Austin Powers:  International Man of Mystery VHS DVD
Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me VHS DVD

These are really the same movie, so I'm reviewing them together.

Bruce invited a bunch of people over for an Austin Powers party.  The original plan was to eat lasagna.  Watch the first movie on tape while getting drunk (making me one of the most likely designated drivers.)   And then go to the second movie at the theatre.  We didn't plan on the Stars Stanley Cup game being on.  So we slipped the Stars game in between the movie viewings.  It worked out well in the end.

Mike Myers movies are typically an odd combination of interesting and annoying.   Sort of like Eddie Murphy movies, his insistence on playing multiple characters often gets in the way of the movie.  Myers secondary characters tend to be over-the-top and thus steal their scenes from the main characters.

That's not really the case in Austin Powers.  In these movies, his characters are the main characters.  And since the title character is by definition flamboyant and over-the-top he doesn't disrupt the flow of the movie.

The movies themselves are pretty much what you expect.  Both Austin Powers and his arch-nemesis are frozen in the sixties and thawed on contemporary time.  That gives them a lot of predictable jokes.  Like the one about, recreational drugs, free unprotected sex with multiple anonymous partners, etc.  One interesting technique was the Laugh-In-style scene transition inserts.  In the second movie they go back in time which opens up some jokes in the other direction.

In the second move, Rob Lowe did a very good job of matching Robert Wagner's character from the first movie.  In fact, most of the time it sounded like his dialogue was looped.

Then of course, there are the women.  Wow.  'Nuff said.

Dr. Evil's son was sort of a good idea, but poorly done.  All of his scenes too repetitive.  The same joke over and over.

On my brother's Total Movie Value Scale, generally fun and not nearly as bad as it could have been.  Rental.

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