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IF LOOKS COULD KILL
aka
TEEN AGENT
Rating: 
USA. 1991.
Director – William Dear, Screenplay – Darren Star, Story – Fred Dekker, Producers – Neil Meron & Craig Zadan, Photography – Doug Millsome, Music – David Foster, Visual Effects – Introvision (Supervisor – William Mesa), Special Effects Supervisor – Martin Malivoire, Production Design – Guy J. Comtois. Production Company – Craig Zadan.
Cast:
Richard Grieco (Michael Corben), Roger Rees (Augustus Steranko), Gabrielle Anwar (Marishka), Linda Hunt (Ilsa Grunt), Michael Silberry (Richardson), Robin Bartlett (Miss Grober), Tom Rack (The Abolisher)
Plot: When someone starts killing off European finance ministers, British Intelligence call upon the help of a top agent known only by the codename Michael Corben. At the same time, high-school student Michael Corben heads to France with his summer school French class. Unknown to him the secret agent Michael Corben is also on the plane but is shot by enemy agents. Upon arrival, the teen Corben is then mistaken for Corben the agent. Outfitted with hi-tech gadgets, he is immediately plunged into the world of espionage where he has to stop one crazed finance minister who is planning to overtake Europe.
One can get William Dear, Fred Dekker and co’s idea with If Looks Could Kill, of parodying the Bond films – sending up all the tuxedos, super-cars, casino sequences, super-villains, Q gadget scenes, henchmen and so on. But good satire requires more than simply quoting scenes in extended slapstick sequences. The Dr No (1962) scorpion sequence is lampooned but it has no sophistication – the scorpion is dropped down a girl’s slip and in her struggles she knocks a stereo on and her subsequent death throes are mistaken for a dance. The film’s more appropriate level of humour comes in scenes seeing Richard Grieco’s friend Michael Silberry using milkshake as shaving cream and then drinking it, or trying to stick his tongue in a girl’s ear.
If Looks Could Kill is passable as entertainment, but only in a rather inane way. If it had been approached with style, pace and zaniness it might have been something. It seems to only have been construed as a vehicle to exploit the heartthrob popularity of teen idol Richard Grieco, then the star of tv’s 21 Jump Street (1987-92) and its spinoff Booker (1989-90). I mean how can one take seriously a James Bond copy who is played by a sloppy teen who wears mascara? Peculiarly, several of the characters throughout the film are named after comic-book artists – Richard Corben, Steranko.
The next few years saw a number of James Bond and spy spoofs with the likes of James Cameron’s True Lies (1994), Spy Hard (1996) and Stephen Chow’s hilarious From Beijing with Love (1994). Later along came Austin Powers, International Man of Mystery (1997) and conducted the Bond movie spoof with considerable sophistication, not to mention took it to considerable mainstream success and spawned a whole mini-genre of spy movie spoofs.
Director William Dear has had a strong genre association, having made the time-travel film Timerider: The Adventure of Lyle Swann (1983), the cute Bigfoot film Harry and the Hendersons/Bigfoot and the Hendersons (1987) and the remake of Angels in the Outfield (1994). The film was also conceived by Fred Dekker who directed the genre homages Night of the Creeps (1986) and The Monster Squad (1987) and later went onto make Robocop 3 (1993).
Copyright Richard Scheib 1999-2012
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