Mario Bava’s big-scale fumetti adaptation hits 4K, an event of major interest in the fantasy fan-scape. John Phillip Law, Marisa Mell and Terry-Thomas are as brilliant as ever, and Ultra HD makes the picture even brighter and sharper. Ennio Morricone’s music is still a delight — the movie doubles as a psychedelic concert. Paramount or somebody has elected to go beyond digital cleanup, to perform a little audiovisual revisionism … which luckily is not too severe. Is it ‘can of worms’ time? This is a straight reaction to a first viewing, and a comparison with previous releases.

Danger: Diabolik
4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray
KL Studio Classics
1968 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 103 min. / Street Date July 22, 2025 / Available from Kino Lorber / 44.95
Starring: John Phillip Law, Marisa Mell, Michel Piccoli, Adolfo Celi, Terry-Thomas, Claudio Gora, Mario Donen, Caterina Boratto, Annie Gorassini.
Cinematography: Antonio Rinaldi
Film Editor: Romana Fortini
Art Director: Flavio Mogherini
Original Music: Ennio Morricone
Written by Adriano Baracco, Mario Bava, Brian Degas, Tudor Gates,
Dino Maiuri story by Angela & Luciana Giussani
Produced by Dino De Laurentiis
Directed by Mario Bava

Known in Europe just as Diabolik, Dino De Laurentiis and Mario Bava’s Danger: Diabolik hit American screens about a month after 2001: A Space Odyssey. We’d like to say the world was forever changed, but here in the states it remained a near-unknown quantity for the rest of the century. If Diabolik didn’t find an audience, it was likely for several reasons. It was buried under the excitement for the recent 2001 and  Planet of the Apes, but the dismal advertising played down its origin as an Italian comic strip. TV’s Batman had presumably spurred De Laurentiis to produce this show and the French comic adaptation  Barbarella. Judging by Paramount’s poster art, Diabolik was sold as a James Bond-ish thriller, like De Laurentiis’ spy spoof  Kiss the Girls and Make Them Die. They didn’t even depict Diabolik in his ultra-cool super-villain mask.

Perhaps some big-city fans could have caught Diabolik in its brief first-run exposure, but we first learned about it in John Baxter’s book Science Fiction in the Cinema, and first saw it at a 1972 Harriet Diamond midnight show. The cashier had to quiz every ticket buyer to make sure they weren’t expecting to see H.G. Clouzot’s  Diabolique. Audiences loved it when we screened it at UCLA, along with George Franju’s  Judex, with which it shares an affectionate attitude toward vintage pulp serial thrills.

We continued to go nuts over the picture, buying 16mm prints and spreading the good word; in the 1970s it was almost the only movie in existence that successfully translated the essence of comic book action dynamics to the screen. In the pre-internet, pre-Video Watchdog era, Diabolik remained a mostly unknown item. When we tried to screen it at FILMEX around 1980, Paramount informed us that it had junked its only remaining 35mm prints.

Fifty years and several home video revolutions later, Danger: Diabolik is a well-known highlight of the career of Mario Bava, the Italian master of fantasy more closely associated with Gothic horrors. We wrote about it at every opportunity — in an early article for  MGM DVD Savant (1998), a DVD review for  DVD Savant (2005), and Blu-rays for  Shout! Factory and  Imprint, both from 2020.

The show had a pretty spotty history on Home Video. The 1995 laserdisc and awful EP VHS tapes substituted a bogus English-language soundtrack that replaced some voices, for who knows what reason. That issue was covered in the first  Savant article. The first DVD was produced by Kim Aubry at American Zoetrope; he went to the trouble of tracking down the English original audio master, which restores the original (and far better) array of vocal talent. Adolfo Celi once again sounded like Emilio Largo and Diabolik is back to DIE-abolik instead of the Italian-inflected DEE-abolik. The 2020 Blu-rays raised the volume of the music track, to what we remembered from the screening of Paramount’s studio print in 1972, with the Ennio Morricone cues slamming in loud and hard. Variety’s dismissive 1968 review had it in for our favored film composer: “Ennio Morricone’s score, as usual, has the lush sound of an FM radio station selected at random.”  Jeez, don’t be nasty about it or anything.

This will be a short review for content. Are you new to Mario Bava fandom and have never heard of Danger: Diabolik?  I’ve written plenty about the movie in the reviews linked above, enough to make anyone beg for less. We’ll now go straight to the evaluation section. For potential buyers, the big questions are: 1) does it look great and wonderful?  and 2) has Paramount or Kino Lorber kept the longest version?

KL Studio Classics’ 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray of Danger: Diabolik is touted as a ‘Brand New HDR/Dolby Vision Master by Paramount Pictures, from a 4K scan of the 35mm original camera negative. That sounds good to us.

The previous 2020 Blu-rays are excellent and will probably suffice for most collectors. This new 4K disc, screened on a 65″ LG monitor, is a big winner with just a couple of caveats, that will probably not bother anybody. The picture seems slightly brighter and we do get an impression of more detail. We not only see the texture of Diabolik’s latex costumes, we see the details of seams and imperfections on the surface. It looks like the ‘cream colored’ rubber suit suffered some wear and tear and minor discoloration here and there.

The added contrast and color makes the visual effects look even better, all except the non-Bava opticals, of course. The illusion of the castle on the hill above the beach is now even better. With the added resolution, we now really see the figure of Diabolik standing at the foot of the tower, a scene or two too early!

As sometimes happens in Ultra-HD, standard TV settings don’t quite capture the super-saturated look of original IB Technicolor prints, where flesh tones glowed and primary colors leaped off the screen. But that adjustment is almost better done on one’s set … the colors at default position are even and balanced, and still very punchy.

There were obviously several versions of this movie for different foreign language markets. The best comparison we can think of is the Sergio Leone westerns franchise. Each of those films was finished in a different cut, a different mix and a different set of credits for at least four languages. When the legal smoke clears, United Artists may really have rights to only the English-language versions of some of the films. Sometimes one can find fabulous Italian discs with different or extended content — with those rumored additional scenes — and sometimes not. Buy a German copy of Fistful of Dollars, and it might be the standard American cut, with a German track adjusted to fit.

Were Diabolik in the hands of a disc boutique with access to all of that material, we would have loved to see how the French, German and original Italian versions differed. But the point being made is that one cannot pin down one correct original version of the film, for there are several.

The disc producers of the earlier Blu-rays delivered (in my opinion) very good recreations of Paramount’s original English-language version of Danger: Diabolik, before regional censorship. I never personally saw an actual distribution print from 1968. Tim Lucas says that some were missing most of the ‘passing the joint’ scene. The 16mm prints I bought, and rented from Films Incorporated, shortened Diabolik and Eva’s lovemaking scene on the rotating bed with the pile of money. The Blu-rays and this 4K have a wide overhead shot, and a completely different music cue.

The producers of this new 4K edition have taken it upon themselves to make some minor ‘improvements’ of their own. We noticed three. None are shocking deal-breakers or even big disappointments. We’re not sure any were really necessary.

The first revision is a simple bit of judgment that we think was unwarranted — a number of night scenes filmed Day for Night have been darkened quite a bit. 4K can easily handle this; we still see what’s going on. But why do it?  The longest D for N scene is the capture of Diabolik, after he and Valmont parachute into a quarry. Nobody ever said it was pitch-black night, and Mario Bava’s cinematography gave the scene a nice vague pre-dawn look, with dark blue skies and handsomely lit figures, some in nice silhouettes. These have all been darkened, as if somebody wanted to make the scenes more ‘realistic.’  If that was the idea, it’s just dumb.

I think the disc producer (or the colorist, if they had the authority) was trying to cover some of the dicey optical effects, such as the figures of Diabolik and Valmont in mid-air.  →  But they’ve revised Bava’s images from the theatrical presentation. As a final proof that the timing of Bava’s Day for Night scenes wasn’t ‘bad,’ we note that in a couple of shots where machine guns fire, the muzzle flashes (live? added?) are now darkened as well. They look like bits of dirt.

The second revision cleans up several shots involving opticals. The quality of traveling matte optical composite work in Danger: Diabolik was always like that seen in a great many continental productions: poor. To maintain visual control of his work, Mario Bava avoided opticals of any kind. Almost all of his in-camera tricks are superb. Diabolik has many optical composites atypical of his work; we can’t see him being happy with them. It’s possible that they were supervised by De Laurentiis people — exactly the kind of Loss Of Control that motivated Bava to stay small and stay independent.

In original prints, views inside moving cars look crude compared to the material around them.  ↑  Diabolik is introduced in a dirty optical, a dock scene with superimposed smoke, plus a dirty (if colorful) title sequence.  →   A shot of Diabolik in a phone booth (with a distracting zoom) has awful blue-screen flaws crawling over the reflections in glass. Most of these are unchanged on the new 4K, but on some the disc producers appear to have done some digital clean-up and color work. The balance between backgrounds is much improved, and some of the matting is cleaner, or at least different. But it’s really a different set of flaws. Instead of blue fringing around the windows in Diabolik’s Jaguar, we have sharp terminator lines. The corner of the Jaguar roof that reflected the blue-screen never matted properly. The revision makes the jagged hole in the roof much more visible. I hadn’t noticed it before.

Again, this doesn’t bother me either. It’s only on a few shots and overall they’re less distracting. Improving the color on those backgrounds is a boost.

The third revision swaps out a music cue at the finish. In the standard English-language Paramount cut, when the imprisoned Diabolik winks, the finale has a not-very-terrific segue back to Morricone’s ‘traveling riff’, with a good vocal wail and Diabolik’s signature evil laugh as the lights click off in his cave hideout. It’s always been dicey, not quite ideal.

The new 4K either reverts to an alternate audio mix (from a different language version?) or invents one of its own. Diabolik’s final wink cues a very long reprise of the ‘Deep Deep Down’ title song, sung in English by Christy. It continues long after the fadeout of ‘The End,’ as did a great many Italian movies, playing over black and serving as walk-out music.

Will viewers like the song ending better?  It sounds odd to me because I’m accustomed to hearing something else. I had to go back to the Imprint disc to hear the original. Kino appears to have edited both audio commentaries to add this music change behind the speakers, at a low volume. We really call it revision, when the people doing the revising don’t explain their reasons, and try to cover their tracks.

One extra listed on Kino’s sales page, but not on the disc itself, is ‘Newly Discovered Outro’ listing the Christy song at 3:11. Perhaps the song ending was to be a separate item, before somebody decided to revise the original feature. It’s not a bad move, but it isn’t what we want in ‘improvements’ to genre classics. Last month we applauded Amazon MGM’s 4K remasters of  the first six James Bond films. The new remaster of Thunderball handles the fan controversy with the feature’s alternate tracks beautifully — both tracks are present, with the ability to listen to one or the other. I’m like any other movie enthusiast — tell me that ‘something new or different’ is available for a film favorite, and I’ll be checking to see if I can afford it. When an alternate Italian disc of Diabolik comes on the market, by all means let me know … I’ll want to see it, even if Law, Mell and Thomas are dubbed in Italiano.

There’s a new 5.1 track on the disc. I’ll be interested in reading a more audio-centric review’s opinion of it. On my equipment, I couldn’t discern too much of a difference.

A look below shows us that Kino has rounded up the usual suspects good previous extras for the movie, and added a stack of relevant trailers, including trailers for the 2020 Diabolik feature reboot, that will debut on Region A disc in a few weeks.

The older commentaries complement each other well … Thompson and Howarth have authoritive facts and back stories to offer, and Tim Lucas gives us a fun 90 minutes with John Philip Law, who acts as if he would have loved to star in a Diabolik sequel. But if you want to hear Tim’s own analytical solo track on the show, you’ll need to source the 2020 Imprint disc.

Final word: It’ll take me a while to get accustomed to this 4K of Danger: Diabolik … the only thing that will gripe me will be the darkening of the Day for Night shots, which smacks of revision ‘just because we can.’  In 4K with HDR, the added contrast range nullifies much of the curse of that revision. In all honesty, the show still looks and sounds great.

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

Danger: Diabolik
4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray rates:
Movie: Excellent
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent 5.1 Surround and Lossless 2.0
Supplements:
both discs:
Audio commentary with John Phillip Law and Tim Lucas
Audio commentary with Troy Howarth and Nathaniel Thompson
Blu-ray disc only:
Featurette From Fumetti to Film (2005, 20:23)
Music video Body Movin by Beastie Boys (6:38)
Teaser Trailer (1:05), Theatrical Trailer (2:23)
Trailers for Diabolik (2021) / Diabolik: Ginko Attacks (2022) / Diabolik: Who Are You? (2023).
Deaf and Hearing-impaired Friendly? YES; Subtitles: English (feature only)
Packaging: One 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray in Keep case
Reviewed: July 6, 2025
(7354diab)

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