THE FACE OF FU MANCHU (1965)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *sociological*

The only literary virtue of racist fictions is that they give the writers a motivation to create the most delirious forms of evil they can imagine, and then project them onto the representatives of what has been termed (rather simplistically) “the Other.”  Some critics would argue either that the virtue is either non-existent or that it matters little in the face of its moral consequences: that of encouraging bigotry against cultural outsiders on the grounds of race, religion, or ethnicity.  I’ll note the partial validity of the latter position, and will admit that I probably would not enjoy the “Yellow Peril” stories of Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu as much as I do were I an Asian.  Nevertheless, Rohmer’s famous character is a little more than just a racist fiction, for Rohmer also made him a superlative genius and a more complex personality than any of his other, rather stereotypical characters.

FACE OF FU MANCHU, directed by Don Sharp, was the first time a film-producer sought to bring out a series of Fu Manchu films since the early 1930s.  In my review of THE MYSTERIOUS DR. FU MANCHU I noted that the first of that early series lacked Rohmer’s pulpish extravagance.  FACE, the first film in a series by European producer Harry Alan Towers, lacks that extravagance as well, but at least that’s not because the Towers film tries to be more melodrama-based.

FACE's script is credited to Towers-- who used a pseudonym for all of his credits-- and it does maintain the structure of a Rohmer novel, which is generally much like a film-serial.  The vllain wants something, the heroes try to prevent his getting it, mix and repeat.  In this case the villainous Fu Manchu seeks a way to cultivate an unstoppable death-drug from the flowers of the Tibetan Black Lotus.  But he cannot obtain the secret from the Tibetans, who apparently refuse to give it to him: instead, he must seek out Western intellectuals who have gleaned the secret.  This was a common Rohmer ploy, as it forced the insidious Chinese “devil-doctor” and his largely Asian servants to infiltrate the worlds of Caucasian culture.

Some enthusiasts of the Towers series find this initial outing to be the best offering.  FACE does move smartly along from plot-point to plot-point, and unlike some later entries in the series, it generally makes sense as far as establishing Fu Manchu’s next goal (he gets the professor who can distill the death-drug from the Lotus, but then he needs certain research papers, etc.).  Fu Manchu is, however, a rather flat character here, despite being granted a formidable presence by actor Christopher Lee.  Towers makes him the period equivalent of a terrorist, willing to annihilate huge quantities of innocents in order to achieve his goal of world domination.  Rohmer’s Fu Manchu was subtler in his bids for power.  No doubt Towers chose this direction because he was trying for something comparable to the contemporaneous James Bond series, in which the superspy was often pitted against super-villain-like threats.

Set more or less in the early half of the 20^th century, FACE has the advantage of not having to contend with modern views-- though when hero Nayland Smith raises the possibility that Fu Manchu may have returned, his friend Petrie replies scathingly, “Oh, not the Yellow Peril again,” as if to distance the film from reality by evoking the stereotype.  In the more extravagant novels Fu Manchu is often associated with all manner of virulent diseases and vile crawling things, but here the Black Lotus is the only natural peril the devil-doctor employs, meaning that the “technology” of this film only achieves an “uncanny” status.  The same status applies to Fu Manchu’s power of hypnotism.  He’s seen here as having the Dracula-like ability to mesmerize complete strangers instantly.  The audience sees him do this once, and it’s implied that he does so at the film’s beginning to force a pawn to take his place beneath an executioner’s axe—surely the film’s most arresting sequence.

Though Towers’ script doesn’t conjure the level of delirium seen in 1932’s MASK OF FU MANCHU, there are some intriguing moments.  Fu Manchu makes his London hideout beneath the River Thames, and the script constantly ties his activities to the river.  Towers’ purpose is certainly to provide clues that lead Nayland Smith to his quarry, but the repeated emphasis also gives Fu the quality of a chthonic death-god, dwelling beneath the streets (and consciousness) of mundane Britishers.  Most of Fu’s servants are Asian thugs with no personality, though as in the novels the villain does use Europeans, with his most prominent non-Asian servant going by the strangely Hindu name of “Hanuman.”

The film also may have borrowed a scene of sadistic content from MASK OF FU MANCHU.  In that film Fu Manchu’s daughter has a man tortured with whips in order to bend him to her erotic will.  In FACE, the devil-doctor’s daughter—given the name “Lin Tang”—specifically asks her father for permission to whip a disobedient female servant, because Lin Tang “likes” her.  Towers allows the audience to lead up to the sadistic act, and then cuts it off when Fu Manchu conveniently decides to drown the female servant instead.  But clearly Towers wants to remind the audience of the Yellow Peril’s penchant for unthinkable tortures.

Aside from Towers’ tendency to “dumb down” the persona of Fu Manchu into a standard super-villain, the first movie has one other sizeable difference from the Rohmer books. Usually, whenever Fu Manchu’s devious plans are undone by Nayland Smith, the villain and his aides simply melt into the English fog, as if they are spirits able to whisk their way back to the mysterious Orient.  Once foiled, this Fu does the same, but in a lengthy coda, Nayland Smith actually follows the Insidious One back to the Orient—specifically, to Tibet, where Fu attempts to get the last Black Lotus seeds from a Tibetan monastery.  It’s far from clear as to whether the Tibetan occupants of the monastery are aware of Fu’s evil plans. At any rate Nayland Smith, anticipating later military ventures against terrorist-havens, blows up the whole monastery to rid the world of the menace of the Lotus seeds.  Today we would call any innocents caught in the blast “collateral damage.”  The main narrative purpose of the explosion is not so much to vilify “the Other”, though, but simply to provide a measure of closure.  Even by 1965 it was axiomatic that Fu Manchu himself would always escape death, and would return for another battle—which is the suggestion with which all of Tower’s FU MANCHU films conclude.  

                        

THE MASK OF FU MANCHU (1932)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *sociological*

MGM’s loose adaptation of Sax Rohmer’s same-title novel, published in the same year, presents a mixed bag to the acolytes of Fu Manchu.

On one hand, the film is much more entertaining than the so-so novel. The three credited writers clearly display familiarity with the overall mythos of the devil-doctor as it had developed up to that point, and they sought to build upon Fu’s reputation for ingenious tortures, less evident in MASK than in the earlier books. The script dispenses with the book’s dull device of a fictional Muslim revolutionary, and instead imagines that the Chinese evildoer seeks to inspire an uprising of diverse Easterh factions by finding the relics of the formidable conqueror Genghis Khan. Arguably, this trope—that of unifying the East to rebel against Europe’s colonial authority—is a major source of Fu Manchu’s appeal, and this stand-alone film certainly captures all the implicit horros of such a rebellion, far more than the two films starring Warner Oland (reviewed here and here).

On the other hand, even though the tortures are inventive, the torturers, Fu and his daughter Fah Lo Suee, are much more one-dimensional than they are even in the least of Rohmer’s novels. To the writers, both villains are merely unregenerate sadists, and though both Boris Karloff and Myrna Loy chew the scenery with vim and vigor, no one would think of this Fu and Fah as, respectively, a “superman” and a “superwoman.” Karloff’s Fu boasts of his numerous collegiate degrees, but the script doesn’t really play up his intelligence or his ferocious dignity. Perhaps it’s a measure of the script’s antipathy for the character that it’s the only English-language Fu-film in which the venerable villain is killed at the end, with no ambiguity about his return.

The rather fusty plot of the novel is accelerated here. Fu’s continual enemy Nayland Snith is first seen informing archaeologist Lionel Barton (played here as a standard English gentleman, not the egotist of the novels) that the latter’s quest to unearth Genghis’s tomb is of the utmost importance. Smith is somehow aware of Fu’s plan to acquire the Khan’s relics—a scimitar and a golden mask—in order to unite all of Asia against the West. Despite giving Barton this warning, Smith does nothing to protect the scholar, so that he’s abducted by Fu’s men quite easily. This incident gives the writers ample opportunity to subject Barton to a memorable torture. However, sicne Barton’s absence doesn’t prevent his expediton from proceeding to Mongolia to unearth the tomb, it seems peculiar that the oily mastermind even bothers trying to pressure the archaeologist for inside info. Karloff’s Fu never says anything to justify the torture, and since the audience never sees Barton break, it seems like a massive waste of the villain’s time and effort. I found myself wondering, “Given how highly visible the expedition is, why doesn’t the evil mastermind just shadow the Europeans until they reach their goal?”

Indeed, apparently the writers realized this was their best course too. Despite Smith’s lectures about the monumental consequences of unearthing the tomb of Genghis, he doesn’t take along any armed guards. Aside from Mongolian coolies, the expedition consists of Smith, a handful of archaeologists (one of them, Van Berg, named for a character in the fourth novel), and the standard romantic couple. In the novels the romance originates from Lionel Barton’s niece Rima and her English suitor Shan Greville. The movie-script changes these to Barton’s daughter Sheila and her suitor Terry Greville, both of whom are thoroughly American despite Barton’s Brit-heritage.

After the expedition unearths the tomb and collects the relics (despite a supposed curse compared to that of King Tut), Fu’s assasins attack the party, albeit unsuccessfully.

Providentially, Fu happens to have transported Barton all the way to China, and he attempts to extort Greville into surrendering the relics in exchange for the freedom of Sheila’s father. Greville takes the relics to Fu’s hideout, but unbeknownst to him, he’s carrying counterfeits of the originals, which Smith had made for reasons that are never at all clear. Fu’s wrath against Greville leads to a scene which may be the film’s most perverse use of torture: the villain orders the stalwart hero whipped, and Fah, who has obviously formed an attraction to Greville, watches the whipping and excitedly commands the slaves “Faster! Faster!” A subsequent scene implies that she intends to enjoy Greville without his consent, but Fu has another plan, using one of his many mind-control drugs to make Greville his pawn. Whereas in the novel Fah Lo Suee entrances Greville to simulate ardor out of a melancholy desire for romantic connection, here it’s obvious that sex with the Chinese villain’s daughter signifies nothing but degradation.

Greville obeys Fu’s will and brings the villain not only the Genghis relics, but also his fiancée. Considering that the film is famous for a line in which Fu exhorts his followers to “kill the white man and take his women,” the Asiatic mastermind shows no interest in degrading Sheila. He only wishes to use her in a pagan sacrifice to his gods, to further inflame the Asian tribes when Fu shows them the relics that prove his fitness to be the new Khan.

Fu also captures both Smith and Van Berg and subjects them to torturous traps, but following a tradition rightly parodied in the AUSTIN POWERS films, the villain assigns no guards to watch the captives. Smith escapes and frees both Van Berg and Greville, leading to a violent conclusion in which the white guys not only slay Fu but also massacre all of the rebellious tribesmen with Fu’s own weapon, an electrical arc capable of being used as a death-ray. The slaughter is then followed by a light-hearted coda in which the white men feel relief when they behold a dim-witted Chinese fellow working in a position subservient to their authority.

It’s hard to know how seriously the director and writers took this farrago of racial myths. Certainly they weren’t concerned about offending Asians of either the Near East or the Far East, nor is there any suggestion that any Asians might have a legitimate beef against colonialism. Even the first Warner Oland film is a little more liberal on that score. Still, the film’s racial myths seem too outlandish to inspire the conviction of even the full-fledged racists in the audience. The alteration of Fah Lo Suee from a melancholy superwoman into a man-eater is one example of the outlandishness, as is a follow-up scene in which a tearful Sheila “de-programs” Greville with the power of her love, and so triumphs over her iniquitous rival. In her autobiography Myrna Loy regarded the film as trash and claimed that she and Karloff were the only ones who tried to have fun with it, but it’s possible to see the writers amusing themselves with the overheated melodrama, rather than trying to make the material convincing, as Sax Rohmer did. Thus MASK is fun on the kinetic level, but its greatest signifance may be that its basic plot was recycled, with far greater poetic resonance, in the superior serial DRUMS OF FU MANCHU.

To touch briefly on the film’s phenomenality, most of Fu’s devices register as uncanny, even his mind-drugs, which as mentioned aren’t as infallible as the ones in the book-series. However, the electrical arc-cum-death-ray is enough to transport the movie into the realm of the marvelous.

MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE (1987)

 

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

I was too old to have been enthused by the 1983-85 cartoon series HE-MAN AND THE MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE. I don't mean that I had grown too old for superheroes and similar adventurers. I mean that by that time it was easy for me to spot most of the influences from which the cartoon-- principally devised to sell the Mattel toy line-- had been constructed, and it seemed a very ramshackle construction indeed.

I saw similar problems with the 1987 live-action movie, but it had one advantage over the cartoon: it wasn't constantly trying to sell me toy-figures with goofy names like "Ram-Man." I'm not even sure if I saw the film in a theater, though I might have given it a chance had it appeared in one of the "dollar theaters" of the period. If I saw it without spending much, that might explain why I find it easier to take than many Golan-Globus productions of the time.

MASTERS is little more than your basic duel between absolute good and absolute evil as they vie over a magic doohickey called "the Cosmic Key." Almost everything about it is indebted to the SUPERMAN film-franchise that was launched in 1978, and which Golan and Globus attempted to pick up in an ill-fated fourth film. There's a copycat John Williams-esque score, a bombastic credits sequence, and various lower-tier actors in fancy costumes.

Yet MASTERS isn't nearly as bad as either SUPERMAN IV or the two HERCULES films.  True, the film does itself no favors-- except in the financial sense-- by having most of the fantasy-action take place on mundane Earth, as He-Man's group and Skeletor's gang contend for the Key. But the David Odell script does play the superhero action fairly straight, aside from a typically unfunny comic relief (Billy Barty playing a Muppet-like dwarf named Gwildor). Frank Langella has often been praised for imbuing his Skeletor with sophisticated menace despite acting through a heavy mask. But I thought Dolph Lundgren managed to keep a fair amount of dignity despite the opposite handicap: having to swagger around in barbarian-garb and showing off his pectorals almost non-stop.

There are of course two innocent humans who get mixed up with the good guys: one who would go on to become a "Friend" and the other who would become a long "Voyager." The latter is an amateur musician who gets the chance to save the universe with his skills, leaving his girlfriend with the major role of-- well, betraying the good guys to supposedly save her parents. Not exactly standout roles for either actor.

Still-- I've seen much worse than this bit of derivative but nicely mounted nonsense.

HERCULES, SAMSON, & ULYSSES (1984)

 

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


These two peplum-efforts had three aspects in common. Both starred bodybuilder Kirk Morris, both appeared late in the waning cycle of the Italian muscleman films, and both featured a hero of one ethnicity struggling in a foreign land. The last of these is the most minor distinction, though, since the muscleman films were well known for having their heroes wander hither and yon across the globe.

HERCULES, SAMSON AND ULYSSES was filmed as "Hercules Challenges Samson," which is the better title since the "Ulysses" here barely does anything of importance. I assume his name got pushed to top billing because of some promoter's idea that a third name in the title would bring in better box office. Or maybe the same promoter had seen positive returns for 1962's ULYSSES AGAINST THE SON OF HERCULES, and decided to bump up the Ithacan chief for that reason. Surely the world will never know, and even I don't much care.

Hercules, Ulysses and their friends do spend a few quiet moments in their native land before heroic duty calls them to slay a menacing sea-serpent. The heroes succeed, but their boat is swamped by a storm and the Greeks are shipwrecked on the shores of Judea.

This could have been the setup for a potentially fascinating "clash of cultures," but since it's a muscleman film, the script's only concern is to bring about a clash of titans. The one moment of culture-shock comes when the seductive wench Delilah, in league with some of the local tyrants, makes some minor moves on Hercules, seeking to inflame the Greek to fight local boy Samson. It's unclear whether or not Delilah has yet made any movies on Samson, although the two do end up together, meaning that Samson's enervating haircut has yet to take place.

As for the fight, the film delivers a good one, with the Greek and the Danite bashing each other about in the ruins of an abandoned city, tossing around stone pillars like spears. However, most of the other spectacles in the flick are subpar, and neither Morris nor the actor portraying Samson (billed as 'Richard Lloyd," but actually an Iranian bodybuilder) have enough charisma to enliven the slow scenes. However, there are some moderately funny scenes here and there, particularly one that takes place at sea, when the survivors of the shipwreck quarrel about eating their homing-pigeons.

THE CRIMSON PIRATE (1952)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *fair*

FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*

CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, sociological*


Though I've reviewed other films belonging to genres that only rarely feature uncanny metaphenomenal content, THE CRIMSON PIRATE is definitely my first uncanny pirate-film-- though I have touched on a few uncanny swashbucklers here and there.

In this case the metaphenomenal functions only to add to CRIMSON's spectacle, consisting of three or four uncanny inventions that don't belong in the eighteenth century setting, including a hot-air balloon, an explosive that may be nitroglycerine, a gatling gun, a flamethrower, and a wooden submarine, all the creations of scientific genius Professor Prudence. Of these, I wouldn't consider the balloon outré enough to move CRIMSON into the realm of the uncanny, but the others qualify, given that they are inventions appearing out of their proper time and space.

Still, the major spectacle of CRIMSON is the body of heroic red-garbed pirate Captain Valo (Burt Lancaster), forever vaulting and swinging and fighting so as to show off his acrobatic skills, often in tandem with his mute partner Ojo (Nick Cravat). Lancaster and Cravat learned their acrobatics as youths in the circus, and this was the second film, following the 1950 swashbuckler THE FLAME AND THE ARROW, to showcase their physical talents. Indeed, there's so much emphasis on the spectacle of half-naked bodies that CRIMSON may be the first pirate-film in which the hero employs neither gun nor blade.  Valo and Ojo only occasionally pick up "found weapons" and clobber their enemies with them, but their preferred method of attack is derived from the Batman-and-Robin school of wading into seas of armed men, using nothing but fists and feet.

In contrast to the pirate epics of the 1930s and 1940s, CRIMSON barely references the history of any particular period. Nor are the opposed parties well defined, though most of them seem to be Englishmen. In the course of hijacking a ship, Valo meets the ruthless Baron Gruda, an emissary sent by a monarch known only as "the King." Gruda has been sent to put down a rebellion on the fictional island of "Cobra." Vallo, out for profits like most pirates, tells Gruda that for the right amount of money he'll find and deliver up "El Libre," the leader of the rebel forces.

It will come to no one's surprise that when Valo and Ojo infiltrate the rebel forces, Valo meets a gorgeous young woman, Consuelo (Eva Bartok), who happens to be the daughter of El Libre. Valo falls for Consuelo and eventually turns against Gruda and his army.

According to Wikipedia the original script by accused Communist Waldo Salt was entirely serious, and there are still traces of a revolutionary theme in CRIMSON, particularly when Valo reflects that the new inventions of Professor Prudence can be used against "the weapons of the old regime."  However, the refurbished script and Robert Siodmak's direction produced one of the most tongue-in-cheek pirate epics of all time, yet not one in which the humor overpowers the adventure-elements. It's no more than a minor classic, but remains essential viewing for lovers of pirate-cinema.

THE GREEN HORNET STRIKES AGAIN! (1941)

 

The mythos of the Green Hornet also originated under George Trendle's aegis, and as I commented in my review of the first serial, was something of a reversal on the Ranger-formula: whereas the Ranger donned a mask to become a symbol of justice, the Hornet donned a mask with the idea of becoming a "stealth crusader," pretending to be a crook competing with other crooks and "accidentally" sending them into the arms of Lady Justice.  I don't know whether or not the 1940 serial was the first to introduce the idea that the Hornet undertook his crusade as compensation for guilt-- a guilt that, to be sure, is passed over very quickly-- but it did give the original serial a little more psychological heft than one could usually expect from an adventure-serial.

In terms of villains the 1941 sequel is no better than the 1940 original: once again the Hornet and his aide Kato are pitted against a group of undistinguished racketeers-- which seems to have been a particular theme beloved by Trendle. However, it's generally more watchable than the Ranger sequel, perhaps benefiting from the crisp cinematography of Jerome Ash.  Of the co-directors responsible, one of them, John Rawlins, never worked on another serial before or after this one.  Senior director Ford Beebe had ample experience in serials, not only in the 1940 HORNET but about a dozen others as well. However, even Beebe's best serials-- probably 1936s ACE DRUMMOND and 1939's THE PHANTOM CREEPS-- don't come anywhere near the best of Witney and English. But the two Hornet films remains reasonably good entertainment even without strong villains, in part due to the Hornet's special gimmick of sending crooks into dreamland with a puff from his gas-gun.

An odd coincidence about the two sequels, respectively from Republic Pictures and Universal Studios: the non-white sidekicks get a little more action than in their first outings. Additionally, at least the actors were racially close the characters they portrayed, with Chief Thundercloud, self-identitified as a Cherokee, playing Tonto and Chinese Keye Luke essaying the once-Japanese-turned-Filipino valet Kato.

HONOR ROLL #28, JULY 31

 In addition to playing Master Po on "Kung Fu" (does that make him "Po-faced?"), KEYE LUKE is probably the first Asian-American to play a superhero: i.e., Kato of "Green Hornet" fame.

BURT LANCASTER played a pirate in a world with some uncanny SF-elements.

RICHARD LLOYD as "Samson" butted heads with Hercules while Ulysses looked on and took bets from the locals.

FRANK LANGELLA's voice is the best part of the He-Man live-action film.

Since I'm not linking Boris Karloff to his perf as Fu Manchu, I'll go with his devious daughter Fah Lo Suee, as portrayed by later A-lister MYRNA LOY.

I thought about linking CHRISTOPHER LEE to his internationally known role as Dracula. But I went with his role as Fu Manchu, because even though none of the films are great, Lee looks the most like the character as described by creator Sax Rohmer.

THE BLACK CAT (1934)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*

MYTHICITY: *good*

FRYEAN MYTHOS: *irony*

CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *sociological, psychological*

"She had seen that the finger of Death was upon her bosom -- that, like the ephemeron, she had been made perfect in loveliness only to die..."-- Edgar Allan Poe, ELEANORA.

I doubt that any film of any genre in the 1930s more successfully captured the fascination of thanatophilia than Edgar G. Ulmer's THE BLACK CAT, only allegedly inspired by the Poe story of the same title.  The film starts and ends with the sight of Peter and Joan, a young honeymoon couple (David Manners, Jacqueline Wells) traveling on a train-- the first time moving into unsuspected danger, and later leaving the peril behind them.  But the two of them are nothing more than the viewpoint characters through which the audience looks into a world that only appears to be part of the normal breathing universe.  "We know too much of life," Hjalmar (Boris Karloff) tells Vitus (Bela Lugosi), but since Poelzing also rhetorically asks Vitus, "Are we not both the living dead," then it follows that they are both symbolically death-spirits looking at life from the outside in.

Being dead, however, doesn't cut either of them off from lusting after the youth and vigor of life.  Vitus Verdegast, eminent Hungarian psychiatrist, journeys to Austria to seek revenge on Hjalmar Poelzig, who betrayed Verdegast's military unit to the Russians during the First World War, causing the deaths of thousands and the confinement of Verdegast to an inhuman labor camp.  By chance Verdegast encounters the couple, and instantly notices in Joan a resemblance to his long-unseen-and-possibly-dead wife.  When their train lets them off at their destination, the three, along with Verdegast's servant, share a cab to the next city.  The cab is wrecked by a heavy rain, obliging Verdegast to take Peter and Joan to the only shelter nearby: the forbidding Bauhaus-inspired domicile of Poelzig, Austria's greatest architect.  (Even the fact that one character is Austrian and one Hungarian suggests the long standing conflict between the two countries.) 

From then on, it becomes a waiting-game.  Poelzig knows that Verdegast has come to kill him, but he verbally manipulates the psychiatrist, tormenting Verdegast by revealing not only that he Poelzig married Verdegast's wife during the latter's untimely absence, but that the psychiatrist's daughter died as well.  What Poelzig doesn't tell his enemy is that the daughter Karen is alive and that Poelzig has married her, while keeping her unaware of her father's existence.

In addition, Poelzig has not one but two black cats roaming his fortress-like abode.  Whenever Verdegast-- who suffers from an irrational fear of cats-- sees one, he falls into a violent fit.  In one scene the doctor kills one of the felines-- which is surely the closest this story ever comes to any element of Poe's short "Black Cat" story. Eventually Poelzig further raises the stakes, as Verdegast learns that Poelzig plans to convene Satan-worshippers at his home for a Black Mass, in which Joan will be sacrificed.

There's a strong Oedipal element in the screenplay, which probably would have been stronger if it had pursued its original course: to have both the Karloff and Lugosi characters be outright villains.  The finished screenplay gives Verdegast greater moral compass, but it's evident in various scenes that he's as attracted to Joan as is Poelzig, who also sees the resemblance to the woman they both desired.  Poelzig, for his part, seems to conflate sex and death.  He expresses his desire for Joan by threatening to murder her on a sacrificial altar, and when Joan tells Karen that her father still lives, Karen doesn't even have time for a "How could you" before Poelzig kills the woman whom he claimed was "the core of my life."  Joan for her part is repulsed by both of these weird old men, but at one point, after she's been given drugs for an injury suffered in the car-crash, she briefly enters an odd hypnotic state in which she seems fascinated with them.  Academic studies would no doubt consider this a prime example of "the woman fascinated with the monster."

Phenomenally speaking, THE BLACK CAT is, like many Poe stories, a tale of the uncanny, in which none of the events are technically beyond the pale of reality, and yet all create a strong sense of "irreducible strangeness."  Since the story includes Satanists, the trope of "weird societies" needs no elaboration.  However, though I also tag BLACK CAT in terms of "perilous psychos," the madmen here aren't much like the standard horror-types, despite the script's copious references to insanity.  Like the villain of THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME, these two madmen are more like Sadean obsessives than garden-variety psychos.  As for the "bizarre crimes" trope, in comparison with other uncanny-films reviewed here, BLACK CAT has the most in common with 1967's BERSERK, in that the final vengeance of Verdegast upon Poelzig deals with extreme mutilation.

PANDEMONIUM (1982)

PANDEMONIUM spoofs horror-tropes in a much more general way than OLD DRACULA, though it focuses principally on the subgenre of the slasher film, still popular in 1982. In fact, PANDEMONIUM's director Alfred Sole had made the "pre-slasher" ALICE SWEET ALICE in 1976, one influenced by earlier horror-thrillers by Roeg and Hitchcock, though ALICE wasn't released until the same year Carpenter's HALLOWEEN codified the rules for the "official slasher."

Sadly, PANDEMONIUM's comedy doesn't succeed as do the thrills of ALICE, in that most of the jokes are just as lame as those of OLD DRACULA. However, PANDEMONIUM provides a greater variety of gags, making one's chances of liking something better than average, along the lines of the old vaudeville saying, "If you don't like one, there'll be another along next minute." I confess I did rather like the "cheerleader shish-ka-bob" scene and Paul Reubens' performance as an annoying twit.

The film also benefits from an ample list of famous faces. Tom Smothers doesn't contribute much as Cooper, a Canadian mountie (did anyone even remember Nelson and Eddy in 1982?) But it's fun to see actors like Eve Arden, Donald O'Connor, Eileen Brennan and Judge Reinhold tossed into the same soup. Carol Kane plays the closest that the film has to a central character: a young woman named Candy who makes the decision to enroll in cheerleader camp just as a serial killer-- maybe more than one-- starts killing cheerleaders. Candy herself is a bit of a monster, given that she has psychic powers a la "Carrie," though Kane plays her like a possessed Linda Blair. She becomes the film's "final girl" long before that role had become set as in stone, though because she ends up fighting the psycho-killer with her powers, this is more of a "combative" work than most slashers. Six years later, Jason would contend with a "Carrie"-like telepath for one go-round.

STAR TREK: THE MOTION PICTURE (1979)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *cosmological, metaphysical, psychological, sociological*

I admire the wit of whoever summed up STAR TREK THE MOTION PICTURE as “Where Nomad Has Gone Before,” referring to the script’s clear indebtedness to John Meredyth Lucas’s script for the Classic Trek episode “The Changeling.” To be sure, though, Wikipedia relates many mutations of the STTMP script that was ultimately credited to Alan Dean Foster and Harold Livingston, though creator-producer Gene Roddenberry and others also did uncredited rewrites, and stars William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy had some level of input as well. The final on-screen story—and here I should note that I’m reviewing the theatrical release—proved to be a partial inversion of “Changeling.” The TV episode told the story of Nomad, a radically empowered Earth space-probe that seeks out Earth with the notion of sterilizing all imperfection. The movie, however, is about a radically empowered Earth space-probe that seeks out Earth looking for its creator in order to obtain some sense of “meaning” about its existential status.

Partly because of some of the script’s dramatic limitations, the overall story is easier to break down into sheer plot-points than were many of Classic Trek’s more ambitious episodes. STTMP definitely borrows from “Changeling” the basic trope of “Planet Earth is in peril from an invading entity," in this case a gargantuan cloud moving through space toward the Federation homeworld, blasting through a few Klingon ships on its way. By this time, the Enterprise’s five-year mission has long ended, with most of its crew assigned to other duties. The former Captain Kirk (Shatner) is now an admiral, while Mister Spock (Nimoy) has apparently resigned his commission in order to undergo a ritual purification of his human emotions on barren Vulcan. The Enterprise itself has been refitted and put under the command of a new captain, Decker (Stephen Collins). But for reasons that don’t entirely hold up, the Federation insists on sending the Enterprise out to investigate the cloud-menace by re-assigning to the command of the ship to Kirk, who usurps Decker’s captaincy, and also bringing back all the usual suspects: McCoy Sulu, Chekhov, Uhura, Chapel and Scotty. Along with Decker, some new (and younger) faces are also present, though the only one of significance is Lieutenant Ilia (Persis Khambatta), with whom Decker shared some unspecified romantic experience.

The Federation does not reach out to Mister Spock, but Spock—whose mental powers sometimes reached improbable heights—somehow reaches out to whatever entity inhabits the cloud. Spock, feeling attuned to the entity in some way, drops his purity quest and volunteers his services to Kirk and his former co-workers. It’s a matter of some irony that Spock’s subplot becomes so integral to the plot of STTNG, for in one of its earliest forms the script was devised for an episode of a never-produced, Spock-less TREK teleseries.

The Old Gang soon find that Spock has become more dispassionate than ever before, not even rising to retort against barbs from his former sparring-partner McCoy. Spock has, in effect, become the “computer” McCoy often accused him of being, seemingly concerned more with making contact with the alien intelligence than with saving the Earth from an invader. In an episode of the Classic series, this situation would have occasioned a barnstorming moral debate, in which Kirk and McCoy would have sought to convince Spock of the value of human emotions. But the script can’t very well torpedo the very plot-point that justifies bringing Spock on board, for Kirk and Co. know that they may need Spock’s psychic attunement to discover what’s going on in the cloud. So Kirk and McCoy can do nothing more than express vague disquiet with the Vulcan’s behavior. The other members of the Old Guard get even less to do than this, and their presence never rises beyond the level of a nostalgia-fest.

Decker gets a little more linear treatment, even though the viewer really never knows much about him save that he’s an earnest young captain. Within a certain space-navy protocol, Decker butts heads with new commander Kirk, and at one point Decker shows that he simply knows more about the retooled Enterprise than does the man most associated with the vessel. Decker also supersedes a prerogative almost exclusively given to Kirk’s character, since he alone gets something akin to a romantic arc.

When the Enterprise comes into contact with the cloud-colossus, it’s immediately clear that they have no ability to challenge the entity’s power. Kirk sounds a bit like the later Captain Picard, refusing to scan the cloud for fear of seeming aggressive. However, the entity scans the Enterprise, and it beams Lieutenant Ilia off the ship. Ilia never comes back, for the alien uses her mortal body as a template for a lookalike robot, Robot-Ilia, who shows up on the Enterprise, using this faux human body to communicate with the “carbon units” on the ship—which the entity has mistaken for an independent mechanical intelligence. Robot-Ilia still possesses some of Ilia’s memories, and seems drawn to Decker. The young captain doesn’t seem especially broken up by losing his former lover, and he’s quite willing to instruct the lissome robot in the ways of “carbon units.” I suppose one can call this “taking one for the team.” In her dialogue with the humans, the robot reveals that the entity within the cloud is called “V’ger,” and it seeks its Creator, which it believes to be on Earth.

Spock then takes the bull by the horns, donning a personal spacesuit and jetpack to plunge into the cloud. Following Spock’s quasi-mystical contact with V’ger, Kirk pulls the rash Vulcan back to the Enterprise. Confined to sick bay, Spock tells his human friends that he was mistaken to hope for an entity of pure logic, that V’ger is some sort of intelligent machine, but one racked with a fierce desire for self-understanding, not that different from that of “carbon units.” Spock’s epiphany traduces his desire to become the embodiment of Vulcan logic and to expunge his humanity, though by the end of the film the character just defaults back to the status he held on the original teleseries.

The Enterprise can do nothing to keep the Cloud of V’ger from drawing closer to Earth, and to further exacerbate tensions, Robot-Ilia, having completed her study of the carbon-units, informs them that V’ger plans to expunge them both from the ship and from Planet Earth, believing that they somehow impede V’ger from contact with the Creator. Kirk, in his only standout character-moment, bluffs Robot-Ilia into granting the carbon-units an audience with the unstable entity. This audience leads to the Big Reveal, as Kirk, Spock, McCoy and Decker all learn that V’ger is the space probe Voyager 6, which was radically rebuilt on the planet of machine intelligences. This clue gives Kirk the insight he needs to attempt using old NASA transmission-codes to set up a dialogue with the mechanical entity. However, V’ger wants more than just talk; he wants direct contact with the Creator. Kirk and Co. realize that the only solution to V’ger crisis is if it receives an infusion of the human “capacity to leap beyond logic,” so that in theory it will go off and investigate other dimensions and leave the Federation alone. Decker sacrifices himself by providing the infusion, allowing himself to merge with Robot-Ilia in a sort of *hieros gamos* of which the ancient Greeks would never have dreamed. Once the godlike robot has its pound of human flesh, so to speak, it vanishes and the Enterprise once more flies the friendly skies of Federation space, looking forward to its next adventure.

In my original theatrical viewing of STTMP, I was naturally disappointed that the dramatic aspects of the show were sacrificed for this Big Abstract Idea (not to mention being put off by all the ghastly uniforms worn by the crewpersons, which outfits were then squirreled away in someone’s stock closet, never again to see the light of day). Nevertheless, purely from a mythopoeic perspective the movie succeeds in putting across its inversion of God’s creation of man and His demand for “tendance.” Here, man makes a device that, thanks to some plot-convolutions, goes far beyond what humanity can achieve in the physical sense. However, this “machine-god” needs tendance in the form of instruction about what to do with all this immense power. Spock plays a role that inverts that of Paul on the road to Tarsus, where the “god” speaks to the erring postulant by telling him in essence, “Don’t be like me.” Decker and Ilia are the beautiful young couple sacrificed to sustain the god, more as food for thought than as actual food— which also has the extra added effect of getting that young upstart out of Kirk’s command chair for good. Later iterations of Movie-Trek would emphasize some of the elements left out of STTNG, such as physical adventure and dramatic conflict—though I don’t think even the best of the movies ever captured the best myth-aspects of Classic Trek.  

QUEST FOR THE MIGHTY SWORD (1990)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *metaphysical, psychological*

I've not found time in the past ten years of this blog to review any of the four Italian-made ATOR films that arose like the success of 1982's CONAN THE BARBARIAN like so many vultures flitting around a fallen corpse. Yet it's not that I hold them in as much contempt as I do the really poor sword-and-sorcery outings, not least CONAN THE DESTROYER, which managed to do everything wrong that the first film did right. The ATOR films are cheerful Italian cheese for the most part, and they certainly do not drag along trying to burn up screen-time, as I recently found to be the case with THE SWORD AND THE SORCERER. 

Three of the four ATORs-- the first, second, and fourth-- were written and directed by best-known-for-porn raconteur Joe D'Amato. For the third, IRON WARRIOR, another director, Alfonsco Brecia, took over, and this may have sparked D'Amato to pull out all the stops with the fourth and last Ator flick, QUEST FOR THE MIGHTY SWORD. I can't say it's good, but it's certainly unusual, being sort of a mashup between bits and pieces of The Siegfried Saga and a lot of quasi-Freudian pop psychology.

The film opens with not one but two Ators: the father, who rules over an unspecified kingdom, and his identically named baby son. It's possible that the older Ator may even be the one from the first film (though none of the stories in the series are literally tied to one another). The only reason for thinking this is that Older Ator is married to a woman named Sunn, while in ATOR THE FIGHTING EAGLE the hero's beloved was named Sunya. (She was, incidentally, a woman First Ator was raised to believe was his sister, which didn't prevent their doing a little canoodling even before they found out that they weren't related. And yes, D'Amato does manage to top that bit of perversity here.)

In any case, Older Ator possesses a magical sword, apparently given him by the gods, and the king uses the blade to personally take on any challengers in a "trial by combat" if they dispute his judgments. On the same day that he does so, one of the gods, Thorn by name, appears in the court and demands the return of the sword. Older Ator refuses. An armor-clad goddess named Dejanira (Margaret Lenzey) also runs up, trying to persuade the merciless deity to let Older Ator keep the weapon. Thorn slays Older Ator with a spear, which somehow causes the sword to become broken, which may be the reason the spear-god leaves the weapon behind. Thorn condemns Dejanira to the fate of a "sleeping beauty," confined to an underground cave until such time as a strong man rescues her-- which is more or less the same curse that Odin pronounces upon Brunhilde in the story of Seigfried.

Sunn also decides to crib from the saga. Since she plans to kill herself now that her husband's dead, she takes both her infant and the pieces of the broken sword and entrusts both to a dwarvish type named Grindl (who appears in a troll costume very similar to that of Thorn's brief appearance in the opener). Grindl wants some sort of payback for raising Baby Ator and keeping custody of the shattered sword, so when Sunn begs him for a lethal poison, Grindl slips her an aphrodisiac mickey. Not only does Sunn have sex with the malignant dwarf, the overlord Thorn decides to wreak further vengeance on Sunn by transforming her into a woman obsessed with giving herself to any man who asks. This curse becomes important later.

Meanwhile, Baby Ator grows into Ator II (Eric Allan Kramer), and he quickly gets tired of his substitute father, who refuses to fix the broken sword of Ator's heritage and uses the young fellow as a handy slave. This sequence is plainly meant to mirror the fostering of Seigfried by the dwarf Mime. Nephele (Marisa Mell), a mysterious female who may be one of the gods, shows up to inform Ator that his mother is still alive and suffering her cursed fate. Ator makes a couple of attempts to kill the "bad father," and he finally succeeds when he manages to repair the broken sword-- also a bit derived from the Seigfried-Mime conflict. Once this is done, Nephele instructs Ator to go looking for Dejanira, even showing the young hero an image of the comely Amazon so that he'll be sufficiently motivated. Armed with the restored sword, Ator braves the cave and its protectors, a slime-covered dragon and what looks like a conjoined-twin soldier armed with sword and shield-- and possibly a robot conjoined-twin soldier, to boot. The doughty (or  is that dotty) hero triumphs over his foes and pulls Dejanira out of her trance, escaping the cave before everything goes boom.

Ator and Dejanira more or less pledge their love to another in the tradition of Seigfried and Brunhilde-- but unlike those two, they have to deal with an encounter with a "bad mother" as well as a "bad father." When the heroes take a few brewskis at a local tavern, they stumble across a put-upon but mature beauty, who's been a whore for several years now. Ator rescues the woman from a ruffian. She tries to repay him with a roll in the hay, but Ator shows her only pity-- which is exactly what is needed to dispel the curse upon the woman, who is none other than Sunn. Apparently all of her hard living immediately catches up with Ator's mom, for she ages quite a bit more than the twenty-something years it took Ator to grow to manhood, and perishes. Dejanira admits that she knew of Sunn's curse but could not speak of it, even though she's been made a mortal by Thorn.

The heroes, joined by a sidekick named Skiold, seek to flee to some shelter free from the designs of Thorn, but if the Odin-like divinity is still pulling any strings, we don't hear of it. Seigfriend and Brunhilde then encounter three more characters derived from the saga: crazed ruler Gunther, his scheming sorceress-sister Grimhild (eighties sex-bomb Laura Gemser), and Gunther's dwarvish servant Hagen. Without dwelling on the saga-equivalents too long, suffice to say that the original idea is that the brother and sister try to chisel in on the great romance of Seigfried and Brunhilde. Sure enough, Gunther and Grimhilde have the same agenda, though they go about it a lot differently. Grimhilde assumes the likeness of Dejanira so that Ator ends up sleeping with the wrong hot girl. As for Gunther, he's apparently decided to borrow a little from HOUSE OF WAX as well, for he plans to "wed" Dejanira by encasing her in plaster. Ator not only comes to the rescue and defeats Gunther, Hagen and several men, he also can conjure up a new weapon out of nothing, for he suddenly manifests a mini-crossbow on his wrist to kill two Gunther-minions. After the villains are all dead, the young lovers flee the castle-- but the film's last shot shows a laughing dwarf appear on the screen before the credits roll-- Thorn, possibly, exulting in some scheme to doom the duo, as they were undone in the saga.

I've occasionally found a high degree of mythicity in apparent sword-and-sorcery junkers like THE SCORPION KING 2. However, even though I believe D'Amato was pursuing some Freudian themes in his remix of the Seigfried narrative, I don't get the sense that he was doing so for any purpose but to keep the pot boiling, as it were. But at least it's a lively enough pot this time.

WILD THING (1987)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure* 
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *sociological*

In all likelihood most fantasy-film concordances would leave out WILD THING, because it contains no marvelous content.  To be sure, there are a fair number of feral-child films—notably Francoise Truffaut’s THE WILD CHILD—that remain confined to the level of the naturalistic.  But WILD THING  transforms the mundane nature of their environments by the intrusion of an uncanny figure.  

WILD THING, scripted by the renowned John Sayles, is tongue-in-cheek meditation on the Tarzan mythos—though not so invested in humor as to become a comedy.  The character of “Wild Thing”—who never receives any other name—begins as the small child of a hippie couple.  The child's parents are killed by a crime boss and his policeman stooge.  The kid sees a tattoo on the hand of the head crook, which will later lead to a vengeful confrontation, just as Tarzan has to wait for maturity until he can take revenge on the great ape that kills his father.  In contrast to the Burroughs book, though, there are never any quasi-Freudian aspects to the conflict. 

Instead of being raised by apes, Wild Thing is raised by street-people, chiefly by Leah, an addled bag-woman who teaches him to avoid all authority, which she refers to as “the Company.”  She’s been victimized by electroshock in an asylum, causing her to rave about how the Company tries to make everyone alike.  This theme isn’t pursued in detail.  Leah perishes during Wild Thing’s childhood just as Tarzan’s foster-mother dies, both having lived long enough to make it probable that the feral child can pursue his own Rousseau-esque existence.

Roaming about the rooftops of the city (which take the place of jungle-trees), Wild Thing becomes a legend to the land-bound inhabitants. The superstition even becomes incorporated into the local culture as a “rite of passage.”  When young Rasheem wants to join a gang of his fellow Afro-Americans (taking the place of jungle-tribes in the Tarzan books), the gang initiates the boy by tying him to a lamppost at night, to see if he has the courage to meet the Wild Thing.  Instead, Rasheem meets a lady social worker by the name of Jane (of course), and both of them are pursued by the hoods of a crime-boss named Chopper.  Rasheem gets away but Jane must be saved by the intervention of the legend himself.

Much of the time, Wild Thing (Rob Knepper) follows the model of Tarzan in cavorting around with minimal clothing.  He doesn’t command animals, though a cat follows him around, giving rise to a legend somewhat credenced by both black and white locals: that Wild Thing can change into a cat.  Through various misadventures Wild Thing romances Jane, learns that Chopper is the man responsible for his parents’ deaths, and takes the appropriate revenge.

WILD THING is by no means a high-energy adventure. Tthe hero only has a handful of battles, and neither the villain nor the hero’s fights against his forces are impressive.  The film does have some winsome moments, as when Jane initiates Wild Thing in the mysteries of sex, or in the many scenes in which Sayles embraces the individualistic weirdness of the street-culture.  However, at no point is it any competition for Sayles’ better film on this theme, THE BROTHER FROM ANOTHER PLANET.

THE WIFE OF MONTE CRISTO (1946)

 

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


One often hears about B-movies being crafted quickly to catch fire from A-films that proved popular with the public. However, Hollywood's first major sound adaptation of Dumas's classic novel THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO became a bonanza for B-movie productions, even many years after the 1934 film had left theaters.

Admittedly, producer Edward Small, who worked on both the original COUNT and two sequels, must have demonstrated the resiliency of the concept, since he produced both 1940's SON OF MONTE CRISTO and 1946's THE RETURN OF MONTE CRISTO. All of these were resolutely naturalistic like the book, but the studio PRC chose to cross-breed their version of the Count with the still popular "Zorro" template-- so that even if WIFE OF MONTE CRISTO was intended to dovetail on RETURN, it was also set apart from being strictly in the Dumas tradition.

That tradition does not, to the best of my knowledge, include any female swashbucklers, though the titular character of WIFE is loosely based on a Dumas character named Haydee. Dumas's chronology for the character is re-arranged so as to imagine that Edmond Dantes (Martin Kosleck), rather than using his money to ruin his enemies, dons a mask and takes the name of "the Avenger" as he rides around fighting evildoers. However, he's injured in one of his forays, and Haydee (Lenore Aubert) dons his outfit in order to keep the Avenger's enemies from suspecting Dantes' dual identity.

Despite the emphasis on Haydee in the advertising, she never seems like anything but a support-character in the story of Dantes. She has one scene of minor swordplay, but Kosleck's Dantes, despite not being as handsome as most swashbuckler-heroes, gets the privilege of the final duel with the bad guy. Edgar Ulmer, though known for having produced some gems on a budget, merely turns in a routine outing here.

HONOR ROLL #27, JULY 31

 Perpetual supporting-actor MARTIN KOSLECK got to star in his own "masked swashbuckler" flick.

ROB KNEPPER played a character who might be called "Tarzan of the Projects."

ERIC ALLAN KRAMER finished up the "saga of Ator" by acting like an A... naw, that's a little too harsh.

By virtue of his last name, DE FOREST KELLEY earns first mention of all the players in the TREK-reunion film series.

CAROL KANE plays a "Carrie" who could care less for slashers.

BORIS KARLOFF has just two starring supercombative roles, but I gotta go with his "monster role" as Hjalmar Poelzing over his "villain role" as Fu Manchu.

IT CAME FROM BENEATH THE SEA (1955)

 

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


IT CAME FROM BENEATH THE SEA (henceforth IT for short) follows the general American model for giant city-crushing monsters supplied by 1953's THE BEAST FROM 20,000 FATHOMS.  Though BEAST's Rhedosaurus had more visual personality than the "sixtopus" of IT, the latter film benefits from a better script, credited in part to George Worthing Yates, who racked up about a dozen SF-film credits in that decade.  In both films Ray Harryhausen shines-- as always-- in his animation of the respective monsters, and if anything "It" seems the more formidable opponent, being able to resort to the concealing waters of the ocean more ably than the big dino.  The scene in which soldiers repel It's gargantuan tentacles with flamethrowers is to my mind much more enjoyable than the often excerpted scene in which the great cephalopod hauls himself up on the Golden Gate Bridge.

Perhaps because the octopus spends so much time under the water, the script is obliged to beef up the dialogue of the creature's human opponents.  The foremost of these is naval submarine commander Pete Matthews, whose vessel encounters the giant beast during maneuvers.  The initial voiceover even frames the encounter as a showdown of sorts, in that the nuclear sub represents one of the finest achievements of modern mankind, and the hostile sea-monster exists to challenge its supremacy.  "The mind of man had thought of everything - except that which was beyond his comprehension!"

Matthews and his sub-mates manage to escape the creature's grip, though Matthews is rather mournful that the ship held no torpedos.  Like the gunfighter deprived of the chance for a fair fight, Matthews will get a chance to redeem himself later.  In a rather peremptory fashion Matthews uses the authority of the Navy to draft two civilians to examine the sub for evidence of the oceanic opponent.  One of the scientists is an older man, coincidentally sharing the name of Edgar Rice Burroughs' monster-fighting hero, "John Carter."  The other scientist, a colleague to Carter, is Lesley "two-girls'-names-in-one" Joyce, a highly trained female professional whose presence provokes Matthews to assert his dominance.  BEAST tossed in a romantic relationship between two scientists, played by the male and female leads, while the female had a vaguely paternal colleague off to the side.  Yates' script shakes up this pattern a little by mixing the military man with the "new breed of woman."  In addition, there's a slight suggestion that Joyce may have some interest in the older Carter, though Carter is blissfully unaware of any such attention, or of Matthews' initial looks of jealousy.

The "dueling romance" schtick in IT was far from new in 1955, but Yates has some fun with it, and keeps it from becoming entirely predictable.  Initially Matthews seems so overbearing that Joyce's eventual affection for him seems to come out of left field, though Yates may've meant to suggest that her response to his masculine assertiveness was inevitable for even a "new breed of woman."  But Joyce does get some of her own back at times, and after It has been defeated, the film ends with Joyce showing a certain assertiveness about "taking possession" of Matthews.

Some 1950s films present Oedipal oppositions between younger and older men for a young female, as seen in 1953's CAT WOMEN OF THE MOON and 1956's FORBIDDEN PLANET. Usually these contests don't end too well for the older male.  In IT, not only is Carter not aware of any possible conflict, he risks his life to save Matthews from the monster, attacking the six-armed terror in its Cyclopean eye-- with the result that all three protagonists live to enjoy their coffee after the monster dies.

In contrast to BEAST's Japanese imitator Godzilla, It never has any personality, and the scientists' discussions of its nature treat the octopus pretty much like a predictable "thing."  Like the ants of THEM!, the sixtopus is not a prehistoric critter, but has been suffused with atomic-bomb radiation, forcing it to leave the ocean depths to look for new food-sources.  But the creature's problems are never addressed with any conservationist compassion, and no one suggests for a moment that it might be corraled somehow.  Sadly, just like Jaws, "no one cry when It die."

I should also note that IT is almost a corrective to the species of cautionary, anti-atomic SF-films.  IT's message is almost more celebratory in tone: "Well, if our atomic tests happen to bring forth rampaging monsters, bring 'em on and we'll cut 'em down!"

IRON MAN 2 (2010)

 

IRON MAN 2, however, proves somewhat less balanced than the debut film. With the bad father out of the way, the script must substitute an excuse for Stark to spiral into self-indulgence again. It's been stated that the script was indirectly influenced by a well-received story-arc from the comic book, in which Stark became an alcoholic as the result of work-pressures. Favteau's scripters only touched on alcoholic visual motifs, but chose to situate these in terms of an almost manic-depressive concept of Stark, oscillating between moods of invincibility-- seen in the opening scenes where Stark celebrates himself through the medium of a science expo-- and moods of extreme depression. The depression comes about logically enough, as Stark tries to come to terms with the fact that the very device that keeps his heart beating is also slowly poisoning him.

Though alcoholism is not the direct cause, Stark-- who has publicly confessed his identity as Iron Man, and who refuses the military access to his armor-- begins acting like a manic drunk, even when in armor. This plot-line culminates in emnity between Stark and his two major support-characters, which leads to major violence when Rhodes dons a duplicate set or armor, takes the name "War Machine," and battles Iron Man in an attempt to bring him under control. This is one of the few areas in which IRON MAN 2 exceeds the original, since the battle of the armored titans here is far better choreographed than the one in the 2008 film. Of course, by film's end Rhodes and Potts are both on Stark's side again, and the key to the industrialist's reformation lies, ironically enough, in his making contact with his late father, who never seemed to appreciate Stark in life.

Downey provides, if anything, an even more nuanced version of the quirky Stark persona than he did in the first film. However, "for every bit of good there's a little bit of bad," and in this case it's a badly chosen villain. Whiplash, a minor villain from the comics, is pressed into service as a "big bad," a conniving Russian whose father's fortunes were ruined by his interaction with Stark's father. Perhaps Favreau and company might have sold viewers on this character, had they been consistent about pitching him as a master planner from the first. However, they introduce him by having him attack Stark in public, like a hundred other vengeance-seeking villains-- and once that's happened, it's hard to credit such a reckless figure as being the great manipulator seen in the rest of the film. I should add that the script also takes one of Iron Man's better 1970s villains, a master-planner type named Justin Hammer, and downgrades him into a pawn of Whiplash.

Sadly, bad judgments regarding the Armored Avenger's villains extended into IRON MAN 3, to date the last and least of the series. But at least the first film stands as one of the more substantive superhero films, even if there seems little potential for any more solo films with the character in the near future.

OSMOSIS JONES (2001)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*

MYTHICITY: *fair*

FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*

CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *cosmological*

If the viewer can ignore the tedious live-action sequences, directed by the Farrelly Brothers and starring a slovenly Bill Murray and his winsomely cute daughter, then OSMOSIS JONES provides a decent formulaic action-comedy.

The idea of personifying parts of the human body goes back at least as far as Jonathan Swift's arguments between brain and stomach, but I don't recall that many attempts to use the trope in cartoons. In this case, the main cartoon characters are the personified inhabitants of Frank (Murray), a slob who constantly neglects his health. This creates a lot of work for all of the body-parts trying to maintain the body's integrity, not least a "police force" of white blood cells. The title character is the street-smart ("vein smart?") officer Osmosis Jones (Chris Rock), who gets no respect despite his devotion to his job. When a new disease strikes the body of Frank, Osmosis ends up getting teamed up with Drix, an anthropomorphic "cold pill" out to terminate the infection. Like most buddy-cop films, the principal heroes Osmosis and Drix don't get along, with the former being too laid-back and the latter too uptight. However, they end up learning that the Body of Frank has bigger problems than a head-cold: an invading virus, Thrax (Lawrence Fishburne) wants Frank dead, which means that all of the separate elements of Frank's body will die as well.

The buddy-cop stuff is routine at best, but the animation is lively, and Chris Rock's saucy rap works tolerably well against David Hyde Pierce's stuffiness. The feature cartoon flopped in the box office. However, it may have educated a few kids on the various functions of the human body-- at least, the ones that you could get in a PG movie-- and that gives it a little more cachet than most modern-day animated features.