JUSTICE LEAGUE: THE NEW FRONTIER (2008)

 

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

This adaptation of Darwyn Cooke’s 2004 graphic novel, DC: THE NEW FRONTIER, received the implicit imprimatur of the artist, in that Cooke is credited with providing “additional material” to the script by Stan Berkowitz. Nevertheless, most of the things that made the graphic novel unique have been sacrificed for the 75-minute running time, and possibly also in order to earn the PG-13 rating.

I can appreciate the efficiency with which the sprawling graphic novel has been condensed. For instance, the Lovecraftian menace of the Centre—a dinosaur-inhabited island derived from a DC Comics’ Silver Age feature—benefits from the condensation, providing a more consistent sense of danger to the heroes. Not surprisingly, the film also purges all of Cooke’s callbacks to DC’s history of non-superheroic adventures, though some of them—the Blackhawks, the Challengers of the Unknown—make glorified cameos that may confuse newbies to the DC Universe. Since the title of the film does not celebrate DC Comics in general, but rather the specific history of the Justice League, the costumed characters get almost all of the attention.

JLTNF is still essentially faithful to the major story-arcs of Cooke’s narrative, particularly those arcs involving the Hal Jordan Green Lantern, the Barry Allen Flash, and the Martian Manhunter. JLTNF does drop one of the important subplots involving Superman and Batman, and in compensation the two heroes get some extremely minor new scenes. In addition, the film is careful to keep all the key emotional scenes that involved any of the major superheroes.

What most hurts the film as an adaptation is that the script fails to provide context in terms of two histories, both real-world history and the history of the DC Universe. Cooke’s graphic novel built on established continuity, in which all of the costumed heroes of the 1940s, including but not limited to the Justice Society, find themselves forbidden to keep operating by politicians and postwar paranoia. Within the history of DC Comics, this retroactive continuity was introduced to explain why so many 1940s heroes quit fighting crime in the 1950s (the real-history reason being that superheroes fell out of favor and simply got cancelled). Cooke elaborated on the 1950s outbreak of fear about Communists, people of color and “little green men,” and used it as a springboard to celebrate the rebirth of DC costumed heroes in the late 1950s. However, JLTNF speeds past the expository section, so that a viewer not already familiar with the comics would barely understand what happened to the Justice Society. The matter of American paranoia is watered down, and most of Cooke’s comments, insightful or not, regarding the marginalization of colored people just disappear. The only scene that adequately captures the sense of governmental overreach appears when federal agents attempt to capture Barry Allen—the quintessence of the straight-arrow superhero—and put him in some black-ops prison for his vigilante actions.

A few of the non-superhero characters—spy-master King Faraday and commando-commander Rick Flagg—still appear in supporting roles. But Cooke elaborated a vision of heroism that included both ordinary, skilled mortals and the characters with godlike powers. But JLTNF doesn’t even suggest such a vision, and the result is that it’s just another animated adventure of the Justice League--admittedly with better graphics-- but nothing more.

AVENGER X (1967)

 

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

The original title to this Italian supercriminal film was MISTER X, after a popular Italian comic book of the same name. Possibly the American version stuck “Avenger” in the title just to make clearer that this wasn’t a mundane mystery, though even the English dub uses the name “Mister X” for the protagonist.

Like his predecessors Fantomas and Diabolik, Mister X has been robbing rich people for years without being apprehended by the law-dogs. Despite, or maybe because of, this reputation, a schemer named Lamarro decided to frame Mister X for one of his own crimes, the better to divert the police from Lamarro’s big operation: that of smuggling drugs into Europe under the cover of a reputable pharmaceuticals enterprise. X, however, doesn’t like being framed, and over the course of the film the super-crook makes it his business to chastise these lesser felons. Sometimes, like Fantomas, X assumes disguises to execute his schemes, and a couple of times he dons a black catsuit with a hood and a domino mask. Still, most of the time the master criminal runs around in ordinary clothes. One online review claimed that X uses “gadgets,” but all I saw was a mundane smoke bomb. X receives assistance from his girl Friday, a lady with the odd name of “Timmy,” who shows off a little judo-skill in one scene.

It’s rare that I’ve seen native Italian actors pull off the charming qualities necessary for this sort of roguish character, but Pier Paolo Coppoli—billed with the name “Norman Clark”—acquits himself well in the charm department, as well as pulling off the brief action-scenes well. For fans of sixties Euro-flicks the best-known name in the cast is surely Helga Line, playing a secondary villain. However, in the version I saw, she’s last seen heaping scorn upon the captive Timmy—but though X frees Timmy, Line’s character just disappears from the story.

CRASH AND BURN (1990)

 

 

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

Though CRASH AND BURN was filmed by Empire Pictures in the same year as ROBOT JOX, and was even re-titled ROBOT JOX 2 in some markets, CRASH's use of giant human-driven "mecha" is far less important to its story. Indeed, there's only one such fighting-machine in the whole story.

CRASH takes place in a post-apocalyptic future devastated by economic chaos brought on by computer manipulation. Like most post-apocs, the collapse is an excuse to set the whole film in some barren desert, as short-hand for the loss of societal richness. But whereas many such films have to deal with roving raiders, CRASH's scripter J.S. Cardone concentrates on a counter-revolution against Unicom, an oppressive government, never seen except through its representatives. Perhaps because Unicom gained its power through a computer breakdown, they pre-emptively forbid the surviving human communities to have access to higher mechanism. This means not only computers, but also the huge robot-mecha that used to be commonplace.

The principal hero, Tyson Keen (Paul Ganus), is one such representative. He's sent to deliver goods to an out-of-the-way television station, apparently underwritten by Unicom, even though the crotchety manager Lathan (Ralph Waite) has no problem taking on-air shots against the government and its uncertain battles with the Resistance. Keen doesn't intend to stay, but in the grand tradition of 1948's KEY LARGO, he's forced to remain at the station by an impending "thermal storm." This means that he has to mingle with Lathan, Lathan's spunky teen granddaughter Arren (Megan Ward), an obnoxious TV-host, and an assortment of other functionaries. But then CRASH diverts into the terrain of the "science fiction mystery," as Lathan is slain by someone staying at the station. 

Cardone almost certainly borrows a few tropes from John Carpenter's THE THING (who among us is a killer) and from ALIEN (the killer is an android sent by Unicom to do the government's dirty work). Nevertheless, Megan Ward's performance as Arren overcomes many of the generic stumbling-blocks, in that she has boyish traits (she seeks to revive a cast-off mining robot she calls "Dv8") while seeking to deal with her girlish teen crush on the good-looking Tyson. 

The film is also enlivened by several strong action-sequences, as Tyson and Arren have to battle Lathan's mechanical killer (cue THE TERMINATOR tropes). Paul Ganus is a little dull, but most of the rest of the cast gives this minor effort their all.

KNIGHTS OF TERROR (1963)

 

 

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

KNIGHTS OF TERROR is a very basic swashbuckler that seems to borrow tropes from both ZORRO and from the "Doctor Syn" novels. Taking place in the 1500s, the setting uses a melange of different character-names, some sounding Spanish (Paolo, Christina) and some East European (Vladimir, Mirko). The titular knights ride around a particular duchy, raiding houses and killing people, and they're so elusive that some people believe that they're ghosts who have taken human form. Like the smugglers from the "Doctor Syn" novels, the riders also wear grotesque masks to further the illusion of their being spirits.

While all this is going on, evil Captain Mirko (Yves Vincent) seeks to force the gorgeous Princess Christine (Scilla Gabel) to marry him. Fortunately for the young woman, a more appealing young man, one Paolo (Tony Russell) comes into the picture, and even meets Christine for the first time in a confessional booth, much as Zorro met his lady-love. Paolo occasionally goes about in a domino mask but when he's unmasked no one, including Mirko, knows who he is. Some of Paolo's allies also wear masks, which reminded me of Zorro's legion of assistants.

The script drops a few broad hints as to who Paolo and his allies are, and the Big Reveal doesn't hold any surprises. There's also no surprise that Mirko is behind the Knights of Terror for some reason, so this time you have two sets of masked swashbucklers in opposition. There are a few good swordfights, and there's good chemistry between Russell and Gabel, but not much else.

GODZILLA FINAL WARS (2004)

 

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

Whatever its flaws, GODZILLA FINAL WARS does a better job summing up the "Millennium" cycle of Godzilla films that GODZILLA VS. DESTROYAH did for the "Heisei" series. At least in the former flick, the Big G goes out on top.

Ryuhei Kitamura directs his only Godzilla film with a fast-paced style reminiscent of such music-video-and-commercial directors as the American McG. The script for FINAL is generally better than your average music video, but the pace is so rushed and heedless that the potential for even basic characterization of the human characters get kicked to the curb. To his credit, Kitamura provides lots of kaiju eye-candy to take the place of drama, which one may justify on the grounds that most of the time the "human bits" in Godzilla films mostly serve to provide a sense of contrast to the battling behemoths.

Kitamura also makes clear from the outset that these "wars" are a tribute to all the "monster mash" elements of the Showa era. The opening asserts that in this world all the countries of the world have reached some sort of accord as the result of their constant battles with giant monsters (some of which appear only in old film-clips). This slightly futuristic setting is more or less a riff on DESTROY ALL MONSTERS, as is Kitamura's opening gambit: to have various countries other than Japan-- the U.S., Australia, France and China. The one monster who's out of the picture is Godzilla, who was entombed in ice by Captain Gordon (mixed wrestling champion Don Frye), who used a super-submarine to consign the Big G to his frozen prison. The submarine, "the Gotengo," is a shout-out to the one in ATRAGON, while the monsters on the loose include such sixties favorites as Rodan, Manda, Ebirah, Kumonga, the Kamacuras, Minilla, Anguirus, and (eventually) a version of King Ghidorah. Kitamura also works in the less celebrated critters of later eras, such as King Caesar, Hedorah, Zilla (a renamed version of America's 1998 GODZILLA), and Gigan. Further, Gordon belongs to a standard "Earth Defense Force"-- also a standard element of kaiju films-- but FINAL's defenders include a bunch of black-clad "mutants "(all Japanese) who don't demonstrate powers so much MATRIX-style martial arts, and these mutants seem like a cross between the X-Men and one of the many *sentai* teleserials that channeled elements of Japanese kaiju films.

Gigan gets an upgrade from his jejune beginnings in GODZILLA ON MONSTER ISLAND. In that film, he was just a big kaiju stooge to his alien masters. Here, he was sent to Earth 12,000 years before the film's present by an alien group, the Xielens, to conquer Earth, but the monster was defeated by a prehistoric incarnation of Mothra. Gigan's body remained submerged in the sea until discovered by the Earth Defense Force, and a cute lady biologist determines that there is a special genetic marker, "M-base," in the body of the dead monster. This genetic marker also appears in the bodies of the Matrixy-mutants, including the only one we get to know, Shinichi Ozaki. But does this strange discovery have anything to do with the sudden upsurge in monster activity?

Then the Xielens show up on Earth, but they present themselves as having come to be of service to mankind (as opposed to serving man, heh heh). The aliens somehow banish the monsters, and sign an accord with the humans to help them against a yet greater threat, an asteroid that may hit the Earth (and nostalgically named after the offending celestial body in GORATH). However, Ozaki, the lady biologist and a few others are given some inside info by the Faerie-Handlers of Mothra, who tell Ozaki that he's bonded to the evil of Gigan but that he still possesses the freedom of choice. They even give Ozaki a talisman to help him, though this item disappears from the story until needed at the climax.

The name of the Xielens is indebted to the alien villains of Planet X from MONSTER ZERO, and the FINAL script underscores by giving us a main villain who quixotically dubs himself "X." X takes less time than his predecessors to reveal his real plot: like the Planet X'ers, he and his people have engineered the upsurge in the monsters. The monsters are controlled through the M-base-- which X also plans to use to control mutant defenders, including Ozaki-- and the impending approach of Gorath is part of a really overcomplicated plan to bring a new version of Gigan and a new version of King Ghidorah to Earth as well. (The latter is apparently dubbed "Keizer Ghidorah" to distinguish him from the original, though the script had no problems rebooting Gigan's origin-- possibly because few people care any more than I as to the original.)

Once the Xielens have control of both the monsters and many of the mutants, the remaining good guys have only one resort: to revive Godzilla, who for some hard-to-believe reason cannot be controlled through the M-base. Once Gordon releases the Big G, he stomps off to Japan and begins the first of his "final wars" with various monsters, most of which are more like tussles. (I did like the one where Godzilla swings Kumonga around on his own webbing.) Godzilla does defeat one version of Gigan with ridiculous ease, but when Gorath arrives, the asteroid births both a second, tougher version of Gigan and the aforementioned Ghidorah. Godzilla gets a rough time from these two, and even some last-ditch help from Mothra doesn't make much difference. Ozaki, who is briefly suborned by X, manages to make his "choice" and send Godzilla enough power to revive the big lizard. Meanwhile, Ozaki has a big Matrix-fight with X and kicks his ass-- though the fight never sustains any emotional interest because Ozaki is so thinly drawn. (He doesn't even get a romantic arc with the lady biologist, though their opening scenes imply that they like each other.)

The FX are strong and produced with traditional "suitmation" techniques to the best of my knowledge, and Godzilla gets to be the consummate badass. He even menaces the good-guy humans at the end, but they're saved by the compassionate Minilla. And while this ending almost sounds like a "puppies and rainbows" conclusion, the script undermines that tendency by giving Ozaki the last word, as he states that this is just "the beginning of a new war." I wish that the whole script had followed something like this insight; that the release of the chaos of Godzilla isn't going to make everything safe, and that at some point in the future, monsters and humans are going to battle again, and that there will be no "final war."

FIREWALKER (1986)

 

FIREWALKER, also produced by Golan-and-Globus and directed by Thompson, takes the same near-comical approach to RAIDERS material, but if anything it's even lamer than KING. It concerns two Americans (Chuck Norris, Louis Gossett Jr.), stuck in Central America and looking for their next big break. Along comes a comely blonde girl, Patricia (Melody Anderson), who informs them of a fabulous Indian treasure, though the script doesn't seem clear on whether the treasure was left behind by the Aztecs, the Mayans, or the Apaches. As the trio set out on their trek, they are menaced by Coyote, a local shaman, also the evil guardian of the treasure. He's also apparently the "firewalker" of the title, though this is barely justified in the careless script.

I've seen other online reviews go into great depth charting the embarrassing inconsistencies of the film, so I won't touch on them here, except for one. After Norris and Co have consulted with a "good shaman" to get help on their quest, they take their leave, and the shaman says something like, "I don't know how Tonto does it." It's not out of line for a Native American to pass arch comments on people looking to plunder Indian artifacts. However, at least Tonto's tribal origins were consistent,while this film's script can't even keep its Native American mythology straight.

Again the humor is largely overplayed by Thompson and largely unfunny, but there's some novelty in seeing Chuck Norris, the Great Stone Face, trying to play things for laughs. He doesn't do that badly, even given the lame lines he has to read, but his relative success might be attributable to a good working chemistry with Louis Gossett, an actor noted for his ability to imbue even the worst characters with total conviction.

HONOR ROLL #88, NOVEMBER 28

 LOU GOSSETT walks a fine line to keep his dignity in an excessively bad Chuck Norris flick.

GIGAN gets his second chance at Big Bad status in the monster-mashup GODZILLA FINAL WARS.

SCILLA GABEL experiences a night-- er, knight-- of terror.

First you crash, PAUL GANUS, then you burn.

GAIA GERMANI provides backup to one of the first "Avengers."

The Hal Jordan GREEN LANTERN forges a New Frontier.

BEVERLY HILLS NINJA (1997)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*

FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*

CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological, sociological*


BEVERLY HILLS NINJA is a formulaic comedy made to showcase the talents of the late Chris Farley.  Farley, despite being a very hefty fellow, was skilled in physical comedy, revealing a certain athleticism not typical of chubby comedians.

Set in contemporary times, NINJA concerns a clan of Japanese ninjas who hold sacred a prophecy of a "Great White Ninja" who will someday come among them.  The clan's sensei adopts into their order a Caucasian foundling, names him Haru and raises Haru as his own son and adoptive brother to his real son Gobei.  Gobei is in all ways a superb ninja, but Haru is maladroit in the extreme, and fails to graduate at the head of his class.

While Haru is alone at the ninja sanctuary, he meets an American woman named Allison, who charms him and involves Haru in her troubles with gangsters.  Haru bids farewell to his adoptive father as he prepares to journey to America to help Allison.  The sensei, justifiably believing that Haru will probably screw up royally, sends Gobei to follow Haru to America and keep him from harm.

Though the slapstick routines are largely predictable, they're reasonably well done, particularly those wherein the superior ninja-brother keeps getting accidentally bashed as he shadows his inept sibling.  There might be a minor element of sibling rivalry in the punishment Gobei takes at the hands of Haru.  The device is somewhat comparable to a similar schtick in BLANKMAN, though in NINJA any aggression is displaced by the fact that Haru is equally clumsy around everyone. 

Oddly, the only scenes that mark this martial comedy as "marvelous" are those in which either Haru or Gobei commune with their sensei through some form of astral-travel/telepathy.  I've rarely seen such scenes in Asian ninja movies, but NINJA treats the idea as if it's a standard trope worthy of mocking.  Oddly, I only recall one ninja-movie-- literally of the American-made variety-- which used such a trope, though NINJA at least has enough a budget to make the psychic stuff look marginally credible.

I debated about whether to consider Haru's exploits as a "combative comedy," but decided against it.  Throughout the majority of the film, Haru is unable to harness any of the ninja skills he's studied, and the movie's standout scene may be one in which Nicolette Sheridan (as Allison) punches out a bad guy before Haru can even get warmed up.  There's one scene at the end where Haru finally gets his mojo working in order to save his adoptive brother, so that the film does end up in a big fight between the two brothers and Allison's gangster-enemies.  But the nature of the violence in BEVERLY HILLS NINJA is that of slapstick first and foremost, rather than combining the comedy with the combative, as was done in 1994's BLANKMAN.

ADDENDUM 6-8-17: I've overruled my earlier judgment and now seem NINJA to be just as much a "combative comedy" as BLANKMAN.

MALEFICENT (2014)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *good* 

FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure *

CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological, metaphysical, cosmological, psychological*


I suspect that the roots of Maleficent's reformation probably run alongside those of OZ: THE GREAT AND POWERFUL-- to wit, the novel/stage play of WICKED, in which L. Frank Baum's "Wicked Witch of the West" was given a sympathetic makeover.  Happily, although OZ was a bore, saddled with a flat protagonist and an actor unable to overcome the script's limitations, MALEFICENT is more successful in its re-imagining.

I mentioned in my review of Disney's SLEEPING BEAUTY that the titular beauty's lack of a birth-mother is compensated for by "Maleficent and the Three Good Fairies subsume the roles of 'bad mother' and 'good mothers' respectively." This psychological division, only implicit in the 1959 film, becomes the film's central theme.

This Maleficent-- portrayed with acidulous charm by Angeline Jolie-- shares the familiar motif of "the Woman Wronged by a Man." Far from being an evil fairy with vague Satanic associations, Maleficent begins as a young wing-backed fairy who dwells in a fairy-haunted forest, far from the prosaic world of man. (I'll note in passing that the designs for the fairy creatures also far excel the dull imagery of the OZ film.)  In the innocence of her youth Maleficent meets an adventurous young man, Stefan, and becomes first his friend, and in later years, his implied lover, though no literal sex is indicated. By the time Stefan reaches his young adulthood, however, he's seduced by the allure of power. When the king of the nearby castle announces that he will deed his kingdom to anyone who can slay Maleficent-- who has refused to accept the tyrant's authority-- Stefan uses his friendship to drug Maleficent.  He shies away from killing her, but because he needs evidence that he has slain her, he cuts off her wings for his trophy. Stefan gets the kingship and the betrayed fairy-woman retreats into her magic forest, biding her time.  When Stefan and his barely seen wife conceive a child, Maleficent appears uninvited at the christening and lays an unstoppable curse upon the female infant Aurora.

In the 1959 film, three wise if somewhat dumpy fairies take Aurora under their tutelage to keep Maleficent from finding her. In this film, the three "good mothers" become three incompetent pixies, so scatter-brained that they can barely figure out how to care for their charge. All-knowing Maleficent finds their secluded cottage easily, where she is presented with a conundrum.  If the infant doesn't survive the clumsy care of the pixies, she'll never live to receive Maleficent's curse, and the fairy-woman will never be revenged on Stefan. Thus Maleficent, who starts out intending to be the murderous bad mother to Aurora, ends up fulfilling the duties of a good mother.

Much of what follows is fairly predictable: Aurora discovers the identity of her mysterious protector and responds to her as if Maleficent is a maternal guide-- which she is, insofar as Aurora is symbolically the child Maleficent might have had with Stefan.  I even foresaw that the "love's true kiss" that would awaken the beauty from her sleep would not come from Prince Philip-- a rather negligible presence in the story--but from Aurora's symbolic mother.  Still, thanks to the stunning design-work and Robert Stromberg's crisp direction, even the predictable moments are pleasurable.  It's perhaps inevitable that, since in the 1959 film Maleficent's nasty raven was an objective correlative of her evil, here the raven, name of Diaval, should be used for comedy relief. Still, his presence also foreshadows Maleficent's need for companionship, and makes her mother-love for Aurora more credible.  The film's weakest point is its villain Stefan, in that the reasons for his betrayal are inadequately explored.

BARBARELLA (1968)

 

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


I once made the following comment about this film's status as an "irony:"

BARBARELLA (1968)— Jean-Claude Forest’s sexy space-fantasy might have borrowed a lot of paraphernalia from FLASH GORDON, but the tone of Barbarella is more Rabelais than Raymond. At times Vadim’s best work verges on straight comedy, but the satirical elements dominate, particularly in the scene of Barbarella's most memorable combat-scene, where she out-orgasms a mechanical sex-machine.

After recently re-watching the 1968 film, I also re-read the original Jean-Claude Forest stories on which the film was based. All of these were translated into English for a 1960s volume from Grove Press, and this seems to be the sole English-language source for the curvaceous crusader's adventures, except for a much later 1970s sequence printed in HEAVY METAL.

The original 1960s stories have been accurately praised as a breakthrough for comic books of the period, in that BARARELLA, however derivative of the FLASH GORDON mythos, seems to have been the first attempt by a major publisher to issue comics with mature sexual content. In addition, whereas FLASH GORDON was all about the hero's continual attempt to overthrow various tyrants of Mongo, Barbarella's exploits are more in the tradition of the picaresque novel, with the heroine merely bopping about from peril to peril-- many of which, naturally, imply sexual encounters.

Despite the allegation that Roger Vadim's script had at least fourteen contributing writers, and that Vadim himself was more interested in stunning visuals than in story, the movie does manage to cull many of the more sensational elements of the Forest stories-- often combining elements from different stories-- and unite them in a plot with some degree of consistency.

This means that Barbarella, rather than simply drifting from one adventure to the next, is given A Mission at the film's beginning. The heroine hails from a far-future Earth which has become so over-civilized that its natives use "exaltation transference pills" to achieve sexual ecstacy. It's not clear why Barbarella, who possesses no special training, is selected to go to Tau Ceti, where she's expected to find missing scientist Duran Duran and prevent his positronic ray from falling into enemy hands. Indeed, this may be one of Vadim's key ironies; that Earth entrusts its future to a female astronaut, without their even being aware that her primary skill is her ability to seduce males (and one female) with her feminine charms. To be sure, in Barbarella's first encounter she initially offers to reward her first male conquest with sex in the Earthling manner. But once he converts her to the old-fashioned method, Barbarella never "goes back," as she uses sex to seduce an angel and a queen, as well as destroying the aforementioned ecstacy-machine with her own erotic capacity.

To be sure, during the course of Barbarella's peripatetic adventures, she does occasionally show that she can use a ray-gun. which is about the only reason I can countenance this film as belonging to my "combative irony" category. Her shooting-skills don't play a major role in the plot, contrary to the many iconic posters showing her brandishing various weapons. Given that in the 1960s a woman handling a gun would have instantly connoted "penis envy" to the Freudians, it's kind of surprising that Vadim never goes there. But Barbarella's greatest weapon is dumb luck, which more or less accounts for the way she encounters the evil queen of Sogo, the resistance movement headed by Dildano (who, despite his name, DOESN'T have sex with Barbarella), and the scientist Duran Duran, who plays only a small role in the comics but becomes far more central in the film-- which surely led to the co-opting of his name by the famed rock band.

Fonda's wide-eyed approach to heroism doesn't much resemble the rather cynical and knowing attitude of Forest's protagonist, but the latter approach probably wouldn't have played any better in the 1960s, given that the film was a box-office flop. The effects are minimal by modern standards, but the excellent costume-work makes up for a lot-- which was also the primary visual appeal of FLASH GORDON, for that matter. Fortunately, over the years the film has become a cult movie, and Vadim's ironic accomplishment has retained its appeal for a small, select audience ever since.

THE HOBBIT: BATTLE OF THE FIVE ARMIES (2014)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*

MYTHICITY: *fair*

FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*

CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical*

Given that I've let seven years pass since I reviewed the middle part of Peter Jackson's HOBBIT film trilogy, it should be evident that the film didn't inspire in me any great passion to review it, either to bash or to praise. And I tend to believe that by this time in the filming-sequence, Jackson too just wanted to tie everything up and be done with the project.

As with the other reviews of the trilogy, I'm not going to dwell on differences between the Tolkien book and its adaptations, except for three points. Naturally, this film finishes up the slaying of the dragon Smaug, who was a principal antagonist of the second movie. Next, as mentioned in the previous review, Jackson concludes a romance-subplot that never existed in the book: a doomed but still not very interesting dalliance between a female elf (Evangeline Lilly) and a male dwarf (Aidan Turner). And the other point is that most of the climactic battle in the book takes place after viewpoint character Bilbo has been rendered unconscious, so that the reader only gets the main action summarized.

For any readers who might have wanted to behold that battle, Jackson and his entourage spare no expense in mounting copious battle scenes. Some of these take place between the fractious armies of the dwarves and of the elves-- both of whom are, in essence, "good guys" who are divided by their lust for treasure and for the self-esteem that comes from holding it. But to banish the potential for tragedy from the story, an army of Orcs, led by a super-Orc named Azog, intrudes on the conflict, providing a mutual enemy for all to fight with. Bilbo even participates in this conflict a little bit before he does indeed get hit on the head and knocked out until all the fighting has been finished.

To be sure, Jackson does keep an element of tragedy from Tolkien's book. Thorinn, king of the dwarves, succeeds in regaining the long-lost mountain-home of his people, and the treasure therein-- but even without his having any contact with the One Ring, the monarch becomes fanatically obsessed with keeping all the treasure, even from those who earned their share. Bilbo, a simple hobbit guided by common sense, eventually shows Thorinn the error of his ways, though the dwarf loses his life despite regaining (perhaps too easily) his sanity.

But Jackson's film is all about the action, not the drama. Many of the big scenes between contending armies are just average, but Jackson managed a standout duel between Thorinn and Azog on the surface of a frozen lake-- though arguably it goes on a little too long. I can't give the whole trilogy a "good" rating as I did for the first film in the series, but it could have been far, far worse.

CARRY ON SCREAMING (1966)

 

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

Though I've not seen all of the eleven CARRY ON films prior to SCREAMING, I've the impression that this film is a little more rigorously plotted than most flicks in the franchise. If so, this may be because the producers were trying to hew to the model of "old dark house" horror-films rather than just sticking to the looser setups for British vaudeville gags. 

Usually the main stars of each CARRY ON film belong to an ongoing ensemble of comedians, including Jim Dale, Joan Sims, Charles Hawtrey, Peter Butterworth, Bernard Bresslaw, and Kenneth Williams. In contrast to this tendency, the central characters of SCREAMING are a devious duo of mad scientists. Orlando Watt (Williams) and Valeria (Fenella Fielding, making the last of two appearances in a CARRY ON movie). Hawtrey, Sims and Bresslaw all have minor supporting roles, while major support-roles are filled out by the characters of Albert (Dale), who loses a girl to the monstrous mad scientists, and the two cops investigating the disappearance, Slobotham (Butterworth) and Sergeant Bung (Harry H. Corbett, who made no further CARRY ONs).

Americans best know Fielding for her role in 1962's THE OLD DARK HOUSE, a collaboration between the American director William Castle and Hammer Studios. This is about as close as SCREAMING gets to anything done by England's premiere horror-makers at Hammer, given that the film is all about a weird family, comprised not only of the Watts but also their pet Frankenstein Monster, "Oddbod." To be sure, Orlando may not even be alive any more, since in his first appearance Valeria is keeping him alive with electrical charges, which they both use to keep Oddbod functioning. But to defray their expenses in their expensive "old dark house," the Watts use Oddbod to abduct local girls, whom the sinister scientists change into wax statues by reversing the dead-coming-to-life currents, or something like that. The Watts then sell the statues to English department stores, and if the viewers wonder about just how remunerative this scheme could be, the script chooses not to dwell on the matter.

After Oddbod steals Albert's girlfriend Doris (Angela Douglas), Albert seeks out the local constabulary. Bung is only too happy to have a new case, to give him an excuse to escape his shrewish wife (Sims). They find one clue at the site of Doris's abduction: a very hairy severed finger. Back at the Watts manor, the duo discover that Oddbod's dropped a digit, so they infuse the hairy beast with more electricity and he grows the finger back. Later, the finger, accidentally exposed to electricity at the police lab, grows back a whole body, which makes it way to the manor and gets dubbed "Oddbod Junior."

Bung and Slobotham investigate the Watts simply because they're in the vicinity of the crime, but neither cop really suspects anything, while Bung is more than a little enamored of voluptuous Valeria. For some reason, though, the Watts think of the constables as a real threat. Albert finds Doris's waxen body in town, but can't prove that it's a transformed human being. So Orlando, who studied with both Doctor Frankenstein and Doctor Jekyll, slips Bung a Mister Hyde mickey, so that the beastly Bung will do Orlando's bidding and steal Wax Doris. Bung reverts to normal without remembering what he's done, but the Watts try to get rid of the investigators with a plot derived from Doyle's "The Speckled Band." Bung still doesn't catch on to the villains, but he gets Slobotham to masquerade as a woman to lure out the kidnappers. This all leads to an epic (for CARRY ON) battle, when Orlando sends the two Oddbods to kill off the detectives. Bung changes into Sergeant Hyde and beats down the monsters. Orlando gets undone when a bolt of lightning providentially revives a mummy he has to have around, and the mummy takes Orlando's secrets to their graves. In a final coda, the married Sergeant Bung finds a way to get around his nagging wife and to shack up with vivacious Valeria.

There are a good smattering of ribald jokes and silly slapstick here, though nothing in particular stands out. Valeria doesn't appear to be a real "vamp"-- even if she does duplicate TV-host Vampira's "mind if I smoke" schtick, so it's  not till the belated introduction of the mummy "Rubatiti" and the ersatz Edward Hyde does CARRY ON SCREAMING register as a monster mashup.

THE MUMMY (1999), THE MUMMY RETURNS (2001), THE MUMMY...DRAGON EMPEROR (2008)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: (1-2) *fair,* (3) *poor*

FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure *

CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical, psychological*

I generally judge horror-films as "dramas" because they principally concern the rise and fall of some type of monster, be it a vampire, a mad scientist, or-- a mummy, like Kharis from this classic Universal series. But films about monster-hunters usually fit better with the category of "adventure." And there's no question in my mind that the "Mummy" series initiated by writer-director Steven Sommers is not about the titular monster, but about the romantically-involved monster-fighting couple Rick O'Connell (Brendan Fraser) and Evy Carnahan (Rachel Weicz).

It's a measure of my respect for the progenitor of all mummy-films, Karl Freund's 1932 THE MUMMY, that I haven't reviewed it here yet, since I think it deserves an analysis about as long as three of my normal posts. Happily, Sommers does not attempt to duplicate the moody charms of the Freund film. Given his priorities, any such attempt probably would not have turned out well. Instead, the script for the 1999 film merely borrows and/or alters names and events from the earlier film, and employs them for one of the better exemplars of the "supernatural tomb raider" genre more or less birthed by the Indiana Jones series.

Many of the romantic bits between Rick and Evy are amusing, particularly their "meet-cute-yet-morbid" scene when soldier-of-fortune Rick, about to be hanged in Egypt, steals a kiss from Egyptologist Evy Carnahan.  Needless to say, the hero is spared a grisly death-- though the stunt almost killed actor Brendan Fraser-- and he goes on to assist brash but inexperienced Evy and her cowardly brother in seeking out a lost tomb. They're looking for a legendary magic book, but they also find the remains of Imhotep, court magician to the Pharaoh Seti I.  Evy reads aloud a spell from the book, which returns the mummy to life.  Like the Imhotep played by Boris Karloff in the 1932 film, this mummy is a magician rather than a mute bandage-swathed killer. But where Karloff's character could only bring about very limited spells, this Imhotep can conjure forth the sort of phenomena one might associate with an angry god-- a plague of locusts, a hostile sandstorm. Indeed, when one sees what the modern Imhotep can do, one can hardly believe mere mortal Egyptians overpowered him back in The Day.  As a meaningless tip of the hat to the Freund film, an Egyptian warrior who seeks to keep Imhotep dead is given the phony name Karloff's character assumes in the 1932 work: "Ardath Bey."

Sommers' feel for light-hearted action is sure, but he makes no effort to ground his story of a malevolent magician in a credible fantasy-structure. One of THE MUMMY's greatest inconsistencies is that when Imhotep wants to send deadly curses after those who have raided his tomb and that of his beloved, he patterns his spells after the plagues sent against Egypt by the Jewish leader Moses.  I can understand Sommers not bothering to research archaic Egyptian magical practices, but why would an Egyptian magician want to copy from Moses-- who, in theory, was calling on magic from a monotheistic deity having nothing in common with Egypt's many deities? The real answer, I suppose, is that Sommers guessed that most moviegoers would know nothing about Egypt beyond what appears in the Old Testament, and so he played to that.  Additionally, the romantic travails of the 1932 Imhotep are made secondary to those of the living monster-hunting couple, though the former "grand passion" does assume greater importance in the sequel.

THE MUMMY RETURNS is a more frenetic film, but it works better, given that here Sommers has totally committed to his project of creating a phony-baloney Egypt with no connections to the real culture.  Rick and Evy are now a married couple with a ten-year-old son. A cult devoted to Imhotep revives the wizard-mummy again, but this time for a world-beating project. It seems that in ancient times a warrior named Mathayus entered into a pact with the death-god Anubis. This Anubis, who functions like a bargain-basement version of Satan, creates an unstoppable army for the warrior in exchange for his soul. Mathayus gets his conquest, but then ends up the monstrous slave of the jackal-god. The cult wants Imhotep to vanquish Mathayus, aka "the Scorpion King," in order to gain control of his immortal army.

In addition, Imhotep-- who was trying to reincarnate his lost love Anck-su-Namun in the first film by sticking her soul in Evy's body-- meets up with Meela, the genuine descendant of his Egyptian princess. However, the cult still needs an artifact in the possession of the O'Connells, which places them, their son, and assorted other allies in conflict with Imhotep's plans.  The son is kidnapped, the anguished parents give pursuit, and Imhotep manages to cause the soul of Anck-su-Namun to come to conscious life in Meela's body. An unlooked-for consequence of this, however, is that half-Egyptian Evy O'Connell is stimulated into reliving her own ancestral memories. It seems Evy was Nefertiri, daughter of the Pharaoh Seti I, and that she witnessed her daddy being slain by his evil mistress Anck-su-Namun and her cover lover Imhotep.  This leads to a running bitch-battle between Evy and Meela, who, in Freudian terms, are incarnations of a dutiful daughter and the Bad Woman who tries to take her father from her.  The Oedipal scenario doesn't really work, though, because Evy is not drawn toward this Imhotep in the manner that Helen Grosvenor is to the original magician-mummy.

Even though MUMMY RETURNS is overstuffed with incidents-- not least the intrusion of the Scorpion King character, tailor-made to further the Hollywood career of Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson-- this strategy plays well to Sommers' strengths, and the result is a fast-paced farrago of crazed set-pieces, particularly the sword-duel between two Egyptian warrior princesses, seen above.  This film would have been a good conclusion to a lightweight but moderately entertaining series.

Unfortunately, seven years later, the studio tried once more to go mining for mummies, and to sum it up with mixed metaphors, this was one too many trips back to the well. Someone must have surmised that there wasn't much more they could do with-- or to-- Egyptian mummies, they decided to go out for Chinese-- that is, Chinese terracotta warriors, yet another undead army. This one is supposed to serve the evil Dragon Emperor (Jet Li), who aspires to world conquest back during some Chinese feudal era.  The "forbidden love" triangle from the first two films is all but xeroxed off, with the Emperor getting peeved when his Number Two Man, a fellow named Ming, gets it on with Zi Yuan (Michelle Yeoh), the same witch who made the Emperor's triumph possible.  The Emperor kills Ming, but Zi Yuan gets even by cursing the Emperor and his army into suspended animation.

After recounting this archaic setup, the film shuttles to 1946. The O'Connells are semi-retired, while their now adult son Alex has gone into the tomb raiding business, despite his general feelings that Mommy and Daddy haven't paid him enough attention.  Alex uncovers, and unleashes, the Dragon Emperor, despite the efforts of a kung-fu cutie named Lin (Isabelle Leong), who takes over the function of Holy Warrior Ardath Bey in the previous films. Lin is the daughter of Zi Yuan, who's been hanging around for centuries in Shangri-La for just this occasion.

There are a few minor entertainments in TOMB. The CGI Yetis were decent, and the DVD shows an alternate ending in which cowardly Jonathan flees China for a locale supposedly free of mummies-- and chooses the one place in South America known for "Mayan mummies."  But most of the film is deadly-dull despite all the fights and chases. As the photo above shows, there's a martial-arts duel between Jet Li and Michelle Yeoh, but it's a waste of time next to the highly kinetic martial battles both actors have produced in earlier films.  Maria Bello replaces Weicz in the role of Evy O'Connell, and gets some equally good fight-scenes, but the "rekindled romance" angle between the monster-battling couple suffers from tired blood.

Frankly, the most significance I can find in the MUMMY series was that Sommers invented "fast mummies" long before anyone came up with "fast zombies." But that innovation didn't eventuate in any great wealth of new mummy movies, fast or slow.

 

HONOR ROLL #87, DECEMBER 22

 BRENDAN FRASER shows that he's no Mummy's Boy.

FENELLA FIELDING is literally smokin'-hot, though all the monsters are conjured up by her crazy brother.

MARTIN FREEMAN sees more action in ten minutes of BATTLE OF FIVE ARMIES than the print Bilbo did in the whole HOBBIT.

"A liberal is someone who can forgive JANE FONDA for Hanoi but not for BARBARELLA."

ELLE FANNING provides MALEFICENT with family affection while keeping all the princes out of the picture.

CHRIS FARLEY dons ninja-garb and mounts a crusade for dumb comedy.

 

DOCTOR STRANGE (2007)

 

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

Originally I didn't like this DTV version of the origin of Marvel's sorcerer supreme Doctor Strange. However, when I compare it to the 2016 live-action MCU film-- which I'm going to have force myself to review-- I found myself much more taken with the Greg Johnson-Craig Kyle script.

I think on first viewing I wanted a movie more filled with the exoticism and the vaulting imagination of the original 1960s Lee-Ditko comics feature. However, on reconsideration I have to admit that it would be really tough, half a century later, to duplicate the exotic tropes that Lee and Ditko utilized in Strange's origin, which was rooted in pop-fictional ideas about Tibetan mysticism and cultural attitudes about the divisions between East and West. As for the imaginative aspects of the feature, these were possible in an open-ended series, which usually dealt with the hero venturing into dozens of amorphous realities ruled by nasty sorcerous overlords. A stand-alone DTV flick like this one is limited to "Strange's Greatest Foes," which means yet another team-up of Strange's mortal enemy Baron Mordo and Mordo's extradimensional patron Dormammu.

The original comic implies that Doctor Strange alone serves a lonely vigil protecting mankind from the horrors of otherworldly occult menace. Instead STRANGE starts off by establishing that there's a whole coterie of experienced sorcerers who guard Earth against supernatural creatures, and that all of them-- including future villain Baron Mordo-- are supervised by the mighty Tibetan wizard known as the Ancient One. The other wizards are of diverse nationalities, but the script doesn't run this trope into the ground as the 2016 film did, and even the treatment of the comics-character Wong-- a manservant who gets upgraded to a powerful wizard-- doesn't come off as special pleading. Yet the cabalistic coterie does need to cultivate a Sorcerer Supreme, and Wong is the one who takes notice of Doctor Stephen Strange.

As in the comics-origin, Strange starts out as a brilliant neurosurgeon who cares only about making money-- though the script does ameliorate his selfishness, since he tells his former girlfriend and fellow doctor that without money, the big hospitals couldn't operate. Strange also has a thing against working with children, which later becomes important to the plot, and the writers attempt to make this palatable by showing that he still grieves for his dead sister, whom Strange wasn't able to save on the operating table. This is by far the weakest element in the story, being yet another variation of the "had I but done better" trope that Marvel made famous with that other Lee-Ditko creation, Spider-Man. Mercifully, references to the dead sister are kept to a minimum.

As in the original tale, Strange suffers a vehicular injury so that he can't operate any more, and after reducing himself to poverty looking for cures, he receives a message from Wong, summoning him to Tibet for a possible remedy. 

What follows is the backbone of the show, as Strange endures the torturous discipline of a Tibetan monastery and the enmity of Mordo, who senses in Strange a competitor. He thinks he's there for a cure, but the Ancient One, taking his cue from Plato, desires a Sorcerer Supreme who doesn't covet the position, but accepts it as his duty. Strange is ultimately introduced to a magical view of the universe, which suggests that the world of matter can be instantly transformed by the will of a master magician. I won't claim that Johnson and Kyle come up with anything radically innovative in their interpretation of the occult sciences. But these days I often find myself settling for simple lucidity. 

The interest level drops a bit as Strange accepts his role in protecting the world from otherworldly villains, specifically that of the magical-energy creature Dormammu, who's using Earth's children as gateways for invasion. But the artists on the DTV come up with a pleasing, more streamlined costume for the hero, and Strange's use of transformation-magic makes for some amusing. On the debit side, neither of the villains have any strong personality, and the only strong symbolic discourse here is the one between the main hero and his ancient tutor. However, that proves to be enough to make DOCTOR STRANGE one of the better efforts from Marvel Animation.

FLAME OF CALCUTTA (1953)

 

 

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

FLAME OF CALCUTTA is one of many "masked swashbuckler" B-films that appeared throughout the late forties and early fifties. In contrast to the swashbucklers of the thirties and early forties, these flicks had no problem showing women in these Zorro-like roles. That said, FLAME is a little ambivalent on that score.

As the title suggests, the setting is Calcutta, specifically that of the 1850s, at a time when the British had established a trade hegemony in India, though they were not at that time in total control. India is still dominated by numerous warring princes, and one of these is Prince Jehan, who deposes another Muslim monarch, name of Amir. But in so doing Jehan creates his own nemesis, for Jehan murders a French diplomatic representative, apparently for being friendly with Amir. The diplomat's daughter Suzanne Roget (Denise Darcel) then seeks revenge on Jehan by organizing the remnants of Amir-loyalists against Jehan. It's not clear whether or not her allies know she's female, but she's definitely shielding her identity from Jehan's people, for Suzanne wears a red mask and flowing red robes that lead to her being dubbed "the Flame." She leads her forces into battle, showing herself to be as good with a sword as this catchpenny production can make evident.

Prior to becoming a freedom fighter, though, Suzanne was engaged to a young British officer, Lambert (Patrick Knowles). Lambert wants Suzanne to quit being a martial symbol and to marry him, but she refuses to leave her father unavenged. Lambert has no jurisdiction over Jehan's new rule, but he can deploy troops if British trade interests are threatened. Jehan decides to force the Brits' hand, hiring an impostor to masquerade as the Flame and to attack British caravans. Because Lambert knows that the real Flame is innocent, he talks her into surrendering to British forces so that she will receive an exculpatory trial. 

Thanks to various info-peddlers, Jehan manages to abduct Suzanne, though his long-range purpose is to implicate her in British raids once more. Lambert foresees the stratagem and outwits Jehan. The final battle is arranged a bit like the one in PRC's SWORD OF MONTE CRISTO,   wherein the male lead swordfights with the main villain while his female partner has to settle for the villain's counselor. 

Much of the narrative is organized around Lambert's machinations as he tries to break British neutrality. However, another similarity to SWORD is that all of the male character's activities are something of a response to the female lead's charismatic personality, so here as in SWORD, I deem the Flame to be the centric figure here, even if she only gets a few half-decent action-scenes. Darcel, with her thick French accent, doesn't make the most appealing of heroines. But then, all of the actors in this routine thriller give no more than the mechanical script gives them. Director Seymour Friedman and one of the two writers have nothing but journeyman work to their names, but the second writer, Sol Shor, contributed to four classic serials in the 1940s: DRUMS OF FU MANCHU, THE CRIMSON GHOST, ADVENTURES OF CAPTAIN MARVEL, and KING OF THE ROCKET MEN. 

WAR OF THE PLANETS (1966)

 

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological. sociological*

WAR OF THE PLANETS was the second of Italian director Antonio Margheriti's "Gamma One" tetralogy. I happened to see the first flick in the series first, THE WILD WILD PLANET (which justified that title), and next to that brain-damaged bit of space opera, WAR seemed rather routine and chintzy.

On re-viewing WAR, though, I find it holds some appeal different from that of the first film. The story concerns how the crew of the futuristic space station Alpha Two is menaced by energy-aliens known as "diaphanoids." (An alternate title for the film is THE DEADLY DIAPHANOIDS.) The aliens are easily the most underwhelming aspect of the film, for they're always represented by nothing more than green swirls of smoke. 

However, Margheriti's depiction of life on the space station is much more lively and appealing than that of a lot of SF-films of the time. The main characters are Commander Mike Halstead (Tony Russel) and his girlfriend, communications officer Connie (Lisa Gastoni), but their respective ranks get in the way. In their first scene together, she objects to him expecting her to tamp down her feelings despite the military hierarchy to which both belong. I wouldn't go so far as to say Margheriti or his writers were attempting to make a philosophical point as such, but the script does keep coming back to the conflict between individuality and authority-- seen at its most tyrannical in the menace of the insubstantial Diaphanoids. By chance, the filmmakers touched on a conflict which would appear throughout Gene Roddenberry's seminal STAR TREK series, which debuted on American TV the same year.

The evil cloud-aliens start possessing human beings, which makes it much easier for them to communicate through their pawns. One of these characters, Captain Dubois, actually seems to struggle against the possession, communicating more than a little sense of what it means to have one's will subsumed. Thus, when Halstead eventually finds a means to expel the possessors, there's a little more emotional context to the victory than one sees in, say, THE GREEN SLIME.

Similarly, though the relationship between Halstead and Connie is fairly sexist, at least it doesn't feel SLIME-y by having the main hero get rid of his romantic competition to win the girl, as SLIME did. So WAR OF THE PLANETS is at least a modestly pleasing thriller, but nothing more.

HERCULES AGAINST ROME (1964)

 

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

I'm fairly surprised that in HERCULES AGAINST ROME this version of Hercules is NOT one of the many disguises for the popular Italian muscle-hero Maciste. It might have been interesting if he were really the Son of Zeus, making a random appearance amongst mortals long after his purported life in ancient Greece-- specifically, during a late period of Roman rule around the time of Emperior Gordian III (second century AD). But instead, this "Hercules" is just a very strong blacksmith with no supernatural aspects.

That doesn't mean that this version of the famed hero (once again played by Alan Steel) can't kick ass when he pleases. Indeed, Steel is pretty much ROME's only selling-point. No matter how many well armed soldiers attack the hero, all Herc has to do is wade into them with bare fists, and they just go flying. A particularly amusing scene has three or four archers draw a bead on the unshielded hero. He hides behind a wooden goat-fence, tears it up, and throws it at some of the nearby soldiers. Why does this action prevent the archers from still shooting him? Best not to ask.

When Steel is not fighting soldiers, the film bogs down in a tedious palace intrigue plot, as an evildoer (Daniele Vargas) assassinates Gordian III and tries to arrange for a marriage of convenience to a noblewoman named Ulpia (Wandisa Guida). None of the intrigues nor the villain's depredations toward the people, nor a B-plot about Ulpia's love for a common soldier, generate any interest. There's a little dramatic potential in the blacksmith's village, since a comely young woman, the unusually named "Erika," has a thing for the big lunk who still thinks of her as a "little girl." But by the film's end Erika fades from the plot, and there's no telling whether Hercules, riding back to his small village, will ever get with her. Despite three attractive female co-stars, ROME does nothing to take advantage of their charms.

THE WHISPERING SHADOW (1933)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*

MYTHICITY: *poor*

FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*

CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*

WHISPERING SHADOW was star-billed Bela Lugosi's first serial, but it's far from his best. 
Even by 1933 it was routine to organize a serial around the activities of a mysterious villain, who became the narrative center while the hero or heroes sought to unveil his identity.  In contrast to SHADOW OF CHINATOWN, where the villain's identity is known throughout, the "Whispering Shadow" is approrpriately seen as a shadowy figure, actually a projected image that appears before his hired thugs to give them their commands. Only a few times is the villain seen in the (heavily costumed) flesh, with the result that the serial does a fairly good job of keeping the audience guessing. I don't think I'm giving anything much away to say that the heroes' number one suspect, Professor Strang (Lugosi), is not the villain this time, but your basic red herring.  Strang, who runs a slightly spooky wax museum, gets involved in the Shadow's quest to steal the Crown Jewels of the Balkan States.  Also involved is heroic main character Foster, who wants to hunt down the Shadow for having killed Foster's brother.

Neither direction nor action-scenes are anything special here.  The marvelous gimmick most on display here is an electrical "death ray" which the Shadow can direct at anyone who wears a "death disc," a sort of homing device for the ray.  These scenes of electrical death are largely the serial's only high points, although Lugosi and heroine Viva Tattersall give intense performances.

LICENSE TO KILL (1989)

 

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

At the beginning of my review of the two XXX films, I wrote:

Most films in the “superspy” subgenre lie beneath the colossal shadow of the James Bond books and films. This means that like those sources, latecomers have the same ambivalence as to their phenomenal qualities. Sometimes they seem to take place entirely within a naturalistic world, and sometimes in one that includes just a few uncanny aspects. And sometimes the superspy’s world possesses outright marvelous aspects, though these are usually confined to specific super-weapons, like Bond’s invisible car in DIE ANOTHER DIE. 

Because a few of the weapons in the two-film XXX series qualify for the “marvelous” category, both films fall into that category as well. However, the general approach of the films is closest to a naturalistic spy-series like the Bourne films, so that the presence of marvelous gadgets in the narratives is somewhat marginalized and treated with a almost condescending irony.

When I wrote the above I hadn't screened either 1987'S LIVING DAYLIGHTS or 1989's LICENSE TO KILL in many years, so  I wouldn't have remembered that the two Timothy Dalton films displayed a similar attitude toward the super-gadgetry of certain Bond films, possibly including the last two in the Roger Moore corpus, OCTOPUSSY and A VIEW TO A KILL, both of which deviated from the more realistic Bond seen in FOR YOUR EYES ONLY.  LICENSE TO KILL is even more dismissive of Bond-gadgets than DAYLIGHTS, for in the earlier film Bond uses a couple of marvelous gadgets in the field.  In LICENSE, the gadgets-- a camera said to shoot bullets and another that shoots what appears to be a laser-- only appear in one scene where tech-whiz Q shows up to give Bond the benefit of his weapons-advice.  In practice, Bond only ends up using one mundane hand-gun from Q's arsenal, though one of Bond's foes does remark on the gun's special qualities.

Possibly even more than in DAYLIGHTS, the producers hoped to remold Bond to make him more "relevant" to eighties audiences by making him an icon of the "just so no" campaign against drugs.  It's true that various Bond books had the hero go after drug-purveyors, as did some of the film adaptations.  But there was no drug-connection in the Fleming short-story that spawned DAYLIGHTS, while the original screenplay for LICENSE by veteran Bond-scripters Richard Maibaum and Michael G. Wilson is all about Bond taking down the powerful Columbian drug kingpin Franz Sanchez.

To be sure, Bond goes after Sanchez not because of his business but in response to the old "he wronged my best buddy" trope.  Borrowing a scene from the book LIVE AND LET DIE, Sanchez wreaks vengeance on his nemesis, Bond's FBI buddy Felix Leiter, by having Leiter's legs mangled by a penned shark.  To avenge Leiter-- not only for his maiming but also for the rape and killing of Leiter's new bride-- Bond refuses the orders of his superiors and goes rogue.  However, this doesn't signal a serious departure from the Bond mythology: not only does Q make a rare unsanctioned trip into "the field" to aid Bond, M is patently sympathetic to Bond's quest.  After Bond's inevitable triumph, he's welcomed back to his old job without no mention of even some minor slap on the wrist.

Were it not for the marginal appearance of the weapons, LICENSE would be one of the wholly naturalistic Bond-films.  Sanchez is certainly a better villain than the two foes who occupy Bond's time in DAYLIGHTS, with actor Robert Davi portraying in him a formidable combination of violence (he's first seen whipping his mistress for sleeping with another man) and ruthlessness. Sanchez even professes a code of honor-- though it's a jaundiced one, in that he claims he values loyalty above all, but shoots one of his aides to death for mouthing off.  Bond spends a fair amount of time whittling away at the resources of one of Sanchez's major allies, Milton Krest (named for a dislikable character in the melodramatic Fleming short story "The Hildebrand Rarity"). 

Bond also makes a few allies-- both "good girls"-- Lupe, the mistress seen being whipped at the opening, and Pam, a tough female pilot/ex-CIA agent.  Both women compete for Bond's attentions, but neither qualifies as a "bad girl," though Bond briefly suspects Pam of duplicity.  In the end Bond worms his way into Sanchez's operation, much as the novel-Bond did in GOLDFINGER.  This leads to Bond finding out Sanchez's new plan to smuggle drugs out of his country, hidden in oil-tanker trucks-- a nice blend between two "foreign commodities" on which the U.S. became overly dependent in the eighties.  After the usual splashy Bond-stunts Bond has a concluding battle with the tough-as-nails Sanchez, who gets Bond on the ropes and only loses because Bond has an ace in the hole.

Sanchez's punishment of Leiter is the closest thing where he comes to committing a "bizarre crime," but while it's true that this isn't the most mundane way for a crime-lord to dispose of an enemy, I still label this trope as naturalistic in that the film doesn't conjure forth any *strangeness* in presenting this atypical murder-method-- in contrast, say, to Emilio Largo's heisting of two atomic bombs in THUNDERBALL.