BLANKMAN (1994)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair* 
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: (1) *psychological, sociological,* (2) *psychological*


"A black man would rather miss than look bad."-- Woody Harrelson's character in WHITE MEN CAN'T JUMP.

I can't say I found BLANKMAN very funny, but as the above illo shows, the two black stars (Damon Wayans, David Alan Grier) don costumes that make them look REALLY bad.  That does demand a special sort of *chutzpah.*

The film has its most amusing moments toward the start, when Wayans' Darryl and Grier's Kevin are seen as children, geeking out over the 1966 BATMAN show while trying to watch it on a malfunctioning TV set.  Then the two kids quickly grow up-- or at least one of them does, mentally speaking.  Kevin becomes a normal guy who works for a television news show, where he lusts after anchorwoman Kimberly (Robin Givens).  Darryl remains frozen in geekhood, working on various absurd and worthless inventions while being supported by Kevin and cared for by their grandmother.

Crime, under the control of mob boss Minelli (Jon Polito), runs rampant in a city where the police are both lazy and chicken-hearted.  Darryl and Kevin's grandmother practices social activism and gets rubbed out by Minelli's thugs.  The more childlike Darryl takes her loss harder than Kevin does, but he also has the more proactive response.  Though he can't fight, he does possess enough science-knowledge to design a bulletproof superhero costume for himself.  He succeeds in his first crimefighting efforts by luck and gumption, but when he attempts to tell people his hero-name is "Blackman," he's misunderstood and the press dubs him "Blankman."  Darryl invites Kevin to join him as his crimefighting partner.  Kevin declines.

To Kevin's dismay, crusading reporter Kimberly falls for the mysterious stumblebum superhero.  But when Minelli's crooks stage a trap for Blankman, Kevin steps up, dons his costume, and uses his karate-skills to fight alongside his dotty brother.  Darryl does have a few oddball inventions that help them out: some funky jet-skates, a bomb-sniffing robot made from a old washing-machine.  These, being slight improvements on then-current technology, would be subsumed under the phenomenal category of the uncanny, except that the bulletproof costume qualifies as a marvelous invention..

Though the script validates the wishful thinking of childhood, the theme isn't pursued with any rigor.  Polito's Minelli is, though not a supervillain, slightly bigger-than-life: he boasts of wearing pure satin clothes when he robs a bank and rises to the comic-book model by constructing a death-trap for the captured heroes.  Givens plays her Lois Lane role straight, which allows her to be a decent foil to Wayans' antics.  The most interesting theme suggested by the sibling rivalry between Darryl and Kevin.  This has less to do with their sexual competition for some Freudian mother-figure (though Kimberly does echo the grandmother's social activism) than with the fact that Kevin has to be the "father" in the relationship, trying to force his simple sibling to grow up.  Darryl, the "fantasy-principle" to Kevin's "reality-principle," rarely shows overt resentment toward Kevin, although I did find it significant that Kevin gets shot, albeit nonfatally, because Darrly neglects to tell him that his superhero suit ISN'T bulletproof.

RESIDENT EVIL: APOCALYPSE (2004)

 

 

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

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

 

The first sequel to RESIDENT EVIL is directed by Alexander Witt and scripted by the first film’s writer-director Paul W.S Anderson. Whereas the original film focused on action within a relatively cramped space, APOCALYPSE displays the franchise’s propensity for big splashy action-scenes. This is because in between the first and second entries, the evil Umbrella Corporation decided to experiment on their former employee Alice (Milla Jovovich) with their T-virus. While the virus usually wreaks unpleasant mutations on its subjects, not to mention turning human corpses into hungry hungry zombies, Alice alone enjoys a beneficial mutation, even if she feels alienated at having been turned into a genetic freak.

 

APOCALYPSE is also much clearer about the genesis of the T-virus. Whereas the Umbrella Corporation was known to most citizens for benign pharmaceuticals while secretly working to produce bio-weapons, the creator of the destructive virus, a scientist named Ashford, originated the virus for a benevolent purpose: to provide disadvantaged people, like his crippled daughter, with a way to regenerate certain organs. This revelation makes it slightly more believable that Alice’s physicality is enhanced by the virus, since the virus does have a similar effect on Ashford’s daughter, though apparently on no one else. (The character of the daughter appears in the story but none of the Umbrella evildoers seem particularly interested in studying her, in comparison to their leaping through multiple hoops to test Alice.

 

In the first flick Alice only had one significant helper, activist Matt Addison, but here she gathers a more significant cast of support-characters. One is a news reporter anxious to get the straight dope on the viral outbreak, while three others are based on figures in the video game: Olivera, a rogue Umbrella operative, cop Jill Valentine, and an Umbrella supersoldier, Nemesis. To be sure, character interactions are not very important in this series, beyond providing a sense of common ground as Alice’s allies come together to resist Umbrella’s ruthless actions. The depravity that is only adequately depicted in the first film gets much stronger treatment here, particularly in an opening sequence in which the corporation’s goons forcibly confine the inhabitants of Raccoon City to their infected city. Later they arrange to launch a nuclear strike to wipe out the city and thus cover up the evidence of their transgressions. Alice’s mission becomes dual: to get her allies out of the city before they’ve either overwhelmed by zombies or slain by a nuclear blast, and then to expose Umbrella’s perfidy. At the same time, one of Umbrella’s head men, name of Cain, hopes to use their chaos as a means to take Alice’s measure, the better to research her new abilities.

 

The simple plot makes it easy for Anderson and Witt to focus on the big battle-scenes—one involving Alice running down the vertical side of a building to take a coterie of guards by surprise, another being a death-match with Nemesis, who turns out to be the vanished character Addison, mutated by Umbrella. Cain arranges the match with almost Nietschean glee in the exercise of power, and he’s one of the series’ best villains, albeit not any stronger as a character than anyone else. The conclusion shows the corrupt corporation winning out over the reporter’s attempt to expose them, though by the next film, their successful cover-up becomes irrelevant to the franchise’s direction.

RED DAWN (1984)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *fair*

FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*

CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological, psychological*

In my review of YEAR ONE I wrote:

...most cavemen films can't resist tossing in dinosaurs.  Such movies attain an "uncanny" status given that they're producing an altered version of real history, not positing the dinos as an intrusion of the marvelous upon the commonplace world.  YEAR ONE, though, isn't mixing dinos with cavemen, but cavemen with Biblical priests and patriarchs.  I suppose I should also judge YEAR ONE as "uncanny" on the same basis, given that historical periods are lumped together in the same cavalier fashion as the cavemen/dino flicks.

RED DAWN doesn't mix elements from different time-periods However, it's no less cavalier in its depiction of an alternate history in which the United States is improbably invaded by Russian soldiers, aided by Cubans and Nicaraguans. In many reviews, recently PREDATOR 2, I've also stated that simply bumping a film forward in time is not enough to give it marvelous phenomenality. As I've specified in greater detail on THE ARCHETYPAL ARCHIVE, this phenomenality depends on violating both the coherence of causal reality and the intelligibility associated with that coherence. In a film like RED DAWN, there is no violation of the standards of causal reality, but there is a deviation from the intelligibility of a naturalistic work. RED DAWN then conforms to the uncanny trope of "exotic lands and customs," which I've most often invoked with respect to strange civilizations off the beaten path of the known world.  Here the strange civilization is a United States that can be easily invaded by ground forces armed with no artillery greater than helicopters with rocket launchers. It's a world altered to conform to the martial fantasies of gun-rights advocates, in which it's really really necessary to avoid registration of firearms, lest the information fall into the hands of an invading army.

That said, in my re-viewing of RED DAWN, I was surprised that it did not conform to the adventure-heavy, rah-rah mood of many Commie-baiting works of the period, not least the very similar Chuck Norris flick INVASION U.S.A., which appeared the next year. On its own terms, RED DAWN attempts to treat its heroic protagonists as capable of vacillation and even betrayal, so that the film aligns better with drama than with the adventure-mode of director/co-scripter John Milius' 1982 epic CONAN THE BARBARIAN.

Though both CONAN and RED DAWN deal with martial protagonists, some of the tropes used in the latter film by Milius and co-writer Kevin Reynolds invert those of CONAN.  I observed in my review of that film that it displayed some surprising sophistication in spite of some lines so over-the-top that they've become more famous than the movie proper.  But CONAN is also a lone hero out for revenge, who remains isolated from any community by the film's end. RED DAWN is about a society of teen warriors, American high-school students forced to grow up fast with the Russkies invade their country. The character of Jed Eckert (Patrick Swayze) leads the pack of kids who escape to the woods and begin living like what an earlier generation called "Red Indians," and for most of the film he's the charismatic leader who initiates the other young men-- and a couple of young women-- into the mysteries of hit-and-run warfare.  Jed tells his new allies that he was named for early American trailblazer Jedediah Smith, which is patently Milius' attempt to align him with a past generation of heroes.

And yet, not only does the society survive at film's end while Jed does not, Milius inverts certain aspects of the heroic attitude. In one of CONAN's best-remembered quirky lines, Conan refuses to weep at the funeral of his lover, while one of his aides does it for him, saying, "He can't cry. So I do it for him."  In one scene, Jed and his brother Matt are told not to cry by their captive father, who is never seen again and is presumably killed by the invaders, and in two more scenes, Jed tells other members of his troop not to cry. Yet toward the film's end-- at a time when both Jed and his brother Matt are getting burned out by their drawn-out guerilla-actions-- Jed does cry, not out of sentiment but in response to the pressure of being forced to execute helpless prisoners.

This is not to say that Milius is debunking the mythology of heroism. He even gives the guerillas-- who name themselves "Wolverines" after their school mascot-- a hated enemy to be destroyed at the climax, one Strelnikov (the craggy-faced William Smith). At the same time, another of their enemies, Colonel Bella, gets the drop on the Eckert Brothers. Yet he lets them go, his own acknowledgment of their common humanity.  Milius then gives both brothers a mythic finish, by having them vanish from the story, implicitly dying after they've made it possible for the new society to be born once the Russians and their allies have been kicked out.

Most interesting is the film's process of identifying the Wolverines with Native Americans. No particular characters are identified as Native Americans, and a group of Russian soldiers pass scathing comments on the massacre of tribal peoples while the soldiers visit Colorado's Arapaho National Forest. Yet not only do the Wolverines take an animal name, they also practice a ritual resonant of tribalism: drinking the blood of a slain deer to fortify themselves. During the execution-scene, one of Jed's soldiers objects to the killing, asking what separates the Americans from their enemies. Jed's response is that "We live here!" This could have been the statement of a Native American justifying the tactics of extreme retaliation, but in Milius' hands, it implies not an opposition between the tribal peoples and those who invaded them, but a merging of identities not possible for the Commies and their allies.

A KNIGHT IN CAMELOT (1998)

  

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

The unimaginative tag-line for this Disney TV-movie-- "King Arthur's Round Table will never be the same"-- sums up the witlessness of this umpty-teenth take on Mark Twain's A CONNECTICUT YANKEE IN KING ARTHUR'S COURT.

Whoopi Goldberg's career was going downhill at the time of this flick, though some might say that this dull KNIGHT is still better (in quality) than her hosting-job on THE VIEW. Goldberg mugs ferociously as Vivien Morgan, a scientist who experiments with gravity and accidentally triggers a time-dislocation, flinging her back to sixth-century Camelot, under the rule of King Arthur.

It's no surprise that the derivative script checks off most of the familiar tropes of the Twain novel. Time-traveler uses her foreknowledge to predict an eclipse? Check. Traveler aces out the phony wizard Merlin and uses modern science to establish her reign as "Sir Boss?" Check. Traveler gets involved in a duel with nasty knight Sagramore, which is played for baggy-pants comedy but still (just barely) qualifies for the combative mode? Check. (And was it really necessary to have King Arthur make Vivien into a knight the moment she makes the sun go bye-bye? Maybe the script could have led up to that development in some more subtle manner?)

Most of the new stuff, like Goldberg teaching the denizens of Camelot how to twist, is as lame as lame can be. There's a loose attempt to relate the rule of Camelot to the rise of American liberalism. Still, the writer wasn't as willing as Twain to banish all magic from Camelot, since at the end-- for which I'm not bothering to mention spoilers-- it turns out that the fake-seeming Merlin was really a super-farsighted sorcerer who arranged Vivien's trip. Some of the changes are more or less predictable. In the book Hank Morgan has an assistant named Clarence and marries a slave girl he names "Sandy," and the TV-script sticks these two characters together for some chaste teen romance. The book alludes to the eventual fall of Camelot because of the forbidden liaison of Lancelot and Guinevere, and so does the film-- but for some reason the writer makes Guinevere a real bitch instead of the usual star-crossed lover. Maybe this was the result of Amanda Donohue in the role, since she was inextricably associated with villainy. In the role of Arthur, Michael York has a nice speech toward the end. 

GODZILLA, KING OF THE MONSTERS (2019)

  

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

While KING OF THE MONSTERS isn't quite bold enough to qualify as one of the best iterations of the Big G, it's a huge improvement over the preceding film in the series, the 2014 GODZILLA.

One of the best changes is the selection of Michael Dougherty as the director, in contrast to previous helmsman Gareth Edwards, who tended to stage the 2014 film in scenes dominated by darkness. In contrast, Dougherty-- who, among others, collaborated with one of the writers of the 2014 film-- makes sure that all of the scenes of big monster-combat are easy to follow. Whereas the 2014 film was trying too hard to keep things realistic, Dougherty's film is a valentine to the best of the Toho Studios monster-mythology. I'm not crediting Dougherty alone with this idea, for clearly the producers had to pay Toho for the use of other kaiju, principally King Ghidorah (Godzilla's principal foe), Mothra and Rodan. The final film in the series, projected for 2020, is also based on the Toho mythology crossbred with that of Universal's only giant creature, in a rethinking of 1962's KING KONG VS. GODZILLA.  (KING includes a brief glimpse at Kong on his Skull Island stomping-grounds, no doubt to build fan-support for the 2020 film.)

The roles of the human characters are marginally better in that they go from being "not interesting at all" in 2014 to "slightly interesting" in 2019. The principal characters-- Mark Russell, ex-wife Emma, and their teen daughter Madison-- are introduced as if the audience ought to already know them, though this is their first appearance. We soon learn that Emma possesses an almost religious devotion to "the Titans," as the various prehistoric beings have been named, while Mark despises the monsters because he and Emma lost one of their children during a monster-rampage.

Most of the prehistoric behemoths are, unlike Godzilla, still hibernating beneath the earth, and Emma becomes worried that the American military will use her monster-research to find and destroy these sleeping Titans. Thus she collaborates with a British terrorist (whose motives are inconsistent at best) to make sure that all 17 of the monsters are revived, so that they can become the new dominant creatures on Planet Earth, and in some way reverse humankind's tendency to reduce the planet to ruin.

Emma Russell's extreme eco-terrorist agenda is rattled off a little too quickly to have any dramatic impact, and to be sure she reverses her course to protect her own kid, though she was apparently OK with the kids of other mothers falling into monster-peril. Yet she's such a blah character that I neither liked nor disliked her: she obviously was just there to serve a function in the plot, as much as were Mark and Madison. Indeed, some of the supporting side-characters, such as Rick Stanton (modeled after the "Rick" character in RICK AND MORTY) and Doctor Serizawa (modeled after the heroic scientist from the 1954 GOJIRA), are far more compelling than the dysfunctional family of the Russells.

If one can make the decision to ignore the human characters and their dubious pontifications, then GODZILLA KING OF THE MONSTERS delivers what the Toho series did best: portraying the impossible vision of a world where giants not only walk the earth, but spend most of their time fighting for supremacy. I was particularly taken with a Mothra/Rodan battle, given that the two kaiju never have an extended fight in the Toho films. That said, the three major battles between the two "apex predators," Godzilla and Ghidorah, are the film's best effects, and the only downside is that I don't know how a Godzilla/Kong matchup can possibly improve on these mammoth dust-ups.

KILLER LEOPARD (1954)

 

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

That said, IDOL is a little better than KILLER LEOPARD, the dullest of the series. In addition to the leopard, Bomba also has to deal with a lady, though only in a non-romantic sense. LEOPARD dovetails the overt plot of the hunt for a man-killing beast with that of a civilized wife looking for her husband, who fled into the jungle from the forces of the law. Garland, one of the few BOMBA leading-ladies who went on to a measure of film-fame, has very little to do, though she does go swimming as well, with the usual result that Bomba must rescue her. There's a slight suggestion that Bomba's interested in her despite her married status, but naturally nothing comes of it, even though he was about 24 and no longer a "boy" in truth.

HONOR ROLL #103. JANUARY 28

BEVERLY GARLAND plays around with Bomba the Jungle Toy.

The "Monsterverse" entries for GODZILLA, Kong, and two of their "new enemies" will all get honored this alphabetical go-round, starting with the 2019 flick in which the Big G battled all the old familiar Toho faces.

WHOOPI GOLDBERG makes a nutty knight of Camelot.

JENNIFER GREY salutes the Red Dawn.

SIENNA GUILLORY provides Alice with zombie-fighting assistance.

DAVID ALAN GRIER gets credit for daring to play a superhero named "Other Guy."

THE WOLVERINE (2013)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *psychological, sociological*

WOLVERINE, however, is more like the original IRON MAN than either of the armored sequels, in that it chooses eclectically from assorted "Wolverine" and "X-Men" stories, but rearranges their elements to produce a vivid new story.  Characters like Viper, the Silver Samurai, Yukio and Mariko Yashida are all altered radically from their comic-book versions, but thanks to the script's sensitive treatment they acquire as much or more symbolic resonance as they had in the comic books.

One major alteration is that whereas the comics-Wolverine was, in the course of his evolution, given an extensive acquaintance with the culture of Japan, Hugh Jackman's Wolverine's first (and superficial) encounter takes place in World War II, where he saves Japanese soldier Yashida from the atomic blast of Nagasaki.  Many years later, Wolverine is summoned to Japan by the same man, now old and dying of cancer.  Though the hero is still suffering bouts of survivor guilt due to being forced to kill the berserk Jean Grey/Phoenix, he agrees to follow the gamine-like Japanese psychic Yukio to Japan.

I won't give away further elements of the plot, but suffice to say that Wolverine is drawn into the expected conflict involving both a plot to kidnap (or kill) Mariko Yashida, heir to the Yashida fortune, and a plot to drain Wolverine of his "healing factor" and the concomitant-but-unwanted immortality it confers upon the hero.

While I'm not of the critical persuasion that believes that stories must be essentially "realistic" to be good, it's something of a plus that one can imagine some elements of the story transpiring without the fantastic devices, much as if someone had tried to make a modern version of Samuel Fuller's 1955 Japanese noir HOUSE OF BAMBOO.  And that's not to say that there aren't a few dubious plot-points in WOLVERINE.  However, whereas IRON MAN 3 simply lets its plot-holes flap in the wind with lofty indifference, director James Mangold and his scripters paper over the (minor) cracks with a studious attention to character interactions-- particularly those between Wolverine and his destined paramour Mariko.  The contrast between the raffishness of Wolverine (Mariko calls the shaggy-looking hero a "caveman" when she first sees him) and the elaborate customs of Japan is one that Mangold plays to good effect.  In addition, the action set-pieces-- at least one of which is clearly borrowed from the Claremont/Miller WOLVERINE graphic novel series-- are fluidly realized.  WOLVERINE is one of the few films I've seen that manages to use "shakicam" techniques to convey thrills rather than to call attention to the "artiness" of the diegesis.

In contrast to the overblown X-MEN ORIGINS: WOLVERINE, this movie deserves to be regarded as the definitive Logan film to which any further entries in the franchise should aspire.  That said, the closing "teaser" suggests a future project that will allow for a more X-tensive X-pansion of mutant heroics.

  

AVENGERS GRIMM: TIME WARS (2018)

 I watched AVENGERS GRIMM TIME WARS before viewing SINISTER SQUAD, so if I have a slightly higher opinion of the (hopefully) final film in this godawful series, it’s not in reaction to SQUAD’s awfulness. TIME’s merits are still small ones. Since GRIMM couldn’t afford the bucks for big-budget superheroics, it tried to suggest grandeur tossing in a few minor name-actors and filming most of the scenes in empty streets and office buildings. TIME doesn’t attempt grandeur at all, and so the mise-en-scene looks closer to that of a low-budget softcore flick—which is certainly more appropriate.

One of TIME’s humble merits is that its writers chose to sponge off another successful DC Comics film, AQUAMAN. The Big Bad this time around is “Magda the Mad,” ruler of Atlantis, who walks around in a skin-tight costume like that of AQUAMAN’s Mera character—and for once, her evil motivation is slightly relatable. Long ago she kidnapped Sleeping Beauty’s Prince Charming, keeping the prince in durance vile for some years before he escaped. When Magda invades the surface world, her main motivation is unrequited love, and there’s a tiny bit of suspense as to whether she can manage to seduce the prince before he reunites with Sleeping Beauty.

The guy playing the price speaks some long lines of dialogue that must have required some practice, and he seems to have some fun with calling Atlantis both “abyssal” and “abysmal.” Not all of the “Avengers Grimm” (yes, they use that name once) surface to oppose Magda—only Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, and Red Riding Hood—but Alice from SINISTER SQUAD re-appears, this time joined by a thoroughly uninteresting version of the Mad Hatter. There are one or two quarter-decent fights, so TIME WARS registers as combative. Its main good points—a sexy villainess, a slightly more comprehensible plot—still don’t provide much relief from the overall tedium.   

FULLMETAL ALCHEMIST THE MOVIE (2005)

 

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

Though I'm a fan of the FULLMETAL ALCHEMIST anime-teleseries, I hadn't watched the later episodes in a while. I'd forgotten that the movie's narrative picks up about two years after the conclusion of the series, and focuses on one of the problems the series left up in the air: that Edward Elric, one of two brothers who practice real alchemy in an alternate world, becomes stranded in "our world," specifically in 1923 Germany, just as Nazism is on the rise.

FULLMETAL ALCHEMIST as a series has strong cosmological mythicity, given that its recurring theme focuses on the ability of the two alchemists Edward and Alphonse to literally transform objects into other objects. This seeming "magic," however, is always governed by a law resembling the laws of physics, which is the element that places the series-concept in Campbell's cosmological bailiwick.

To be sure, the movie is a little less mythic, largely because it's not able to deal as fully with the Faustian themes so often raised in the series. But the film does find a substitute for this theme with a Nazi science-experiment that attempts to open a gate into Elric's world in order to tap into the fabulous powers there.

As a sidenote, while Elric is trying to prevent the Nazi conspiracy, he gets assistance from none other than German-Jewish filmmaker Fritz Lang. The screenplay throws in some witty references to Lang's history with early science fiction films, as well as showing the mechanical dragon from SIEGFRIED and having Lang go by the fake name of "Mabuse." There's also a real dragon who is actually one of the denizens of Edward's world, who at one point is defeated by several spears that supposedly came from "the spear of Longinus." But this bit of quasi-Christian mythology is not enlarged upon.

OZ THE GREAT AND POWERFUL (2013)

 

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


As a film OZ is far from being "powerful," and has no shot at all at being "great."

I have nothing against latter-day talents doing remixes of well-known works, be they famous books like L. Frank Baum's WONDERFUL WIZARD OF OZ or its best known cinematic adaptation from 1939.  Indeed, the MGM WIZARD is renowned precisely because it skillfully remixes elements of the source novel and adds a cornucopia of new material. That film even changes the phenomenality of Oz itself, which in the Baum novels is a marvelous land that co-exists alongside the real world.  The MGM movie transforms Oz into a projection of Dorothy's consciousness, so that the film fits the "uncanny" manifestation of my "delirious dreams" trope.  Yet even in this delusive form, MGM's Oz loses none of its narrative power.

In contrast, Raimi and his scripters bring nothing new to the table.  OZ tosses together most of the familiar tropes of the 1939 film with no passion or insight.  It also works in a few elements of Baum's novel-series, but these aren't enough to redeem the film's overall predictability.

The central idea of OZ is to provide a more involved backstory for Baum's "Wizard of Oz" character.  Though the film's character shares the name "Oscar Diggs" with Baum's original, as well as a few biographical elements (former traveling carnival magician), Raimi injects a more "adult" take on the character.  To put it simply, this Diggs (James Franco) is a dog.  Wherever the carnival goes, Diggs uses his skills as a magician and other charms to win over countless women.  As OZ is a Disney-affiliated film, Diggs' peccadillos are never made explicit, but it's strongly suggested that his main strategy is to win women by giving them music boxes that he claims are priceless mementoes-- though of course he has dozens of the things.  Yet he's not utterly irredeemable, for he does have One True Love in his life, a woman named Annie (Michelle Williams).  She seeks him out at the carnival to tell him she's received a marriage proposal from a man named John Gale (a "shout-out" to Baum's best-known heroine "Dorothy Gale.") 

Diggs, consumed with a desire to be "a great man" rather than the sort of good fellow who marries and keeps a regular job, declines to commit to Annie.  Moments later, as a Kansas whirlwind looms on the horizon, one of Diggs' deeds catches up with him.  Having never heard the rule about "not shitting where you eat," the carnival's strongman finds that his wife has one of Diggs' music boxes, and comes after Diggs, ready to maim the magician.  Diggs manages to clamber into a hot-air balloon maintained by the carnival, and in no time he's on his way to Oz.

This somewhat more realistic version of a children's character calls to my mind similar developments in Gregory Maguire's 1995 novel WICKED, which rewrote elements of the Baum novel and spawned its own popular stage-musical adaptation, even as Baum's book did.  I don't suggest that the scripters sought to consciously emulate Maguire's novel, but I suspect that they were aware of its general thrust: to rewrite the backstory of the Wicked Witch of the West.  It's therefore not surprising that the first character Diggs encounters is one Theodora (Mila Kunis), who is the selfsame Witch before she becomes "wicked."  Upon encountering the weird stranger and witnessing him perform an act of stage-magic, Theodora tells Diggs that he must be "the Wizard" whose coming will overthrow another witch, one who is guilty of slaying Oz's king.  Diggs, who desperately needs succor in this strange land, allows Theodora to believe him to be her savior.  During their progress to the Emerald City, Diggs also shares some non-specific romantic moment with her-- a dalliance that results in Theodora becoming instantly besotted with him.  The script later encourages the interpretation that this amour fou is founded in Theodora's projections than the result of Diggs' actions. 

On the way, Diggs picks up a comedy-relief ally, a flying monkey named Finley (Zach Braff).  Braff also plays Diggs' backstage assistant back at the carnival, making him one of two Oz inhabitants who resembles someone Diggs knew in his world.  This trope is patently derived from the 1939 film.  It doesn't have any strong resonance here, though, since Oz doesn't seem to be Diggs' dream, but is a real place, as in the Baum novels.  We see a similar rewriting of a dream-fantasy in Tim Burton's take on ALICE IN WONDERLAND.

In the Emerald City Diggs meets Theodora's sister Evanora (Rachel Weicz).  She sets him a familiar task: before he can become Oz's new ruler, he must kill a wicked witch, the same one guilty of killing the old king.  Diggs reluctantly accepts, and he and Finley set out on the Yellow Brick Road.  On their way they add to their company "China Girl", the last survivor of a city of china-glass people decimated by the wicked witch's flying baboons.  The trio do encounter a witch, but it's Glinda the Good Witch, the second character to reflect Diggs' real-world experience, as this Glinda is a dead ringer for Annie (and therefore is also played by MichelleWilliams).  Glinda straightens things out: the real wicked witch is Evanora, who both killed the King of Oz (and Glinda's father) and controls the evil flying apes. Glinda, much like Annie, encourages Diggs to do the right thing and help her mount a defense of the people of Oz against Evanora's tyranny.  Meanwhile, Evanora manages to turn Theodora to the Dark Side by playing on her unbalanced love for Diggs, so that Theodora becomes Sam Raimi's incarnation of the formidable Margaret Hamilton original. 

Given the original Wizard's penchant for trickery, it will come as no surprise that Diggs ends up using trickery to defeat the two evil witches-- though both of them must survive to become the characters Dorothy later encounters.  There are some enjoyable set-pieces here, especially one involving the poppy field, and the climax gives Glinda the chance to avenge her daddy in a vivid magical fight with Evanora. However, on the whole the ending is both pat and predictable.

None of the characters runs any deeper than his or her function in the story, and this is particularly evident with Oscar Diggs.  His lechery doesn't spring from any elements vital to this Raimi rethinking of the Kansas conjurer; it's just the script's method for transforming Theodora and uniting Diggs with a fantasy-world version of his true love.  Glinda/Annie gets the last laugh at the ending, for through her influence Diggs becomes an ego-effacing "good man" rather than the ego-serving "great man" he wanted to be.  But this minor elaboration of sexual politics comes off as a random thought rather than a developed theme.  In addition, the doubling of the villains, which may have been patterned after Lucas' STAR WARS continuity, proves merely distracting, as neither Theodora nor Evanora are charismatic villains in themselves.  They're more like "placeholders" in the greater Oz-continuity.  The actors do the best they can, but most of the time they're reduced to acting out pre-arranged gestures rather than well conceived characters.

The only elements that seem somewhat original are those that the script borrows from Baum's novels.  Baum's china-people were to my knowledge never adapted to film before, and even though OZ only has one of them, China Girl's presence at least mitigates the film's heavy indebtedness to the 1939 WIZARD OF OZ.  And the film's use of stage-magic and technological trickery evokes the American cultural underpinnings of Baum's world, which is notable for having broken with the pre-technological fantasies of the European prose-fantasy tradition.  But on the occasions that Raimi and his scripters hit on a theme correctly, it seems like a stab in the dark thanks to all the tedious in-jokey references to the MGM version.

Lastly, I found the visual look of Oz heavy on pretty colors but not really informed by a good design-sense, in contrast, say, to the Burton ALICE.

THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN (2003)

 

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

Reportedly neither Alan Moore nor Kevin O’Neill cared for this big-budget rendition of their same-name graphic novel franchise. There are probably any number of points on which the film could be justly criticized. One unjustifiable complaint, though, would be that the adaptation did not follow the original. After all, all of the characters that Moore and O’Neill pastiched for their concept—Allan Quatermain, Mina (DRACULA) Murray, Jekyll-and-Hyde, Captain Nemo, and the Invisible Man—were substantially revised from their original models.

When I first saw this film—directed by Steven Norrington from a script by comic-book scribe James Rohinson-- I didn’t really mind the very different takes on Mina Murray (Peta Wilson) and the Invisible Man (Tony Curran), one transformed into a full-fledged vampire queen and the other into a petty thief who simply acquired the invisibility formula from the original inventor. The film’s versions of Quatermain (Sean Connery), Jekyll-Hyde (Jason Flemyng) and Nemo (Nseeruddin Shah) remained largely faithful to the comics-incarnations, at least in terms of what their physical abilities. However, I couldn’t stand the re-imagining of Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray (Stuart Townsend) as an invulnerable immortal (because his magic portrait now protects from physical harm as well as aging), nor Twain’s Tom Sawyer (Shane West) as a turn-of-the-century American G-man. On my re-viewing, the Sawyer character remained just as annoying, but the Gray character gained merit, thanks to Townsend’s excellent execution of that rare hero-type, “the Tough Fop.”

The basic situation remains the same as in the graphic novel: it’s 1899, and the British government assembles a task force of “extraordinary gentlemen” to take down threats to the Empire. In contrast to the first graphic novel, the threat is a masked mastermind known as “the Fantom”—a spelling that may allude less to the Phantom of the Opera and more to the lesser-known French supercriminal Fantomas. The Fantom and his servants are plotting to sow disunity amid the European countries and so foment a World War. However, the Fantom’s mask conceals of the most famous supervillains, and one whose name was invoked in the Moore-O’Neill series—though the film’s script doesn’t get much mileage out of that particular bit of pop mythology.

To be sure, Moore and O’Neill’s creation is the better pastiche of pop-culture characters, though this is partly because the comics-medium is better suited to exploiting a multitude of multi-layered references to both fiction and history. A two-hour movie, particularly one aimed at action-junkies, could not, with the best will in the world, have captured the density of the original franchise. That said, whereas in the comics the group is genuinely assembled to serve as England’s proto-superhero squad, in this LEAGUE there’s a secret agenda behind the team’s formation. That agenda isn’t strikingly original, but it does add some needed drama to the plot.

The exigencies of the main plot don’t allow for much character interaction on the part of the principals, with the exception of Gray and Murray, who enjoyed some torrid past together. Aged Quatermain functions as the “Professor X” of the super-group, but he doesn’t play well with the other members (Connery said he took the role without really understanding the script). There’s a forced attempt to forge a surrogate father-son relationship between Quatermain and Sawyer, and Skinner the Invisible Crook gets on everyone’s nerves, but LEAGUE will never be on the top of any lists for “quarreling superhero team movies.”

In the final analysis, the movie delivers on its main point of appeal: expensive feature-film action. The team’s assignment is nothing but a device to get the ball rolling, just like similar plot-contrivances in most James Bond flicks, and Norrington does pull together a lot of well-staged fight-scenes without seeming to repeat himself—which is a skill a lot of MCU movies could stand to learn. Connery, who retired after acrimonious experiences on the LEAGUE set, nevertheless acquits himself well in the splashy battle-scenes, and Jason Flemyng, the “muscle” of the group, projects the powerful aspect of Hyde so well that the rubber mecha-suit he wears in the role comes off better than it would’ve with a lesser actor.

There’s a very mild anti-imperial theme in the movie, but LEAGUE precedes the hyper-politicization of the superhero film—which might be its single best feature.

MANDRAKE THE MAGICIAN (1939)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*

FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*

CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological, metaphysical*


Here we have two serials that follow the normative pattern of their species: a hero, generally without special resources beyond sheer athleticism, finds himself pitted against a mastermind who commands a small group of thugs and at least one super-scientific device.

MANDRAKE THE MAGICIAN achieves this paradigm at the cost of its original model, though.  The character spawned by the 1934 Lee Falk-Phil Davis comic strip is said by some fans to have possessed real magic powers at the strip's outset.  Whatever the truth of this, Mandrake's most popular incarnation has been an "uncanny" one, in which the hero's only magic consisted of advanced hypnotism, of being able to convince his victims that they had been transformed into ducks or umbrellas or whatever.

Perhaps Columbia-- a late competitor in the serial market-- thought that this hocus pocus would have been too sedate for serial fans.  Perhaps the company didn't want the FX-budget associated with massive hypnotic illusions.  For whatever reason, the Mandrake of the serial, played by Warren Hull, only resembles the comic-strip version in being a professional magician.  When his involvement in a government experiment puts him at odds with a masked villain, Mandrake wades into action with both fists flying.  Only a few times does he use his magician's talents to escape handcuffs or the like.

The Wasp, the masked villain in question, has got hold of a "radium-energy" projector with which he can send deadly beams against any enemy.  As usual in such serials, both heroes and villains are constantly after some needed power-element that keeps the plot boiling.

The action in MANDRAKE is lively but pedestrian.  As is often the case in such serials, there's a minor mystery about who the costumed villain is in reality, but as the Wasp's costume is the most interesting thing about him, the revelation is an anticlimax.

Another change: the comics-Mandrake was assisted in his crimefighting by a giant African manservant named Lothar,  who was certainly one of the few black characters in the period who got the chance to go around beating up white guys, albeit only those of a criminal nature.  The serial substitutes a "Lothar" manservant who gets into only a couple of scraps and who is played by Hawaiian actor Al Kikume.

HONOR ROLL #102, JANUARY 24

EDWARD EARLE was the epitome of a "waspish personality."

What was extraordinary about JASON FLEMYNG was that his "good monster" came off pretty well compared to his more "heroic" teammates.

JAMES FRANCO is neither great nor powerful in the merry old character of "Oz."

THE ELRICS, Alphonse and Edward, deliver their take on a magic-using steampunk universe. 

Of all the "supermodel superheroes" in the AVENGERS GRIMM series, ELIABETH EILEEN is the only one who shows any moxie whatever.

RITA FUKUSHIMA stands as one of the only non-X-people who could hold the screen alongside Jackman's Wolverine.

SPIDER-MAN: NO WAY HOME (2021)

 

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

Do I dare

Disturb the universe?

In a minute there is time

For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

--T.S. Eliot, THE LOVE SONG OF J. ALFRED PRUFROCK

I was only moderately entertained by the first two MCU/Sony collaborations on the SPIDER-MAN franchise, and I had no reason to think that Number Three would be any different. When I heard that advance sales were breaking records, I tended to put it down to a lack of competition in U.S. theaters. But I started hearing positive reviews from sources I respected, so, despite having boycotted ETERNALS and SHANG-CHI among others, I queued up and bought my ticket. SPOILERS apply throughout, naturally.

One review asserted that the Sony people may have been more in control of the script than the MCU/Disney people. That alone might be one reason as to why WAY provides a massive crossover of all three live-action movie versions of Spider-Man-- Tobey Maguire from the Sam Raimi trilogy, Andrew Garfield from the Marc Webb duology, and Tom Holland from the Jon Watts neo-trilogy. In addition to bringing together all three versions of Spider-Man-- in what might be considered a GOOD version of SPIDER-MAN: INTO THE SPIDER-VERSE-- WAY also brings together five villains from the earlier franchises: the Lizard (Ryan Ifans), Electro (Jamie Foxx), Sandman (Thomas Haden Church), Doctor Octopus (Alfred Molina), and the Green Goblin (Willem Dafoe). The effect is that the Holland-verse gets a much needed infusion of Classic Spider-continuity, though since all five villains come from other heroic universes, they probably won't come back for encores right away.

The means by which the continuities become interwoven is probably partly derived from MCU's concept of "rewriting reality" in AVENGERS: INFINITY WAR, and partly from the ending of the first IRON MAN, in which Tony Stark impulsively reveals his superhero identity to the public, in marked contrast to the comic book series. It's arguable that the entire arc of the previous MCU film, FAR FROM HOME, existed to set up this Big Reveal, in which the villainous Mysterio, dying from self-inflicted wounds, unveils Spider-Man's secret identity to the world and attempts to frame the hero for murder.

The second part of Mysterio's plan doesn't have the slightest effect upon Peter Parker's life, and this major plot-hole is one of the things that most reminds me of an MCU film. The viewer never knows why none of the legal agencies ever show the slightest interest in investigating the alleged murder. There's a sequence in which a government agency arrests Parker, his girlfriend, his best friend and his Aunt May, but their only concern is whether or not the four of them had anything to do with appropriating government-tech-- and that concern evaporates with ridiculous ease because it would have interfered with the important part of the story.

Even when the law-dogs lay off, Parker's life turns to crap because everyone knows of his double identity, and it also affects the lives of his high-school buddies. Since Parker doesn't have the resources of a Tony Stark, who could insulate himself from the public with his money, he eventually gets the idea of "rebooting" his reality, since he saw it done twice in his AVENGERS films. He seeks out help from Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch), who tells him that it's a stupid idea. Then Strange comes up with an idea almost as stupid: to cast a massive forgetfulness spell designed to eradicate the public's knowledge of Parker's identity. (One wonders if the spell had the ability to erase Mysterio's original broadcast and the multitudinous recordings of news broadcasts resulting from the Spider-Reveal.) But in another display of MCU goofiness, Strange and Parker manage to muck up the spell by not preparing the parameters in advance. This scene is almost like a Laurel and Hardy routine, though it's somewhat saved by the opposition of Holland's nerdiness with Cumberbatch's waspish hauteur. 

The accidental side-effect of the botched spell is that it penetrates into alternate universes and spirits into the Holland-verse other characters who know of Parker's double identity-- which means the aforementioned five villains and, later on, the other two Spideys. (There were early plans to have Kirsten Dunst show up as the first Mary Jane, though this didn't work out.) Doctor Strange collaborates with Spidey and his two friends to capture the five villains and send them back to their own universes-- which, as far as it goes, sounds like any number of routine "get rid of the illegal aliens" trope.

But the script then takes a radical new turn. The Holland Spidey has been represented as somewhat more innocent than either the Maguire or the Garfield versions, and even the spell-mucking scene draws upon that concept, since Holland-Parker messes things up due to not wanting to lose his connections with the people he values. Once Parker learns that all of the otherworldly villains became corrupted by their mutations, he gets the idea that he ought to give them all a "second chance" by curing them of their respective manias before sending them back. Doctor Strange disagrees, but Spidey manages to trap the magician in another dimension following a suitably mystic contretemps between the two classic Lee-Ditko characters. 

Parker briefly manages to convince the five villains to let themselves be cured, though Electro and the Goblin seem to be high-risk types. In fact, moments after Parker and his friends manage to cure Doc Ock, the other villains rebel, resulting in a chaotic melee in which Aunt May perishes, and then all of them flee. It's only after that Parker's buddy Ned accidentally summons Maguire-Parker and Garfield-Parker into the Holland-verse, and all three Parkers unite in the mission to give the villains their "second chance"-- including the Goblin, who was responsible for May's death-- which means that there has to be a ton of hero-villain battles at the conclusion before the universe can be stabilized. And on top of all this, Holland-Parker not only loses his aunt and his new "brothers," everyone in the Holland-verse does indeed forget the true identity of Spider-Man.

And at last I can reveal my reason for quoting Eliot at the start of this review. Other Spider-Man films, particularly the first SPIDER-MAN, correctly translated the sense of the original comic:

... the script for SPIDER-MAN seems acutely aware that Peter Parker’s seemingly accidental acquisition of spider-powers functions in the story as a Gift from Above. He abuses that gift by not using his power in the public interest—i.e., to prevent a criminal from escaping the law—and he pays for his neglect when the same crook murders Parker’s beloved Uncle Ben. In both the comic and the movie, Parker is chastened by this development, but goes further by taking on the role of a crusading superhero. The role is not without its perks—Parker even out of costume becomes more appealing to girls, and he continues to enjoy the thrills of spider-powered athleticism. But his great power doesn’t just create a sense of responsibility. The costume sometimes becomes more of a hair-shirt, as bad luck frequently dogs his steps, often making him think of his abilities as an ongoing curse.

However, one thing that WAY does that other Spider-flicks don't is to suggest that Parker's psychological struggle to redeem himself is also a search for a "way" to act properly in a world where even the best intentions can lead one to perdition. Prufrock asks if he dares to disturb the universe, and that's the dilemma with which Holland-Parker struggles when he considers the possibility of giving a second chance to men who largely don't seem to deserve it. I've seen my share of superhero films in which heroes jump through hoops to redeem characters I didn't particularly like, ranging from the Ghost in the MCU's ANT MAN AND THE WASP and the Asian kid in DEADPOOL 2. But in NO WAY HOME, the viewer is obliged to contemplate whether the act of villain-redemption is worth it when it has so many negative consequences. But WAY does have a more substantial reason for having the hero suffer from his hair-shirt: he purges himself of his own negative nature and embraces his fate as a redemptive hero. The worst thing about WAY is that I really don't know where the series can go from this, since further iterations may start to seem like "It's a Wonderful Life, Part 2."

RED: WEREWOLF HUNTER (2010)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*

CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*

These two films play upon the mythology of the “Red Riding Hood” folktale, though the treatments are as far apart as mountain and valley.

“Werewolf hunters” don’t have as detailed a lineage in the cinema as “vampire hunters.” Still, the basic idea of RED: WEREWOLF HUNTER could have been a worthy addition to the former pack.  RED’s titular heroine is a member of a family of werewolf hunters, introduced to the viewer by a sound narrative device: Red falls in love with a young outsider.  She brings him to her woodsy home with the intention of telling her all about herself and her family’s anti-werewolf crusade.  Unfortunately for Red, there’s a new werewolf in town.  Unlike others of his breed he possesses the power to change at will, rather than being subject to the moon’s phases.  He uses that power to gather a cult of his fellow shape-changers.

Unfortunately, though RED is set up to promise kickass thrills, neither the FX nor the fight-choreography is ever more than pedestrian.  This might have been forgivable had the script done anything interesting with the relationship between Red, Red’s family, and her outsider-boyfriend.  But none of the heroes are given more than cursory characterization.  Early in the story the boyfriend is bitten by the werewolf, which exacerbates the family’s hostility to him as an outsider.  But the script doesn’t do anything with the conflict, though Red’s mother tells a tragic story of losing her husband to werewolf-ism.  The overall story is perhaps a little better than the average Syfy-Channel film, but not by much.

DEVIL MAY CRY (2007)

 

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


As long as one approaches this 12-episode anime adaptation of the Capcom "hack and slash" video games as nothing but extravagant nonsense, one's likely to find it reasonably good fun.

There's never much backstory here to get in the way of the action. The white-haired hero Dante is apparently the offspring of a human and a demon, but though he's skilled with both guns and a big ol' blade, he can only make ends meet by running a demon-hunting business (given the unexplained name of  "Devil May Cry").  Most of the episodes are fairly repetitive-- a customer importunes Dante to help with his demon troubles, and after a little suspense about the where and when to find the critter, Dante dispatches the malfeasant with copious amounts of gut-bursting violence.

Dante is, however, saddled with a few "human" characteristics that don't play any more believably than those Hayao Miyazaki gave to his heroic character in HOWL'S MOVING CASTLE.  He's incredibly indolent and constantly borrows money from others.  In addition, he's never seen eating anything but pizza and strawberry sundaes.  Apparently being half-demon gives one the power to eat fattening foods and remain eternally buff.  Still, he remains largely unflappable and low on affect in the tradition of badass devil-hunters everywhere.

Naturally, the more human elements come from Dante's support cast.  The most effective are two characters created for the anime show: Morrison, an agent who finds Dante jobs and functions as a sort of "older mentor" figure at times, and an orphan girl named Patty, who encounters Dante in the first anime episode and decides to move in to the devil hunter's digs, essentially playing "mother" to him by yelling at him for not cleaning his place.  The other two hail from the video games: human demon hunter "Lady" and demonic demon hunter "Trish," both of whom are incredibly hot babes who are implicitly warm for Dante's form.  However, no actual romance ever gets off the ground to distract from the ultraviolence.

Most of the episodes are pretty much alike, but all benefit from a good head-bopping "heavy metal" theme tune.  Dante's best antagonist appears in Episode 2, a sort of "motorcycle demon" who lures bikers to their death.  However, the best episode overall concerns the first meeting of Lady and Trish, who try to kill each other even before they learn of their mutual acquaintance with Dante.

Though demons and hell are frequently referenced both of them are just video-game constructs with no metaphysical depth.  The psychological angle of giving the emotionless hero a little girl sidekick to nag him all the time is a minor accomplishment, however.

THE SCORPION KING 2: RISE OF A WARRIOR (2008)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*

MYTHICITY: *good*

FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*

CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological*

When I reviewed the third iteration of the SCORPION KING series, I remarked that it wasn't as fun as the first film, and that I barely remembered the second film in the series. However, though KING 2 certainly had the outward appearance of being just another routine DTV franchise-sequel, a closer look caused me to realize that despite its obvious flaws (lame acting, lousy FX), the story was actually a little more mythically portentous than the original flick.

The behind-the-scenes credits would seem to encourage such a belief: credited scripter Randall McCormick barely worked on anything that wasn't a sequel, and director Russell Mulcahy was a long way from his one indisputable hit, 1986's HIGHLANDER. Nevertheless, the script follows an interesting quasi-Freudian pattern. In the character's first appearance, he was actually an archaic man turned into a modern-day monster in the course of the second MUMMY film, while the 2002 film showed Mathayus at the apex of his career as a hero in the mostly fictional ancient realm of Akkad.

KING 2 pursues a familiar strategy: showing Mathayus as a teenaged barbarian warrior (Michael Copon). The youth is defined as a son seeking to emulate his respected warrior-father Ashur, who's respected for his prowess with the king's bodyguards, the Black Scorpions. Ashur forbids Mathayus from following in his footsteps, but the teenager joins a mercenary training-camp anyway. There he encounters Layla, a teenaged girl with whom he's grown up, and who wants to be a warrior. Both teens get on the bad side of their trainer Sargon, but Ashur's pull with King Hammurabi saves them from punishment.

Sargon, however, is more than just a trainer of mercenaries; he's also (very improbably) a guy who's made a deal with some Akkadian devil to get mystic powers. He uses his powers to secretly slay both Ashur and Hammurabi, and then (even more improbably) ascends to the throne of Akkad. Both Mathayus and his widowed mother Inanna know that Sargon killed Ashur but cannot prove it. Mathauyus continues to train as a warrior, waiting for the chance to slay his father's killer.

After coming back from some campaign, Mathayus has a brief scene with his widowed mom, and then meets the new king, who doesn't seem to remember the son of Ashur. Sargon takes a quasi-paternal interest in Mathayus, inviting the latter to join his bodyguards-- the first move that moves Sargon from the role of "father-killer" to "bad father." 

Mathayus bides his time, which gives him the chance to accept the king’s hospitality by dallying with a few slave-girls. Then the hero tries to slay the usurper. However, Sargon's magical powers render him  invulnerable to ordinary weapons. Mathayus flees the king’s forces and seeks a method to slay his enemy.  He meets Layla again, and their liking for each other is transparent. The two of them are joined by Ari, a young Greek scholar, who persuades them that for a price he can lead them to a sword capable of killing Sargon.

Ari leads the other two to Knossus, where they invade the temple of the Minotaur and slay a very badly-done bull man. Ari then reveals that the sword is in the underworld, the land of the dead. Mathayus remains firm on slaying his father's killer, and even makes a few more converts in the temple: Greek warriors eager to loot the underworld of its treasures. Their leader Pollux is sort of a 'good father stand-in," for he knew Ashur in life and is roughly the same age as the hero's daddy. During the group's trek into the netherworld, Mathayus also sees a dead spectre whom the hero thinks is Ashur, though the viewer does not see what the hero sees.

After the would-be thieves have slain a few underworld monsters, the domain's queen Astarte shows up. She claims to be "the goddess of love and war" but takes a shine to Mathayus. While she tries to tempt him into becoming her consort, some of the warriors sneak away to look for the magic sword, which they find and successfully pilfer. However, Layla can't stand seeing the goddess mess with her chosen man, and challenges Astarte to a fight, significantly insulting her as a “cradle robber.” 

After a short battle between the young and the ageless, Astarte cheats and wins the fight.  She then tells Mathayus that she has Ashur with her in the underworld with her, and, though she doesn’t quite state her relationship with him, it's not impossible that she's dallied with him as she now dallies with the hero, which would make her the "bad mother" against Inanna's "goiod mother." Despite Mathayus offending the goddess by rejecting her,  most of the expedition escapes-- though "good father" Pollux perishes and remains behind.

While the good guys journey to meet "bad father' Sargon, "bad mother" Astarte meets him first. In fact, while Sargon is having sex with some slave-girl, Astarte possesses or replaces the girl just as Sargon's trying to have sex with her. Astarte hasn't come for pleasures of the flesh, though: she wants to be sure that Sargon-- who has apparently received his occult powers from her-- retrieves her sword. Sargon asks her for more power and she bestows on the villain the ability to become a scorpion-monster-- thus foreshadowing Mathayus's final fate in the second MUMMY film.

Amid other complications, Mathayus confronts Sargon, but the wily villain disguises himself as Ashur, thus providing yet another link between “the two fathers.” The disguise doesn’t fool the hero, since he believes that he saw his father in the underworld. Sargon then reveals that he's been the prime mover in the hero's quest, for he suborned Ari the Scholar to steal the real sword and bring it to Sargon. However, Ari double-double-crosses Sargon, so that Mathayus gets the really real weapon and eventually slays his enemy in a big battle. 

Once the "bad father" dies, “bad mother” Astarte shows up to reclaim her sword. She's tempted to kill Mathayus and take him down to her realm with her, but he improbably convinces her to let him live since she'll have him one day. The last thing Mathauys sees before swooning is Astarte, and when he wakens, the next thing he sees is his real mother Inanna (the second of her two scenes in the whole film). All of Mathayus's surviving allies are there as well, with Layla taking over as the hero's destined squeeze. Since the first film focuses on how the character first became "the Scorpion King," this teen version of the hero doesn't attempt to ascend to the Akkadian throne. A final voice-over reminds the audience that Mathayus does have a somewhat tragic fate in store, and that his heroic propensities will at a future date lead to him becoming a monster not unlike the "bad father's he's slain.

On a minor but not irrelevant note, the name "Layla" strongly resembles that of a Near Eastern goddess called variously Lilith and Lilitu, and this goddess also shares characteristics with two others whose names are evoked in the film: Inanna (also called Ishtar in antiquity) and Astarte. I don't think that this name-association  can be simple coincidence, and I find it more probable that writer McCormick intentionally gave all of the women in the hero's life roughly-similar names. I would not press the Freudian comparisons too far. Still, given that his real mother Inanna barely has any purpose in the script, her appearance so close to Astarte at the climax may have been informed by a quasi-Freudian notion of the basic identity of the two mothers-- and even of the prospective mother of the hero's future children, if any. Similar, there are so many good and bad versions of the father in the film that some Freud is justified. This intellectual debt, however, may not do much for many viewers, who would be justly irritated by the film's unfunny lapses into contemporary phrases like "music hath charms to soothe the savage beast" and "what fresh hell is this."

DINOCROC VS. SUPERGATOR (2010)

 

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

DINOCROC VS. SUPERGATOR has a small advantage over SUPERGATOR in that it's directed and co-written by Jim Wynorski.  Wynorski will never be anything but a junk-film director, but in general I've found that he does try to keep his goofy trash scenarios lively.  To be sure, Wynorksi follows closely in the footsteps of Roger Corman by injecting as much bimbo-flesh as he possibly can, but unlike the director of SUPERGATOR, Wynorski seems to choose a better breed of bimbo.
He also throws in a couple of references to Cormanological film-history, as when the bimbo-gamewarden's boat is named "Wild Angel" and a tour-guide shows tourists where "She Gods of Shark Reef" was made.

While SUPERGATOR stuck pretty close to the template, D VS. S at least tosses in other familiar tropes: David Carradine as the evil mogul whose company creates the two beasts (guess neither one is supposed to be a "dino" anymore), a karate-chopping mercenary lady, a "ragin' Cajun" crocodile hunter who tells the audience that "crocodiles and alligators are natural enemies," and a field of giant mushrooms.  Oh, and the bimbo-gamewarden runs around in hot pants. 

The almost inevitable disappointment is that in all of these "vs." films, the creature-battles last only three minutes at most, so they're always perfunctory affairs.  Since the "dinocroc" for some reason is able to run around on its hind legs like a T-Rex, the poor supergator seems outmatched from the start.  Bad form, Wynorski!