purpose.  NASA administrator Harry Sherwood (Karl Malden) provides details and sends Bradley to Washington.  The Hercules satellite doesn't have enough missiles to counter the largest chunk of Orpheus from impacting.  The President (Henry Fonda) calls upon the Soviet Union for help.  Dr. Dubov (Brian Keith) and his interpreter, Tatiana (Natalie Wood), arrive in New York to discuss detente in the face of this global emergency.

Following the 1970s love of disaster movies, this one is single-minded in following the efforts to stop the meteor.  There is a lightly-touched and unrequited romance between Dr. Bradley and Tatiana.  There is some character development and plenty of tragedy.  To insert some action, there are multiple meteor fragments that arrive ahead of the big one.  Hong Kong gets washed away by a tidal wave, a Swiss resort is buried after a strike, and Manhattan is partially flattened.  Trevor Howard has a series of cameos via video conference as the man tracking the incoming fragments.  Martin Landau is a general who views cooperation with the Russians as a bad idea and Orpheus as no cause for concern.  Huh?  You were at the meeting with the President!  Yes, that was bad writing and really damaged his character.  He was just a blowhard buffoon.

The science is atrocious.  A manned-mission to Mars could not possibly reroute to the asteroid belt and still be able to return to Mars.  We don't have that technology today!  Worse, what did NASA expect to happen when sending the Challenger 2 in the vicinity of a comet colliding with an asteroid?  The missiles that were fired at the meteor had their rockets burning the entire time; that's a lot of fuel.  Modern SpaceX rockets have about 3 minutes of fuel; the ones here just go on and on.  In fact, when the fuel runs out, the rocket just dies and drifts away.  No, it should continue on the same flight path.  One of the reasons that both the US and the USSR needed to combine forces was because neither had enough firepower alone.  Okay, but the closer it gets to Earth, the more firepower is needed.  They waited until Orpheus was just a couple of hours from Earth before firing their missiles.  Gah!  Their goal was to vaporize the meteor when it should have been to deflect the meteor.

Both Natalie Wood and Brian Keith were fluent in Russian, which surely helped in their casting.  Wood's parents were Russian immigrants.  I have no idea why Keith was fluent in Russian.  Having an interpreter for central characters is awkward and just slows the story.

Overall, mediocre.  It falls closer to Armageddon (1998) than Deep Impact (1998).  Even so, Armageddon, though even more ludicrous than Meteor, was more entertaining.  If you are looking to watch a disaster movie in this genre, Deep Impact is the one to see.