Movie Review: Danger: Diabolik!

4/10A

Now then. If this film was marked for cmoic book accuracy and style alone it would get a much higher score.

It's based on an Italian comic book (or, "fumetti") about the escapades of a master criminal, the eponymous Diabolik. He's a sort of masked nutter with mental eyebrows and a supervillain's laugh, whom we first meet stealing ten million quid from a rolls royce. By stealing the Rolls Royce.

He quickly returns to his lair, a crazy sci fi masterpiece of kitsch.

Oh, not to forget. He has a REALLY REALLY gorgeous girlfriend. I mean, it's absurd how beautiful she is. There's a lot of female flesh on show really, from gangsters' molls in bikinis to society ladies in gowns. Despite all the lovelies populating the world Diabolik's relationship remains entirely monogamous throughout the tale and this is refreshing and kind of sweet.

Of course, sweet in the loose sense since these two are randy as rabbits in spring, and spend the first ten minutes of the film shagging on the ten million quid.

This is the sort of use that Diabolik puts his winnings to - he has little interest in spending his money and is more interested in the craziest and more difficult scams. At one point he decides to steal a gigantic 25 tonne gold ingot that is welded into solid steel. If that ain't a useless bauble I don't know what is.

The film is mental - the acting extreme, and occasionally bad, the effects, while inventive are incredibly cheap (at one point, an aeroplane is created using a 2d drawing and what looks like a stepladder for the boarding steps) and this means that despite this film being a superior work of story and filmmaking than the far more campy and intentionally funny Batman movie from a couple of years previous, it doesn'ty really achieve anything more than moderate success.

It's apparently a massive cult movie and I can see why, it's immensly and purely CULT - I think it's worth seeing for anyone who's into superheroes and supervillains, 60 movies, or even just pretty ladies.

So in summary, it's not a great film, but I greatly enjoyed it, that gets it an A.

A