MARIO BAVA: KILL BABY KILL : LOBBY CARD GALLERY AND REVIEW

CAST:

Giacomo Rossi-Stuart (Dr Paul Eswai), Erika Blanc (Monica Shuftan), Max Lawrence (Burgomaster Karl), Fabienne Dali (Ruth), Piero Lulli (Inspector Kruger), Gianna Vivaldi (Baroness Graps)

PRODUCTION:

Director – Mario Bava, Screenplay – Mario Bava, Romano Migliorini & Roberto Natale, Story – Romano Migliorini & Roberto Natale, Dialogue – John Hart, Producers – Luciano Catenacci, Fabienne Dali’ & Nando Pisani, Photography – Antonio Rinaldi, Music – Carlo Rustichelli, Optical Effects – S.P.E.S (Supervisor – E. Catalucci). Production Company – FUL Films. Italy. 1966.

SYNOPSIS:

Dr Paul Eswai travels to a small village to conduct an autopsy at the request of the local police. There he finds that the villagers live in fear of a murderous ghost child.

COMMENTARY:
Italian director Mario Bava made considerable distinction with his Black Sunday/The Revenge of the Vampire Woman/The Mask of the Demon (1960), a film that essentially created the continental Gothic horror film. Black Sunday inspired other directors like Riccardo Freda and Antonio Margheriti, while Bava himself revisited Gothic horror several times with Black Sabbath (1963), Night is the Phantom/The Body and the Whip/What! (La Frustra e il Corpo) (1965), this and Baron Blood (1972).
 

Kill Baby ... Kill is an interesting effort. It has only the barest whisper of a plot. Nevertheless, Mario Bava accumulates a wonderfully haunted atmosphere. The film is filled with striking images such as the child’s face looking in through the window, her ball eerily bouncing along corridors and swings emptily swinging. There is one nifty scene where the hero is caught in a loop running into a room and out a door on the other side that keeps bringing him back to the first door he entered where he then starts to run so fast that there are two of them running in and out at once until he catches up to his other self. The film is ravishingly shot in golden hues 

Mario Bava’s other genre films are:- the Gothic classic Black Sunday/The Mask of the Demon/The Revenge of the Vampire Woman (1960); the Greek muscleman fantasy Hercules in the Center of the Earth/Hercules vs the Vampires (1961); the giallo The Evil Eye (1962); the Gothic horror anthology Black Sabbath (1963); the Gothic horror Night is the Phantom/The Whip and the Body/What? (1963); the psycho-sexual thriller Blood and Black Lace (1964); the sf/horror film Planet of the Vampires (1965); the spy comedy Dr Goldfoot and the Girls Bombs (1966), Bava’s worst film; the masked super-thief film Danger Diabolik (1967); the giallo Five Dolls for an August Moon (1970); the giallo Hatchet for a Honeymoon/Blood Brides (1971); the giallo Twitch of the Death Nerve/Bloodbath/A Bay of Blood/Carnage/Ecology for a Crime (1971); the Gothic Baron Blood (1972); the giallo/haunted house film Lisa and the Devil/House of Exorcism (1972); and the possession film Shock/Beyond the Door II (1977).

     

MARIO BAVA: BLOOD AND BLACK LACE: GALLERY AND REVIEW

CAST:

Cameron Mitchell, Eva Bartok, Thomas Reiner, Ariana Gorini, Dante DiPaolo, Mary Arden, Franco Ressel, Claude Dantes, Luciano Pigozzi, Lea Leander, Massimo Righi, Francesca Ungaro, Guiliano Raffaelli, Harriet Medin, Mary Carmen 

SYNOPSIS:

It is a dark and stormy night, and at the high fashion salon of Contessa Cristina Como (Eva Bartok), there are a few people who wish to see one of the models, Isabella (Francesca Ungaro), who has not arrived for the show rehearsals as of yet. Two of those people want to see her because she supplies drugs to them, but her bosses are growing impatient with her non-appearance for more professional reasons. However, Isabella will never show up, not alive at any rate, because after her taxi dropped her off at the mansion's gates, she was followed and murdered by a masked figure - and she will not be the last...

COMMENTARY:

Blood and Black Lace has an important place in the history of horror movies and thrillers, because it was here that the idea of joining horror violence to thriller suspense and plotting was first thought up. Certainly there had been prototype old dark house thrillers that aimed to chill, and Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None formed the template for much of this kind of shocker to come, but it took the inspired director Mario Bava to pick up this notion and truly run with it. So it was here that all those much-maligned, and in turn much admired, giallo and slasher movies got their start; whether you think that's a good thing or not was a matter of taste.

What is inarguable is the immense style that Bava brought to the table, not something that his followers were always able to match to any great sufficiency, but setting the bar high for anyone who chose to imitate him, and there were plenty of those. The whole set up involves the glamorous deaths of beautiful women, something the Inspector (Thomas Reiner) investigating after the discovery of Isabella's body in a wardrobe puts down to the killer being a "sex maniac". The thought of such deviants were rare in cinema thrillers until Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho came along, but the use of a term like that here turns out to be an example of misdirection.

That said, it does provide Bava all the excuse he needed to decoratively present his screen murders with a flair not often seen outside the work of, well, Mr Hitchcock, and even he wouldn't go quite as far as Bava did here until Frenzy a few years later, a film that repaid the debt to the Italians who were so in the thrall of the Master of Suspense. The killings here range from death by iron claw glove to burning on a red hot stove, all very nasty, but somehow weirdly palatable in the context of the drama due to the elegance of their assembly. There's no doubt that they were the reason this film was made, and they prove the most memorable aspect.

Where the rest of the film falls down is in the bits in between. The dialogue leans heavily on the exposition side of things, where the characters basically explain the machinations of the narrative so we can understand who has a motive, or, in the final third, why the murders have occured at all. Funnily enough, the big reveal is not held back until the very end, as we find out who is behind the scheming at the sixty minute mark or thereabouts, and the rest shows how they get their comeuppance. The appearance of Cameron Mitchell will set alarm bells ringing among those seasoned viewers of the kind of trash he starred in when he wasn't in The High Chapparal, but if you haven't seen this before don't get too complacent as it doesn't pan out the way you might expect. A pioneer in its field, Blood and Black Lace is satisfying in its imagery, if not entirely when the suspects discuss their predicament. Music by Carlo Rustichelli.

Review:Here 
Images: Marcus Brooks

KARLOFF AND BAVA: BLACK SABBATH : I TRE VOLTI DELLA PAURA : GALLERY AND REVIEW

CAST:

Boris Karloff (Narrator). A Drop of Water:- Jacqueline Perreiex (Helen Corey), Milly (The Maid). The Telephone:- Michele Mercier (Rosy), Lidia Alfonisi (Mary). The Wurdulak:- Boris Karloff (Gorka), Mark Damon (Count Vladimir d’Urfe), Susy Andersen (Sdenka), Glauco Onorato (Gregor), Rika Dailina (Maria), Massimo Righi (Peter)

PRODUCTION:

Director – Mario Bava, Screenplay – Mario Bava, Alberto Bevilacqua & Marcello Fondato, Based on the Short Stories A Drop of Water by Anton Chekov, The Telephone by F.G. Snyder and The Wurdulak by Ivan Tolstoy, Producer – Paolo Mercuri, Photography – Ubaldo Terzano, Music – Roberto Nicolosi, Music (US Version) – Les Baxter, Art Direction – Giorgio Giovannini. Production Company – Emmipi Cinematografica/Lyre Cinematografica/Galatea S.P

SYNOPSIS:

A Drop of Water – A woman is asked to dress the corpse of a neighbour who has died but steals a ring from its finger. Upon returning to her apartment, the dead body rises to haunt her. The Telephone – A woman living alone in her apartment receives phone calls from her dead boyfriend whom she turned over to the authorities. He is now able to see everything she does and taunts her that he will kill her by dawn. The Wurdulak – A nobleman travelling across the Russian steppes seeks refuge with a family. They are concerned about their father who went hunting a vampire known as the wurdulak, leaving them with the warning that if he returned after five days he must be killed. The father returns just after the five days expire and the family is uncertain what to do, even as he starts to drink their blood 

COMMENTARY:

Black Sabbath was the seventh film of the great Mario Bava. Bava had single-handedly created the entire continental Gothic horror genre with his Black Sunday/The Mask of the Demon/The Revenge of the Vampire Woman (1960). Black Sunday was the greatest of Mario Bava’s several forays into the Gothic horror but Black Sabbath is commonly regarded as at least his second best. Here Bava seems to be trying to revisit what he did in Black Sunday – two of the three episodes are adapted, like Black Sunday, from stories by Russian authors, and the third story returns to the same 19th century Russian milieu of Black Sunday. The principle difference is that here Mario Bava shoots in colour as opposed to black-and-white.

Black Sabbath is an anthology of three stories. Boris Karloff is brought as linking narrator, fulfilling much the same function he did on tv’s Thriller (1960-62). The principal frisson in all three stories is the theme of an individual’s home being alienated from them – the first two stories almost entirely take place inside a single apartment with a woman being haunted and driven insane by an eruption of the supernatural. The first story A Drop of Water is occasionally heavy-handed but Mario Bava builds an effectively eerie accumulation of atmosphere through the likes of amplified drops of water and blinking lights from the street, eventually arriving at the ghostly appearance of the dead body in the apartment

Even better is the second story The Telephone, which has a number of intensely unsettling moments like where the mysterious caller starts taunting the girl about things she has just done; where writing mysteriously appears on a blank piece of paper as she is reading it; and the caller taunts her “You’ll be dead by dawn” – a shock effect taken from The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1919).

  

The third and best story The Wurdulak most resembles Black Sunday in tone (although in colour it comes out looking more like a Hammer film). It too plays on a sense of alienation of the familiar – in this case, a vampire that specifically preys upon members of his own family by turning their affections against them. There are some fine scenes with Boris Karloff returning and settling back into normal family life in blithe disregard of his family’s uncertainty about what he has become. Mario Bava builds some intense atmosphere with faces seen outside windows, Boris Karloff skulking around in a white perm and subtly underlit makeup, and a superb moment where a now vampirized child returns, knocking on the door and his mother is unable to resist her maternal affections to go to him

 

Mario Bava’s other films are:- the Gothic classic Black Sunday/The Mask of the Demon/The Revenge of the Vampire Woman (1960); the Greek muscleman fantasy Hercules in the Center of the Earth/Hercules vs the Vampires (1961); the giallo The Evil Eye (1962); the Gothic horror Night is the Phantom/The Whip and the Body/What? (1963); the giallo psycho-sexual thriller Blood and Black Lace (1964); the Gothic Kill Baby ... Kill/Curse of the Dead/Curse of the Living Dead/Operation Fear (1965); the sf/horror film Planet of the Vampires (1965); the spy comedy Dr Goldfoot and the Girls Bombs (1966), Bava’s worst film; the masked super-thief film Danger Diabolik (1967); the giallo Five Dolls for an August Moon (1970); the giallo Hatchet for a Honeymoon/Blood Brides (1971); the giallo Twitch of the Death Nerve/Bloodbath/A Bay of Blood/Carnage/Ecology for a Crime (1971); the Gothic Baron Blood (1972); the giallo/haunted house film Lisa and the Devil/House of Exorcism (1972); and the possession film Shock/Beyond the Door II (1977).

Review: Richard Schieb

Images: Marcus Brooks

MARIO BAVA'S BARON BLOOD: ELKE SOMMER JOSEPH COTTON: STILLS GALLERY AND REVIEW

CAST:
Elke Sommer (Eva Arnold), Joseph Cotten (Alfred Becker), Antonio Cantafora (Peter Kleist), Massimo Girotti (Professor Karl Hummel), Rada Rassimov (Christina Hoffman), Alan Collins (Fritz), Dieter Tressler (Dortmund), Humi Raho (Inspector)

PRODUCTION:

Director – Mario Bava, Screenplay – Vincent Fotre, US Adaptation – William A. Bairn, Producer – Alfred Leone, Photography – Emilio Varriano, Music – (US Version) Les Baxter & (Italian Version) Stelvio Cipriani, Special Effects – Franco Tocci, Art Direction – Enzo Bulgarelli. Production Company – Leone International Films/Cinevision Ltd. Italy/West Germany. 1972. 

SYNOPSIS:

American Peter Kleist arrives in Austria to visit the castle of his ancestor Otto von Kleist. Von Kleist was a notoriously sadistic nobleman who gained the nickname Baron Blood because he reportedly hung the bodies of his victims on spikes outside his castle. Peter believes he has found a parchment left by a witch that lists an incantation for bringing the Baron back from the dead. Disbelieving that it can do so, he and Eva Arnold, a local girl working on the restoration of the castle, read the incantation out in the room where the Baron was killed. Immediately afterwards, a hooded and hideously deformed figure appears and begins brutally killing people

COMMENTARY:
Mario Bava was one of the great legends of Italian horror cinema. Mario Bava first made his name with the beautifully eerie Gothic horror Black Sunday/The Mask of the Demon/Revenge of the Vampire (1960). Black Sunday’s success was such that it inaugurated an entire genre of Italian (and continental) Gothic horror films throughout the 1960s. Black Sunday was imitated by numerous other directors including Riccardo Freda and Antonio Margheriti, and made Barbara Steele into an essential icon of continental horror. Bava returned to the Gothic upon a number of other occasions – in the anthology Black Sabbath (1963) and the likes of Night is the Phantom/What!/The Whip and the Body (1963) and Kill, Baby ... Kill!/Curse of the Dead/Curse of the Living Dead/Operation Fear (1965), as well as combining it with the peplum in Hercules in the Center of the Earth/Hercules in the Haunted World (1961). During the mid-1960s, Bava began to veer away from Gothic horror and essentially created the giallo film with the likes of Blood and Black Lace (1964), Blood Brides/Hatchet for a Honeymoon (1971) and Twitch of the Death Nerve/Bay of Blood/Carnage (1971). Baron Blood was the last full-fledged return to the Gothic that Mario Bava would make. 

Baron Blood is not quite up there in the same classic category with Black Sunday – the plot seems too indifferently pieced together for that – but is still an effort that shows Mario Bava on good form. The film overspills with atmosphere. Bava shot on location at a real castle – Castle Kreuzenstein in Austria – that provides loads of sepulchral Gothic doom and an authenticity that no art director could ever fabricate. Bava piles on a maximum amount of backlit fog, while creeping his camera through the oppressiveness of the castle’s interior. There is a suspenseful scene where the sinister figure of the Baron pursues Elke Sommer through the fog. By the time that he made Baron Blood, Mario Bava had become one of the directors pushing an increasing degree of sadism in Italian horror cinema, something that would find its full-flowering in the work of Dario Argento, Lucio Fulci, Umberto Lenzi and Italian gore cinema of the 1980s. Here there are some nasty scenes with Dieter Tressler’s mayor having his neck snapped and then being hung, or of Alan Collins being whacked over the head and then dumped in an Iron Maiden. The makeup job on the Baron looks suitably grotesque. 

The script holds no surprise as to the identity of the reincarnated Baron – they had do something with the imported American name actor – that said, Josef Cotten is not an actor particularly suited to doing over-the-top villainy. In the English-language version released by AIP, Stelvio Cipriani’s score has been replaced by one from Les Baxter, who tends to go into overdrive with the ethereal early electronics. (The original score was reportedly much superior)

Mario Bava’s other genre films are:- the Gothic classic Black Sunday/The Mask of the Demon/The Revenge of the Vampire Woman (1960); the Greek muscleman fantasy Hercules in the Center of the Earth/Hercules vs the Vampires (1961); the giallo The Evil Eye (1962); the Gothic horror anthology Black Sabbath (1963); the Gothic horror Night is the Phantom/The Whip and the Body/What? (1963); the psycho-sexual thriller Blood and Black Lace (1964); the Gothic Kill Baby ... Kill/Curse of the Dead/Curse of the Living Dead/Operation Fear (1965); the sf/horror film Planet of the Vampires (1965); the spy comedy Dr Goldfoot and the Girls Bombs (1966), Bava’s worst film; the masked super-thief film Danger Diabolik (1967); the giallo Five Dolls for an August Moon (1970); the giallo Hatchet for a Honeymoon/Blood Brides (1971); the giallo Twitch of the Death Nerve/Bay of Blood/Carnage (1971); the giallo/haunted house film Lisa and the Devil/House of Exorcism (1972); and the possession film Shock/Beyond the Door II (1977).      

Review: Richard Scheib
Images: Marcus Brooks

MARIO BAVA: RARE STILL : BAVA AT WORK ON SET OF BLACK SABBATH WITH MICHELLE MERCIER

BARBARA STEELE: BLACK SUNDAY : LA MASCHERA EL DAIMO REVIEW AND PHOTOGRAPH GALLERY

CAST:

Barbara Steele (Katya/Princess Asa), John Richardson (Dr Andrej Gorobec), Andrea Checchi (Professor Choma Kruvajan), Arturo Dominici (Prince Ivo Javutich), Enrico Olivieri (Prince Constantine), Antonio Pierfederici (The Priest), Ivo Garrani (Prince Vajda), Tino Bianchi (Ivan)

PRODUCTION:

Director/Photography (b&w) – Mario Bava, Screenplay – Ennio De Concini & Mario Serandrei, English Language Dialogue – George Higgins III, Based on the Short Story The Vij by Nikolai Gogol, Producer – Massimo De Rita, Music – (Italian Version) Robert Nicolosi & (English Language Version) Les Baxter, Art Direction – Giorgio Giovannini. Production Company – Lina Productions/Galatea/Jolly Films.  Italy. 1960. 

SYNOPSIS:

In 17th Century Russia, Princess Asa is tried and convicted for vampirism and witchcraft. A mask with spikes on its inside is hammered over her face and she is burned at the stake. Two centuries later, the coach of Professor Choma Kruvajan and his companion Dr Andrej Gorobec crashes in the forest. They come upon the chapel that holds Asa’s coffin where she is kept imprisoned by the shadow of the cross coming through a window. Kruvajan accidentally revives Asa. They must then try to stop Asa as she attempts to possess her modern-day descendant Princess Katya

COMMENTARY:

Black Sunday is a genre classic. It was a success that produced a deluge of continental (primarily Italian) horror. Hammer had already fired up a massive Gothic revival with The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) and Dracula/The Horror of Dracula (1958) in the previous three years and in the USA Roger Corman had had similar success with a series of Edgar Allan Poe adaptations. With Black Sunday, director Mario Bava defined a set the tropes that would become the continental Gothic formula. As opposed to Hammer’s product, the Italian horror film placed an emphasis on sadism, particularly facial mutilation; and as, opposed to the Anglo-horror film, which is very much rooted in the battle between reason and suppression, the continental Gothic became a genre that was based in the past (most Italo-horror films are set in the early 19th Century or earlier) and firmly on the side of superstition – science and reason never enter into these films, there is rarely ever a Man of Reason like Peter Cushing’s Van Helsing. There were many imitators through the 1960s – directors such as Riccardo Freda and Antonio Margheriti – making similar films set in large gloomy castles and featuring necrophiliac minglings of death and love. 

Most importantly, Black Sunday made Mario Bava a cult name with audiences. Bava had worked as a cinematographer and had purportedly (uncreditedly) directed several forgettable spaghetti Gothics – I Vampiri/The Devil’s Commandment (1957) and Caltiki, the Immortal Monster (1959) – before debuting with Black Sunday. Bava would then go onto a number of other Gothic horrors – Black Sabbath (1963), Night is the Phantom/What! (1963), Kill, Baby ... Kill!/Curse of the Living Dead (1966), Baron Blood (1972) – as well as giallo psycho-thrillers like Blood and Black Lace (1964), Blood Brides/Hatchet for a Honeymoon (1969) and Twitch of the Death Nerve/Bloodbath (1971). While many of these are excellent, Black Sunday would be a film that Bava never managed to subsequently surpass. 

It is almost impossible to gain an appreciation of Black Sunday’s atmosphere when seeing it on video – it needs a cinematic airing to give true voice to the extraordinary beauty of Mario Bava’s atmosphere and camerawork. For a period like 1960 when camera set-ups where still largely static, Bava’s camerawork is incredibly sinuous and fluid, always on the move. The shock opening with Barbara Steele being tied up, her back bared and the letter ‘S’ branded into her flesh, then the spiked Mask of Satan placed onto her face and hammered on with a crunch and a spurt of blood still holds some effect thirty years later. (It was this scene that had Black Sunday banned in the UK until 1968). What is most striking is Mario Bava’s instinctive feel for Gothic mood – the scene where the prince appears out of the shadows and approaches the bed of Ivo Garrani is almost pure Castle of Otranto (1764). The most extraordinary sequence in the film is the luring of the professor to the castle, which is filled with images like the black coach appearing out of the mist and racing through the forest in slow-motion with Arturo Dominici on top maniacally whipping the horses along; and the luring of the professor into the castle where Dominici and his lantern move further and further ahead, while giant embossed doors boom shut unaided by human hand, slowly trapping the professor deeper and deeper into a claustrophobic maze of underground passages. 

Although the film makes some claim to be based on the Nikolai Gogol short story The Vij (1835), there is virtually nothing of this in the finished script. The Vij was set around a night in a crypt as the hero waits for the witch to arise from her tomb while she marshals occult forces against him, a scene that is puzzlingly missing from the film. The main sequence of The Vij would have been perfect for the film’s extended climax, but is not used – in fact, the climax that Black Sunday has is oddly anti-climactic. In subsequent films, Mario Bava showed himself to be a director less concerned with plot than with visual set-pieces and this is probably the problem. The script here seems oddly unbalanced – it, for instance, makes mistakes like having the vampires engage in ordinary fistfights with the heroes, which rob them of their supernatural menace; it also jumbles vampires in with what should be a straight-forward reincarnated witch story. Nevertheless, Black Sunday is a classic. 

The film was purportedly remade as Black Sunday/The Mask of the Demon/Demons 5: The Devil’s Veil (1989) by Mario Bava’s son Lamberto, although this had almost nothing to do with the original here. The Nikolai Gogol story was more faithfully adapted as the Russian-made The Viy (1967) and the Yugoslav-made A Holy Place (1990). 

Mario Bava’s other genre films are:- the Greek muscleman fantasy Hercules in the Center of the Earth/Hercules vs the Vampires (1961); the giallo The Evil Eye (1962); the Gothic horror anthology Black Sabbath (1963); the Gothic horror Night is the Phantom/The Whip and the Body/What? (1963); the psycho-sexual thriller Blood and Black Lace (1964); the Gothic Kill Baby ... Kill/Curse of the Dead/Curse of the Living Dead/Operation Fear (1965); the sf/horror film Planet of the Vampires (1965); the spy comedy Dr Goldfoot and the Girls Bombs (1966), Bava’s worst film; the masked super-thief film Danger Diabolik (1967); the giallo Five Dolls for an August Moon (1970); the giallo Hatchet for a Honeymoon/Blood Brides (1971); the giallo Twitch of the Death Nerve/Bloodbath/A Bay of Blood/Carnage/Ecology for a Crime (1971); the Gothic Baron Blood (1972); the giallo/haunted house film Lisa and the Devil/House of Exorcism (1972); and the possession film Shock/Beyond the Door II (1977).      

Review: Richard Scheib

Images: Marcus Brooks

DANGER DIABOLIK : JOHN PHILLIP LAW AND MARISA MELL : REVIEW AND GALLERY

CAST:
John Phillip Law (Diabolik), Marisa Mell (Eva Kant), Michel Piccoli (Inspector Ginko), Adolfo Celi (Ralph Valmont), Terry-Thomas (Minister of Finance)

PRODUCTION:

Director – Mario Bava, Screenplay – Mario Bava & Dino Maiuri, Story – Dino Maiuri, Adriano Baracio & Angela E. Giussari & Luciano Giussari, Based on the Comic-Book Created by Angela E. Giussari & Luciano Giussari, Producer – Dino de Laurentiis, Photography – Antonio Rinaldi, Music – Ennio Morricone, Art Direction – Flavio Morgherini. Production Company – Dino de Laurentiis Cinematografica/Marianne Productions. Italy. 1967.

COMMENTARY:
A glorious, cult classic, Mario Bava’s Danger: Diabolik is based on a fumetti (Italian comic book) created by a pair of schoolteachers (!), the Guissani sisters. Arch super-criminal Diabolik (super-cool John Phillip Law) and his glamorous partner in crime, Eva (super-sexy Marisa Mell) are the scourge of the establishment. They stage a daring daylight robbery, waltzing away with $1,000,000 right under the nose of the dedicated Inspector Ginco (Michel Piccoli). Escaping to Diabolik’s swanky, hi-tech lair, the pair make love on a bed covered in $100 bills, in one of most iconic scenes in cult film history. At a press conference, Diabolik doses the Minister of Interior (Terry-Thomas) with laughing gas humiliating him in front of the assembled newsmen. Inspector Ginco cranks up his war on crime, until only Diabolik and crime boss Valmont (Adolfo Celi) remain in his sights. Valmont, a far more murderous criminal than Diabolik, offers to help Ginco trap our leather clad supervillain, leading to a showdown between the ageing establishment types (both the police and the mob) and the youthful, free-spirited anti-heroes. 

Produced by Italian mega-mogul Dino DeLaurentiis (as a companion piece to his charming Barbarella (1967)), Danger: Diabolik saw Mario Bava working with the biggest budget of his career: around $3 million. True to form, Bava used his technical wizardry to craft an exquisite looking comic book caper for a mere $400,000. DeLaurentiis was overjoyed and offered Bava the chance to make a sequel with the remaining money. Irked by the producer’s creative interference and alleged megalomania, Bava refused and subsequent attempts to lure him into directing King Kong (1976) and Flash Gordon (1980) also came to naught. While Bava’s independent streak remains admirable, it is nonetheless a shame a second Diabolik adventure was never made. It would have undoubtedly catapulted him onto bigger, international co-productions, part of the sixties superhero boom, a genre perfect for his pop art sensibilities. Imagine how Kong and Gordon could have turned out had Bava made them.

Everything about this live-action cartoon, clicks: the pop art production design, the outlandish gags, dynamic action, and an ebullient atmosphere of carefree sensuality, perfectly served by the casting of John Phillip Law and Marisa Mell (Replacements for a miscast Jean Sorel and Catherine Deneuve, who refused to strip off for the love scene, even though it contains no actual nudity). Having excelled as an angelic innocent in the earlier Barbarella, here Law essays the exact opposite, a literally diabolical genius. As with his later turn in The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1973), he imbues the daredevil anti-hero with swashbuckling verve. Sadly, following this triumvirate of colourful characters, Law seems to have lost his way. Many of his later performances are regrettably wooden, although cult film aficionados should check out his cameo in Roman Coppola’s delightful CQ (2001), which pays affectionate tribute to both DeLaurentiis productions. The legend goes that Marisa Mell was an unexceptional Italian starlet, until a car crash and subsequent plastic surgery resulted in her Frankenstein-style transformation into the blonde bombshell beloved by cult film fans the world over today. As Eva, Mell remains effortlessly sexy and never descends to the level of token girlfriend. Eva is one of the most striking heroines in cult film, confident, capable and totally devoted to her lover.

Though they are ostensibly criminals, there is something appealing about Diabolik and Eva’s playful rebelliousness, underlined in the witty script co-authored by Bava, Dino Maiuri and British writer Tudor Gates (Gates went on to write the mid-seventies lesbian vampire trilogy for Hammer, and co-wrote a comedy-giallo with Bava titled Cry Nightmare! (1968) that was eventually filmed by Antonio Margheriti). While the government officials and boorish mobsters remain callous and crass, the criminal couple never hurt anyone innocent and are clever, stylish and genuinely in love. Their anti-establishment antics must have played really well to young people in 1968 (One scene has Diabolik destroy Italy’s tax records, to the public’s delight). However, Bava plays fair by depicting an establishment figure, Inspector Ginco, as a decent, caring, honourable man and has Diabolik ultimately undone by his own greed and self-interest. Though that sequel never arrived (Although Terry-Thomas returned for the spoof Arriva Dorellik (1968)), Diabolik’s entrapment during the serial-like climax remains only a temporary setback. As his diabolical laughter suggests, the spirit of rebellion can never be entirely suppressed.  

EXTRA GALLERY TO FOLLOW
REVIEW SOURCE:HERE
IMAGES: MARCUS BROOKS