THE INCREDIBLE PROFESSOR ZOVEK (1972), INVASION OF THE DEAD (1973)

  






PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: (1) *poor?,* (2) *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, metaphysical*


When I started watching a subtitled copy of INVASION OF THE DEAD-- whose title is prefaced by the familiar name of the heroic wrestler Blue Demon and the unfamiliar name of a "Zovek"-- I assumed that the latter was just one of many cinematic luchadores of whom I'd not heard. Instead, I learned that the actor billed as "Professor Zovek" was a real-life Mexican celebrity, a combination "mentalist/athlete/escape artist" who was popular in Mexico until his death in 1972, and whose career is summarized here. After finishing INVASION I looked for and found an untranslated copy of the performer's only other film. Both films were directed by Rene Cardona, one of the leading lights of Mexican horror/SF/superhero cinema.

I rate ZOVEK "poor?" in mythicity mostly as a placeholder, since I can't really judge a movie without knowing what the characters are saying. In every way the performer's first film looks like a typical Mexican translation of an American serial, with some larger-than-life hero charging in to vanquish an insidious mad scientist. 

A plane explodes, killing over twenty scientists, and the government suspects foul play, possibly committed by rogue scientist Doctor Druso. They send for Professor Zovek, who apparently doubles as a government agent when he's not performing escapes in his nightclub act. After some set-up to establish Zovek's incredible abilities-- he's seen hypnotizing some hot chick who I don't think ever appears again-- he heads out to the Mexican countryside, looking for Druso's lair. Druso has already kidnapped Zovek's comic sidekick (popular Mexican comedian Tin Tan) and the hero's new hot blonde girlfriend (Tere Velasquez, sister of the more well known Lorena Velasquez). 

Frankly, I forget the entire middle of the film, but there's a long, long slam-bang fight as Zovek penetrates Druso's lair, for the mad scientist has created a small army of freakish humanoids for some damn reason. Zovek gets a lot of martial-arts action against the freaks and the guards, and even the hot blonde gets some karate-action as well. It seems pretty incoherent, but then, I doubt Cardona wanted to do anything but sell the performer Zovek as a hard-hitting superhero.



INVASION OF THE DEAD is a different, weirder animal. I've no specifics about its production, but since so much of the action again takes place in the Mexican countryside, it seems likely that Cardona almost immediately started a new Zovek opus, possibly on some of the same locations. The original work, according to some reports, may not have originally included the well known luchador Blue Demon.

In 1973 only diehard fans of sci-fi movies knew anything about Ed Wood's PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE; the book that bestowed fame on both the late filmmaker and his film would not be published for another five years. One account claims that Cardona used some clips from PLAN 9 in a Blue Demon film, HELL SPIDERS, but I've not verified that yet. Some reviews peg INVASION as a "remake" of PLAN 9, which it certainly is not. At most Cardona may have decided that he liked the basic idea of an alien force reanimating dead people, because it would be easy to film a lot of ragged zombies stalking around the countryside.

Before any zombies rise, archaeologist Professor Volpi and his hot daughter Erika (Christa Linder) call Professor Zovek to the countryside to consult on some weird archaeological cave-drawings that seem to prophesize a major calamity. Around the same time a fireball strikes the earth, and leaves behind a black metal spheroid. In no time the dead are springing from their graves, making one wonder why there are so many burials far from civilization. The zombies attack anyone they meet and create new zombies when they kill people. The zombies atypically retain some human knowledge of skills like driving cars, but unlike the animated corpses from PLAN, they aren't being used to accomplish any particular game-plan.

As for Blue Demon, he never meets Zovek at all despite the poster above, though there's a scene in which the wrestler supposedly talks to the mentalist over the phone. The Demon largely contributes talking-head scenes with his comedy-relief sidekick about previous alien visitations to Earth, and he has one big scene fighting zombies and a couple of unexplained werewolves, possibly left over from the previous Zovek movie. The sidekick actually gets a better scene, pretending to act like a zombie to avoid being mauled by a gang of the critters.

Zovek, though, is the one who gets the most zombie-fighting action, and this includes keeping a zombified Professor Volpi from strangling sexy daughter Erika. Zovek alone saves humanity by destroying the alien spheroid.

In a contrast to Bela Lugosi's passing before PLAN 9 even started filming, Zovek apparently completed all of his scenes-- including a long speech about how the catastrophe may occur again and again-- before he performed an aerial stunt in Japan and was tragically killed. Possibly Cardona meant to film additional scenes to bulk up the movie's run-time, but ended up doing them with Blue Demon instead.

INVASION is a cheap production. But it wouldn't have cost Cardona much to film a few scenes of alien plotters in gold lame suits discussing their plans, so I think he made a conscious choice to avoid Ed Wood's stilted expository scenes, desiring a sense of mystery about the aliens' nature. Portentous though Zovek's final speech is, it's the only part of the film-- aside from the antics of the comical sidekick-- that works pretty well. To be sure, Christa Linder-- an unusual German face in a Mexican flick-- provides ample pleasures every time she's on screen, but Cardona can hardly take credit for her biological gifts.

Both films are the sort of lively junk on which Cardona built his career, so they're certainly better than a lot of dull Mexican fodder. As an actor Zovek is a little too hyperactive to project any charm or gravitas, but his onscreen fight-scenes have their moments, and had he not made these movies, I suspect almost no one today would remember his faded fame.

THE FATAL FLYING GUILLOTINES (1979)







PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY:  *poor*

FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*

CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological*


FATAL FLYING GUILLOTINES-- made about four years after the trend-setting MASTER OF THE FLYING GUILLOTINE-- is a dull, thinly-plotted ripoff of the earlier film.  The rambling story concerns the quest of hero Carter Wong to obtain a rare medical text to help his ailing mother, only to find that his quest brings him into conflict with a sect of Buddhist monks and a weird old hermit whose principal defense is a pair of "flying guillotines"-- two hatbox-like devices that can be hurled by chain-attachments so that the box-section settles over a victim's head and decapitates him.  These may be the most blatantly absurd weapons ever invented for an old school kung-fu film, and they're pretty much the only thing worth watching in this opus.  But the earlier GUILLOTINE film was many times more entertaining than this plodding mess.


About the only thing unusual about this film is that (SPOILER SPOILER) the hero triumphs over his decapitating foe, only to be slain by another malefactor.  It's very rare for the main hero of an adventure-tale to be knocked off in this fashion, but I tend to view this sort of deviation as an example of a storyteller tossing in a motif more suited to a work in the dramatic mythos, simply to inspire a shock-response.

AMAZON WARRIOR (1998)

 






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


If AMAZON WARRIOR isn't the worst post-apocalypse film, or even the worst just from the nineties, it'll do until a worse one comes along.

While there can be some virtue in low budget films that come up with clever ways to skirt their production values, WARRIOR suggest a bunch of wannabes who carelessly threw this project together on a dare or a bet. 

Having seen many post-apoc flicks, it's not objectionable that the script barely establishes any ground rules for the cataclysm that reduces all humanity to small primitive, quasi-medieval enclaves. That's almost a given of the genre. But even a dopey film like AMERICA 3000 came up with a rationale for the rise of an Amazon society. WARRIOR just tosses in the notion that an Amazon society arose for some reason, though we know nothing about its history even in a general sense. We only know that when protagonist Tara (J.J. Rodgers) is a child, her Amazon tribe is wiped out by a vague band of male "marauders," who are also nearly a given in this genre. Like a really crummy retread of Lady Snowblood, this last Amazon then devotes her life to exterminating marauders, to the point that they deem her "the Angel of Death."

To her good fortune, Tara meets a hunky guy, Clint (Jimmy Jerman), who also has a plot to take down the marauders, though Clint has a more long-range goal, to keep a general named Steiner (played by one of the producers) from uniting all the marauder tribes. Tara doesn't team up with Clint immediately. She takes a commission to guide a group of whiny girls, the daughters of a rich man in one of those enclaves, from one place to another. This plot-line falls apart when the writer gets tired of it, having the girls betray Tara to her marauder enemies. The traitors are then executed by the nasty villains, and this sets up Tara's teamup with Clint to take down Steiner. 

What makes this no-budget dreck egregious is not the predictable plot-- which does have a couple of adequate fight-scenes-- is the fact that the writer constantly has all the character use modern idioms of speech, This might have even been funny under the right circumstances, but the overall impression is that the author couldn't be bothered to write anything else. I hope this is the worst film in its genre, because I couldn't take anything worse.

STAR TREK: STRANGE NEW WORLDS, SEASON ONE (2022)

 







PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *cosmological, sociological*


Despite my having heard a few favorable mentions of STRANGE NEW WORLDS, I was pretty sure that it wouldn't prove any artistic challenge to Classic Trek, for reasons I cited in this essay about one of TREK's other imitators. And I made that guess even without knowing that Akiva Goldsman was one of the showrunners.

What I didn't expect was that SNW would instill in me a much stronger appreciation for STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION, because even the weakest episode of NEXTGEN projects a greater sense of authenticity than this weak sauce series.

I saw a few episodes of one of Paramount's earlier streaming space-serials, DISCOVERY, and maybe one or two of PICARD. Both seemed focused on single main characters with assorted support characters. Whether I'm correct in that impression or not, there's no question that SNW follows the ensemble model of NEXTGEN. I wasn't overly fond of most of the new characters of the older show, but at least all of them comported themselves seriously in their dual role as explorers and military agents.

I probably haven't seen most of the shows Goldsman has worked on since the 1990s. But even though Goldsman only co-wrote the first and last episodes of SNW's first run of ten stories, every dumb, overly referential joke sounds like it was culled from the two works on which Goldsman made his toxic reputation: BATMAN FOREVER and BATMAN AND ROBIN

Goldsman and his collaborators made a superficial effort to emulate the style and continuity of Classic Trek. The stories focus (in theory) upon the captain who helmed the Enterprise before Kirk: Christopher Pike, whose character appeared in Classic Trek's first pilot, which was also recycled into a two-part story taking place during Kirk's regime. Pike's SNW adventures all predate that story, and Pike is now played by a weary-looking Anson Mount. Since that pilot also established Mister Spock as Pike's second in command, a version of Spock (Ethan Peck) appears in SNW as well, and so does a reworked version of Number One (Rebecca Romijn), a one-shot character from the pilot. Not satisfied with these shout-outs, the showrunners also claim that Pike's Enterprise also harbors younger versions of Lieutenant Uhura and Nurse Chapel, though not surprisingly they've both been turned into "Mary Sue" characters. But I suppose even bad retreads of classic characters aren't as bad as the original ones, of which Helmsman Ortegas, the one who always has a bad joke ready in her quiver, is easily the worst.

What I said in my cited essay is that all the later TREKs have fallen short in creating the kind of freely associative myths found in the Classic version. Goldsman and his writers aren't even able to come up to the level of any of the TREK-imitators, for they unravel ungainly plots designed only to spotlight each actor having his or her "Mary Sue" moment. This Pike would never fantasize about Orion slave girls; he's too busy moaning about a time-travel vision in which he believes he must die to save others. (What a cheery way to start a series.) The new version of Number One is revealed to be an "augment," so she faces prejudice because of the Federation's restrictions about genetic alteration. The character of T'Pring from the Classic episode AMOK TIME is no longer a conniving double-dealer; she's now another girl boss, and she and Spock have a more intimate romantic relationship-- that is, when we're not seeing the beginnings of a relationship between Spock and Nurse Chapel. And how about the pirate episode, where a small contingent of raiders somehow takes over the Enterprise, despite its hundreds of crewpeople? Or what amounts to an "alien holodeck" adventure, which was so bad I couldn't even bear to finish it? 

I've liked Mount and Romijn in other roles, but for the rest of them, I can't even tell if they have any real acting chops, because their characters are so one-dimensional. The only new-to-me performer I liked was Paul Wesley, who plays a slightly younger version of Captain Kirk, and who really does a fine job of emulating William Shatner's style without being entirely derivative-- which is more than I can say for Ethan Peck's Spock.

There's more action on each of the episodes than one often saw in other TREK-imitators, such as VOYAGER. However, the directors are inept at making any of the set-pieces exciting, so SNW scores a blank in that department too. The show's only virtue is that it's not as "in your face" about its political agenda a DISCOVERY was, but that's not really enough reason to watch the next season.


SHANG CHI AND THE LEGEND OF THE TEN RINGS (2021)

 







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

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

The above movie poster for RINGS is amusing because, intentionally or not, it recapitulates visual elements from the first issue of the Marvel comic book that birthed Shang-Chi, where the young hero stands in the foreground, kicking some henchman's ass while overhead looms the imaginary figure of his father. But I should leave the majority of direct comparisons between the comic and the film for a separate article. As a CHFB poster asserted (and I'll credit him in the comments if anyone asks), RINGS is far less an adaptation of the MASTER OF KUNG FU franchise than a MCU imitation of CROUCHING TIGER HIDDEN DRAGON.

One of the key differences, though, is that TIGER was in part a modern filmmaker's take on the gender politics of traditional Chinese history, even though that film is set in the 1940s. Neither director/co-writer Destin Cretton nor the other two scripters are capable of critiquing any societies except Western ones, so all their "girl boss" tropes are ultimately as empty as those of BLACK PANTHER WAKANDA FOREVER-- though happily, RINGS does have fewer bossy babes.

I must include one item from the original conflict between Shang-Chi and his father because RINGS utilizes it briefly. In the comic, the evil father trains his son to be a "master of kung fu" so that Shang will perform assassinations in the name of his father. This detail is shoehorned into RINGS, but the movie has very little to do with dramatizing any conflict between father and son. Instead, RINGS is more about the role of women in both character's lives.

For a thousand years the power-obsessed warlord Wenwu (Tony Leung Chiu-wai) wields the power of a god with the ten rings he wears as armbands, and thus he amasses a covert kingdom of crime. Then in modern times he goes searching for power in the lost kingdom of K'un-Lun-- pardon me, I mean "Ta Lo." His attempt to learn Ta Lo's secrets are thwarted by a kung-fu guardian (Fala Chen, who may've been cast because she looks somewhat like Michelle Yeoh). Wenwu is so smitten by this girl boss that he woos and marries her, and they have two children, son Shang-Chi and daughter Xialing. In theory Wenwu gives up the conquering life to be a normal father, though it's a little suspicious that he still insists on Shang becoming a juvenile ass-kicker.

Sadly, Mrs. Wenwu, the woman in all three lives, meets her demise. In his grief at this loss, Wenwu spins a web of sin once more, but if anything he becomes an even less accessible father. At some point both Shang and Xialing flee his influence, though one ends up in the United States and the other in Macau, played in their respective adulthoods by Simu Liu and by Meng'er Zhang. 

There's a reason why Wenwu allows his children to remain outside his sphere of power, and it's tied to his gaining access once more to the forbidden kingdom of Shangri-La-- darn, I mean "Ta Lo!" But finally Wenwu comes after his offspring, or rather after certain artifacts they both possess-- although the artifacts don't serve that much purpose in the script beyond bringing about an alliance of Shang, Xialing, and Shang's comedy-relief girl-buddy Katy (the perpetually unfunny Awkwafina). The alliance takes place only after Xialing beats up her brother for no particular reason, by the way, because that's just the way girl bosses roll.

And why does Wenwu want to gain access to Ta Lo this time? Well, he claims that the people of Ta Lo forced his wife to leave their paradise-- a claim later disputed. But though he has one motive for wanting to invade and destroy Ta Lo, that wasn't quite enough for Cretton and company. So the same lack of feminine influence in the crime-lord's life is used against him, when he hears the voice of his late wife calling out to him, telling him he can be reunited with her in Ta Lo.

With unfunny Kate in tow, Shang and Xialing manage to enter Ta Lo before their bad dad does, and there they meet their good auntie Ying Nan (Michelle Yeoh, bringing to bear her usual charisma, even though Ying is a lot sketchier than her character from CROUCHING TIGER HIDDEN DRAGON). Ying and her fellow Ta-Losians explain that a demonic being has spoken to Wenwu in order to trick him into releasing said demon. I must admit that though this cosmic threat is not purely necessary just to make Wenwu invade Ta Lo, the various soul-sucking demons and flying dragons serve to provide a lot of the CGI that MCU-filmgoers probably expect. If RINGS had provided nothing but the wild choreography of the Jackie Chan Stunt Team, it might not have done so well in the American box office.

Though I've made fun of some of the film's rote tropes, RINGS does offer some very basic action-entertainment without lots of preaching, so it's ahead of a majority of other MCU films in that respect. The only tedious sequence in that respect is the scene in which Wenwu discourses on the character on whom he was based, Marvel Comics' "Mandarin." I understand that the writers had to throw in this rationale. A Fake Mandarin had been introduced in IRON MAN 3, and so, because the MCU was married to the idea of using the "ten rings" schtick for Wenwu, Wenwu had to explain why he both was, and was not, the Mandarin. Everything Wenwu said to the heroes about the phony Mandarin was credible, so far as it went. But then the writers felt they had to be cute, claiming that the word "Mandarin" referenced various culinary items. A moment or two on Wikipedia can make clear the word's real history, so why is it worth lying about, for the sake of a lame joke?

Though RINGS happily does not mess with most of the content of the Marvel "Shang-Chi" feature, there are a handful of cameos of MCU versions of Marvel characters, as well as quickie name-checks on such figures as "Master Khan" and "The Dweller in Darkness." And although F* M**c** is the hate that dare not speak its name in RINGS, oddly Tsai Chin, who played the daughter of F* M**c** in a series of five sixties movies, appears as Katy's grandmother. 

HERCULES AND THE LOST KINGDOM (1994)

  





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


Compared to the previous film in this series, KINGDOM is considerably more muddled and dependent on wild coincidence. Its only basis in archaic mythology is a story in which Hercules expiates a sin by enduring a year of servitude under Queen Omphale of Lydia. But though a version of Omphale appears in the telefilm-- oddly, played by the same actress who would most frequently portray Hercules' mother in the series-- she's not important to the story. But because the original Omphale narrative concerned slavery, KINGDOM finessed that into not one but two instances where the mighty hero finds himself encumbered with people he's liberated.

After Hercules defeats an unruly giant, a messenger brings him news that he's needed by the people of the lost kingdom of Troy, which for no clear reason Hera shunted to some obscure location after the Trojan War. But the messenger dies, so the only way Hercules can find the kingdom, according to Daddy Zeus (Anthony Quinn), is to find a magical compass in the possession of Queen Omphale (Elizabeth Hawthorne). This feat Hercules is eventually able to accomplish by "temporarily" selling himself into slavery to the Queen, possibly thanks a little sexual persuasion off-camera.

But on his way to Omphale's land, the hero encounters a young woman about to sacrificed to bring rain, so he liberates her. The writers playfully named the woman after one of the archaic hero's wives, Deianeira (Renee O'Connor, a couple of years before playing Gabrielle on XENA). Initially Deianeira resents being saved, because she wanted to be a sacrifice. Yet she's apparently not a member of the tribe, having knocked around as an orphan for years. She has a vague memory of having been a princess, a story Hercules dismisses as fantasy, and she thinks that for years she's been followed by a mysterious hooded figure, which the audience sees to be truth. In any case, she attaches herself to Hercules, and without even invoking the old "you're responsible for people you save" aphorism.

After Hercules acquires the compass, the script builds up the idea that Deianeira may have come from Troy, so her crossing paths with the hero is a fortuitous coincidence. During their time in Omphale's kingdom, a slave named Waylin (Robert Trebor, who would play another support-character in the HERCULES series) also attaches himself to the little entourage.

When the trio reach Troy, they find that the people of Troy, living in the woods and exiled from their own city by minions of Hera, identical blue-skinned warriors called the Blue Priests. Deianeira learns that her dreams are real, as she soon meets her father the ailing King of Troy. The monarch lives just long enough to pronounce the young woman Troy's new ruler and then he kicks the bucket.

Deianeira lays plans to take back the city. And although there's a young, age-appropriate Trojan who clearly fawns on her, Deianeira suddenly begins getting affectionate toward Hercules, though he clearly thinks of her as an annoying little sister. (Actor Sorbo was a little more than ten years older than actress O'Connor.) After being rejected, Deianeira gets kidnapped by the hooded man who's been watching her for years. His reason for so doing was to arrange her eventual sacrifice to Hera, and once she's in the hands of the Blue Priests her death seems inevitable. 

Suffice to say that Hercules and the Trojans liberate the city and Deianeira, but only by Hercules taking the young woman's place and getting sucked up into the heavens. Yet as Zeus helpfully informs Deianeira, Hera won't be able to kill Hercules (why not?), and indeed, the film ends with him getting cast back to Earth, ready for another adventure-- hopefully, a better one than KINGDOM.


HONOR ROLL #222

Before she played Hercules' mom, ELIZABETH HAWTHORNE essayed the role of his maybe-lover Omphale.



SIMU LIU, SIMU LIU, what are you gonna do?



They should have changed the name of ANSON MOUNT's character from "Captain Pike" to "Captain Punk."



Just another post-apocalyptic Amazon, that's J.J, RODGERS.



SING CHAN was ever the one for cutting remarks.



PROFESSOR ZOVEK might not have worn a mask like his partner Blue Demon but his feats were a lot less stage-managed than those of the luchadors.