THE GRAND SUPERHERO OPERA

THE CROW: CITY OF ANGELS (1996)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical*

I don't often subscribe to the "lightning in a bottle" theory of creativity. It often sounds like the idea that creative works are born more of inspiration than the more mundane perspiration. But in the case of the 1994 CROW, James O'Barr original comics-concept of an undead avenger melded perfectly with the diverse talents of director Alex Proyas and his writing-team. The film's success spawned three more feature films and a TV series, and most of them are just OK formula-fodder. The first sequel, though, proves the worst of the lot, hurt by the filmmakers' attempt to copy the original only in broad strokes.

One of the sequel's big mistakes was to bring back one of the few surviving support-characters, the child Sara, as an adult character (Mia Kirshner), a tattoo artist who finds life in Los Angeles no more pleasing than her earlier existence in Dreadful Detroit. The fact that she simply trades one bad phase of life for another in effect jinxes the audience's investment in the film, much the way the death of Newt undermined ALIEN 3. There's so little advantage gained from using her as a link to the first "Crow-avenger" that writer David S. Goyer would have done better to start fresh. She only supplies the New Undead-- the significantly named "Ashe" (Vincent Perez) with some minor guidance in his new role in the scheme of things, as well as applying some rather inconsistent face-paint to keep Ashe roughly in the Eric Draven mold.

I don't know how responsible director Tim Pope was for the visual look of the film-- he claimed that the studio had interfered with the filming of ANGELS-- but he certainly got the nod because he'd proven himself as a successful maker of music videos, so I tend to think that for the most part the film looks the way he wanted it to look. But where Proyas' Detroit looked fearful and imposing, Pope's L.A. just looks mean and depressing. (Maybe not that far from the L.A. of this century...)

Goyer's other main idea of a major change-up is that Ashe is killed with his young son instead of with a girlfriend, though there's nothing all that compelling about the loss of Ashe's offspring. The lack of a romantic connection also gives Adult Sara a chance at a somewhat doomed relationship with the hero, which also proves desultory. The killers, just like the first film, are another gang of bizarre drug-dealers, led by a flamboyant nut named Judah Earl (Richard Brooks). And whereas Top Dollar had his weird half-sister reveal to him the secret of the avenger's powers, Judah has a blind prophetess, given the fairly predictable name of "Sybil." It's possible Goyer and Pope thought they were being deeply symbolic with their assortment of prophets and tattoo parlors, but all of these references are entirely meretricious.

On top of all that, the action scenes aren't that impressive either, while at the climax, Ashe reveals a new power just because it's convenient. So CITY OF ANGELS belongs to the long list of sequels that utterly failed to put across even a formulaic notion of a series-concept. After this, Pope mostly concentrated on more music videos, while Goyer worked on a lot of projects within the superhero idiom, albeit with extremely uneven results.

DRAGON SHOWDOWN (1966)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical*

Long ago I saw on TV the English language version of this Japanese film, entitled MAGIC SERPENT, which allegedly had ten minutes cut out. This version aired on streaming with subtitles, suggesting that it represents the original cut of the Japanese production. Thus, I'll review it using the streaming title, even though the new English title also doesn't represent the literal Japanese title. I'm also informed that SHOWDOWN is a very free adaptation of a popular Japanese story, "Jiraiya," and indeed the hero of the movie changes his original name to Jiraiya over halfway through the story, so I'll refer to him by that name throughout the review.

Jiraiya is a small child when usurpers-- the evil Daijo and his magician-ally Orochimaru-- slay Jiraiya's father Lord Ogata and Ogata's court. Some retainers escape with the child, but Orochimaru changes himself into a giant dragon and pursues the party. However, a huge eagle descends, claws the dragon's face, and bears Little Jiraiya away.

Ten years later, Jiraiya has become a young man (Hiroki Matsukata) living in forest-seclusion with his master Hiki, who has taught the young man both magic and swordcraft. Hiki changed himself into the eagle that saved the son of Lord Ogata because he had formerly been the tutor of Orochimaru (Ryutaro Otomo) before the latter turned his skills to evil. All of his life, Jiraiya has been honing his skills to overthrow the slayers of his family, and one day, the usurpers locate him. A small band of ninjas assault Jiraiya in the forest, but he defeats them all, in part through the use of magic in which his head detaches from his body-- easily the most memorable scene in the movie.

Once the ninjas are vanquished, Jiraiya also stumbles across a cute young woman nearby. He takes her presence for granted when she tells him she just happened by. In due time this will be revealed to be a falsehood, for the woman, name of Tsunade, is actually the offspring of Orochimaru. She's never met her father, though, and to some extent she attaches herself to Jiraiya so that she can get a chance just to meet the parent she never knew, just for her own peace of mind.

Like a lot of similar revenge-dramas, the first and third acts, depicting first the reason for revenge and then its culmination, are the strongest. The filmmakers adequately fill in the second act with incidental stuff-- Orochimaru seeking out Hiki and killing him, the introduction of a young boy with his own grudge against Daijo-- but not much of it is very memorable. But SHOWDOWN delivers a slam-bang kaiju finish, with Orochimaru's giant dragon fighting a giant toad conjured up by Jiraiya-- with the extra added attraction of a giant spider whipped up by Tsunade.

Matsukata, who assumes a rather cheery attitude when not in battle, makes a good contrast with Otomo, whose dourness recalls that of the celebrated Toshiro Mifune. The FX are the main attraction, but I grade the mythicity as "fair" for having reproduced even the broad outlines of a famous myth, whether from folklore or literature. I was rather surprised that in one scene the soldiers of Daijo are shown bearing flintlock rifles, which presupposes contact with the Western world. This feels like a slight violation of the setting, since everything else in the movie invokes a world dominated by archaic magical beliefs. But for all I know, some literary versions of the original Jiraiya story may have crossed that line first.

BRUCE LEE AGAINST SUPERMEN (1975)

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*

One might think there would be some stupid fun to get out of a kung-fu mash-up of Superman, the Green Hornet and Kato, and Italy's long-lived franchise The Three Fantastic Supermen. But not so, unless one happens to be a devotee of films exploiting the legacy of action-hero Bruce Lee (i.e., "Brucesploitation").

The Bruce-imitator this time up is Bruce Li, who appears early in the film dressed as Kato for one scene, in which he's also called that name. Some reviews claim that Li then becomes a second character named "Carter." I think it's more likely that the producers of the film meant to have Li be their version of Kato for the whole film, but got nervous about inviting the wrath of foreign lawyers for their unsanctioned use of the Green Hornet franchise. So for the rest of the film, Li dresses in more or less regular clothes (though suggestive of Bruce Lee attire) and is called by the semi-sound-alike "Carter." Carter like Kato remains in contact with a costumed fellow named "Green Hornet," but he mostly hangs around in a car monitoring the situation, dressed in a domino mask and a red union suit with a hornet on the chest.

Carter is called upon to fight a criminal gang that purposes to abduct a famous professor, Ting, who's supposedly invented a way to feed the world's millions at nearly no cost. (We hear about this miraculous process but don't see it, so I don't count it as relevant to the film's phenomenality.) After Carter fends off the gangsters a few times, the gang's leader Tiger seeks help from a mysterious kung-fu practitioner, Superman, who hangs around wearing a black leotard and a white cape, as well as teaching his kung-fu to two nameless, similarly attired students. These are the characters I believe to be functional stand-ins for The Three Fantastic Supermen, even though the Hornet and maybe one other minor character are the ones wearing something like the distinctive red leotards of the Italian heroes.

When the filmmakers aren't wasting time with extraneous car-chases and a bathroom catfight between two jealous women, a few of the kung-fu fights between Carter and Superman are watchable but unmemorable. No one has super-powers or special gimmicks, except that Superman has some spiked gauntlets on his wrists. There are some incoherent scenes of Carter fighting what look like costumed mimes, but there's no fun to be had in this dull potpourri. To say the least, the illicit use of franchise-names for characters bearing no resemblance to the originals does not constitute a crossover, only one of the dumbest attempts of a cheapjack film to coast on the success of both fictional and non-fictional icons.

SHINOBI GIRL: THE MOVIE (2015)

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*

The only thing I slightly like about this cheapjack item is the subtitle. "Shinobi Girl-- the Movie?" As in contrast to-- Shinobi Girl the absolutely-nothing-else?

OK, OK-- from what IMDB tells me, it looks like the material for this "movie" may have appeared as an 8-episode TV series in some venue *somewhere.* But that "logic" still doesn't justify a "The Movie" indicator.

SHINOBI just barely qualifies as a "superhero-adjacent" film. Noriko (Alexandra Hellquist) gets raped by a Wall Street executive (the film barely mentions the event) and so decides to don masked ninja-gear and launch a crusade against "one percenters" in defense of the 99 percent. The man she killed was the husband of Tiffany Brooks (Molly Fahey), and Tiffany sends various henchmen, led by her hot bodyguard Raven in pursuit of the vigilante. Oh, and just to prove how evil the "one percent" is, Tiffany and her cohorts hold slave-auctions in the basement of their Wall Street complex, the slaves being downtrodden 99-percenters.

What follows are various badly choreographed battles, both with swords and with fists, where Noriko-- nicknamed "Shinobi Girl" by the media-- appears mostly alongside other hot girls with no acting talent, all in nondescript locales like garages and office buildings. There's one odd scene where Noriko seems to appear out of nothingness to thwart a bad guy, but since she has no super-powers, one must assume this was supposed to be a "ninja trick."

Damn, now NINJA CHEERLEADERS begins to look pretty good after I suffered through this tripe.

PITCH BLACK (2000)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, sociological*

Twenty-four years after its debut, PITCH BLACK is still a very serviceable "survival-drama," and that's to the credit of director/co-writer David Twohy and co-writers Ken and Jim Wheat. The latter two are credited with the original story, but they don't seem to have been directly involved in later continuations of the "Riddick franchise." Many of their earlier screenwriting credits were sequels to earlier concepts, so it's ironic, though not unexpected, that they apparenty weren't to keep control of their own idea. But then, the movie PITCH BLACK wasn't as significant for launching the fairly minor space-hero Riddick than for propelling thirty-something actor Vin Diesel into "name above the title" status.

In a spacefaring future, a transport ship is struck by meteoroids and disabled. Its pilots are forced to make a crash landing on a desolate planetoid, where they're able to breathe the atmosphere. That's about the survivors' only piece of good fortune, for the planet is a desert seemingly devoid of other life, kept in perpetual daylight by three suns. One organic life-form hides beneath the ground, a swarm of manta-like monsters that pick off survivors when they get the chance. The survivors make their way to an abandoned geological station, whose scientists were apparently slain by the creatures. The survivors have a chance to escape by fixing up the geologists' ship, but they also learn of a ticking clock: that when the suns eclipse, the multitudinous mantas will come forth and devour them all if they can't get away first.

The outward menace of the planet and its monsters, though, didn't make the movie a sleeper hit. Though most of the survivors are either pilot-personnel like Carolyn (Radha Mitchell) or ordinary passengers, two of the survivors are opposed to one another: an alleged cop, Johns (Cole Hauser) and his prisoner, a murderer named Riddick (Diesel). This dangerous individual gets loose during the crash landing, but Carolyn begins to wonder if Riddick or his captor are the greater danger. The writers somewhat tip their hand as to Riddick's potential heroism when they have one passenger, a girl-masquerading-as-a-boy named Jack (Rhianna Griffith), express admiration for the strange, powerful fugitive. Once the script suggests that "the crook" Riddick may be the more appealing figure, there are no surprises when he assumes a quasi-leadership figure and kills the corrupt Johns (actually a bounty hunter, not a cop).

Though Griffith and Keith David (playing a practical-minded Muslim holy man) add spice to the drama, BLACK's main sociological myth is that of "altruism vs. self-interest." Riddick initially seems to be the incarnation of the latter, while Carolyn-- a junior officer thrust into the default position of ship's captain-- represents the former. However, Carolyn's position of altruism evolves from guilt over an act of self-preservation. As for Riddick-- is he truly outside the sphere of human influence as he seems to be?

The original film has a strong emotional dynamic, but the "pick-off-survivors" trope requires the sacrifice of some of the characters necessary to the dynamic. A major script-weakness is also the contrived nature of the predators. If they're carnivorous-- and even able to assimiliate alien humanoid flesh-- what do they live on, when human beings don't happen to land on their isolated world?

I don't think the next two iterations of the Riddick saga manage to compensate for losing at least one of the major characters who does not escape the desert planet. But Diesel's charisma makes even the future failures bearable.

THE MUMMY AND THE CURSE OF THE JACKALS (1969)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical*

The above art, showing a fight between the titular mummy and a jackal-man, is far better than anything in the movie, particularly the film's climactic fight, where one can hardly see the two fighters in prevalent darkness. But now that I mention it, CURSE might have been better had everything been filmed in prevalent darkness.

Director Oliver Drake had definitely seen better times. He'd written and/or directed a few dozen B-films in the forties, including the last of the Lon Chaney Jr "mummy movies," THE MUMMY'S CURSE. Most of the films he worked on were quickly forgotten, but five years before the 1969 CURSE, he wrote a psycho-thriller that might be his best scripting work: LAS VEGAS STRANGLER. He wasn't responsible for writing this feeble mummy-flick-- that honor went to a writer with only two other credits on IMDB-- but Drake may've contributed a little input, since the names of the two mummies in the film are "Akanna" and "Sirakh," re-arrangements of the doomed Egyptian lovers from the Universal series, "Ananka" and "Kharis."

But though the Universal mummy-films are mostly formula-fodder, the writer for CURSE didn't seem to have any awareness of what formula he was trying to emulate. Back in ancient Egypt, Princess Akanna (Marliza Pons) is informed by her dying Pharoah father that he's received a message from the gods. Rather than living out her life in ancient Egypt, the gods want Akanna to be entombed under a magical spell that will preserve her for centuries, until the time is right for her to rise again. Along for the ride is Sirakh, a low-ranking Egyptian who's in love with Akanna and attempts to steal her body from her special tomb. For this he's punished in the usual way-- the bandage-wrapping, the tongue-uprooting-- and made into a sleeping sentinel meant to serve Akanna when she next awakens.

Cut to modern Las Vegas: in a small house there, David Barrie (Anthony Eisley) shows off his two mummy-sarcophagii to a couple of friends. I'm not sure if Barrie is some sort of "Egyptologist manque" or what. Barrie claims that he simply found the caskets in a downed plane and took them with him. He claims to have some notion of exhibiting Akanna and Sirakh but doesn't seem to know how that would work. The conversation with Barrie and his friends is just there to set up Barrie's entrancement with the perfectly preserved non-mummified body of Akanna. He also mentions an Egyptian legend about a "bite of the jackal," which is also confusingly referenced by the Pharoah, and Barrie plans to test the legend by locking himself in the room with the opened caskets.

Sure enough, at some hour or other Akanna wakes up (Sirakh takes a little longer) and somehow inflicts the bite of the jackal on Barrie. I think this whole jackal-thing was the writer's dim attempt to bring Anubis into the mix, but it's never justified. The spell, or bite, or whatever it is works its magic, and Barrie becomes a raging Jackal-Man. He gets free and assaults a few Vegas residents, goes back home, re-transforms, and then gets his new instructions from Akanna.

After lots of talky, badly-lit incidents, Akanna finally reveals the plan of the Egyptian gods: they want her to conquer the modern world in the name of the ancient deities, with only a walking mummy and a Jackal-Man to aid her. How she would accomplish this, the audience never learns. But a real Egyptologist, Professor Cummings (John Carradine), hears about the Jackal-man killings and shows up on Barrie's doorstep, having implicitly figured out who got hold of the two missing mummies. Cummings, who doesn't have more than fifteen minutes in the movie, provides the info a local cop needs to put down this ancient threat: strike at a certain time, when the moon's no longer full, and Akanna's power will be weaker. The upshot is that Akanna loses her youth and the two monsters, each of whom is jealously possessive of his mistress, perish after fighting one another, I guess because Akanna's power wanes.

Only John Carradine's scenes justify watching this pile of dreck. He actually looks better here than in some of his earlier sixties films, and his speaking voice is as resonant as it was when he played roles like "High Priest of Kharis" in the 1940s. All of the other actors, whether experienced thespians like Eisley or dabbler-types like Pons, convey nothing but sheer boredom.