Leonard Part 6(1987)

Submitted by Tornado Dragon

According to Leonard’s butler, Frayn (Tom Courtenay), the reason that this movie is called “Part 6” is because the first five parts of the series were “confiscated in the interests of world security.”

One day, Leonard (Bill Cosby) launches a single-handed assault on Medusa’s (Gloria Foster) stronghold, the warehouse headquarters of International Tuna, with the aid of a special combat suit he has and a couple of items he earlier received from Nurse Carvalho (Anna Levine), an Albanian fortune teller whom he always seeks consultation from before every assignment. After going through a bunch of her vegetarian henchmen, he manages to find her mind-controlling sphere that controls the animals’ behavior, and he escapes with it and delivers it to Snyderburn (Joe Don Baker), the head of the C.I.A. Later on, Medusa tells her right-hand man, Man Ray (David Maier), that her offensive will begin on schedule, but Man Ray asks her how that will be possible considering that Leonard took the sphere. Gloria tells him that he will be returning it tonight, then leaves his presence.

That night, Leonard attends a play with his ex-wife, Allison (Pat Colbért), that stars their daughter, Joan (Victoria Rowell), but he ends up getting embarrassed and ashamed when Joan performs full-frontal nudity towards the end of the show. Once it concludes, Leonard and Allison meet up with Joan in the dressing room, and when Giorgio (Moses Gunn) – the play’s director and Joan’s much older boyfriend – comes in soon after, Leonard asks him if he can speak with him outside. He tries to voice his displeasure to Giorgio about Joan getting naked in the play, but he is unable to due to various interruptions, and then when Allison comes out and tells him that he should go back into the dressing room and speak to their daughter right now, he refuses to do so. He steps outside the theater to clear his head while Allison goes back into the room to talk to Joan, but Leonard soon decides that he needs to assert his parental authority over Joan and goes back inside to confront her. However, when he enters the dressing room, he finds her and the rest of the cast and crew bound and gagged and Allison missing. After Leonard removes the tape from Joan’s mouth, she tells him that a “weird guy” came in here and took Allison away (that “weird guy” being Man Ray), and he then reads a note attached to Joan’s clothes ordering him to bring the sphere if he wants his wife back alive. After promising Joan that he will get her mother back, Leonard heads out to his car, where Frayn is waiting for him. He tells Frayn that Medusa and her goons got Allison and that they need to get the sphere, so Frayn drives them both to the C.I.A.’s headquarters.

When Leonard and Frayn arrive there, they find Snyderburn and three scientists in a laboratory with the sphere and a bunch of caged rabbits, trying to figure out how to get the sphere to work so they can control the animals for their own ends. Leonard and Frayn go into the lab and speak to the quartet, and they are told by one of the scientists that there are three liquids in the sphere that, when consumed by an animal, apparently modifies its mental state and leaves their mind open to the sphere’s influence. However, they are having trouble activating the mind of the rabbit that they are currently experimenting on so it will attack. Leonard tells them that they are likely using the wrong rabbit, so he takes the rabbit and switches it out with another one, and while he does this, Frayn opens up the other cages that have rabbits in them. Leonard and Frayn then reveal that their attempt to help is really just a ploy to distract the agents and grab the sphere when Leonard shouts out the word “quailish,” which is the word that triggers any mind-controlled animal to attack (he learned the word from Nurse Carvalho before he assaulted Medusa’s warehouse, but he initially didn’t understand its meaning). All the rabbits immediately go after Snyderburn and the other agents, giving Leonard and Frayn their chance to grab the sphere and leave.

While making their way back to Medusa’s headquarters in Leonard’s car, Leonard has Frayn open up the sphere and sees the three containers full of colored liquid inside, and he remarks that Medusa is undoubtedly planning to dilute that concentration and pump it into the entire San Francisco Bay area (so all the animals will drink it and become susceptible to the sphere and the trigger word). After Frayn remarks that it all looks like dishwashing liquid, they stop at a supermarket and pick up three bottles of dishwashing liquid that are the same colors as the liquids in the containers, then switch out the original liquids with those, hoping that this will leave the sphere unusable. As they continue on their way, Nurse Carvalho suddenly appears in her bus and pulls up next to them when they reach a stoplight, and somehow, Carvalho magically trades places with Frayn so she is riding with Leonard and Frayn is driving her bus. When they all resume driving, Leonard explains his dilemma to Carvalho, and she responds by giving him a stick of unsalted butter, a stack of raw hamburger patties, and a raw hot dog. She then magically transports herself out of the car and emerges next to Frayn, who got ahead of them and parked the bus, leaving Leonard to go on alone.

Leonard walks up to the main door of Medusa’s headquarters and shows the surveillance camera outside that he has the sphere. He is let in, but after he hands the sphere over to Man Ray, Medusa reneges on her promise to give Allison back, then two of her vegetarian henchmen hold him up at gunpoint. Moments later, Medusa walks up to Leonard and informs him that she knows that he put dishwashing liquid into her sphere, but she reveals that that doesn’t matter because that type of liquid was already in it to begin with. Also, the sphere will work no matter what kind of liquid is in it because the molybdenum chromium catalyst is what makes the “magic” happen. Medusa and her goons then take Leonard towards the cell where Allison is being held, and after passing Medusa’s large stable of mind-controlled animals along the way, Medusa explains that, in less than 15 minutes, she will switch on some distribution pumps, and the liquids contained in the large vats upstairs will flow into every single waterway in the Bay area. She then has Leonard put into Allison’s cell and restrained, and as she departs, she tells her goons that the offensive will start immediately.

Seconds later, a bunch of mind-controlled lobsters and crabs break open a hole in one of the cell’s walls and come in to kill Leonard and Allison, but one of the lobsters unintentionally cuts the wire on the restraint on Leonard’s right hand, giving him a chance to grab another lobster and make it cut the wire on his left hand. When he removes a lobster from Allison’s body and tries to get it to cut her restraints, it refuses, so he forces the lobster into compliance by showing it the stick of butter and threatening to make a meal out of it. He and Allison then split the stick in half and wave the pieces in front of the other crustaceans to get them to back off, giving them the chance to escape through the hole in the wall. Leonard soon tells Allison that they can go home now, but Allison tells him that he must get the sphere. When he refuses to even consider it, she warns him that, if he doesn’t get that sphere, stop Medusa, and save the world, then he can just forget about seeing her ever again. He then asks her if she will move back in with him if he does save the world, and she replies that she will think about it. They then walk off together to put an end to Medusa and her plans.

Leonard and Allison go into the stable and steal two suits from the workers there, then mount a horse and go charging into the main control room just as Medusa is about to throw the switch on the pumps. Allison snatches up the sphere, and Medusa tells Man Ray to go to their emergency procedure and release pump five before ordering her vegetarians to kill Leonard. She then goes up to Allison and demands that she give back the sphere, but Allison hits her over the head with it and knocks her out, and after that, Leonard has Allison throw the sphere over to him before telling her to take the horse and go free all the animals. Soon after, Leonard notices a “No Meat” sign in the room, and he realizes that the burger patties now need to come into play. He thus takes them out and presses them or throws them against the skin of the vegetarian goons, and the touch of the meat causes them to get badly burned and makes them run off. Moments later, Man Ray challenges Leonard by claiming that he isn’t afraid of a little meat, so Leonard takes out the raw hot dog with the intention of using it on him. Man Ray defiantly takes a bite of it, but it turns out that he can’t handle meat any better than the vegetarian henchmen can when his head suddenly explodes into sawdust. Leonard then flings one last patty at the “No Meat” sign, which somehow causes it to catch fire and trigger a chain reaction of explosions in all the nearby machines as well as other parts of the warehouse. Meanwhile, Allison opens all of the animals’ cages and pens in addition to the building’s main door, and the animals go running out of the warehouse, where Joan, Frayn, Carvalho, and a bunch of police officers and animal control officers are waiting outside.

Leonard then goes upstairs to deal with the three vats, and while he is trying to shut them down, Medusa’s wheelchair-bound henchman, Andy (Hal Bokar), appears with a Tommy gun and starts shooting at him. All of his bullets miss, however, and he is so distracted with trying to kill Leonard that he fails to notice that his wheelchair is about to hit the edge of one of the vats. The resulting collision causes Andy to get thrown forward and down into the liquid, and because he has no legs to swim with, he quickly drowns. Afterwards, Leonard walks over to Andy’s wheelchair and picks up his Alka-Seltzer tablets, and he drops a few of them into the liquid to mock Andy’s indigestion issues. However, he discovers that the tablets cause the liquid to become highly volatile, so he tosses some more of them into the other vats, too. The liquids froth and bubble violently, and then all the vats soon burst, causing the liquids to flood the entire warehouse. All of Medusa’s underlings get washed away, and Medusa – who, by this point, has regained consciousness – winds up drowning when a huge shower of the liquids comes right down on top of her. The building then threatens to blow, but just before it does, Leonard frees a still-trapped ostrich and then rides it off the roof, and the ostrich flaps its wings hard enough to make them both float down to the ground safely. As Snyderburn and his subordinates make their arrival, Leonard hugs his family, then hands the sphere over to Frayn and asks him to get rid of it. Frayn thus has Carvalho throw the sphere high up into the air, and after he takes his long coat off to show that he is wearing Leonard’s special combat suit, he destroys the sphere with a pair of heat-seeking missiles that he fires from the underarms of the suit. Snyderburn angrily tells Leonard that he will never work in this town again, but Leonard replies that that depends on what his wife and daughter have to say, after which he, his family, and his friends return home. Snyderburn and his subordinates then get non-fatally drenched in the torrent of liquids still flowing out of the burning warehouse.

The movie ends with Leonard and Allison having a private dinner together in Leonard’s restaurant to celebrate their reconciliation. Frayn narrates that Joan has left the theatre and is now with Greenpeace picketing toxic waste dumps. In a repeat of their date from a few days ago (but done in a more positive way), Leonard lets Allison pour soup all over him before sharing a kiss with her, and the movie ends with Leonard continuing to allow Allison to dump other food onto him while they both smile and laugh.