Fantomas (1964) Fantomas is a super-criminal and master of disguise originally appearing in a silent crime serial, and this is his campy revival. The French have been careful about not letting much of this sort of pop drivel escape to the outside world, but it's heartening to know they have done something other than art films and classy heist flicks. This came to my attention through a Russian release with French and dubbed Russian audio, but I had to work a little to find a copy I could watch with english subtitles. If you like to see cars driving around you're in luck as this has lots of over-extended auto chases, but I found the "careening down mountain roads in a car with no brakes" sequence to be most elaborate and fairly thrilling. There is more dangling from a rope ladder off a helicopter in this film than I have ever seen in one movie before. The one thing I think they really deserve credit for is the thought they put into the disguise bits. Usually when someone is "disguised" as another character in the film and they are simply played by that actor they will put them in a split screen and you know you are just looking at the same actor in two different suits. In this case they deliberately made up the disguised version a bit off, with the ears an odd shape or the eyebrows wrong, and part of the face off-color and slightly shiny like it really was a mask. Good thinking. Pretty lite fare overall, and at times I wondered if it would ever end, but it was good for educational purposes. 5/10
Fantomas and Lackeys in Secret Submarine:
