LEGO DC SUPER HEROES: THE FLASH (2018)

 

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

As I may be the world's greatest despiser of JUSTICE LEAGUE: THE FLASHPOINT PARADOX-- and not much more sanguine about the comic-book plot that birthed it-- I may not be the best audience for even a Lego Flash flick with a time-travel theme. Obviously, this production is not burdened with pretentious doom-and-gloom, since all the Lego movies keep things light. But still, for me The Flash works best having contemporary adventures against evil aliens and dastardly super-villains, not messing around with time-paradoxes.

Though this movie doesn't sport the "Justice League" banner, much of the story revolves around Flash's place in the League. The short version: Professor Zoom, an evildoer from Earth's far future, forms a massive hate for 20th-century super-speedster The Flash, and devotes his life to ruining the hero's life. The first part of Zoom's plan involves subjecting Flash to a series of "deja vu" experiences, and later he takes over Flash's role as Earth's favorite speed-hero, as well as making the rest of the Justice League look bad. 

As is often the case with the Lego movies, the main plot is fleshed out with one or more subplots. Here, one involves the induction of the size-altering Atom into the League, and in deference to his debut here, he gets a fair-sized amount of attention (such as his shrinking down to atom-size to change the makeup of the Joker's laughing gas). In addition, there's a pointless interpolation of a "League of Super-Pets," consisting mostly of Superman's Krypto, Batman's Bat-Hound, and Aquaman's sea-horse Storm. 

A tangential plotline involves Flash solving his problems by appealing to two of DC's wizard-types, Doctor Fate (given a voice like Berry Gordy for some reason) and Zatanna. They tell Flash that he was given his power by "The Speed Force," as if it were some metaphysical entity. That may well be current DC canon, but this sort of notion is a little abstruse for a comedy-oriented cartoon.

LEGO FLASH is fairly ordinary of its type; not too good, not too bad, not too-- FLASH-y.

UNMASKING THE IDOL (1986), ORDER OF THE BLACK EAGLE (1987)

 

 

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

UNMASKING THE IDOL is one of two films made by the same producer, director and writers, most of whom didn't do much of anything afterward, though director Worth Keeter found a lot of work on the Americanized versions of several POWER RANGERS serials. That accidental connection seems fitting, for both of these films, while superficially aping the James Bond franchise, are just about as off-the-wall as any of the feverish fantasies from Japan's sentai series.

In both films Ian Hunter-- who also disappeared from the moviemaking profession after making the second film-- plays Duncan Jax, Interpol agent. Despite looking somewhat like Chevy Chase and sounding like Ray Walston, Jax goes around fighting huge armies of goons, blowing things up, and pulling things like an instantly inflating balloon out of his ass. But this Bond-act is mitigated by the fact that Jax covers up his tuxedo with a ninja outfit. Why does Jax dress like a ninja? The script does not say, though one must admit that James Bond is so often seen doing spectacular stunts with his bare face hanging out that he ought to be ruined as a "secret" agent. Jax seduces one babe early in the film and makes the usual witless double entendres, but his true love seems to be his pet baboon "Boon," whose presence brings a new level of lunacy to an already goofy movie.

Interpol assigns Jax and a small group of tough guys to infiltrate a remote island and take out Goldfinger and Doctor No-- er, Goldtooth and the Scarlet Leader. The former is hoarding gold for some big world-conquering coup, and the Scarlet Leader, who always goes around in a red ninja-suit, is going to use an ancient idol to unleash an occult power. The idol doesn't wear a mask, so I don't know why the title talks about "unmasking" it, though there is a minor revelation when the Scarlet Leader is unmasked. Maybe the writer got the two confused? Or maybe he just thought two buzz-words together might make the concoction sound tastier to trash-film devotees.

To be sure, there's some money behind this wack-a-doodle project, so that stunts and sets are at least competent compared to the real bottom of the barrel stuff. But when one of my main characters is a baboon who goes around wearing a little karate-outfit when he gets in a fight, any attention to verisimilitude has pretty much gone out the window.

After IDOL's "everything and the kitchen sink" approach, Jax's one and only sequel couldn't help but seem fairly restrained, more on the level of your average "Nu-Image" action-flick. Jax is more Rambo than Bond or even Ninja-Bond this time, as he and a whole new crew of mercenaries plunge into the wilds of South America to battle a Neo-Nazi cult, who are also holding prisoner an Interpol lady agent with the winsome name of Tiffany Youngblood. There aren't as many wacky lines as in IDOL, though we do get a tough girl mercenary (Anna Maria Rapagna) state that she hasn't had so much fun since Nicaragua.

One can't fault the villains here, though, for they're just as fanciful and derivative. Baron Tepes, a fat guy with an eyepatch, leads the Neo-Nazis as they plan to dominate the world with a proton-ray satellite. But Tepes himself won't be the leader of the New Order, because he's got Hitler himself on ice and ready to be revived.

Again, a lot of stuntmen go flying from planted charges as the heroes go around blowing things up. Boon the Baboon doesn't appear as much, though he does get a scene in which he pilots a small tank (with a shark-face) against the Nazis. Jax himself has a few distinctive moments, like when he uses a metal wire to saw his way out of a prison, and later uses the same wire to set a trap that cuts off a Nazi motorcyclist's head. But just in case anyone in the audience gets too comfortable with the prowess of the good guys, there's a scene in which the lot of them try to push a big truck down the road to get its engine started, and end up pushing the vehicle off a cliff. (Hey, now we know where the MCU got its model for incompetent heroes!)

Both films have enough goofy action and dumb lines to furnish "so bad it's good" entertainment, and in comparison to the many deadly-dull excuses for adventure-flicks, that's nothing to sneeze at. 

A CHINESE ODYSSEY: CINDERELLA (1995)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical, psychological*

Well, Part 2 isn't nearly as good as Part 1, particularly with respect to the trope of "love vs. higher duty." But the second film exceeds the first one in one respect: the folkloric reference in the subtitle makes ever LESS sense. 

So at the conclusion of PANDORA'S BOX, Joker, the 500-years-later mortal reincarnation of Monkey King has been caught between a rock and a hard place, consisting of two demon-sisters who want from him information on his earlier self. Joker falls in love with one sister, Jing Jing, while his associate Pigsy accidentally impregnates the other sister, Spider Woman, though the whole topic of this demon-mortal pairing just gets dropped in Part 2. Jing Jing commits suicide, but the goddess Kuanyin gives Joker a time-travel box that might save Jing Jing's life. But after a couple of misfires, the box hurls Joker back 500 years. Though the audience sees many of the same myth-figures that existed in this time-- Monkey's allies Pigsy and Sandy, and enemies Bull King and Princess Iron Fan-- Monkey himself does not appear, perhaps having been banished or confined by the goddess. Monkey's absence will eventually open the door for Joker to eventually retro-incarnate himself, re-assuming his godlike identity in place of the mortal one.

Jing Jing and Spider Woman both exist in this time period as well, though neither has ever met Monkey's mortal form before. So does Joker get to approach Jing Jing and seek to convince her of the true love they share?

Ah, no, Joker meets a totally different woman, the fairy Zixia (Athena Chu). She knocks Joker around, takes his time-travel box from him, and declares him to be her slave. Joker keeps trying to recover the box, and over time Zixia begins to show evidence of the Takahashi Rule: "knowing that the guy belongs to someone else makes him interesting." It helps that she has a special sword that only her true love can pull from its sheath, and guess who unsheathes the sword without even knowing he's doing something special?

So there's no impediment to Zixia falling in love with Joker, even though she like Jing Jing has a mean sister who shares the same body (nothing interesting is done with this). But why does Joker fall out of love with Jing and in love with Zixia? Writer-director Jeffrey Lau utterly fails to sell this new relationship, even though he once more has the services of the two actresses who played the demon-sisters in the first film. 

Meanwhile, Bull King is still around in this archaic period, but his current project is to put aside his first wife Princess Iron Fan and to get married to the fairy Zixia. Joker, who's not yet conscious of his having fallen for Zixia, gets pulled into this comedy of errors. This includes the development that Iron Fan recognizes Joker as the reincarnation of Monkey, and since she once "dated" Monkey, she tries to get Joker to rendezvous with her.

Longevity Monk is around too, and Bull King wants to devour his flesh in order to become immortal, just as he will 500 years in the future. Joker finally becomes resigned to the fact that in order to save the Monk and defeat Bull King, he must retro-incarnate and become Monkey King once more. However, that means subsuming his later identity so that he once more assumes all the historical duties of Monkey King, such as protecting the Monk on his journey to the west. He must also don a special metal ring around his head that causes him pain when he tries to return to his old romantic habits-- which doesn't exactly sound like the idea of Buddhist enlightenment to me.

Though there's a cool battle between Monkey and Bull at the climax, the ending is very confusing. I think Monkey journeys back to the future, where Jing Jing and Spider Woman have become mortals and are married to the descendant of Pigsy (maybe the baby got erased by time-alterations?) and a mortal version of Zixia is married to a descendant of Joker. Sad, sad, sacrifice for the hero of the story, roll credits.

Stephen Chow is uniformly good even acting through the monkey-makeup, and glamorous Athena Chu provides strong support even though her character is underwritten. But whereas Part 1 benefited from its similarity to the popular "White Snake" narrative, Part 2 doesn't hold together. I still give it a fair mythicity rating because the story touches on the trope of "love vs. duty," but it isn't as affecting this time around. 

DESPICABLE ME 3 (2017)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological*                                                                                                                                               While I thought DESPICABLE ME 2 was funny, the decision to make Felonious Gru a full-time family man and an agent of the Anti-Villain League didn't play to the strengths of the original character. Possibly the writers of #3 sensed that on some level, since the film begins with Gru (Steve Carell) and his new wife Lucy (Kristen Wiig) acting as agents for the AVL and getting fired when they fail to capture the latest new super-villain, former child actor Balthazar Bratt (Trey Parker). Unfortunately, after the former super-villain and his wife get fired, the whole story becomes mostly about their trying to redeem themselves with the ungrateful agency and become super-villain fighters once more. I think this was short-sightedness on the part of the writers, since Gru and Lucy could just as easily gone into private consultation on the prevention of super-villainy or something.                                                                                               

  The writers, though, weren't terribly interested in originality, since for #3 they resurrected one of the moldiest of moldy-oldie plotlines: the guy who finds out he's got a secret twin brother he's never known about: a twin who's opposed to the original in some way. In Gru's case, he learns that when his parents split, the father (who I guess is deceased in the story) took with him a twin named Dru, while the mother kept Gru. Gru became a famous super-villain in reaction to his mother's negligence, but Dru's father wanted Dru to become a villain. Unfortunately for the dad, Dru was a light-hearted schmuck with no talent for villainy. When circumstances bring about the reunion of Gru and Dru, what Dru wants most is for his twin to school him in the art of the skillful super-heist artist. Gru obliges, but only as a means of catching up with Balthazar and nailing him so that Gru and Lucy can get their jobs back.                                             

The interactions of Gru and Dru are pretty hokey, but the notion behind Balthazar Bratt is leaden to the point of distraction. The concept is that as a child he had a successful TV show about a naughty kid super-villain. When the show was cancelled, Bratt decided to become a real malefactor, complete with all sorts of kid-themed super-weapons. I suppose the kid-audience #3 was aimed at might have enjoyed the spectacle of a forty-something man sprinting around like a juvenile, but none of that alleged humor worked for me. There's a subplot about Lucy trying to learn how to be a mother to Gru's three adoptees, but that too proved forgettable.  


 

THE REBEL BOXER (1972)

 

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

This chopsocky is currently streaming with the title SA MU CHEN, which is the name of the heroine essayed by star Nancy Yen. Since that title isn't very catchy I'm substituting one of the English alternative titles, even though the "boxer" here is more a revenger than a rebel.

BOXER is a shot-back-to-back sequel to another film, FURIOUS SLAUGHTER, about a fellow named Yung, a folk-hero who opposes an evil band of criminals, the Axe Gang. (One guess as to the miscreants' favorite weapon.) At the end of SLAUGHTER, Yung is blinded by lye and killed. BOXER claims that he didn't get killed but went into hiding, though he still has to recover from the blinding. Miss Ma, Yung's sister, hears about Yung's supposed death and investigates, though her main profession is that of a doctor and her proficiency in martial arts is not explained (though possibly her brother taught her). The Axe Gang not only traps Ma, they lure forth her brother (played here by Jimmy Wang Yu). After lots of fighting, Ma devastates the Axe Gang, though her brother dies anyway.

This is one of the most straightforward chopsockies I've ever seen, with no side-characters and only one bit of comic byplay, wherein a nasty gangster tries to get lady doctor Ma to examine his nether regions. From what I can tell BOXER was one of Nancy Yen's first starring roles, though I know the actress only for support-cast performances. She handles the close-up, non-doubled fight-scenes quite well, and does nicely with one or two scenes in which she has to emote about her missing brother. Still, if the producers hoped to mold Yen into another kung-fu diva, BOXER was probably too mild a concoction to impress the HK audiences.

The Axe Gang enlists two outsiders to help fight Ma, one a swordsman and the other a monk with a peculiar but non-uncanny weapon: a short staff he uses as a club, with a human skull mounted on the end. The only uncanny weapons here are the chosen weapons of the Gang. There would be nothing weird if the villains simply carried around ordinary axes, as seen in depictions of Tong wars. But most of the gang use axes that are attached to the end of long chains, which they even use to "net" Ma in the scene shown above. I find it unlikely that any professional gang ever made use of axes on chains, which seem only a little less impractical than flying guillotines.

PLANET TERROR (2007)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *psychological, sociological*

I remembered enjoying Robert Rodriguez's PLANET TERROR pretty well when I viewed it as part of the GRINDHOUSE ensemble-feature, but for the past fifteen years I was never tempted to pull out my copy of the film and re-watch it on the small screen. Now, having watched TERROR on streaming (along with Rodriguez's faux-commercial for MACHETE, which spawned a real two-film series). And now, without seeing TERROR as part of the whole love-letter both Rodriguez and Tarantino wrote to seventies exploitation movies, this overbaked zombie flick has little more than gore effects to recommend it.

To be sure, zombie movies weren't a huge part of the seventies movie culture, but took fire more in the eighties in response to George Romero's big-budget zom-com DAWN OF THE DEAD in 1978. Of course it could be argued that the seventies were also the decade in which American filmmakers began making greater use of advances in makeup-appliances, and TERROR is replete with lots and lots of melting faces and whatnot. TERROR also resembles certain seventies sexploitation films in having a large ensemble of characters who each have separate story-lines that may or may not be brought together by some common peril.

I found that though I'd been able to disregard Rodriguez's flat characters in my first viewing of TERROR, they were far less interesting this time around. Some of them are not meant to be anything more than comic relief, like a barbecue chef who keeps telling his sheriff-brother he'll never give up his special barbecue recipe. I didn't expect much of those minor characters. But I found myself profoundly bored with the acrimonious relationship of the dysfunctional married couple, played by Josh Brolin and Marley Shelton. All we know is that Shelton's character wants to leave Brolin's character because he's some sort of violent control freak. But the wife is also a bisexual who apparently committed to the male doctor and had a child by him, and who plans to leave her husband for a former female lover. What then made Shelton commit to Brolin the first time? Rodriguez's script is too insubstantial even to give a hint.

The central relationship, though, is that of a mysterious gunman, El Wray (Freddy Rodriguez) and his former girlfriend, go-go dancer Cherry Darling (Rose McGowan). Rodriguez at least built up the failure of their relationship somewhat better than he did with the dysfunctional couple, but here too there are missing details that get plowed under as the zombie apocalypse begins, after which El and Cherry are forced to flee the brain-eaters and form a caravan of other fugitives.

Even less interesting are the schemers who created the apocalypse, bioengineer Doctor Abbington (Naveen Andrews) and rogue military man Lt. Muldoon (Bruce Willis). Muldoon still commands a presumably illegal operation oriented on recovering the chemical that unleashes the zombie plague. But since the plague is in the process of dooming the civilized world, Muldoon's activities don't have much resonance. At one point the detachment captures Cherry and some other women, and two soldiers, one played by Quentin Tarantino, attempt to rape Cherry. The best thing one can say about Tarantino's performance is that he's intending to place a one-dimensional scumbag, and so, aside from one very corny line, he accomplishes his task.

Since El Wray is so vague as to become inert, the only strong persona is that of Cherry Darling. Unlike the others, her character arc gets substantial development within the context of an exploitation film. When the film starts, she's a dancer disenchanted with her profession, and she even considers trying to branch out as a standup comedian. A zombie assault changes all of Cherry's plans, as one undead freak rips off the dancer's left leg. El Wray improvises to give her an artificial limb, first consisting of a table leg, and later, a machine gun. The image of a go-go dancer who can shoot enemies with her artificial gun-leg is the only part of TERROR that equals the most delirious of seventies exploitation cinema, and to my knowledge McGowan has never given a more three-dimensional performance.

I don't take  most of the sexual politics of TERROR seriously, though one could argue that all the "heroic bloodshed" is meant to escape the usual masculine priorities so as to pull in a feminine sensibility. But even speaking as a viewer who was never big on zombie-films, I think a lot of the zom-stomping becomes routine and therefore dull. And so I think it's unlikely I'll ever give TERROR another full viewing, be it in fifteen years or fifty.

Note: TERROR is a very minor crossover film in that it recycles Michael Parks' "Earl MacGraw" character from Rodriguez's FROM DUSK TO DAWN.

HONOR ROLL #261

 FREDDY RODRIGUEZ was a long way from Fred Jones when he visited a planet called Terror.                                                                    

SHAN MAO is frankly just a placeholder since I've already done an entry on this movie's star Nancy Yen.                                                       

At least the name of BALTHAZAR BRATT gives an honest warning.        

ATHENA CHU doesn't have any Cinderella moments here.

 

The movies of IAN HUNTER would make good illustrations of a book titled "Bond for Dummies."                                                           

LEGO FLASH puts his best feet forward.