The Secret Agents Club

Deck the Halls was not as bad as The Secret Agents Club film, a vehicle for Hulk Hogan in 1996 who had gained fame as professional Wrestling participant at a time when children persuaded their parents to see the entertainment, An excruciatingly bad group of young people hang out in the garden nuclear shelter of a toy store owner who has an Asian assistant, the significance of which only emerges when his young son arrives as the same time and the gang of children in search of the father and discover the assistant badly injured and the store wrecked. The parental home has also been wrecked. The Asian boy joins the gang while his father recovers and the boy is quickly able to show his Kung Fo fighting skills.

In this instance the kidnap is to try find a new Ray Gun which the father has created/ secured in his role as the leading member of a government secret organisation to protect the USA nation. The son has an uneasy relationship with his father because of the long absences from home and which he believes contributed to the premature death of his mother. Father leaves a message to say the boy can trust someone who the boy has not previously met so when someone who appears nice and normal comes to their rescue they are persuaded to enter his van to find themselves eventually captured having knocked out and tied up the man who came to save them and who is a secret agent colleague of the father. The main villain is a female who appears to have based her role on Joan Collins at her worst and is assisted by a Nazi style doctor who wants to drill into the brain the kidnapped father and a strong arm who wears a large metal boot.

The children determine to rescue the father after learning his location breaking into the fortified HQ defended by a force of 200 armed mercenaries with machine gun vehicles and other military support. The children use toys. The film ends with the arrival of the USA colleagues of the father and they escape after a massive explosion destroys he complex and the villains. What amazed me is the film was made in 1996 when it had the hallmarks of the films I viewed as a child at the Saturday morning club at the Odeon Cinema in Wallington in the later 1940’s