Our Man Flint: Dead on Target (1976) (TV)

User Rating:

3.6/10   

Director:

Joseph L. Scanlan

Writer:

Norman Klenman (writer)

Genre:

Action | Drama

Plot Keywords:

Spy | Spy Hero | Character Name In Title

Cast

Ray Danton	...	Derek Flint
Sharon Acker
Lawrence Dane
Donnelly Rhodes
Gay Rowan
Franz Russell
Linda Sorenson		(as Linda Sorensen)
Susan O'Sullivan	...	Executive Assistant (as Susan Sullivan)
rest of cast listed alphabetically:
Lon Katzman

Also Known As:

Dead on Target

Runtime:

77 min

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Color:

Color

Aspect Ratio:

1.33 : 1

Sound Mix:

Mono

Filming Locations:

Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

Company:

20th Century Fox Television

Movie Connections:

Follows Our Man Flint (1966)

Dead On Arrival

If you thought that In Like Flint was a disappointing sequel to Our Man Flint, worse still was to come with busted TV pilot Dead On Target, which scrapes beneath the soil beneath the concrete beneath the bottom of the barrel for something so lazily incompetent it looks like it was made in the stone age with primitive tools. Cheap doesn't cover it. Aside from being shot for next to nothing in Canada with a cast who, for the most part, only recently seem to have mastered the art of connected speech, the film stock is so cheap it looks like it was shot on Super 8mm with sound recorded on a well-used Memorex cassette tape. The same aerial shots of cars driving across the same bridge or along the same road are used over and over again almost as punctuation while in one sequence you can even see the cameraman reflected in the car window more clearly than Flint and his kidnappers. Even the uncredited clumsy wakka-wakka 70s score comes from a music library to save hiring a composer while there aren't even any end credits aside from a copyright notice.

Ray Danton and one of the worst hairstyles in television history share the lead, no longer a superhero super agent but now a very dull private eye with a masseur, a phone answering service and a female apprentice so unflatteringly photographed that in several shots she looks like a man in drag. Unless you count Lawrence Dane, Canada's answer to William Windom, or the actor who played Dutch in Soap, here cast as an Arab terrorist (and his is the best performance), the biggest name in the supporting cast is an unbilled Kim Cattrall, who can briefly be glimpsed for about four seconds as an extra just before the wildly overlong title sequence that is as seemingly endless and clumsily timed as everything else in this horrendous misfire. There is a certain train wreck fascination to it, but it's still a very, very long 74 minutes.