We've got the girl in the box

As we're all learning in this late capitalist society, the disingenuous nature of "choice" is making it almost impossible to make any genuine or valuable choices about anything. So I discovered last night when having failed to make the "choice" to not just watch TV all night, I then had to decide what bit of product from the mountains of garbage I've got at my disposal to enjoy. Home alone, so obviously it had to be something that the significant other wouldn't enjoy, so I quickly whittled it down to three:

1) a couple of episodes of The Persuaders:














2. 60's Italian freakout heist drama Danger: Diabolik:

3. mind-alteringly brutal Russian WWII movie Come and See:

In the end I couldn't face Tony Curtis' spleen-rupturingly annoying Danny Wilde (not even Moore's brilliantly even-more-wooden-than-usual Lord Brett Sinclair can make up for him), and to be honest I didn't really want to experience what promises to be an entirely accurate cinematic representation of Hell while I had my curry and regulation three cans of lager. So, Danger: Diabolik (1968) it was. Now, Danger: Diabolik has a number of things going for it. For a start it was the inspiration for the Beastie's excellent Body Movin' video. It also features a manic Terry-Thomas who was in the middle of a run of lunatic European dubbing heavy movies. Then there's John Phillip Hall who also made the undeservedly famous Barbarella and the deservedly unfamous Skidoo (although the soundtrack to Skidoo by Nilsson is a psychedelic work of art) in the same year as playing the lead role in Diabolik. By some Italian make-up magic, John Phillip Hall genuinely looks as if he's made of moulded plastic and I can only assume that this is deliberate because he also sports a very "Eagle-Eye" haircut. The film itself is, of course, dreadful, a hideous mess of disconnected scenes that start and end unexpectedly and with a soundtrack so ill-matched to the film one assumes that one has put on a Goblin soundtrack and turned the movie down (more on the mighty Goblin in a later post I'm planning about Dario Argento). Diabolik is also surprisingly boring, with a story that starts nowhere and ends in much the same place. However, it is also utterly brilliant, chock full of scenes that scream "IT'S THE 1960's", not least a fabulous moment in which we discover our hero and his partner Eva (played by the remarkable Austrian model Marisa Mell, whose eye-popping figure (her thighs are genuinely terrifying) is clearly the only reason she was hired) "doing it" on a revolving white leather sofa, buried in dollar bills:

Anyway, the plot such as it is, involves Diabolik nicking stuff from governments and toffs, occasionally getting into trouble, getting out of trouble, "doing it" with Eva and once in a while having a shower. He also sometimes wears a figure-hugging body suit (white or black, apparently depending on his mood, because he wears a white one while pulling a night-time heist) and pulls the kind of ready to spring into action poses that Kenny Everett did in his Spiderman going to the bog skits. The big finish involves a molten 20-ton gold ingot and the kind of suggestive glittering liquid dousing that only the Europeans could pull off in the 1960's, and we can all be grateful for that. Director Mario Bava is much more well-known for his equally eccentric horror and giallo movies, but to be fair, Diabolik is probably the most iconic. And stupidest.