Great news that Mexican movie director Guillermo Del Toro is to make the movie version of Sixties’ TV sci-fi show, The Champions. Remember it? It featured one beautiful man (Stuart Damon), one beautiful girl (Alexandra – I want to say Bastardo – but, no, I mean Bastedo) and then one not-so-beautiful man (William Gaunt): all playing agents endowed with supernatural gifts and working for some international outfit called Nemesis.
The ejaculatory, spraying city fountains in the opening credits sequence were the one thing that impressed my child’s eye; the paranormal bits of course I took to be entirely natural, what with me being a precocious and witchy Madame Arcati and all. I couldn’t understand what the fuss was about. I didn’t realise then just how dull life is for most wretches.
Del Toro is perfect for this project: a master of the schlock-free other-worldly. If you’ve not seen Pan’s Labyrinth yet, then get the DVD. It was my movie of the year last year; a literal fairy story set in Fascist Spain of 1944, featuring a most wonderful and sinister faun (pictured) among so many other underworld creatures – but none so dreadful as some of the pathological human beasts. Del Toro’s The Devil’s Backbone, set during the Spanish Civil War of ’39, is also hugely impressive: a creepy ghost film fusion of the political and fantastical and allegorical.
What Del Toro will make of The Champions - which he will write, direct and produce - I can’t guess. It has to be a big tentpole movie because of the promise of super-action, but I don’t doubt he will add many new things, make it adult but not at the expense of fun and just a teensy bit of profundity.
For more on the old The Champions click here.
1 comment:
I agree, Pan's Labyrinth is a tremendous film and one of the few movies I am happy to watch with subtitles.
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