Danger: Diabolik (1968)

Danger: Diabolik

"Bava's superb visual sense him in good stead in this comic-strip adventure which looks like a brilliant pastiche of the best of everything in anything from James Bond to Matt Helm"

Monthly Film Bulletin

After spoofing the spy genre in his 1966 film "Dr. Goldfoot and the Bomb Girls", Bava created a colorful and intriguing look into the similar genre. While “Danger: Diabolik” might not be a perfect film, it is successful in being an interesting journey through a comic book version of the spy genre. Diabolik owes more of its aesthetics to  Adam West’s Batman than Sean Connery’s James Bond.

The film centers around Diabolic, an expert thief who steals from the rich, but unlike Robin Hood does not give back to the poor. In the beginning of the film, we see Diabolic pull off a heist of epic proportions and when he returns home his girl asks him to steal a set of emeralds for her. This request sets in motion a sequence of events that features Diabolic driving a submarine, derailing a train, climbing a tower, and finally, ending the film, by being covered in molten gold.

On top of already being filled with a strange mixture of comic book and spy aesthetics, Bava seems to fill every frame with strange psychedelic lights and imagery.  He is able to use the bright lights and colors that fill his previous gothic dramas to merge into the hippie culture of the late 1960s. At one point, Bava has a camera slowly pan through a party as women dance in short skirts and people pass a joint. Bava’s camera focuses on the faces of these nameless characters that are painted in bright blues, greens, and reds as the wiggle through the dance floor.

Now that we have talked about the plot and some of the aesthetics of the films, lets move on to Diabolik’s hilariously useless disguise. Diabolik’s costume merges the gap between the 1960s comic films and the modern super hero craze. This costume is ridiculous. It seems to be a mixture between a man in a leather BDSM suit and a Mortal Kombat character. It is basically a head to toe black leather skin that clings to his body ( a comparison could be made to Adam West’s Batsuit) And do not worry about Diabolik, he has thought of everything because at one point in the film he removes his black leather suit to reveal an identical grey suit. This film willingly deserved its place on the final episode of “Mystery Science Theater 300”

In the end “Danger: Diabolic” is an interesting look into an early comic book adaptation. Roger Ebert claimed that with his film “Mario Bava has exploited every cliché in the book.”  I can't help but agree with Ebert’s review, but there seems to be something unique  inside the way Bava combines the cliches. It certainly is more inspired than Bava’s last film, which comes from the fact that “Danger:Diabolik” was actually a kind of passion project for him. While I wouldn’t call it the best comic book film ever made it’s also not “Howard the Duck”. It stands somewhere in the middle between inspired film making and Kitsch.   

Dr. Goldfood and the Girl Bombs (1966)

Dr. Goldfood and the Girl Bombs

“It was the most dreadful movie I’ve ever been in. Just about everything that could go wrong did. At one point, they even lost the soundtrack to the whole movie! They literally lost it!”

Vincent Price

While many critics agree with Price’s opinion on Mario Bava’s “Dr. Goldfoot and the Girl Bombs”, I found it strangely entertaining. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not advocating that Bava’s film should knock “Vertigo” off Sight and Sounds top one hundred list, but any film that is bold enough to title itself on a terrible pun like Dr. Goldfoot (get it, its like “Goldfinger”….but a foot) deserves recognition.

The plot revolves around Dr. Goldfoot, an evil mastermind who is trying to get what all men with mustaches want..the world. The only thing that stands in the way of Dr. Goldfoot  are a dozen gullible military generals. In order to eliminate these unsuspecting men, Goldfoot creates walking bombs that are disguised as beautiful scantily clad women. These women robots (who closely resemble the killer robots made by the evil magician in Bava’s earlier film “The Wonders of Aladdin") main goal is to seduce generals and as the generals become aroused something happens chemically and the bombs explode. And that is about as much of a scientific explanation we get inside the film. As the tagline of the film states “ Meet the girls with the Thermo-Nuclear Navels”. Now that is a plot! 

Like all of Bava’s films the cinematography is top notch and actually cleverly alludes to other American films. Most notably, Bava has his Abbot and Costello-like agents fall out of a plane while clutching onto a nuclear bomb that is being dropped over Russia. It’s interesting to see that Kubrick’s imagery inside “Dr. Strangelove, or: How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb” was already being spoofed only two years after the release of the film. (On a side note, the titles of these films are really beginning to take a bite out of my 500 word limit) 

Now that we’ve discussed the positive elements of this film, let’s discuss Italian comedy. I just don’t understand it. I thought Price’s opening to the film was genuinely funny and most of Price’s scenes are entertaining. In opposition to this any time the Italian comedy team of Franco and Ciccio loudly erupt onto the screen with their juvenile and slapstick-style comedy I tend to stare blankly at the screen in boredom. The style of comedy would be dated even for early silent cinema. They truly stand out just as you would imagine two bumbling Italian clowns would in a sixties era Bond film.

While this film is certainly not perfect, it successfully keeps the viewer entertained throughout its brief eighty minute runtime. Yes, the jokes, characters, and most of the acting is terrible, but it is never boring. I’m sure there is some kind of thesis to be written about the political awareness of the characters in an early cold war era film, but come on this is a film about sexy girls who self detonate in order to assassinate generals. Just watch it for entertainment and leave “Dr. Strangelove” for the political analysis. 

The Road to Fort Alamo (1964)

The Road to Fort Alamo (1964)

With the release of Sergio Leone's "A Fistfull of Dollars", the western genre was forever changed. Protagonists became darker, violence increased, and the West became visceral. It is in this climate of genre-revisionism that Mario Bava directed his first western "The Road to Fort Alamo". While this film aesthetically could be considered a Spaghetti western, its plot and characters seems to have more in common with classical American westerns.

Like many Spaghetti westerns, the film opens on a lone rider traveling though the desert wilderness. Bud Massey, played by the great Ken Clark (who musical fans will remember from his role in the 1958  version of "South Pacific"), is hopelessly wandering the west following the murder of his family and the destruction of his farm by unknown assailants when he stumbles upon a squadron of calvary soldiers who have been slaughtered in a similar manner to his family. Among the remains of these fallen soldiers, Massey finds a promissory note from the government entitling the regiment to 150,000 dollars cash. With this promissory note in hand, Massey rides to the next town, assembles a group of men who steal the dead soldier's uniforms, travel to the bank (in their new calvary uniforms), and attempt to cash the note. When the robbery goes bad and an old women is shot, the bandits, with their new cash in hand, flee into the desert. When they have successfully escaped capture from the town's sherif, Massey and his friend Slim are betrayed  by other members of the gang and are knocked unconscious and left in the desert as the rest of the gang make off with the money. The next morning, the men are awakened by calvary trumpets as they are discovered by an actual calvary unit and are forced (because of their stolen uniforms) to play the part of soldiers as they try and find the men who betrayed them. 

If this brief synopsis of the first fifteen minutes of the film does not make you want to watch this film, then Bava's beautifully strange cinematography should. While maintaining the Italian western aesthetic, Bava's directorial flourishes call back to his previous films. Colored lights fill shadows like in the horrifying set pieces of his previous films "Hercules in Hell" and "Black Sabbath". In two scenes, Massey and Carson fight in complete silhouette in front of a strange blue light. This is a western that is seemingly set in the same bright and colorful world of Bava's more horrific films, while still clutching in many ways to the American myth of the west.

In my opinion, this film works as a link between the classical John Ford style western of America and Sergio Leone's darker vision for the Italian spaghetti western. The physical landscape is far removed from Ford's Momument Valley, but the themes of the film tend to resinate more with the American West than its Italian counterpart. Massey is not Clint Eastwood's character in Sergio Leone's films, instead his persona is more closely linked to Ford's John Wayne. He is a good man who is forced into violent circumstances and in the end learns from his mistakes and leads a moral life. I would go into more detail into Massey's arc, but I do not want to spoil the plot of the film. 

In the end, Bava's "The Road to Fort Alamo" is a gem of Italian cinema that seemingly links the cinema of John Ford and Sergio Leone. If you can find a copy of it somewhere, you might just surprise yourself with how much you love the film. If you looking for a spaghetti western with the themes and plots of an American western, and the aesthetic of a Bavaesque horror film; then 1964's "The Road to Fort Alamo" might just be the film for you.

P.S.

     

Anyone one who knows me will tell you that I am a stickler for video and sound quality inside the films I watch. It is a testament to how great this film is because of how much I was engrossed in the experience of watching this incredible western in a terrible lower than VHS quality transfer on youtube. The version of the film I watched was about fifteen to twenty minutes shorter than the theatrical film, it constantly switched between English and Italian dubbing, and all of the musical score was blown out. This was a truly dreadful transfer, but in the end the film still somehow managed to transcend this abysmal viewing. If you'd like to test your patience on a bad quality rip of the film, here is a link to the film's youtube page.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1HLStRiGQ-o  

27 Days of Bava!

In 2004, I was in the six grade and one October night I had an experience that would forever shape my future love of film. I can distinctly remember sitting on my bed, flipping though the television stations when I landed on the Bravo Network. I do not remeber what film I saw first, but I instantly knew I was seeing something that my parents would not approve of so I did two things. First, I ran to the T.V., turning the volume down to a whisper. Then I ran upstairs, grabbed a blank VHS tape, hurried back down the stairs, pushed it into my VCR, and hit record. The program I was secretly recording was Bravos's "100 Scariest Movie Moments" and it would eventually fuel my love of horror movies for the rest of my life and ignite my unquenchable thirst for film. For the next four nights, I would sit in front of the T.V. mesmerized by the acts of violence and terror that erupted from the screen. As the show counted down the scariest moments in cinema history, I watched, with paper in hand, ready to jot down the name of each film. By the end of that five night period, I had five hours of tape recorded and a notebook full of films. I then grabbed a TV Guide and meticulously  searched for the films on my list. When I found a film, I would write down when it would air and then record it on a VHS tape. In this manner, I amassed a collection of hundreds of horror films that I would label under fake names (to keep my parents questions at bay) and watch once my parents went to sleep. While I did this for years, there were still several films that I never found and Mario Bava's "Black Sunday" was at the top of my list of unaccounted films.

The clip that played that drew me to Bava's masterpiece was the iconic image of a large metal mask being hammered onto the beautiful Barbara Steele's face and the blood dripping down in spectacular black and white photography. Even though I have never seen the actual film, I can still remeber the fog that seems to float throughout the scene and the horrific image of the executioner's blank expression. I can distinctly remeber sitting up and turning my face away from the screen when the large wooden mallet plows into the mask. These images have haunted my memory for the past ten years, and I am sad to say that not only have I never seen "Black Sunday", but I have never seen a single Bava film. Thus for the first month of my film blog, I will briskly make my way through all 27 of  Mario Bava's directorial features. Every day I will watch one film beginning with 1957's "I Vampiri" and ending with 1977's "Beyond the Door II". If you would like to follow along with my exploration into the cinema of Italy's master of suspense at home, here is a calendar of the films I will be viewing during this retrospective:

10/27 - I Vampiri (1957)
10/28 - Caltiki, the Immortal Monster (1959)
10/29 - The Giant of Marathon (1959)
10/30 - Black Sunday (1960)
10/31 - The Wonders of Aladdin (1961)
11/1 - Hercules in the Haunted World (1961)
11/2 - Erik the Conqueror (1961)
11/3 - The Girl Who Knew Too Much (1963)
11/4 - Black Sabbath (1963)
11/5 - The Whip and the Body (1963)
11/6 - Blood and Black Lace (1964)
11/7 - The Road to Fort Alamo (1964)
11/8 - Planet of the Vampires (1965)
11/9 - Knives of the Avenger (1966)
11/10 - Kill Baby, Kill (1966)
11/11 - Dr. Goldfood and the Girl Bombs (1966)
11/12 - Danger: Diabolik (1968)
11/13 - Five Dolls for an August Moon (1970)
11/14 - Blood Brides (1970)
11/15 - Roy Colt and Winchester Jack (1970)
11/16 - A Bay of Blood (1971)
11/17 - Baron Blood (1972)
11/18 - Four Times that Night (1972)
11/19 - Lisa and the Devil (1973)
11/20 - Rabid Dogs (1973)
11/21 - The House of the Exorcism (1975)
11/22 - Beyond the Door II (1977)

The Film Addiction Manifesto

This blog will serve as a record for my journey though cinema. I will adhere to the following rules throughout my film trek:

1.     I will watch at lease one film a day.

2.     I will record my thoughts on at least one of the films watched each day.

4.     The written response to each film must be published within a week of the original viewing.

             

As I document my journey through cinema, I will watch many different kinds of films. While some might be black and white Swedish masterpieces, others would make Bergman turn in his grave.  I hate the divides that exist among the modern film community. If I had a dollar for every time I read a post online of a genre film fan bashing an art-house film fanatic and vice versa, I would have enough money to retire off this blog alone. I hope that this blog will act as a merger between these two seemingly distinct groups of film viewers. We can all weep at Isak Borg’s existential crisis inside Bergman’s masterful 1957 film “Wild Strawberries” one night, while the next night we can cheer for Tony Anthony’s ridiculous blind gunslinger as he fights a Mexican bandito (played by none other than Ring Star) inside Ferdinando Baldi’s 1971 western “Blindman”. We are all cinephiles, and I hope this blog will demonstrate that a fan can appreciate the films of Kurosawa, Bergman, and Godard, and still love the films of Wood, Yuzna, and even Bay…..well, maybe not Bay. I hope you all can find some kind of entertainment inside this experiment in cinema and will follow me through my film addiction.