Diana Rigg was already well known as Emma Peel, the iconic kick-ass star of sixties hit TV series The Avengers, when she made these two short Super-8 films The Diadem (1966) and Mini-Killers (1969).

The Avengers was one of that decade’s most successful TV series, so why Ms. Rigg should have agreed to appear in these rather bizarre home-movies, I have no idea, but perhaps as Steven Puchalski suggests over at Shock Cinema, we should:

Think of these silent shorts as stag films for AVENGERS fetishists, who love watching Rigg beating the bejesus out of burly guys, amidst secret agent-style shenanigans.

That almost sums them both up. The Diadem is mainly an Emma-Peel-style showreel, with lots of fighting and not much plot, while Mini-Killers obviously had a bigger budget, was shot in color in exotic locations, with a bigger cast, some special effects, and a more convoluted plot involving killer dolls.

Both films were made for distribution as Super-8 home movies in Germany. The question is why did Rigg make them? Mini-Killers was filmed after she had starred in The Assassination Bureau with Oliver Reed, and appeared with the George Lazenby in the James Bond classic On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, so we can scrub lack of money off the list of possible reasons why. Who cares why, it’s just some wonderful and bizarre fun from the 1960s.
 

 
‘Mini-Killers’ plus Emma Peeler photo shoot, after the jump…