You Only Live Twice (1967)

  Bond!  In Japan!  With ninjas!

Apparently, this was supposed to have been watched before On Her Majesty's Secret Service but I didn't get the disc until way late.  It doesn't really matter, since there isn't a lot of continuity but it still irks me that they were out of order.

Ok, let's get straight to it.  Bond (Sean Connery) fakes his own death in Hong Kong and is buried at sea, only to be picked up by a submarine.  M (Bernard Lee) tells him that the Russians and the Americans are about a bikini strap away from going to war over their astronauts being abducted...from space.  The British traced the signal of the unknown kidnapping craft to somewhere near Japan, so that's where Bond goes.  After his first contact is killed, 007 tracks the attackers back to the Osato Factory, a chemical manufacturing company.  He also links up with M's Japanese contemporary, "Tiger" Tanaka (Tetsuro Tanba) to make use of local resources, especially the lovely Aki (Akiko Wakabayashi).  They learn that an Osato ship made an overnight stop at a nearby island so Bond decides to infiltrate it.  To do this, he must attempt to be as Japanese as possible, which isn't very. 

No shit you guys Sean Connery makes a terrible Japanese person. 

After applying some prosthetics and a wig, Bond-san acquires a fake wife named Kissy (Mie Hama) and goes to the island.  What happened to Aki, you ask?  Well, it's over an hour into the movie so she had sex with Bond and then died.  I think his dick has killed more women than the Hanta Virus.

Back to the island.  Inside a hollowed out volcano, SPECTRE's leading man Blofeld (Donald Pleasance, who gets a major upgrade to Telly Savalas in the next movie) is holding the astronauts captive until war is declared.  Somehow the end game is $100M but I'm not really sure how that was supposed to work out.  Doesn't really matter though because Bond.  And ninjas. 

I have to say, the most unintentionally hilarious moment of this movie was when Donald Pleasance is trying to flee.  He's still holding his signature white cat when an explosion goes off.  The cat was clearly not prepared for the stunt and you can see it trying like hell to bolt free from Pleasance's grasp. 

  Look at its little face!  I laughed my balls off. 

Overall, this was a very weak effort with some utterly baffling moments. I would give this a pass.