TV Review - Danger 5: Series 1

A few years ago someone recommended I watch Nicolas Winding Refn's Drive and that went down so well I own a copy of the coat the lead character wears. When this person recommends I listen and when Danger 5, then on UK Netflix, was a suggestion I sat down and watched it transfixed. The work of Dinosaur, the successor to Alrugo (Italian Spiderman) and now the work of Dario Russo and David Ashby alone, the series is close to indescribable in its' brilliance.


It's set in a weird alternate version of the Second World War which seems influenced largely by sixties genre television and centres on Danger 5, a team of top allied agents seemingly fighting the battle against the Nazis more or less alone. One comes from each of the top five allied powers (well, more or less) - American Jackson (Ashby) is macho, stubbon and brash; Ilsa (Natasa Risic) is a Bond-esque femme fatale who speaks Russian (with subtitles) but is understood by the rest of the characters; Tucker (Australian in a slight conceit to the show being, well, Australian, played by Sean James Murphy) is uptight and sensible; English girl Claire (Amanda Simons) is virginal and by-the-book while Frenchman Pierre (Aldo Mignone) is relaxed, popular with women and always ready to make a cocktail.

The show brutally sends up the excessive formatting of sixties adventuring shows. Each episode starts with a lurid teaser of the latest Axis scheme, which is always insane - stealing monuments, cloning and militarising dinosaurs, Japan vanishing - before a scene of the team relaxing in a lounge before being given a mission by Colonel Chestbridge (Tilman Vogler), their inexplicably bird-headed commander with open contempt for Claire. This always involves a batshit scheme from a real-life Nazi hanger-on (Josef Goebbels for example is trying to come up with a suitably entertaining dance performance for Adolf's birthday) that's more in line with something a villain in The Persuaders would be up to and always has the additional mission to "Kill Hitler!" (played by Dario's father Carmine, Professor Bernardi in Italian Spiderman; similar to Ilsa he speaks subtitled German but everyone understands him and most of the other Nazis just speak English). Along the way they always meet an old friend of Pierre's who always dies while telling him a perfect cocktail recipe, while every episode ends with an in-vision advert for some product (modelled by Dario Russo). And despite killing off the Nazi sub-boss behind each scheme Hitler himself always manages to jump to safety (in the exact same piece of stock footage) despite a hail of gunfire. 

Along the way there's plenty of crap model work, theft from multiple genres, clumsy telegraphed romance (Jackson lusts after the promiscuous Ilsa, who sleeps with just about everyone else, while Tucker ineptly tries to impress the indifferent Claire), cartoon sidekicks, insane machinery (at one point the team gets a sentai-style mech), bad acting, busty resistance fighters, improbable Nazi schemes, intentional racism (Asian characters are played by Caucasians in bad make-up while the second series, set in the eighties, very much implies that the vaguely tanned Pierre is actually meant to be black) and misogyny (take a shot every time a male character lamps a girl).

The series is endlessly inventive, refusing to just take the funny concept and have it sit there for six episodes. If anything the rampant escalation of silliness can sometimes be a little too breathless; Danger 5 firmly fits into the "British" model of cramming every scene with jokes instead of spreading them out across twenty-odd American-style. It's all played deadly straight by the leads, though in line with its' inspirations guest actors are wildly variable in terms of tone and many bit part players are intentionally dreadful. And at the heart of it there's clear affection for the genre; it takes a lot of money and love to make something look, sound and feel this bad while also keeping it hugely entertaining.

Sadly the series recently disappeared from Netflix in the UK - hopefully as a forerunner of a DVD release as it really does warrant a purchase. Instead there are currently only releases in Australia and Germany, which is a real shame - it deserves a wider audience and fully earns a place alongside Garth Marenghi's Darkplace for a fully immersive and utterly brilliant lampooning of cult TV.