Jun 11, 2011

Superseven is Back in [Live] Action!

Earlier this week, I touched on the longstanding connection between spies and superheroes in my review of the excellent new superhero spy film X-Men: First Class.  The weirdest and coolest marriage of spy and superhero has to be the odd fumetti and fumetti neri genre of the mid-to-late Sixties, an offshoot of the Eurospy movement which found the Italian James Bond wannabes dressing up in tights and masks.  Often, there was not much very heroic about these characters (The Fantastic Argoman used his powers to make beautiful women sleep with him, and Diabolik and his imitators may have dressed up in costumes, but were only out to enrich themselves), so I like to use Alan Moore's preferred term from Watchmen and refer to these fellows as "costumed adventurers" rather than superheroes. (Read all about them in my Costumed Adventurer Week recap.)

Hollywood stunt man-turned-director Bob Griffith is surely one of the costumed adventurer sub-genre's most ardent admirers, as he's single-handedly revived it with his homage to the likes of Superargo and Argoman, Superseven.  (Not to be confused with eurospy Super Seven - two words - who liked to call Cairo.) You've already seen the fake trailers he created for this character out of clips from existing films; now you can see Superseven in action in his own original adventures!  Griffith has created two Superseven shorts so far, starring Jerry Kokich and Olivia Dunkley.  The second one, "Operation Breakdown", just went up today.  The first, "Operation Triplecross," is available to watch here.  These are highly entertaining shorts sure to thrill fans of Sixties Eurospy and costumed adventurer movies.  Check out "Operation: Breakdown," and just count the references to Argoman, Diabolik and others! (And stay tuned for an interview with Griffith about his work and his inspirations in the near future.)

2 comments:

Paul Bishop said...

Great stuff!

Elliot James said...

I have a lousy VHS copy of 24 Hours To Kill off TV twenty years ago. ("Allah disposes," says Mr. Slezak.") This sounds good. $20 bucks is a little high though.