Dino De Laurentiis entrusted Bava with the most ambitious and highest- budget project of his career: Diabolik … First released on newsstands on 1 November 1962, the comic created by the Milanese sisters Angela and Luciana Giussani features a master thief who is, on one hand, a descendant of Rocambole and Fantomas, and on the other, a product of the economic boom and the age of 007 … Catherine Deneuve was initially cast in the role of Eva Kant, but she did not get along with Bava and was replaced by Marisa Mell … That Diabolikdraws from this (pop) visual style is clear in Flavio Mogherini’s set design – somewhere between a futurist nightmare and a nouveau riche fantasy – and in the costumes by Luciana Marinacci and Giulio Coltellacci, which boldly eroticize Marisa Mell. But Bava perhaps goes further, undertaking a subtler and deeper operation, shooting a truly Warholian film; not just because he reproduces the iconography of consumerist stereotypes, but because he does so without critique – embracing emptiness and bad taste, abandoning not only irony and parody, but any trace of sociological commentary or surface-level rebellion … Diabolikdoes not use its “lowbrow” source material to expose or denounce consumer society, as Jean-Luc Godard did with Alphaville. It does not pretend to be smarter than it is, likeModesty Blaise. It does not even try to seem more fun or daring than it is, like Kriminal or Satanik. It is a kitsch film that destabilizes the very idea of a commercial product, much like Warhol’s Campbell’s soup cans challenge the idea of art through their flatness and deadpan uniformity … Diabolikis a perversely anti-spectacular film that pretends to seduce with images of modernity, transgression, luxury, eroticism and extravagance … Bava – a refined painter and creator of impossible worlds – does exactly what Diabolik does: he throws things away, destroys them, wastes them.

Alberto Pezzotta, Mario Bava, Il Castoro, Milan 2014