Danger: Diabolik movie review (1968)

Bava is just the director for this. His credits reveal a thorough grounding in schlock exploitation films: "Hercules In the Center of the Earth," "The Evil Eyes," "Dr. Goldfoot and the Girl Bombs," etc.

"Danger: Diabolik" is a superior example of its type. Law is Diabolik, a supercriminal who lives underground in his electronic hideout with a sexy blond (Marisa Mell) and millions of dollars worth of gadgets. (Didya ever wonder how these guys pull off the largest underground construction projects in history and keep them a secret?) He specializes in grandstand burglaries involving millions of dollars, priceless emeralds, the national gold supply, etc.

The law is hot on his trail, led by the unlikely combination of Terry-Thomas and Michel Piccoli. Terry-Thomas is the finance minister, delivering pleas to the nation in what must be his own Terry-Thomas imitation, and Piccoli is the chief inspector. Piccoli usually plays a sinister, cruel, middle-aged Gallic lover (to Jane Fonda in "The Game Is Over," Jeanne Moreau in "Diary of a Chambermaid" and Catherine Deneuve in "Benjamin"). It is nothing short of hilarious to find him in this enterprise, reciting lines like: "Whatever you say, chief."

The villain is Adolfo Celi, another master criminal who wants to turn Diabolik over to the cops in exchange for a pardon. Celi is the definitive spy-spoof bad guy (he ran the island in "Thunderball"), and this time he has an airplane with a trick door that drops his victims through the floor (in "Thunderball" they fell into a pool of sharks).

We get Celi and Law falling out of the plane and threatening each other on the way down; Law climbing a tower after Piccoli recites, "No one could scale that height," and Law inventing comic-book tricks worthy of Batman (he sabotages a Terry-Thomas conference by releasing Exhilarating Gas, after first carefully taking an anti-Exhilarating Gas tablet). Perhaps because its pretensions are more modest, "Danger: Diabolik" is more successful than "Barbarella" and more fun, too.

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