image, his fluid camera style and arresting way with colour composition", and that "Although pictures by Bava have been pouring out of Italy for years, I can recall only one or two here - no horror of course, because this genre, which allows him greater scope, is still banned in Australia". The Monthly Film Bulletin also gave the film a positive review, noting that: "Bava's superb visual sense stands him in good stead in this comic-strip adventure which looks like a brilliant pastiche of the best of everything in anything from James Bond to Matt Helm." In his 1970 reference book Science Fiction in the Cinema, John Baxter declared that "Judex is alive and living at Cinecittà", praising Bava as a "brilliant cinematographer and one of Italy's finest fantasy film-makers" who gives the film "the visual pace of a streamlined juggernaut", and applauded Law's "dazzling characterization". RetrospectiveDanger: Diaboliks status as a cult film gradually grew as studies of Bava's career began, and was explored in the DVD featurette From Fumetti to Film, which drew attention to the film's relation to its comic book roots. According to Lucas, the film was generally well received by contemporary critics and audiences who viewed it in the context of its pop art aesthetic, but it was disregarded as "not only artificial, but frivolous" by the counterculture of the time due to their preference for the realism in New Hollywood films such as Midnight Cowboy, The Wild Bunch and Woodstock. He states that its popular reception evolved from being seen as "quaintly campy" in the 1970s, "interesting" in the 1980s, to "fashionable" in the 1990s due to its VHS and LaserDisc release — the result of a successful letter-writing campaign among fans directed at a hesitant Paramount Home Video — coinciding with new trends in lounge music, style and fashion. In a 2012 issue of Film International, John Berra similarly noted that the film had initially "been left to languish in obscurity since its staggered international release at the end of the 1960s" and that it "mostly existed as a kitsch reference point or as an easy target for tongue-in-cheek parody", citing both its MST3K episode and the "Body Movin'" music video as examples. Berra described the film as being "warmly received" by the internet community, who routinely embraces comic book adaptations and seeks to adopt films that have been neglected by popular audiences. Lucas