TURBO; A POWER RANGERS MOVIE (1997)

 In contrast, the second and last film in the franchise-- full title TURBO: A POWER RANGERS MOVIE-- is co-directed by two men.  One is David Winning, who like Spicer was largely a TV-show director, but whose work seems far better photographed and paced than Spicer's.  His collaborator is Shukim Levy, who had a long history writing, directing, and composing for the regular teleseries.  His participation suggests that someone in charge of the franchise may've decided that the second movie needed to have more of the wonky feel of the teleseries.

In terms of its villain, TURBO definitely outclasses the previous film.  The opponent here is the oddly-named Divatox, a wildly-clad sorceress whose player (Hilary Shepard) seems to have taken the same florid, over-the-top approach as Carla Perez (the teleseries' Rita Repulsa, who again gets a brief cameo along with her buddy Lord Zedd). Divatox's evil scheme-- to force a good hobbit-like wizard to help her release an evil volcano-demon-- isn't less corny than the master plan of Ivan Ooze, but the script, on which Levy also worked, keeps the script moving with assorted complications.  Even the intrusion of a grade-school-age Power Ranger is handled with enough aplomb to keep it watchable-- which is something George Lucas did not accomplish with his kid-protagonist in THE PHANTOM MENACE.

And just as Divatox's costume emulates the wild apparel-designs of the teleseries, TURBO, while not exactly fast-paced, does climax in one big lively fight at the end.  In addition, the fight benefits from a plot-thread in which the villains turn two Power Rangers, Kimberly (Amy Jo Johnson) and Jason (Austin St. John), into their evil servants.  Given that all the English-speaking actors on the series were always obliged to be disgustingly goody-goody, it's fun to see a character like Kimberly's looking pleased with her evilness (and pretty sexy because of it!)

BTW, the only reason I class these films under the "metaphysical" function is because they deal with a basic "good vs. evil" conflict, though that's not to say that either does well with these concepts.