The Spy Who Loved Me
Equal parts Benny Hill, eye watering melodrama and regular Bond villain megalomania.
Evil doers steal nuclear subs from both the UK and Soviet Union. Both dispatch their best agents to Cairo: 007 and XXX, which as the name implies spends most of her time dangerously close to a wardrobe malfunction.
The villain has an underwater “thing”, more SeaWorld than Nautilus, with (surprise!) sharks without freaking laser beams on top of their freaking heads.
Speaking of underwater stuff, this is the one where the white Lotus that turns into a sub and back again appears, plus a completely unnecessary underwater fight scene. Somehow, Wet Nellie is an appropriate name for that contraption.
Anyway, the actual plot is for the villain to use a sub locator, drive his modified tanker to them, attack them with sound waves forcing them to the surface and use them to nuke NYC and Moscow, so that humanity can be reborn undersea. Of course, after Bond and XXX are captured, she is dressed in Leia clothes and is violently leered at. A crappier cross of Captain Nemo and Harvey Weinstein.
The dragon is Jaws, the giant with metallic teeth. He is a brute, but seemingly in the vein of Dracula, since his trademark move is biting people in the neck. There is a recurring scene of Jaws nearly killing Bond somewhere, Bond foiling it at the last moment and Jaws emerging unscathed from the wreckage. He actually swims away in the end, even though they are in middle of the ocean.
This is a much demure film, without the bombast and campiness of other Bonds. There’s a bunch of classical music played for giggles and the mandatory quote of the Lawrence of Arabia tune the desert. Even the fight scenes are quiet and restrained.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.