76. Danger: Diabolik

Mario Bava, 1968

Further back in the list, we looked at several camp films, but it has been a long time since anything truly campy has hit the list. Until now, that is. Mario Bava is primarily known as an Italian director of Gothic horror films like Black Sunday and Black Sabbath. While he went largely unappreciated in his own time, he has lately been recognized as the cinematic and visual effects genius he really is. The opening moments of Black Sunday, when a witch is tortured and killed, in part by having a spiked mask hammered onto her face, is some of the most beautiful black and white cinematography I have ever seen. Still, perhaps the reason Bava was so unknown in his time was because he was a contract director, making what films he was told to, rather than really seeking out work of his own. The result is an incredibly eclectic body of work, which includes the horror films mentioned above, slasher films like A Bay of Blood, science fiction fare like Planet of the Vampires, Westerns like Ray Colt and Winchester Jack, and a truly terrific camp action adventure, adapted from an Italian comic series, Danger: Diabolik.

I first saw Danger: Diabolik as an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000. It’s a very funny episode, one of the best of the later, Sci-fi Channel years, but what always struck me about it was how watchable the movie was. There are a lot of movies on MST3K which are so bad that they make simply watching the episode they’re on something of a chore. There are other which fit in so perfectly with the comedy of the show that they become classic episodes. There are still others, then, from which you get the feel that you could easily watch that movie on its own. Danger: Diabolik is one of these last few. Of course, the dynamic visuals of the film are lost in the MST episode, both because of the cropping needed for television and the truly poor print provided to the MST crew.

The reality of the film is a wild, colorful, and sexy romp through late sixties Italy. The film is filled with fantastic visuals, wonderful effects shots, and a sly sense of humor. John Phillip Law, Sinbad from the classic The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, plays Diabolik, a master criminal general clad in a black leather cat burglar outfit, complete with stylish mask that lets law act with his eyes in a terrific way. Bava places Diabolik all over the place, the best being a sequence in which he scales a stone tower wall with suction cup devices. It’s a series of great shots and makes use of the terrific idea of throwing Diabolik into a white version of his usual outfit so that he blends in with the wall. Pretty much, though, the movie is kind of a camp, super spy version of Bonnie and Clyde as Diabolik spends the movie running around with the insanely gorgeous Marisa Mell, playing his girlfriend Eva Kant. The two really just seem to find it both funny and thrilling to go out and commit these elaborate crimes, even if they’re as goofy as getting the French Minister, played by Terry Thomas, hopped up on laughing gas on live TV. Still, Mell really is just about the sexiest girl to grace the screen at the time and the film knows it. Bava doesn’t hesitate to dress her in a series of flimsy, sexy outfits, or to tease the audience by placing her in a shower with transparent doors, but also with two opaque circles on the door to obscure the best bits. There is even a shot early on that is a long, slow move from Mell’s toes to her face, showing her for the sex object she is right from the start. Not long after that, we get the somewhat famous shot of her and Diabolik rolling around and making love covered by hundreds of hundred dollar bills. Scrooge McDuck was never as sexy. In the hands of a lesser director, this fun romp would be just that, a bit of camp in the vein of Barbarella. Bava, however, brings a visual flair to the film that is unequaled in camp cinema and makes a fun movie into a truly dynamic one, with thrilling colors, fantastic action sequences, and great miniatures, particularly Diabolik’s own bat cave. It’s rare to find a movie this campy and this sexy that’s also this well shot. I really have fallen in love with Bava’s work and it is this film above all the others, largely for how unusual it is, that proves him to be not just a genius of horror, but a genius in the entire medium.