For Your Height Only (1979) from Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy; Greg Wroblewski)

Long story.

Tuna sent me this movie because he thought it would appeal to my sense of the absurd. He was right.

It's about a small secret agent named 00, A  2 foot 9 inch dwarf Weng Weng. Now, we aren't the Guinness people, but I think it's a fair guess that he's the shortest secret agent of all time, unless you count Tom Cruise in those Mission Impossible films.

Anyway, unlike James Bond, Weng Weng gets his assignments and his gadgets from the same guy, presumably because the Filipino Secret Service can't afford to have two separate guys do this, or perhaps because there are not enough letters in Tagalog to support having both an M and a Q. The obligatory Bondian scene with the gadgets is one of the best I've ever seen. The M and Q guy, like all the characters in the movie, speaks in 1930's American gangster slang, and he gives the l'il guy his gizmos with some interesting twists. And, bizarrely enough, he keeps complimenting 00 on his listening skills.

• First, there is a radio controlled hat which looks just like one of those red, white and blue trimmed straw boaters that they wear on the floor of political conventions. Well, the "secret" agent looks mighty dapper in this, let me tell you. There isn't any explanation of why a secret agent would need a radio-controlled Maurice Chevalier hat, but the bad guys seem to be deathly afraid of it. Perhaps there is the ever-present fear that he might break into "Thank Heaven for Little Girls" in his squeaky voice. Of course, if that was the plan, the Agency could have saved a few bucks, since this tactic would be just as effective with a non-electronic hat.
• Then there is a fountain pen which kills. "Of course. It isn't any good if you need to write with it, but we can't have everything."
• Then there is a ring which can detect poison. It is made out of gold because the service couldn't afford platinum. Times are tough at The Secret Agency. (That is what the Agency is called - I guess they couldn't afford any marketing guys to create a catchy name for them)
• The film also features an umbrella which fires bullets. This plays an important part in the film. You see, the budget was so small in this movie that they couldn't afford guns, so they have one bad guy point the umbrella at the l'il nipper, and the sound effects guy adds a gunshot noise to the sound track. 00 then uses this same umbrella to float down from a multi-story building, ala Mary Poppins.

The bad guys are so impoverished that they have to drive Volkswagen bugs. This is only one sign that their Evil Organization isn't doing that well. I'm pretty sure their cash flow problem stems from the fact that their evil master plan is to sell heroin to kindergarten children. Well, that's certainly evil enough, but it doesn't sound very profitable. I'm fairly sure that the average Filipino kindergarten kid had very little disposable income in 1979, so the sales volume in The Evil Organization must be hurting. Either that, or the bad guys have priced the heroin so low that they can't make a profit from it. Either way, it isn't much of a plan.

Some sample dialogue from the film:

• "Why, he's making a monkey out of the forces of evil."
• "Alright sister, freeze, the jig is up."
• "Oh, my little head."
• (about a police photographer photographing a crime scene) "I wonder if she does Bar Mitzvahs"

By the way, if you're looking for a chick-flick to impress your date, you can't go wrong with For Your Height Only - it's rated 9.0 by female IMDb voters.

Both of them.

Amazingly enough, this film inspired a sequel called The Impossible Kid