Reader Mark Turner has kindly sent us a link to the Carscoop blog, where he found a tantalizing profile of the new Diabolika car being offered by Fiat. That's right: the great antihero creation of the Giussani sisters is being celebrated with his own car. It's enough to make me want to learn how to drive, or at least a black leather catsuit for Donna to wear as she chauffeurs me from place to place. Wait till you see the tire tread!
Oh, how I wish John Phillip Law was still around to see this! He'd flip. Speaking of whom...
... I've just had the pleasure of reading JOHN PHILLIP LAW: DIABOLIK ANGEL, a new bilingual book by Carlos Aguilar and his wife Anita Haas, published in Spain by the magazines SCI FI WORLD and QUATERMASS. Carlos (who wrote the Jess Franco volume for Glittering Images' "Bizarre Sinema!" series) and Anita befriended John at various Spanish festivals and tributes and got him to agree to a career-length interview, which forms the core of this book, which is also mostly illustrated with stills from John's personal archive. Among the visual highlights are photos from the legendary censored sex scene from VON RICHTOFEN AND BROWN and a couple of stage productions starring JPL as Dracula!It was the nature of my friendship with John that we mostly talked about one film, DANGER: DIABOLIK, and occasionally the other two films that framed it, DEATH RIDES A HORSE and BARBARELLA, and this book soothed my curiosity about his feelings about his other work while also telling me much more about him as a human being than I ever expected to learn. (I had no idea that he was a distant relative of George Washington, or that he was a Christian Scientist, or the candid details of his past love life and drug usage, or that he had been the co-owner of the first sushi restaurant in Los Angeles!) I'm very grateful to Carlos and Anita for the education and all the more sorrowful that John is no longer among us for further conversation about these and so many other things. I will be reviewing the book in more detail for VIDEO WATCHDOG, but, for now, I will just say that it's a great gift to JPL's fans, as well as an engrossing insight into the actor's life (and I mean "the actor's life" generally, not just specifically) and an object lesson in how to live life to the fullest by putting one's personal search for happiness and fulfillment before professional ambition. Great cover and production values, too. The book's ISBN number is 978-84-612-4501-7, and it can be ordered online here.
