1968 • 12 • 96 mins • £9.99 • OUT NOW!

Director: Mario Bava

Starring: John Phillip Law, Mariska Mell, Terry-Thomas, Adolfo Celi

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We've all been tempted by the prospect of a life of crime, but vice and iniquity have rarely seemed as seductively groovy as they do in this cult cut of ’60s cinema.

Based on a popular Italian comic strip, it’s the tale of Diabolik, an enigmatic arch criminal with a taste for high-fashion gimp-wear. A kind of pop art Raffles, he spends his days snaffling improbable riches before roaring away in a black E-type Jag, hooting as he heads home to his palatial undersea base, there to frolic on a banknote-littered revolving bed in the company of a barenaked blonde. You may be plotting a bank job even as you read those words. God knows, I’m looking at a 12 stretch.

Producer Dino De Laurentiis also gave us Barbarella, and in many ways this is a companion piece, though it’s cooler and fl ashier, less snickery and psychedelic. Diabolik himself is John Phillip Law, Barbarella’s sightless angel, and he’s as much a visual as a performance, his crazed gaze seemingly torn from the comic strip. Director Mario Bava earned his stripes in horror, but here he demonstrates an intuitive grasp of the comic book aesthetic, framing his shots like panels while smartly injecting all the velocity of the moving image.

Yes, this is an exercise in consummate cool – the story itself is negligible, the characters blanks – but hey, a triumph of style over substance is still a triumph.

DVD Extras
Informed commentary from John Phillip Law and Bava biographer Tim Lucas; “From Fumetti to Film” – a Making Of documentary that ropes in such disparate talking heads as Swamp Thing artist Steve Bissette and Beastie Boy Adam Yauch; the Beasties’ Diabolik-homaging music video for “Body Movin”, complete with commentary from Yauch, and the movie’s original trailers, which contains the deathless line “He robs from the rich to give to the girls!”

Nick Setchfield