Danger Diabolik 1968

There’s one genre of superhero movies that I don’t have very much experience in just yet and that is the 60’s era of Eurospy movies. There was a large number of these pseudo James Bond-esque spy movies that are all over the place. Some of them involve masked spies, some involved less heroic protagonists, some were based on European comics from the time, and then there’s this one that combines all three of those. Diobolik was an Italian comic created by Angela and Luciana Guissani in ’62 where it ran for several years before this film was optioned by noted producer Dino De Laurentiis (and many years afterwards). The film also has the recognition of being the last televised episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000 excluding the recently Kickstartered reboot series. But knowing that, it was surprisingly much more entertaining and watchable than most movies featured on MST3K. It was incredibly bizarre at times, but the director Mario Bava had a great visual eye, and the film had a fun mix of comedy and innuendo befitting an Austin Powers movie without the overt winks to the audience.
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