THE GRAND SUPERHERO OPERA

BATMAN: YEAR ONE (2011)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological, sociological*

Though Frank Miller's BATMAN: YEAR ONE was published the year after his classic work THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS, I've never thought that the second Bat-project held up as well. ONE dealt with Batman in his youngest crimefighting years, just as RETURNS dealt with him returning to the fray in his more advanced years. I respect ONE for accomplishing its fairly limited aims, but to this day I've not reviewed it, since I don't have much to say about it.

The DVD adaptation of ONE is arguably stronger than the DVD of RETURNS, given that the earlier graphic novel was packed with many convolutions and bits of business that the adapters felt constrained to omit. In contrast, the storyline of ONE was very straightforward and so required less tailoring.

Miller's careful parallelism between Bruce Wayne (Ben McKenzie) and James Gordon (Bryan Cranston) is maintained from the start, in that both characters arrive in Gotham at the same time. For Wayne, his advent is a return to the painful site of his parents' murder after 12 years' absence, during which he has been training himself to become a scourge of the underworld. For Gordon, Gotham is a refuge after some unspecified departmental conflict at his previous position as a police lieutenant Somewhere Else.

While Wayne's only contact in Gotham is his butler Alfred, who knows of and abets his master's plans, Gordon brings with him his pregnant wife Barbara. Gordon hopes to build a new life for his wife and future child, but he's almost immediately dismayed by the unremitting corruption of the Gotham police department. He encounters this corruption mostly in the form of the present commissioner Loeb and his flunky Arnold Flass, both of whom are deep-dyed villains from start to finish. Slowly, over the course of Year One, Gordon carves out his own niche in Gotham as a honest cop who gets some of the police force and the local newspapers on his side-- though this means, in part, beating the hell out of Flunky Flass.

By contrast, Wayne knows what he wants to do, but not how to do it. He's not yet had his "I shall become a bat" moment. This transpires only after he's made a disguised foray into Gotham's red-light district-- a foray which bombs spectacularly. But once he assumes the role of Batman, Wayne's ability to handle crises seems to expand exponentially. Inevitably, even honest cops regard this caped vigilante as a lawbreaker, so that Batman spends a lot of time dealing with cops of all types, particularly the corrupt ones who work hand in glove with organized crime. He uses a number of low-level uncanny gimmicks most of the time, but at one point activates a sonic beacon that calls dozens of bats to help the hero confound the police-- the only marvelous element in the narrative.

Gordon not only tries to bring down Batman in, he comes close to discovering the masked man's double identity. But Gordon also succumbs to temptation, cheating on his pregnant wife with an attractive policewoman. This plot-thread helps to humanize Gordon but doesn't add much to the overall story.

The least cohesive element in ONE is a subplot about Selina Kyle. The DVD plays down her status as a hooker, though she still "meets" Bruce Wayne when he's still in his pre-Batman phase-- a meeting in which the two of them exchange kung-fu blows in the street. The series didn't explain why a prostitute possessed superlative martial arts skills, and did even less to account for why, upon beholding the costumed vigilante, Kyle should suddenly decide to dress up in a cat-costume and commit cat-burglaries. This was the weakest part of the original comic, so it's also just as ill-conceived in the adaptation.

If the actual story is just adequate, the voice-work by Cranston, McKenzie and Eliza Dushku (as the future Catwoman) is extremely good. (Three years after this DVD, McKenzie would take on the role of a Young Jim Gordon for the 2014 teleseries GOTHAM.) The animators successfully duplicate the spare, clean artwork of the series-artist David Mazzucchelli. It's a good basic adaptation of a basic story with some narrative problems, and nothing more.

DRACULA: SOVEREIGN OF THE DAMNED (1980)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical, psychological* As much as I admire the Marv Wolfman-Gene Colan epic that I've termed THE FALL OF DRACULA, I never would have thought anyone would have selected it as the first feature-length adaptation of a Marvel story. After all, one reason Marvel allowed Wolfman and Colan to devote the last three years of TOMB OF DRACULA to the vampire lord's tragic demise was that the comic's sales had declined. Many comics-fans esteemed the feature, but who in the early eighties cared what comics-fans thought?

This ninety-minute feature (give or take a few minutes) premiered on Japanese television first and appeared in American venues like cable and video stores a couple of years later. I speculate that Toei Studios weren't so much engrossed with the TOMB OF DRACULA iteration as with the possibility of forging profitable working arrangements with Marvel Comics. To be sure, the name of Dracula certainly commanded its share of attention among Japanese audiences, just as had the name of King Kong back in 1966, when Toei produced a version of the great ape's adventures for American television. It's of passing interest that the very next year after SOVEREIGN, Toei produced a TV-film that freely adapted Mary Shelley's FRANKENSTEIN, supposedly "licensed by Marvel Entertainment," though I saw no resemblance between the TV-film and Marvel's 1970s take on the Monster. Apparently around the same time, Toei had something to do with the rather charmless 1981 SPIDER-MAN cartoon, so a relationship did develop, even though SOVEREIGN probably didn't contribute anything more than a "trial run."

So how does SOVEREIGN rate next to the excellent source material? Well, apparently some literal-minded studio boss instructed writer Tadaaki Yamazaki to boil down almost everything in the last three-year run into ninety minutes, possibly trying to impress Marvel with Toei Studio's fidelity. Given that impossible task, Yamazaki deserves credit for a yeoman effort. Naturally he doesn't keep such franchise-characters as the Silver Surfer, who made a brief appearance in the long comics-arc, and though Dracula's daughter Lilith makes an appearance, someone renamed her "Layla" even though she keeps the same comic-book attire, and she's not said to be Drac's progeny, at least in the English dub. Yamazaki radically simplified the vampire-lord's origins from the comic as well. Dracula still starts out as the 16th-century warlord Vlad Tepes, a man who commits extreme cruelties to defend his country. But in SOVEREIGN, Vlad dies and Satan himself raises the warlord from death to become his agent of evil. In the comics-story Satan played a much less active role in Dracula's travails.

In FALL, Dracula wants to build a base of power, in part to better deal with his vampire-hunting enemies: the wheelchair-bound Quincy Harker (renamed "Hans" in the anime), Rachel Van Helsing, and Drac's distant relation Frank Drake. To this power-gathering end, Dracula finds his way to a Satanist cult, one which is about sacrifice a virgin bride to the demon, and he impersonates Satan in order to control the worshippers. Yamazaki brings in new motives: Dracula resents Satan's manipulations and intends to kill the devil's bride, named Dolores in the anime, just for spite. But after abducting Dolores, the vampire and the aborted sacrifice fall in love within mere minutes. The script does not dwell on what passes between them, but somehow the undead count begets a son on Dolores. I suppose nine months pass until the boy is born, though I'm not sure why Satan, pissed at having his bride stolen, is willing to wait that long for vengeance.

However much time goes by, things come to a head when the three vampire hunters overtake Dracula, while Satan instructs his followers to slay the vampire and his bride. Before Dracula can kill all the Satanists, one of them unleashes gunfire that kills the newborn. The distraught parents bury the unnamed child, but this time Heaven apparently intervenes. The babe is brought back to life, becoming a golden skinned adult who calls himself Janus, and he fights with Dracula in the name of Heaven. (A later section implies that Dolores brought Janus to life with some hidden power, but this doesn't affect the plot at all.) In the comic Janus' conflicts with Dracula go on for a while, but the script races on to the next high point: Dracula contending with Satan himself.

Satan plays his trump card and removes Dracula's powers, making him into an ordinary mortal. In this form the vampire hunters won't attack him, but Dracula is desperate to recover his lost status. In New York he tries to get Layla to bite him and re-vampirize him, but she kicks him to the curb. Drac travels to Transylvania seeking help from the other vampires there, but a new lord has arisen in the meantime, and a mortal Dracula has to fight him. Drac gets his powers back, but the vampire-hunters show up, and Harker sacrifices himself to destroy the vampire-lord for all time, The End.

Obviously SOVEREIGN has far too many plot-threads to give any of them proper development, and no one who didn't know the source-material would be able to navigate the flood of barely explained characters and incidents. But Yamazaki does succeed in one department: he, like Marv Wolfman, makes the monstrous central character both noble and ruthless in a compelling manner. The animators do a fine job translating the Colan images of the Count into limited movement as well-- though all of the other characters suffer by comparison, in terms of both art and writing. In the final analysis, this first feature adaptation of a Marvel comic must be judged a failure. But at least it's an interesting failure.

NINJA CHEERLEADERS (2008)

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

Despite the title, there's not a lot to distinguish NINJA CHEERLEADERS from a lot of light-hearted adventure flicks. The best comedies try to keep up a constant barrage of jokes and pratfalls, but writer-director David Presley seems to think it's side-splitting just to have three hot girls running around beating up guys and wielding katanas. Oh, and they get dressed up in ninja outfits at times, which is the only metaphenomenal content here.

The "cheerleader" part is misleading. The three girls-- April, Courtney and Monica-- are indeed freshmen who perform a few cheerleading routines at a community college (do those institutions even have football teams?) But they spend more time earning college money dancing at a go-go club run by an old fellow who's both their boss and their sensei Hiroshi (George Takei). Given the fact that their cheerleading has nearly nothing to do with the story, why not NINJA GO-GO DANCERS?

The girls don't have any real challenges for their great fighting-skills beyond punching and kicking mooks who get fresh with them. (One of them is seeking to get accepted by a good college, which subplot will rate a big Who Cares from everyone who would watch a film with the title NINJA CHEERLEADERS.) Then a crime-boss (Michael Pare) gets out of prison and he wants to reclaim the go-go club. He kidnaps Hiroshi, so the girls seek to rescue their mentor, when they can find time away from championing Girl Scouts against rude customers. The ninja-girls clobber a lot of Mafioso types, very rarely getting hurt in the fights, so the crime-boss enlists one female Asian fighter (Natasha Chang) to take on all three ninja-girls. The henchwoman does very little until the climax.

There's nothing noteworthy about the fight-scenes, but at least Presley provides a fair number of them, so that puts him ahead of the putz behind SOUL OF THE AVENGER. There's a little nudity, naturally not provided by the three main actresses, zero characterization, and a couple of moments where the script just throws continuity-logic out the window. For George Takei and ninja completists only.

BEOWULF AND GRENDEL (2005)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological, sociological* Sturla Gunnarson's take on the medieval poem "Beowulf" is never less than diverting, not least thanks to the film's gorgeous cinematography of the stark but beautiful Icelandic locations. It's deliberately an inversion of the moral certainties of the poem, wherein Evil is identical with physical monstrosity. The script's take might have been influenced by John Gardner's 1971 book GRENDEL, which told the Beowulf story from the POV of the monstrous titular man-slayer.

BEOWULF is constructed much like the sort of mystery in which the audience sees a crime committed and then watches to find out how and when the hero will dope out the truth. Twenty years before the story proper, the Danish king Hrothgar (Stellan Skarsgard) leads some of his men to chase down a petty thief, a big hairy man whom the Danes consider to be a "troll." The big man flees the hunters in the company of his young son Grendel, but when they are both cornered on a cliffside, the father orders his son to hide in a crevice. The "troll" then faces the Danes and is killed by their arrows. Hrothgar spies the hiding boy but does not reveal his presence.

Grendel grows into a savage beast-man (Ingvar Sigurdsson), and finally initiates a war against his father's slayers, killing twenty men in the king's mead-hall. Hrothgar is now old and befuddled, and he half suspects the origins of the killer. News of the murders reaches the tribe of the Geats, and their great hero Beowulf (Gerard Butler) journeys to Denmark with his retinue of warriors. Unlike the hero of the poem, this Beowulf is intensely curious as to the origins of Grendel. He's perplexed that the savage man simply avoids fighting with the Geats, while continuing his crusade against the men of Hrothgar.

A new character, a witch named Selma (Sarah Polley), provides some of the answers to Beowulf's questions: that Grendel refuses to engage with the Geats because they, unlike the Geats, have done him no harm. It's strongly suggested that Selma's claim to witchy powers is a pretense to give her some immunity from attacks by brutish men, for she tells Beowulf that she was forced into prostitution by evil slavers before setting up her witch-hut. She, as much as Grendel (who rather clumsily raped her at one point, but in ignorance of his crime), is an outcast from the rude Scandinavian society that recognizes only physical strength as a virtue. Even after Hrothgar confesses his past offenses against Grendel, Beowulf remains committed to ending the savage's rampage. In the poem the hero is mighty enough to rip the monster-man's arm from his body, but since no one here possesses supernatural powers, this Beowulf sets a mechanical trap that tears off Grendel's limb. Dying, Grendel flees to the sea, where his body is claimed by his mother, billed as "The Sea Hag." Later, when the prideful Danes hang up Grendel's arm as a trophy, the Hag emerges at night, kills various warriors, and steals the arm as well. Beowulf pursues the hag to an underground cave, and the monstrous woman, who possesses fangs and great strength, almost kills the hero. Beowulf only triumphs (slightly as in the poem) because he acquires a sword from the Hag's treasure-trove and kills her with it. Though the script isn't able to assert the true nature of the Hag and her son without breaking out of its own continuity, I think it's implied that both are offshoots from humankind, whom the primitive tribesmen mistake for "trolls." The tone of BEOWULF is uniformly dour, and the warriors' limited knowledge about the world's nature provides some dramatic moments. But as a whole this Grendel-sympathetic take on the poem is just fair in terms of its symbolic discourse.

SCREAMERS (1995)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, sociological* I only watched SCREAMERS once before this recent re-watch. Given that the primary adaptor was ALIEN's Dan O'Bannon, I tended to assume that he had translated Philip K. Dick's short story "Second Variety" to repeat his ALIEN-tropes: isolated group under siege by a relentless monster. Even the idea of the group being the pawn of governmental forces appears more in SCREAMERS than in the short story. (Note: another writer revised some or all of O'Bannon's dialogue for the finished screenplay, but O'Bannon claimed that his plot and characters were substantially unaltered.)

I freely admit that the "Screamers"-- the name given to the metamorphic robots from the Dick story-- don't even come close to the mythic appeal of The Aliens. However, I appreciate that O'Bannon reworked the Cold War aspects of the Dick story to something closer to the milieu of Vietnam. This time, the opposed parties reside not on the moon but on a colonized mining-planet named Sirius 6b. The Earth-based corporate combine known as "The New Economic Block" sends miners to Sirius to harvest valuable minerals. However, the mining activities unleash fatal radiation (more or less taking the place of the original tale's nuclear fallout). The miners refuse to keep mining, so the NEB starts a war to force their compliance, radiation or no radiation. For twenty years the Sirius-based Alliance contends with the forces of the NEB, and the former manage to come up with a counter-measure-- albeit one that's a double-edged sword. The Alliance (taking the place of "the Americans" from the prose tale) manufactures robots called "Screamers," robots that tunnel beneath the earth and attack anyone not wearing a protective screening-device, which device only the Alliance soldiers have. However, the Screamers start producing new varieties of their species on their own, and they have no loyalty to their creators if they find them out in the open without their protective devices.

Alliance commander Joe Hendricksson (Peter Weller) desperately wants to see an end to the stalemate conflict, with the hope that he might return to the planet of his birth. He's briefly buoyed up by news that the NEB back on Earth may be seeking a detente, but this proves to be a lie to keep the proxy war going. Meanwhile, a new source of minerals on another world renders the conflict on Sirius irrelevant. Disgusted, Hendricksson decides to seek out the NEB compound, presumably to negotiate a separate peace. Hendricksson takes along an eager-beaver young soldier who's completely naive about the realities of the war, and the script gets a lot of mileage out of the "young pup/old dog" badinage. On their way, the two soldiers find a ragamuffin boy, and they take him with him to the NEB compound. One of the NEB men shoots the child, proving that it's just a new model of Screamer (so called, by the way, they emit screaming noises when they attack).

No detente discussions ensue. The NEB forces--two soldiers and female civilian Jessica (Jennifer Rubin) -- recently lost most of their forces to another infiltration by a human-looking Screamer. Hendricksson and his aide escort the other three back to the Alliance base, only to find it too has been overrun by Screamers. There are various Carpenter-like moments where humans accuse other humans of being robots, but these don't develop into anything compelling. The script does play into Hendricksson's desire for normalcy by having him fall in love with Jessica, presumably the first woman he's seen in many years. When the survivors have been narrowed down to just the two of them, Hendricksson tries to make Jessica use a one-person emergency shuttle to go back to Earth-- an action that loosely parallels the conclusion of the Dick short story. And as in the Dick story, the only female turns out to be one in a series of robotic human pretenders. However, in a turnabout ending that I'll bet resembles NOTHING in the Philip Dick oeuvre, the Jessica-Screamer reciprocates Hendricksson's feelings, fights another model of her type, and makes it possible for Hendricksson to escape-- though there's an indication that even now, he may not be alone. Though all the performers are good, Weller is the glue that holds the whole apparatus together-- though, to be sure, the Screamers comprise the main icon of the film. Despite SCREAMERS' commercial failure, years later there was a sequel-- though I'll surprised if it works that well without being able to draw from the wellspring of Dickian paranoia.

KING OF THE WILD (1931)

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *cosmological, sociological*

I've seen very few serials from the era of silent cinema, but my impression is that a fair number of silent chapterplays dealt with fairly mundane threats, like accused men trying to prove their innocence. It's not surprising, then, that the hero of this early sound serial, one Robert Grant (Walter Miller), is mostly an ordinary guy trying to clear his name after he's accused of killing an Indian prince. Grant's quest for justice forces him to pursue one of the real criminals to the jungles of Africa, where the majority of the action takes place. In Africa Grant ends up foiling the schemes of big-game hunter Harris as he tried to move in on a diamond mine owned by a brother and sister, the latter becoming the leading lady of the tale. For twelve chapters there's lots of fighting and running around, as well as a handful of forgettable cliffhangers, until Grant finds the evidence that exonerates him.

Aside from its minor place in serial history, there are two points of interest in this somewhat creaky Mascot production. One is the narrative's sole source of metaphenomenality, in that the evil Harris picked up a most unusual henchman in his travels: a hairy ape-man named Bimi. There's little discussion of Bimi's nature, but he's immensely strong, seen bending metal bars in an early scene. Since he's not an animal despite being very hirsute, I think the writers' intent was that Bimi was some sort of "missing link," and in my system that aligns him with other types of "freakish" forms of life. I concur with reviewer Jerry Blake that the script doesn't go the obvious route and make Harris tyrannize and torment his apish pawn. Though Harris remains a cad, he treats Bimi fairly well during all of their scenes, which makes the missing link's loyalty relatively believable.

The other point of interest is that even though only old-movie buffs will recognize most of the actors, such as Dorothy (PHANTOM EMPIRE) Christie and Mischa Auer, WILD gives Boris Karloff one of his juiciest pre-Frankenstein roles as conniving Arab Mustapha. I can't claim that Mustapha is any better as a character than dozens of other Karloff heavies from the period. But at least Dear Boris gets enough screen time to strut his stuff, in contrast, say, to 1927's TARZAN AND THE GOLDEN LION, where one has to look hard even to make him out.