WANDAVISION (2021)

 

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

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

In one respect, it seems anomalous that any disciple of the ultraliberal Kevin Feige-- in this case, WANDAVISION showrunner Jac Schaeffer-- should choose to adapt one the most ultraconservative plotlines to come out of Marvel Comics, courtesy of John Byrne, who in most respects would seem to be one of the most ultraconservative plotters in Marvel history.

But now that I've streamed the nine-episode narrative of WANDAVISION, the reason seems obvious: mediocrity calls to mediocrity. For most of his career, John Byrne has been a mediocre writer, whose ability to provide pretty pictures encouraged editors to buy his mediocre melodramatic scripts. WANDAVISION, like the majority of efforts from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, is just a series of meaningless melodramatic episodes, made somewhat palatable by the skilled services of actors like Elizabeth Olsen and Paul Bettany, who respectively play "Wanda" (aka the Scarlet Witch) and The Vision. 

One good thing about WANDAVISION is that because its melodramatic incidents are so bereft of meaning, I don't feel the need to cover them in detail. Instead I'll devote more space to the strange parallel between the conservatism of Byrne and the ultraliberalism of the Feige disciple.

Quick background: the Scarlet Witch became a regular Avenger in 1964, but was not romantically linked to any other Marvel character until the early 1970s, when she became entwined with the android hero The Vision. For roughly the next twenty years, their entanglement was a liberal's wet-dream of a relationship marginalized by human bigotry, much akin to the earlier paradigm of mutants vs. human in the X-MEN titles. Though writer Steve Englehart was not the sole architect of this development, he's associated with most of the high points, ranging from having the characters married, giving them mystically inspired children (since the Vision technically didn't have seed to donate), and letting them set up housekeeping in a suburban town.

In 1989, John Byrne-- who was still considered a superstar thanks to his tenures on the X-MEN and SUPERMAN titles-- took over Marvel's WEST COAST AVENGERS. In a contemporary COMICS JOURNAL interview, Byrne made it very clear that he did not validate the liberal thought-experiment of human beings, mutant or not, marrying artificial people. Indeed, he memorably compared the idea to that of "marrying your toaster." In a sequence named "Vision Quest," Byrne divested the Vision of all his human characteristics, so that he became an unfeeling robot, and he revealed that Wanda's children were demonic illusions rather than distinct entities, banishing them into narrative nothingness. I know that this state of affairs lasted a long time in the AVENGERS titles, even after Byrne no longer wrote for Marvel, but I have no idea what the current state of affairs may be for the two heroes.

Over thirty years later, Kevin Feige worked his versions of the Vision and the Scarlet Witch into his AVENGERS films. Given that these grandiose productions did not lend themselves to the slow soap-operatic development seen in serial comic books, I have often wondered why he bothered. Most of the burgeoning romance between the mutant sorceress and the android develops off screen, and the culmination of their relationship is that the Vision is destroyed and Wanda mourns him. 

I suppose WANDAVISION was conceived as some sort of answer to that question, inadequate though it is. Rather than simply reviving the Vision as most comic books would, Schaeffer rather ham-handedly treats the hero's demise as being as permanent as is a human's death in the real world. Wanda, whose powers are much greater than in the comics (though still erratic in nature), doesn't just magick up two fantasy-kids. This time, she transforms an entire town of people into the perfect suburban community, thus combining Englehart's idea of the suburban sojourn with Byrne's notion of a berserk heroine's fantasy-psychodrama. Moreover, Wanda's transformed town goes through phases patterned after famous American sitcoms that the heroine encountered in her youth. 

I don't know if Schaeffer deemed his sitcom-spoofs as piercing satire or as affectionate parodies. All I know is that whether he was sending up BEWITCHED, THE BRADY BUNCH or GROWING PAINS, all of the lampoons were excruciating to sit through. I mean, you know you're doing badly when even THE BRADY BUNCH seems wittier than its purported mockery. Of course, I suppose Schaeffer could always excuse the witlessness of the sitcom-imitations by the fact that they're being generated by the mind of a young woman from the fictional Middle European land of Sokovia, who grew up watching bootleg copies of American sitcoms but who was not actually a script-writer herself. Suffice to say, Schaeffer COULD say that, but I still wouldn't excuse him from perpetrating such garbage entertainment.

Though Wanda has generated her fake suburban dream-town to palliate her grief and to imagine herself enjoying a happy life with a re-created version of Vision, she's also broadcasting signals of her "TV shows" in such a way that the signals can be received by official entities. One entity is the real-life FBI, represented by Jimmy Woo (Randall Park), playing the MCU's version of an Asian lawman who first debuted in the 1956 title THE YELLOW CLAW.  The other organization of the fictional Marvel SWORD, which deals with extraterrestrial threats. This group is dominantly represented by Monica Rambeau, which character Schaeffer wrote for the 2019 CAPTAIN MARVEL film. 

Because of circumstances beyond her control, Rambeau was separated from SWORD for a time, allowing an Evil White Guy to take charge of the group. (How does one know that his evil and his whiteness are connected? It's hard to prove, but I felt that in the first scene that EWG has with Monica, it's strongly implied that his white privilege got him the job once the more qualified Superior Black Woman Monica was out of the way.) Sure enough, toward the end of the series it's revealed that EWG is the real villain: that he attempted to confiscate the shattered body of the original Vision in order to create a new defensive technology. Wanda witnessed her former lover being disassembled like, well, a toaster, and that, among other factors, caused the heroine to flip out and magick up her ideal suburban life. 

Most of the middle range of episodes focus on Jimmy and Monica trying to figure out what's going on with the fantasy-town while also seeking to prevent EWG from provoking a major conflict with the godlike powers of Wanda. Both are fairly dull secondary heroes, but they get some assistance from Darcy Lewis (Kat Dennings), a quip-happy scientist from the first two THOR movies. Finally, toward the end of the series it's belatedly revealed that a mystery villain seeks to manipulate Wanda's powers to her own ends. Malefic magician Agatha Harkness, extremely loosely based on a long-time Marvel support-character, suffers from fuzzy motivations and is played more for humor than for menace-- probably there's already talk that she might spun off into her own series. (As I've observed elsewhere, no matter what bad things either a female or person of color may do, in the MCU, all is forgiven thanks to identity politics, since only White Men can be truly evil.)

To wrap up, somehow I enjoyed the performances of Olsen and Bettany even though I hated their dialogue, much as I would enjoy the pretty drawings of Byrne despite his ghastly attempts at characterization. This mingling of strange bedfellows therefore shows that, to paraphrase Tolstoy, good conservative stories and good liberal stories are all good in different ways, while mediocre stories from both camps are all pretty much alike.

JOHNNY ENGLISH (2003), JOHNNY ENGLISH--REBORN (2011)

 

PHENOMENALITY: (1) *uncanny,* (2) *marvelous*

MYTHICITY: (1)*poor* (2) *fair*

FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*

CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological, psychological*

The two JOHNNY ENGLISH films-- spawned from a series of commercials featuring British comedy-star Rowan Atkinson-- will never be lauded as the finest comedies, or even the best spoofs of the spy-genre.  But they certainly give me a run for my analytic money in terms of figuring out their phenomenality and their relation to my concept of the combative mode.

The first film-- which I'll call ENGLISH for short-- features Atkinson as Johnny English, a member of the spy-organization "MI-7."  Like the cinematic version of the teleseries "Get Smart," English is a daydreamer who imagines himself in James Bond-like situations but is actually a low-level agent with no experience in the field and no competence whatsoever.  Unlike the GET SMART movie, which invoked the Bondian trope of "spy-gimmicks," ENGLISH barely even references the idea that MI-7's spies have such trinkets at their disposal.  In addition, unlike Maxwell Smart Johnny English shows no ability in terms of fighting or shooting.  Since the film lacks a hero with spectacular dynamicity, it can only rate as subcombative.

ENGLISH's villain Pascal Sauvage (John Malkovich) provides a much stronger connection to another Bond-trope: the idea of the plotter who comes up with a "bizarre crime" that goes beyond the normal limits of ordinary criminality.  In the finished film Sauvage doesn't have any uncanny or marvelous resources-- just a bunch of gun-toting henchmen-- but his plot is rather clever.  By stealing the Crown Jewels of England, he sets off a chain of events that will culminate in his ascension to the throne of Great Britain.  Once he has absolute authority over the British Isles, he plans to turn them into a vast penal colony, to which the rest of the world can send their hardened criminals.  It's a silly idea, and yet-- perhaps because Sauvage's French background is stressed-- it does carry a certain resonance.  Maybe it's because England's history includes a period in which it transported a goodly number of criminals to Australia.

Malkovich makes a good smarmy villain, constantly amused by English's bumbling attempts to bring him to justice.  But aside from one scene that suggests that English may have some buried fighting-ability, the would-be agent shows no ability to do anything but constantly embarass himself before huge crowds of people-- which, as it happens, was the dominant schtick Atkinson practiced in his "Mister Bean" teleseries.  A little of this routine goes a long way, and ENGLISH overdoes it by more than half.  Even with the clever premise of Sauvage's master plan, too much of the film seems like setups for Atkinson's antics.

A side-note: I said that "in the finished film" the villain only had henchmen at his command.  However, the DVD's deleted scenes include two instances where Sauvage executes two victims in a clever manner: ushering them into an elevator whose walls are lined with flamethrowers-- flamethrowers so hot that they can reduce a man to ashes in minutes.  But since I rate this as "uncanny," the device wouldn't have changed the film's phenomenality had it been included in the completed flick.

Although JOHNNY ENGLISH REBORN includes three of the four writers who worked on the first film, REBORN is a much tighter spoof on the superspy genre, without omitting Atkinson's signature screwups.  The enemy this time is an organization of assassins called "Vortex," and it utilizes an outright marvelous device-- a mind-control drug that can force anyone to become a killer.  In addition, English gets to use quite a few marvelous devices, such as a motorized wheelchair with a gun in its body, and a missile-launching umbrella.

But the biggest change is that in the interim between the two films, Johnny English becomes a master of armed and unarmed combat.  In the first film he's an incompetent after the model of Inspector Clouseau, but in the second, he has hewed closer to Maxwell Smart-- which is not to say that he doesn't still use his skills in comic fashion.  For instance, his martial training in Tibet involves building up his resistance to pain by having his genitals repeatedly smashed-- which, as it happens, does prove to be a useful talent to have at the film's climax.

Another improvement is that one of the villains is a virtual clone of James Bond, a good-looking agent named Simon.  A similar figure appeared in the first film, only to be knocked off immediately, but this time the simulacrum of Bond is a direct opponent to English, who remains to some extent still a "Bond manque."  Simon even has a tradition of stealing English's girlfriends, which helps to personalize the relationship when the villain's perfidy is revealed.

The film makes far more ingenious use of stuntwork, thus paralleling and sending up that aspect of the superspy genre, particularly a chase involving cars chasing the motorized wheelchair.  Atkinson's physical stuntwork is improved as well, particularly in a scene toward the end where he has to "fight himself" while under control of the mind-control drug.

Both films, incidentally, are well served with glamorous female agents.  Even here, ENGLISH just has one major babe, while REBORN has two.

THE CAVALIER (1978)

 

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

I'm not sure why this chopsocky comedy earned the title "The Cavalier." I suppose the intent was to associate "cavaliers" with "knightly heroes," as I've also seen four or five other HK films with the word "chivalry" in their titles. Both words were originally associated with mounted horsemen, and though it's no surprise that not a single character in the movie rides a horse, I'm not sure that any of these characters comport themselves even as unmounted knights.

So there's this old kung-fu patriarch whose only online billing is "Grandfather." He's apparently taught a lot of his skills to his granddaughter Peng (Lung Chung-erh), and he insists that it's time for her to get married. But Grandpa wants a grandson-in-law who can bring some kung-fu skills to the match, in order to produce "strong sons." His unique approach is to haul Peng into the town square of some city and announce that if any man can defeat Peng in battle, she'll become his bride. Peng seems basically okay with this proposition, and maybe that's because she trounces almost all challengers, and thus doesn't really think she's going to get beaten. (There is a big hulk she can't vanquish with her punches, but that guy gets dragged away by his jealous wife.) 

Two guys wander into the square. They call each other "brother" but they may be using the term figuratively, since they're both Ming revolutionaries working against the Ching tyranny. (Or was it the other way round? At one point their main enemy claims to be working for the much later Manchus.) Kan (Sze-Ma Lung), the dominant member of the duo, gets pulled into a fight with Peng and he counters her moves. Grandpa decides that he's officially proposed and demands that Kan marry Peng. Kan has deep political matters on his mind and can't be bothered with marriage, so he and his partner run away. Grandpa and Peng spend most of the film chasing them, during which time all four get into a lot of comical fights with flirtatious guys and petty functionaries. As is often the case, Hong Kong's idea of broad comedy registers as lame in my eyes (especially a moment where one of the defeated functionaries wets himself). But considering that writer-director Joseph Kuo had worked on the two BRONZE MEN films, most of the kung-fu scenes are rather sloppy, with even the excellent Chung-erh indulging in what some call "swingy-arm kung fu."

Only one sequence proves an exception, and it's also the only part of the film that causes me to rate the film's mythicity "fair." Toward the end of the movie, Kuo apparently decides to inject a little straight adventure into the mix. All through the flick, Kan and his allies (including another lady fighter, Nancy Yen) have prated about wanting to knock off Kung (Lo Lieh), the "war minister" of the enemy dynasty. Kan's coterie attacks Kung's pavilion, and Kung's forces gain the upper hand.

Along come Grandpa and Peng, still trying to drag Kan into marriage. Grandpa pulls a bunch of homemade grenades out of his robes and decimates Kung's soldiers. Then Grandpa squares off against Kung, and it's revealed that the two of them are old enemies. Kung claims he can best anyone with his "magic kung fu," but when he attacks, Grandpa repels Kung with his "negative soul-power," which for some reason manifests as a jet of steam from Grandpa's staff. Kung is flung away, and Grandpa thinks Kung is toast.

Instead, Kung's magic-fu makes him into your basic juggernaut, able to stave off all the blows of the remaining revolutionaries, all the while laughing like a manic hyena. (Lo Lieh really rocks the crazed laughter thing, all the more impressive since he's keeping it up while doing his signature fighting-moves.) At last Grandpa remembers his former teacher informing him that the only way to defeat magic-fu is with a "Yin-Yang" maneuver that combines the powers of one male and one female fighter. Grandpa enjoins Peng and Kan to attack Kung together and this leads to Kung's colorful defeat. But then Grandpa insists on Kan marrying Peng again, and so Kan heads for the hills, pursued by Gramps, Peng and a whole wedding entourage.

One odd thing about this opus is the total lack of romance between Peng and Kan. From what I can tell Chinese audiences like soppy romance as much as anyone else, and even kung-fu films are rife with lovers who court each other with karate chops. But aside from Kan telling Peng that he's not rejecting her because she's ugly, there's zero sense that the two of them have any romantic resonance. I guess in the writer's mind real romance would have offset the "Sadie Hawkins" vibe he was going for.

GAMERA VS. VIRAS (1968)

 

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

Having never seen the Gamera films in order, I wasn't sure when they turned into pure juvenilia. As it happens, GAMERA VS. VIRAS marks the transition well-- which is about all it does well. This is the first time, according to the Mill Creek translation, that Gamera acquires the cognomen "friend of all children," and not one but two precocious tykes find that they can call on his help like Jimmy Olsen summoning Superman, but with no rationale whatever.

The image of Gamera as a monster that stomps on people while he feeds on oil-refineries has gone out the window. An alien spaceship descends to Earth, planning to raze humanity so that its masters can take over the planet. Gamera intercepts the candy-colored spaceship and drives it away.  But the aliens don't give up easily. When they learn that Gamera cherishes children, they abduct two smart-ass kids-- Boy Scouts residing in Japan-- and threaten to kill them, so that Gamera backs off. 

Eventually the boys get loose and free Gamera from the aliens' control, but their leader-- a gigantic octopus-critter named Viras-- engages the giant turtle in battle.  Up to this point, the story has been banal in the extreme, and the big battle-scene is no different. Viras is a poorly designed kaiju-creature, lacking any of the interesting powers seen in Barugon and Gyaos.  The references to myth and folklore, or even to average facets of Japanese life, are gone.

NIGHT OF THE COMET (1984)

 

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


NIGHT OF THE COMET is often described as a SF-comedy. I don't think that it is, but if it was, it would definitely be of the "one-joke" variety. That one vivid joke-- what happens to a couple of young "valley girls" when the rest of the world is destroyed-- has made COMET into a minor "cult film," though I also don't think it deserves that distinction either.

As a light take on the SF-genres of the "post-apocalypse" and the "zombie plague" respectively, COMET is diverting enough. But like a lot of films without much focus, the best mythic material-- psychological in this case-- appears at the beginning. The picture introduces its audience to two teenaged sisters living in Southern California, Regina and her slightly younger sister Samantha. Regina works as an usher at a movie-theater, plays video games, and has occasional sex with her boyfriend. Samantha gets the burden of introducing their backstory. Their barely mentioned mother left the sisters' father long ago, and the father-- a military man-- departed to serve in some unspecified capacity in Honduras. But he put his new wife Doris, a full-time evil stepmother, in charge of the two girls. Not only does Doris play around on her absent husband, she even punches out Samantha for being too sassy while Doris is holding a party.

The occasion of the party is the appearance of a comet due to pass very close to Earth. Though a voice-over warns the audience that the comet last appeared near Earth at the time of the dinosaurs' extinction, most people on Earth-- or at least in America-- are celebrating the heavenly body's approach with "comet parties." By chance neither Regina nor Samantha are up and about watching the comet's passage, and that's one reason that they-- and a tiny handful of other humans-- are spared the effects of the comet's dust. In the space of one night, most of humanity dissolves into calcium dust, and another small handful turn into unusually chatty zombies.

After Regina and Samantha get over the shock of being almost the only persons in the city, they take measures to arm themselves. Fortunately they've had training with guns and in armed combat, presumably due to their absent father, and this comes in handy defending themselves from killer zombies. Then they meet Hector, another normal human who avoided being affected by the comet-dust. Regina seems very interested in Hector, but strangely Samantha doesn't seem to consider moving in on her sibling's territory, though Samantha does enjoy tormenting her sis about whether or not Hector might be gay.

The two girls and Hector also fall afoul of a government think-tank. These scientists also avoided the dust but who are now ruthlessly gathering other normals and using them in experiments in order to find a cure for the dust-poison. Eventually the cure is made irrelevant when the dust is dispelled by rain, and so Hector and Regina must begin thinking about repopulating the Earth, apart from a handful of surviving kids. Samantha is belatedly given a suitor her own age so that she doesn't end up being the odd girl out.

There are some amusing moments in COMET, the standout being the girls having fun fooling around in a nearly deserted mall (where, in the tradition of George Romero, they meet more zombies). But a smattering of cute lines does not make this movie a comedy. In essence, the film follows the same dramatic trope seen in most apocalyptic tales: the need for the younger generation to rebuild the world-- effectively becoming their parents-- after a cataclysm has conveniently wiped away the previous generations.

MACISTE IN THE VALLEY OF THUNDERING ECHOES (1964)

 

 

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

Though this Italian-made film was circulated under the title HERCULES OF THE DESERT, its mythology is that of the Maciste films. Maciste, rather than being rooted in any particular time and clime, tended to wander around history as the scripters' needs arose, a standout being his appearance in 15th-century Scotland in THE WITCH'S CURSE.

Prior to the appearance of the titular muscleman-- once again essayed by Kirk Morris-- there's conflict brewing in some vaguely ahistorical desert terrain. The good guys are essentially Bedouin Arabs, who may be Muslim but are not really hard-and-fast about it. This wandering tribe, the Gameli, believes that there exists a "land of green pastures" promised to them by a prophecy. However, the land lies in a valley that seems to be haunted by frightful specters who create a fearful racket, "the thundering echoes," so none of the Gameli want to pass into the valley. Further, like so many wandering tribes, they automatically draw hostile fire from the tribesmen of the big cities. One such walled city is ruled by ambitious Queen Farida (Helene Chanel), who plans to exterminate or enslave the Gameli.

The High Priest of the Gameli, though, knows how to call forth the sort of great hero they need as their champion. As reviewers before me have remarked, in most movies Maciste just wanders into trouble out of nowhere in particular. However, the scripters here must have felt like doing something with the putative meaning of his name, "born from the rock," for the High Priest performs a summoning-ritual in a cave, and lo, the biceped hero manifests out of the rocks therein.

Eventually, after Maciste kicks the asses of Farida's warriors-- and this is a Maciste with a Hercules-like level of power, unlike other iterations-- the hero wins an invitation to the queen's palace, where, like many evil queens before her, she enslaves him with her insidious potions. Naturally, there's a good-girl Gameli heroine (Spela Rozin) vying to rescue Maciste from the bad woman's clutches, and Rosalba Neri, also a renowed Euro-babe, rings in with a minor support-role.

Most of the action is just OK until the literally "bang-up" conclusion. Maciste ventures into the thunderous valley, where he finds that the "thunder" is being produced by a tribe of weird-looking guys beating on metal gongs or sheets of metal. Maciste whips them all, thus paving the way for the good guys to take possession of the valley, but the thunder-makers are never explained. Since they don't show special powers, one has to assume that they're mortals, perhaps using their phony thunder after the fashion of the Greek Salmoneus, hoping to pose as gods to unwitting mortals. Whatever the reasoning. this sequence is the most spirited one in the movie, exceeding even the sumptuous shots of Helene Chanel.

HONOR ROLL #122, MAY 27

"Do you believe in Maciste?" sings SPELA ROZIN.

CATHERINE MARY STEWART enjoys a night on the zombie-town.

"I don't know what started the fight," complains Gamera, "I just told VIRAS I'd have an order of fried octopus."

NANCY YEN gives main heroine Lung Chung-erh a helping fist.

Poor Johnny English; ROWAN ATKINSON had just one note, and only one of them was super-combative.

"'Tis a far far better thing to die outright," sez PAUL BETTANY, "than to get revived as part of a lousy subplot on Wandavision."

BATMAN FOREVER (1995)

 

 

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

What's the best thing I can possibly say about BATMAN FOREVER, a stinky sequel that makes SUPERMAN IV look highly professional by comparison?

How about "it manages to be bad simply by virtue of the producers' intrinsic dumbness about superhero films, and not because it's trying to inject crappy political content into the mix?"

That, and the fact that Kilmer's Bat-suit doesn't look as much like a tank as did Keaton's. This allows Kilmer's Batman to engage in a few fluid fight-scenes that were an improvement on most of those in the two Burton films.

FOREVER is not a bad Bat-film simply because it doesn't give viewers the "grim-and-gritty" version of the hero seen in the Burton films. Given that director Joel Schumacher was charged by his producers with making Batman more "kid-friendly," it was possible that he might have come up with some valid take on the "camp Batman" of the 1966 TV show, or even the similarly outrageous Bat-comics of the Silver Age, which I tend to refer to as "Candyland Batman." Certainly Schumacher chose to make his Gotham a bright and scintillating landscape for the most part, and at least one of his two chosen villains, The Riddler, would have fit into this milieu much better than the most current version of the Prince of Puzzles.

The trouble is, though, that even a more light-hearted Batman is not an excuse to just crank up the visual effects and let the story go to hell. Michael Bay, who in the same era was making splashy action-fare like BAD BOYS and THE ROCK, even displayed a greater sense of narrative storytelling than Schumacher does here. 

The basic pattern of the FOREVER script, to be sure, could have been copied from a lot of bad Bat-comics of the Golden and Silver Ages. Villain strikes at society. Hero stops him but villain gets away. Rinse and repeat until the villain gets caught. But a stand-alone movie needs more than a repetitious storyline and glossy FX. The so-called script was a collaboration between a married writer-team, the Batchelers, who hadn't done much before or after FOREVER, and Akiva Goldsman, who had worked with Schumacher on the successful film THE CLIENT. Given that Goldsman went on to perpetrate such awful scripts as those of BATMAN AND ROBIN and LOST IN SPACE, I choose to blame him alongside Schumacher for pissing on the Bat-mythos.

Whereas BATMAN RETURNS found a tolerably logical reason for the film's versions of Penguin and Catwoman to work together, Goldsman can't be bothered to create any real characterization for either the two villains, Riddler (Jim Carrey) and the incredibly awful choice of Two-Face (Tommy Lee Jones). The latter does not really belong in the world of Candyland Batman, he's "grim and gritty" at the core, even if he occasionally appears in some more light-hearted cartoons. Riddler and Two-Face have no plausible reason to work together.  For one thing, Riddler is a complete noob in this script, with no criminal rep whatever, so Two-Face-- even granting that Jones plays the role like a manic version of Nicholson's Joker-- seems not just crazy but stupid for accepting the green-clad goofus into his confidence. Additionally, while Carrey can be forgiven for giving the audience a hyper-kinetic Riddler, given that this was what the actor was known for, but Jones clearly has some idea of stealing Carrey's scenes, and thus every scene they share is an ordeal akin to having teeth pulled without anesthetic.

And then there's Val Kilmer's Batman. I suppose he makes some attempt to give the Caped Crusader a little gravitas at times, and at times he succeeds. But the spoofy dialogue often undermines the actor, particularly in Kilmer's first appearance in Bat-garb within the film. The hero is called in to prevent Two-Face from killing innocents, but Goldsman is so desperate to get in his funny lines that during this sequence both Kilmer-Man and his new love interest Chase Meridian (Nicole Kidman) waste time flirting in the midst of the emergency. The movie never recovers from this portrait of the crusader and his romantic partner as complete morons.

This is also the movie that brings Robin into the movie franchise, and not surprisingly, this is no less heavy-handed. Even by the nineties there were politically correct morons who blanched at the idea of an adult superhero inducting an actual child into the business of being a superhero, and so I suppose it was inevitable that New Robin (Chris O'Donnell) was a twenty-something victim of tragedy. Since O'Donnell is only about ten years younger than Kilmer, the idea that Bruce Wayne would feel a burning need to succor this version of orphaned Dick Grayson comes out of La-La Land. Even the dry comedy of Michael Gough's Alfred can't save any of the Kilmer-O'Donnell scenes, though they're still a little less excruciating than the Kilmer-Kidman scenes.

None of the psychobabble uttered by Meridian about Batman or anything else possesses the slightest resonance with the operatic world of comic books, much less to any real-world concerns. Schumacher strains to borrow some "street cred" by adapting a sequence from Frank Miller's THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS-- the one in which Young Bruce Wayne encounters a ferocious bat beneath Wayne Manor-- but he blows it, because he can't give the scene any personal tone; he just bulls on through it, as if he thinks it'll satisfy the comics-nerds.

Not that I really expect a lot of psychological depth in summer action movies. But at least I'd like to see the high-octane set-pieces to have some moxie, and everything Schumacher puts together is like a bad imitation of Michael Bay at his worst. I would rather watch the worst TRANSFORMERS than to ever abuse my eyeballs again with a single scene from BATMAN FOREVER-- and I mean that, like "forever."

X-MEN APOCALYPSE (2016)

 

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


After the merely mild enjoyment I had from 2011's X-MEN FIRST CLASS, and the general boredom I derived from X-MEN: DAYS OF FUTURE PAST, I considered X-MEN; APOCALYPSE more of a return to form, at least roughly comparable to the strongest X-film thus far, 2003's X2. That said, APOCALYPSE has some of the same problems as FIRST CLASS: "too many superheroes spoiling the cookery."

FUTURE PAST seems to have come about largely to allow Singer to reshuffle the continuity of the post-Singer films, particularly the third film, in which both Jean Grey and Professor X were killed. While I don't oppose such reshuffling overall, the X-franchise isn't as easy to reboot as some concepts, in large part because it does feature such a polyglot of interrelated characters. In APOCALYPSE Scott Summers and Jean Grey have a fleeting encounter with Wolverine for the "real first time," thus invalidating the continuity of the first film. But if the franchise ever makes it to the present day-- APOCALPYSE is set in 1983-- through what sequence of events does Wolverine eventually become a full-time X-Man?  Or will Singer just hop over such confusing matters?

Though I do think the film could have benefited from some pruning, what I liked most about it was that this did not seem focused only on Singer's "favorite characters," as was the case with FUTURE PAST. The titular mutant villain, preserved in suspended animation since the reign of ancient Egypt, revives in 1983 and decides that he wants to destroy-and-remake the world-- to which end he enlists four modern-day mutants as his henchmen as he prepares to destroy the world. I confess that I don't remember much about Apocalypse from the comics, except that when he makes the modern-day scene he spends a lot more time learning the lay of the land. Thus, when he enlists various mutants to serve as his "four horsemen of the Apocalypse," it makes a little more sense that the comics-character might invoke such a Judeo-Christian reference, as opposed to the fellow who's never seen anything since the days of the pyramids. I guess if Singer had wanted to keep faith with his villain's Egyptian associations, the evil mutant might have called his henchmen "the four sons of Horus"-- though that reference would have gone over the heads of most moviegoers.

Wolverine's brief appearance allows other, often-marginalized characters their chance to shine, particularly Summers, Grey, and a new version of Nightcrawler, whose history in X2 must also be considered null and void. That said, Singer does insert one of his "favorites" amid the Four Horsemen. Rebooted versions of Storm and the Angel, and a newly-minted cinematic Psylocke, serve as three of the Horsemen, and all three of them must make do with less than generous backstories. The exception is the fourth Horseman, perpetual X-villain Magneto, who seems egregiously out of place in his role as a flunky to another Big Bad Mutant. Neither the excellent performance of Michael Fassbinder-- who is given some burn-down-the-barn dramatic scenes-- nor a subplot about Magneto being the daddy of X-ally Quicksilver, can smooth over the rough edges here.

Mystique, whose alternate name "Raven" may have confused some audience-members, was opposed to the X-Men most of the time during FUTURE PAST. Here she seems to walk into the X-mansion without so much as a by-your-leave, though I confess this may have something to do with FIRST CLASS continuity I've forgotten. Frankly, I barely remembered the presence of Scott's brother Alex in the earlier film, and though he serves the purpose of a narrative bridge here, he's another figure I wouldn't have minded seeing excised.

What the film does have going for it-- if one can negotiate all the convoluted histories-- is action. Not counting the solo films for Wolverine and Deadpool, the group-oriented X-films haven't mounted any impressive action-sequences since the aforementioned X2. One may not have much sense of Apocalypse's motives, but he makes for a great 'everyone-beat-on-the-bad-guy" opponent: arguably a much better one than the fairly sympathetic Magneto. The concluding battle, in which all of the X-Men keep throwing their multifarious powers at the Big Bad, is much better choreographed than the big concluding fight in BATMAN VS. SUPERMAN, and most of those in CAPTAIN AMERICA CIVIL WAR-- with the obvious exception of the 'airport battle."

Finally, given that the other two "pre-summer superhero" films were rife with all manner of hazy political pontifications, APOCALYPSE is refreshingly free of such overtones, even if there's a de rigeur reference to "groups who hate and exploit mutantkind," et al. APOCALYPSE, simply by virtue of being an "apocalyptic" superhero tale, reminds us that at heart such combative works transcend the mundane realm of politics.

HIGHWAY TO HELL (1991)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *metaphysical*


Not having seen HIGHWAY TO HELL for many years, I didn't remember that it had enough comic elements to qualify as a comedy. That itself is something of a giveaway: upon seeing HIGHWAY again, I found hardly any of the humorous content really funny, despite its broad nature.

HIGHWAY, rather than taking the farcical approach of many supernormal comedies, plays its main story fairly straight. Charlie (Chad Lowe) and Rachel (Kirsty Swanson) are young, in love, and on the elopement path, driving to Las Vegas for a quickie marriage. Brian Helgeland's script doesn't devote any time to the reasons why Rachel's parents didn't want her to marry. The entire focus is on the trope of the eloping lovers, who find that the desert plays host to many roads, including the "highway to hell."

A grotty police officer pulls the young lovers over and promptly abducts the blushing bride. Fortunately, before encountering this denizen of Satan's domain-- generally addressed as "the Hellcop"-- Charlie receives some assistance from Sam (Richard Farnsworth), an old desert-rat who for many years has dwelt in the wilderness, because years ago his bride was similarly stolen from him. Apparently it took Sam so long to learn the byways of hell and to accrue some supernatural weapons that he grew too old to make an assault on Hell himself. However, he donates his arsenal and his intel to Charlie, who drives into the unholy domain-- most of which still looks like the barren desert. The weird-looking inhabitants range from MAD MAX-like bikers and various pathetic condemned souls, one of whom is Clara, Sam's former love, who surrendered to the blandishments of the realm's Satanic ruler (though I didn't quite follow what she got for signing away her soul). Moving from the pathetic to the ridiculous, there are also a few more noteworthy sinners hanging around this version of hell, the most memorable being Adolf Hitler as played by the acerbic Gilbert Gottfried.

Helgeland's version of Hell has almost nothing to do with standard Judeo-Christian concepts, and thus Satan (Patrick Bergin) has more in common with the Greek Hades. He's a supernatural "snatcher" who can abduct virgins to be his brides, though for unspecified reasons he'd really prefer to have his brides surrender themselves willingly. In fact, there are few if any references to the Other Side, and at no time does Charlie get any help from the servants of Satan's opponent. Charlie isn't able to overcome the Hellcop or Satan's other minions by force alone, so he resorts to that beloved device of road-movies everywhere: the climactic race.

The base concept of HIGHWAY is a lot stronger than the execution, but it's refreshing to see a protagonist who's somewhat maladroit without playing the fool, while Bergin makes a persuasive, borderline-tragic devil-figure. It's worth a look, but not two.

RISE OF THE GUARDIANS (2012)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*

FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure* 

CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical* 

I'm a longtime lover of crossover-concepts, so I suppose 2012 must go down in my personal history as the first time not one but two animated crossover-films appeared in the same year: Dreamworks’ RISE OF THE GUARDIANS and Disney’s WRECK-IT RALPH.  Both are reasonably amusing entertainments, but only one of them realizes the full potential of a crossover: to juxtapose ideas that weren’t meant to go together but can successfully blend when the writer understands how to play the disparate elements off one another.

Given that Dreamworks did a nice job with crossing over fairy-tale figures in its original SHREK film (though not so much in the sequels), I might have expected that company to produce the better 2012 crossover-film.  Instead, the Dreamworks film never goes beyond its derivative nature, which might be capsulized as “MIRACLE ON 34^TH STREET meets THE AVENGERS,” with lots of goofy jokes.

The viewpoint character of GUARDIANS is Jack Frost, a young winter-spirit able to conjure up ice and snow wherever he pleases.  Though he generally has no cares beyond having fun, he has two sources of disquiet:

First, he doesn’t know who he is or where he came from, except that the unapproachable, never-seen being called “the Man in the Moon” gave him his name. 

Second, though he can interact with humans with his powers, they can’t perceive him, and only know his name as an outmoded expression. 

In contrast, children the world over still believe in the mythic characters who comprise the Guardians—Santa Claus (given a delightful Slavic accent here), the Easter Bunny (rendered as an Aussie for some reason), the Tooth Fairy, and the Sandman.  In their capacity as Guardians, these folkloric characters not only pursue their assorted child-nurturing duties, they keep watch to make sure that children’s belief in them stays strong so that they can continue those duties.

Along comes a menace to that stability: an evildoer named Pitch Black, also called the Boogeyman, who flourishes on the emotion of fear.  The villain manages to take control of the benign dreams created by the Sandman and spawn hideous nightmares—or to be precise, night-mares, since Pitch’s creatures all take the form of black monster-horses.  With these minions Pitch begins undermining the ability of the world’s children to believe in their protectors.  The Sandman is (apparently) killed, the Tooth Fairy’s domain is ransacked, the Easter Bunny’s eggs are smashed.  Though Christmas is months away, even Santa is diminished by the growing plague of disbelief. 

The Guardians attempt to enlist the flighty Jack Frost to their cause.  As if usually the case with rebel-heroes, initially Jack can only be drawn into the battle by appealing to his self-interest: his desire to know how he came to be what he is.  This becomes a running subplot, in which Jack learns that there’s a record of who he once was in the Tooth Fairy’s collection of harvested teeth (don’t ask).  However, in good time Jack gets religion and begins fighting Pitch for the sake of the kids, particularly one young boy who maintains his belief long after his kid-friends have lost their faith.  A climactic scene in which the kids use their belief to combat Pitch's terrors put me in mind of a similar "belief vs. unbelief" struggle in the 1982 animated cartoon THE FLIGHT OF DRAGONS.

The attention to Jack’s self-realization is a secondary matter: GUARDIANS, which has obviously patterned its concept on comic-book hero-teams like the Avengers and the Justice League, falls squarely within the mythos of adventure. Accordingly, Dreamworks doesn’t spare the CG-graphics in the area of wild battle-scenes.  At the same time, the film provides an acceptable amount of fun with such ideas as a sword-wielding Santa or a boomerang-tossing Easter Bunny.  However, though GUARDIANS is enjoyable formula, it’s never anything more than that.

There are hints of mythic resonance that could have gone beyond mere plot-utility.  Jack is revealed to have been a human before becoming a frost-spirit, and the Tooth Fairy tells him that all of the Guardians were humans raised to the status of protective spirits.  This follows a myth-pattern set by the heroes of ancient Greece, who were portrayed as mortals who once lived and later became gods.  The Man in the Moon, who remains an otiose deity-figure, is a folkloric stand-in for God on High.  The villain is a pretty simple Satanic type, seen to best effect when he plays “tempter” and nearly sways Jack Frost from his heroic course.  It’s interesting that the writer of the books on which the film is based named this boogieman “Pitch,” a name which appears in the 1960 Mexican film "Santa Claus" as a name for the Devil.  However, this devil's gimmick of unleashing nightmare-horses gets old very quickly; he might have seemed more like a master of nightmares had he been able to unleash a greater variety of horrors.

MOTHRA VS. GODZILLA (1964)

 

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


The fourth Godzilla film is also the third to pit the big lizard against a second colossal creature. However, while Godzilla's previous foes Angilas and King Kong present the same danger to humankind that Godzilla does, Mothra-- making her second appearance following her 1961 debut--
has a different tonality.

Indeed, though the film was retitled GODZILLA VS. THE THING for the American market, the Japanese title shows the correct emphasis: this is structurally a Mothra film in which Godzilla is the giant moth's antagonist. 

A typhoon, rather than atomic tampering this time, is responsible for causing the gigantic egg of the next Mothra to be carried from Infant Island to the shores of Japan.  Indeed, nuclear power is only occasionally addressed in this film, mostly by picking up on the plotline of 1961's MOTHRA, which argues that Infant Island has been reduced to a wasteland by atomic testing.  It's not abundantly clear as to how the islanders can live there at all, though it may be that their resident moth-god provides some help in that regard.  When the storm deposits the egg off Japan, greedy businessmen, much like those from the first Mothra film, lay claim to it and advertise it as a spectacular attraction for "Happy Enterprises."  Some noble reporters, primarily lead male Sakai and lead female Junko, question the businessmen's right to the great egg.  The "Mothra-fairies" appear first to the businessmen, attempting to regain the egg of their deity, but the corrupt corporate types merely try to capture the fairies for further exploitation.  The fairies then appeal to the reporters for help, but even the Fourth Estate can't do much to stir up opinion against Happy Enterprises.  It's rather surprising that the government doesn't intervene in the matter, since the fairies warn that the adult Mothra may attack to regain the egg, and the creature's last rampage would be an event the government wouldn't want to repeat.

Enter Godzilla, rising once again from a short-lived hibernation.  Sakai and Junko journey to Infant Island, hoping to persuade the islanders to summon Mothra to save Japan-- and the egg-- from Godzilla.  The islanders initially refuse, but Junko delivers an impassioned speech which sways them.  The giant moth, moved by the prayers of its people, attacks and almost defeats Godzilla, only to receive a death-wound from the Big G's fiery breath.  Godzilla rises to attack again but the Japanese military delays him again, notably with an electrical trap.

However, the egg has been kept safe long enough that it can now hatch, which it does in a bravura sequence, nurtured by the sacral song of the fairies and the islanders.  (There's even a suggestion that the islander-god may have some existence separate from Mothra herself, since one of the islanders' idols flashes with magical power.)  Two Mothra-larvae hatch from the egg and end up defeating Godzilla by ambushing him with gobs and gobs of enfolding silk.  The larvae and the fairies then return to Infant Island as the reporters bid them a cheery farewell.

In my review of MOTHRA I noted that because the giant moth was female, this signified "the hegemony of feminine nature." MOTHRA VS. GODZILLA underlines this hegemony even more than the first film.  If Godzilla and similar creatures represent the face of an unforgiving nature, striking back against the abuse of humanity, Mothra symbolizes the feminine virtue of motherly forgiveness.  It's surely not accidental that Junko, not the more forceful Sakai, is the one to speak most eloquently on the need for the islanders to forgive and forget.  Even the notion of the egg's spawn twin larvae-- mirroring the image of the twin fairies-- speaks to the feminine prodigality of the natural world, as against the destruction wrought by male-oriented technology and weaponry.

1990: THE BRONX WARRIORS (1982), ESCAPE FROM THE BRONX (1983)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*

MYTHICITY: *poor*

FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*

CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*

These two Italian action-flicks, both directed by sometime-cult director Enzo G. Castellari, are little more than enjoyably trashy takes on earlier American films, particularly 1979's THE WARRIORS and 1981's ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK.

From THE WARRIORS Castellari and his collaborators essentially took the notion of colorfully costumed gangs battling one another.  The 1979 Walter Hill film takes place in a modern-day setting, however, so the essential concept of both films is more properly derived from John Carpenter's 1981 effort.  Both Castellari films take place in an oppressive future society where the gangs are posited as revolutionary forces against the tyrants. 

The main plot-thread of ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK is that the hero is obliged to venture into hostile territory to save the President of the United States from the inhabitants of New York, now a massive high-security prison.  The first Castellari film, 1990: THE BRONX WARRIORS, keeps the basic idea that a person of influence-- in this case a wealthy heiress--- blunders into the "no man's land" of New York's Bronx, which is entirely ruled by the aforementioned Halloween-costumed gangs.  She's saved by Trash, the more or less beneficient leader of  a group called the Riders.  However, instead of negotiating with the Riders for the heiress' release, the government sends a hired mercenary named Hammer (Vic Morrow) to re-acquire the heiress (essentially altering the heroic character played by Kurt Russell in the Carpenter flick to an outright villain).  The hero, played by Mark Gregory, has a moderate raffish charm but the film benefits more from seasoned performers like Morrow and Fred Williamson, and some decent costume-designs.

ESCAPE FROM THE BRONX ratchets up the sense of social inequity as the tyrannical government decides to force all inhabitants from the Bronx before razing it for a future development project.  Trash is again the hero, though he's lost his old gang; however, he recruits new adherents in his efforts to force the government out of his stomping-grounds and return the power to the gangs. The scenes in which the fascist cops are expelling the innocent lowlifes from their homes are the more potent sequences, but ESCAPE looks like it was shot with much less attention to action scenes and costumes, while between the shooting of the two films Mark Gregory managed to lose some of the sculpted musculature that made him look like a dystopian version of Italy's Maciste. Henry Silva is on hand in a role that duplicates that of Vic Morrow, but he's more subdued and therefore much less effective.

HONOR ROLL #121, MAY 19

MARK GREGORY not only escaped the Bronx, he escaped from a very short movie career.

THE ITO SISTERS had their second appearance during the epic battle of Mothra and Godzilla, but later they complained that they were only payed in peanuts.

JACK FROST nipped at the noses of all the other holiday-themed superheroes.

CHAD LOWE found himself "on a highway into hell!"

OLIVIA MUNN enjoyed one of the shortest runs of a promising X-woman on film.

"Who cocked up Robin's cinematic career?" You can't blame CHRIS O'DONNELL.

CROW: WICKED PRAYER (2005)

 

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

Whereas SALVATION sticks fairly close to the template provided by the original film, the third CROW sequel (and so far the last) at least shifts in a new and prospectively richer environment: a mining-town on a Native American reservation somewhere in the American Southwest.  The film adapts a novel based on the Crow concept by one Norman Partridge, which I have not read, but it's ingenious to associate the concept of "the Crow" with Amerindian culture, given that crows and ravens play a significant role in many Amerindian myth-systems.

In addition, whereas the Crow-series has never been known for outstanding villains, this entry, presumably following Partridge's novel, ups the ante by introducing a gang of Satan-worshipping motorcyclists who style themselves War, Famine, Pestilence, and Death, which suggests a potential conflict between Amerindian paganism and apocalyptic (albeit inverted) Christian culture.  "Death" (David Boreanaz) is the leader of the group, who also goes by the last name "Crash," and he has a chippie girlfriend with the last name "Byrne"-- which leads to an inevitably tortured pun that even I, a lover of bad puns, couldn't tolerate.  The Satanic cyclists, who cherish the idea of becoming supernatural vessels of Satan, perform ritual murder upon one Jimmy Cuervo (Edward Furlong) and his girlfriend.  However, Cuervo comes back as the Crow and begins knocking off the evildoers one by one.

In the hands of a more experienced production team, and with a little more money behind it, WICKED PRAYER might have been a good basic asskicking adventure, no matter how slenderly it invoked the myths of either "white" or "red" cultures.  But though the action-scenes are better than those of SALVATION, they're still far from outstanding, and allegedly many of the Crow's scenes are derived from other films, adding to the cut-and-paste feel of the narrative.  As written, main villain Luc Crash might have been an excellent foe-- particularly since he does become a Satanic powerhouse for a time-- but any appeal he may've had is undercut by a disinterested performance by Boreanaz.  (Like Jesscia Alba, Boreanaz seems to be one of those rare actors who gets worse the longer he's in the biz.)  Edward (TERMINATOR 2) Furlong tries gamely to portray this version of the haunted hero, but he's less than compelling.  The script alludes to the marginalized status of Amerindians in American culture but doesn't manage to say anything of consequence.  The most I can say for the film is that if it does remain the last in the series, at least it tried to change the routine somewhat.

CAPTIVE GIRL (1950)

 

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

CAPTIVE GIRL breaks with that "tradition," for it only has one female in it, though as she's dressed in a leopardskin one-piece, she may make a more positive impression.  Played by swimming champion Anita Lhoest, who never made another film, she's not a "Sheena"-style fighter but she does have a pet tiger that comes to her aid.  In addition, since she was orphaned by one of the film's villains and has the usual jungle-upbringing, she seems to have a slight rapport with the animals, though the tiger is the only one who obeys her.  The title makes no sense because she spends most of her film-time running around free.

In place of two babes, CAPTIVE gives the viewer two villains of note.  One is Buster Crabbe, who played Tarzan in a 1933 serial, just one year after "Jungle Jim" star Johnny Weismuller made his fame by playing the ape man in the MGM film-series.  The two "ape men," who were both swimming stars in their youth, naturally have a climactic battle underwater, but it's a pretty desultory battle.  I got more entertainment out of seeing long-time B-film badguy John Dehner as "Hakim," the guy responsible for orphaning the jungle girl.  He's dressed up in witch-doctor garb and colored in "brownface"-- supposedly because he's some sort of Arab-- but the actor projects a nice aura of menace despite it all.  The villains are both after a sunken treasure connected to the old sacrificial rites of Hakim's tribe, and as usual Jungle Jim represents the role of the progressive colonist, trying to turn the heathens away from the old ways.  It isn't much, but it gives the story a little more heft than the threadbare MARK OF THE GORILLA.

THE BLOOD OF HEROES (1989)

 

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

"I don't like brutality.  I like heroics. I like the blood of heroes."

Though BLOOD OF HEROES takes place in a post-apocalyptic "Mad Max" type of world-- right down to being shot entirely in the Australian outback-- the 1989 film doesn't have a hero in the mold of Mel Gibson's Max.  Whereas Max's struggles against the savage denizens of his world were meant to lead to a renovation of the fallen order of things, the protagonists of BLOOD fight only for their own survival. To be sure, as is often the case with sports movies, survival is also tied in part to a sense of personal honor.  But though this futuristic society is also divided into your basic "haves" and "have nots," there is no convenient revolution as we see in RUNNING MAN. 

The "haves" are the elite classes that inhabit the Nine Cities, the only remaining citadels of civilization. The "have nots" are various tribes that eke out a hardscrabble life in their "dog-towns," where their only entertainment is furnished by traveling bands of players called "juggers."  The juggers engage local players in "the Game," which is best described as a combination of football, hockey, and gladiatorial combat.

The two main "heroes" of the film comprise the basic ensemble of the "old pro and his young student."  Sallow (Rutger Hauer) and his team arrive at a small dog-town for a game.  Kidda (Joan Chen), a young local woman yearning for a way out of her miserable existence, fights on the locals' side in the game and permanently injures one of Sallow's team-mates.  This leaves Sallow short a team-member, and gives Kidda a way to pursue her dream of prominence through sports.

Sallow, she learns, has seen better days than the dog-town route.  At one point Sallow was a member of the Cities' official "leagues," who receive high salaries and esteem from the elite classes.  Sallow made the mistake of openly romancing a woman of the upper classes, which got him kicked out and relegated to the dog-towns.

However, ambitious Kidda proposes that their team could journey to one of the Cities and issue a challenge to the local League-team.  Her motive is self-advancement in that she hopes to be "spotted by the majors," so to speak.  But once she puts the idea into Sallow's head, the Old Pro feels compelled to put his team on the line-- not to overthrow the elites, but just to find his self-respect once more.

The characters, including principal heroes Sallow and Kidda, are not deeply drawn, though they're Shakespearean compared to the protagonists of most post-apoc adventures.  The emphasis here is on the action-scenarios-- given verve by the driving rhythms of Todd Boekelheide's score-- and the basic theme of personal honor.  This theme is borne out by the "blood of heroes" line quoted above.  The line is spoken by a spectator of the climactic game, a woman who may well be Sallow's former lover.  She has no significant action thereafter, so it seems her main purpose is to enunciate the theme: that there is a "heroism" in sport that transcends its brutality.  In contrast, the man to whom she speaks the line, a high mucky-muck with the risible name "Lord Vile," can only see brutality.  Like most sports films this one ends with a victory for the underdog, but BLOOD sells something more than facile victory, as does RUNNING MAN.  As the title suggests, it suggests the sacrificial aspect of sports, and the notion that such sacrifice springs from a nobility that does not depend upon social stature.

GODZILLA AND MOTHRA: THE BATTLE FOR EARTH (1992)

 

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


I goofed when I stated that I had reviewed all the stories in the Heisei GODZILLA series except for GODZILLA 1985, for I belatedly realized I hadn't done this film, either.

Structurally, GODZILLA AND MOTHRA is similar to their two monsters' first crossover film, 1964's MOTHRA VS. GODZILLA. Once again, there's slightly more narrative attention paid to the mythology of the colossal caterpillar/moth than to the cranky green reptile. But this time it's because the project was originally supposed to be all about Mothra and his dark twin Battra. Patently Godzilla was merely written in for purposes of marketing, so although his battles with the two giant moths are better than average, Godzilla himself has no raison d'etre beyond being Mean and Green.

Of all the films in the Heisei series, this one has the most engaging human characters, particularly a divorced couple that ends up re-bonding over the battle of titanic kaiju.  Takuya, an unusually impolite Japanese explorer, gets dragooned into joining an expedition with his ex-wife Masako. The expedition, funded by an unscrupulous corporation, voyages to Infant Island, home of Mothra, the tribe that worships him, and the minute twin fairies who act as spokespersons for the giant caterpillar, who are now styled "the Cosmos." Though there are agents in the group who merely want to harvest a Mothra-egg for profit-- thus proving that no one in Japan learned anything from the 1964 film-- Masayo and Takuya are intrigued by the Cosmos' revelation that the fairies also represent a long-vanished, super-scientific civilization, strongly reminiscent of Atlantis. This civilization was wiped off the face of the Earth by Mothra;s destructive twin Battra, and Mothra had to fight his twin to keep Battra from wiping out all of humankind.. After being defeated, Battra fell into a deep sleep, but the fall of meteors to Earth has reawakened his menace-- as well as Mothra's other famous enemy, the Big G.

After some exploration hijinks for Masayo and Takuya-- which, for a change in a kaiju film, are actually amusing-- their unscrupulous cohort Ando arranges with his aides to steal a Mothra-egg, taking it out to sea with the aid of a freighter. However, both the re-awakened monsters home in on the freighter. Battra battles Godzilla, apparently just out of sheer orneriness rather than out of concern for Mothra. But the delay gives the egg the chance to hatch, and a new Mothra is born.

The human party manages to make it back to Japan, where the CEO of Ando's group does what CEOs usually do: he grabs hold of the twin fairies to use them for evil merchandising purposes. Naturally, Mothra invades Japan to rescue the Cosmos fairies, and Battra and Godzilla follow in due course. 

The two moths join forces against the big reptile, resulting in one of the most colorful titan-battles in Japanese film (partly because the moths use colorful dust as a fighting-technique). Godzilla is defeated (temporarily) and the moths attempt to drop him back in the ocean. Before being dumped off, Godzilla wounds Battra fatally. Then, at the eleventh hour, the fairies reveal that Battra's true destiny was to destroy a big asteroid fated to annihilate Earth. However, say the fairies, it's all good, because Mothra can and will destroy the asteroid, which comprises the film's climax.

The last-minute revelation that Battra had a "good" purpose during his long sleep undermines the original concept that he was a destructive deity provoked into action by humankind's excesses. I surmise that if Godzailla hadn't been inserted, maybe Battra's mythic persona would have remained more consistent. But BATTLE FOR EARTH still ranks as one of the more enjoyable films in the Heisei series.

THE 18 BRONZE GIRLS OF SHAOLIN (1983)

 

 

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

This Taiwanese flick was probably conceived as a quickie knock-off of Hong Kong's two BRONZE MEN films from 1976, reviewed here. Some data suggests that it was completed as early as 1979 but didn't get released until 1983-- which is about the most comprehensible thing about GIRLS. There are a lot of wack-a-doodle kung fu films out there, and GIRLS is just another one of them, a plotless melange of stunts and meaningless espionage.

An introductory voice-over makes reference to the invention of kung fu "thousands of years ago," though the action of the film must be post-1636, since that was the year in which the Ching Dynasty began. The heroes are apparently rebelling against the Chings, though there's no mention of any rival dynasties, and only one of the main characters is given a motive for being a rebel. This is the character played by Doris Lung Chung-erh, who may or may not be a person named "Pai Yu-fei," since at least two characters claim to be this person, and by the end of the film no final identification is made. Since Pai is motivated to fight the Chings because they killed her family, and since Lung's character opposes the Chings, there's a fair chance she was meant to be the "real Pai"-- though I don't think the writer cared about providing anything more than the sliver of motivation.

The Chings may or may not be behind the activities of an evil monk, Chi Kong, who wants to steal the training manual from a monastery where a one-eyebrow monk is training 18 female fighters, all of whom wear golden (not bronze) clothing and have their skins painted gold.  I guess the bronze girls somehow fall under Kong's control, since they end up fighting the good guys at various times, including a big crazy-fu climax.

In between stunt battles, the writer tosses out various dopey comedy scenes, mostly involving people masquerading as the opposite sex, or as differently abled, all for no real purpose. There are a few good stunts at the conclusion, and Lung's fighting is usually worth a look. The diabolical devices, like those of the BRONZE MEN, are mostly chambers outfitted with deadly devices, including huge artificial roses with thorns!