THE LION OF ST. MARK (1963)

 

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

Unlike the majority of European "masked swashbuckler" flicks, LION OF ST. MARK benefits from what looks like a higher than average budget and more attention to the dramatic scenes by director/co-writer Luigi Capuano. Capuano had already worked once before with Gordon Scott in ZORRO AND THE THREE MUSKETEERS (which I tagged as a cheap Euro-adventure) and twice before with leading lady Gianna Maria Canale, who with Capuano made two female swashbuckler films in 1960 and 1962.

Set in Venice in the early 1600s, the city is under constant menace from pirates, led by their chief Titta (Alberto Farnese). For some reason Venice does not maintain its own standing army, but relies on a group of mercenaries who have proven utterly incompetent-- a state of affairs demonstrated when the pirates brazenly raid a fancy party given by the upper classes, and despoil many partygoers of their riches.

Attending the party is Manrico Masiero (Scott), a former soldier who's disgusted that the authorities don't defend their city with the native men of Venice. Manrico's father is grooming him for success in the diplomatic corps, and has tacitly arranged a marriage between Manrico and stuck-up rich girl Isabella, who boasts to her friends about how she's going to "change" her future husband. The raid emboldens Manrico to take a crucial step: since he can't fight pirates as himself without angering the authorities, he dons a black mask (and sometimes an all-black outfit) to do so (with the help of other young blades of similar sympathies). He takes the name "Lion of St. Mark" because this Christian icon was then the symbol for Venice.

To be sure, anger isn't the only thing that results from the party-raid. It's at this event that Manrico spots Titta's attractive henchwoman Rosanna (Canale), though she doesn't notice him. When the Lion and his accomplices make their first attack on one of Titta's ships, the masked hero ends up sword-dueling Rosanna, who gives a good account of herself before being disarmed. Interestingly, in contrast to most masked swashbuckler movies, the heroine never shows the slightest interest in the Zorro-like protagonist.

Though Rosanna and Titta escape capture, Rosanna is later taken prisoner by the mercenaries. Their leader shows his scurrilous nature by threatening to torture his prisoner, so Manrico uses his authority to intervene. He also stages her escape, which causes Rosanna to look at him with different eyes. The two of them meet on the sly a few more times, with Rosanna explaining that she was raised with pirates and has never known any other life. While the romance elements are nothing strikingly original here, they also don't feel as if the writers are trying to get them over with as quickly as possible.

The action-elements are well executed as well, particularly a scene wherein Manrico's warriors scale the wall of a pirate refuge, and Scott is good in both of his roles. The final battle gets rid of both the pirates and the incompetent mercenaries and Rosanna is pardoned for a happy ending with Manrico.

THE COOL WORLD (1992)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*

FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*

CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological, sociological*

Sometimes the aesthetic failings of a bad movie provide more insight to a critic than any average well-polished effort. Upon recently re-screening Ralph Bakshi's 1992 COOL WORLD, I found myself moved to write two separate essays about it, even though it was an utter flop that allegedly sank whatever was left of Bakshi's feature-film career. In this essay, I devoted some thought to the way the film inadvertently reflected some of the broad outlines of the history of animated cartoons in America. In this essay, I'll consider the film itself, not so much for what it is but what it might have been.

There have been umpteen films whose logic doesn't scan when examined carefully. COOL WORLD is in a different category from any of these, for most films make at least a show of consistency. From start to finish, Bakshi, despite attempting to emulate the success of 1988's WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT?, makes no effort to provide the viewer with any logic as to the workings of a world where animated cartoons mingle with living human beings.Given that Bakshi showed nearly no concern with explicating the tangled skein of his story for the viewers' benefit, it seems pointless for me to try to recount the few plot-threads that make up the movie-- particularly when there are reviews online which have provided yeoman service in trying to untangle the mess, like this one from I SPIT ON YOUR TASTE.

What I'm doing here, rather, is exploring the thematic ramifications of what Bakshi wanted to do the original idea behind COOL WORLD-- an idea he was forbidden to pursue, according to numerous write-ups like this one-- and what he ended up making instead. Nathan Rabin in the aforementioned link describes Bakshi's original idea thusly:

he sold his idea for a horror cartoon about a hip underground cartoonist stalked by the half-animated offspring of an ill-fated tryst with a cartoon sexpot to Paramount.

We as viewers will never know whether or not Bakshi's original idea would have made a good film or not: the filmmaker's productions had always been, to say the least, rather uneven. But like most of his earlier works, the idea is a more hard-edged rendition of more mainstream themes. ROGER RABBIT teased the viewer with the idea of sex between human beings and toons, and yet defused any scandalous potential, the better to soothe audiences who expected something that didn't stray too far from the mainstream. Early in ROGER, Eddie Valliant shows the titular rabbit evidence that Roger's wife has been "playing patti-cake" with Roger's boss, but the joke is that she really is just playing patti-cake with the guy. The gag simultaneously illustrates Roger's twisted toon thinking-- to him, his wife's playing parlor-games with another man is as much a betrayal as her having illicit sex (if not more)-- and it keeps the audience's adults from having to explain a sexual tryst to their young'uns.

There's no such "out" in Bakshi's original idea: sketchy as it is, it's clear that Bad Things Happen when a living human being, or "noid" (short for "humanoid") has sex with a toon (or "doodle," which is Baskhi's more irreverent version of the same thing). "Doodle" is a clever turn of phrase, reflecting Bakshi's interest in scatological humor ("doodle = doody.") I suspect that even if Bakshi had finished the film he wanted to make, his "Cool World"-- whether it would have been a separate universe, or just "the bad side of town"-- would have been roughly the same sort of chaos that appeared in the finished 1992 film. In the completed Cool World, the cartoon-verse is cool only in the sense that it's a place of no consequences. Doodles in the Cool World beat each other up, piss on each other, and apparently can have produce babies after having sex, though doodle-children seem to be be just as weird, as perverse and as invulnerable to real harm as any other doodles. It's a world devoted to the Freudian Id running wild at all times.

Not having access to Bakshi's original script, I can only speculate on the reasons why the half-human child of the "underground cartoonist" would have been royally pissed off at her father. Would the guy have been a deadbeat dad, who deserted a pregnant doodle-mom? This was certainly be a stock formula in film-melodramas since the silent years of cinema, and one that applied not only to forbidden liaisons between the differing classes, but also between White Americans and non-whites. The script-kernel strongly suggests the horror of miscegenation, and since Bakshi himself has claimed that he spent his adolescence enjoying an easy familiarity with his Afro-American neighbors, I'll speculate that he may have intended to satirize the fear of miscegenation that so frequently surfaced in American's middle and upper classes.

If Bakshi had any such intentions, they went out the window when his producers saddled him with a new script, written by two guys who had enjoyed their biggest writing-hit with 1982's POLTERGEIST. To the scripters' credit, they did at least keep the basic idea of the forbidden nature of noid-doodle sex, but instead of focusing on one cartoonist pursued by his half-breed offspring, the rewritten COOL WORLD deals with two male human beings being subjected to the temptation of curvaceous doodle-dolls.

Frank (Brad Pitt) is introduced first, though he turns out to be more of a supporting character, as well as the "superego" to the Id of the Cool World. He's first seen as a young man in 1945, shortly after the end of World War II. which in a generational sense makes him something of a "father-figure" to the other male, though Pitt was actually younger than his male co-star. A traffic accident injures Frank and takes the life of his mother. Immediately following this trauma, Doc Whiskers, a weird scientist-doodle in the Cool World. uses his new invention, "the spike," to spirit Frank into the doodle-dimension. Despite joining the doodle-universe, Frank remains a living human being, and he's almost immediately appointed the head of law-enforcement in Cool World. Much later in the film-- too late to help orient the viewer-- it's revealed that Frank only has one law to enforce: no sex between humans and doodles. It's loosely implied that sometimes other humans cross over into Cool World even without the intervention of Whiskers and his spike, but Bakshi spends no time on such petty details-- even though, since Frank's the only "noid" we see among the doodles, it seems a little like he's set up only to police himself. Sure enough, again disturbingly late in the film, it's revealed that in the 40-plus years since his transition, Frank regularly hangs with a doodle girlfriend, but that neither of them have transgressed on the Cool World's one prohibition. Ah, the rectitude of the "Greatest Generation!"

Enter Jack Deebs (Gabriel Byrne), a guy who's spent years in prison for an act of passion: murdering a man who'd been sleeping with his wife. Momentous as this act might be in the life of a real human being, no further details about the wife or her lover come up again: Deebs is really in prison only so that he can fantasize about his ideal woman. Perhaps in the abortive story-idea, Bakshi had some idea of the underground cartoonist having coitus with a being drawn by his own pen: certainly this would be a familiar, if onanistic, idea often seen in underground comics. But in COOL WORLD, Deebs' creation-- a blonde bombshell named Holli Would-- is not really something he's created; she's existed in the doodle-dimension for some indeterminate time, long before Deebs draws her to help get him through his woman-less confinement. Strangely, Holli waits until Deebs's last day in prison to draw him into her dimension-- perhaps to avoid competition with three-dimensional women? At any rate, as soon as Deebs is in the Cool World, his naivete makes it probable that he will eventually have sex with Holli-- whom Deebs thinks he's created-- even though Frank makes token attempts to keep Deebs from making this Big Mistake.

 What's the Big Mistake, since this time it has nothing to do with spawning unwanted hybrid children? Well, it's more along the lines of Lovecraft than anything. Holli, for reasons that are never clear, cherishes the desire to cross over into the mortal world and become mortal herself, which she can only do by having sex with a human "noid." Perhaps needless to say, Holli succeeds and makes the jump to the other world-- at which point Frank belatedly reveals to Jack that Holli's presence in the real world could destroy both dimensions. Even when Holli successfully transforms into a living human being (Kim Basinger), the transformation isn't stable, as she sometimes morphs into a clown-version of herself-- an implicit mockery of her feminine charms. perhaps. But by dumb luck Holli stumbles across Doc Whiskers, who has also made the transition (long after the viewer has mostly forgotten who he is). He directs her to "the spike," which may be able to stabilize her. Frank tries to stop her and Holli kills him, which finally emboldens Jack to pursue her. Once Holli gets the spike, regular human beings start turning into hideous doodle-versions of themselves-- except for Jack. He transforms into a hyper-muscular superhero, complete with an absurd adenoidal voice, and after some struggles against Holli's conjured-up cartoon-demons, Jack manages to restore the disparate dimensions into a status of "separate and unequal."

This climax is the only part of COOL WORLD that makes up for the general tedium and incomprehensibility in the beginning and middle sections of the film: once Bakshi gets himself past all the scenes that required some degree of exposition-- for which Bakshi usually substitutes some form of cartoon-havoc-- he's free to let the demons of Cool World run riot. filling the screen with their Cthulhu-esque chaos. To be sure, both Deebs and Frank remains flat characters from start to finish, so there's no sense of invigoration when Deebs gets his act together, nor any sense of tragedy when Frank dies. Not that Frank really dies, for in yet another last-ditch revelation, "a noid killed by a doodle becomes a doodle." Thus Frank is reborn into cartoon-form, and is finally able to unite with his doodle girlfriend. Holli's punishment for almost destroying two worlds is quite underwhelming, too. Deebs-- who has permanently transformed into the superhero-doodle, even though he Deebs WAS NOT killed first-- has decided to make Holli into his new wife, and the last shot shows Doodle-Holli sitting around discontentedly, now unable to get out of Doodle-World and, for good measure, stuck with a cloddish superhero husband.

It's an unholy mess of a film, and it's hard to avoid the thought that in composing such an ode to freeform nonsense, Bakshi was cutting off his nose to spite his face. He took the formulaic script and gave it no more cursory attention, but even though the film's failure may have embarrassed the interfering producers, it certainly did the animator's career no good whatever.  But then, as I mentioned in the other essay, Bakshi's role as the "Crown Prince of Adult Animation" was bound to lead to some sort of usurpation by the forces of mainstream marketing. There could be great potential in the basic vision of a cartoon-verse where all of humankind's illicit desires run riot. But COOL WORLD, like the hybrid-child of Bakshi's original idea, ends up more like a "doodang" than a doodle-- a doodang being a beast that literally does not know whether it's fish or fowl.

XXX (2002)

 

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

CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*

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

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

The ideology of the XXX films probably made this necessary in the minds of the scripters.  Whereas Bond would receive his weapons as the largesse of his government employer, both of the characters who portray a spy with the “XXX” codename—Xander Cage (Vin Diesel) in the first, Damian Stone (Ice Cube) in the second—effect an adversarial “Stick It to the Man” attitude toward the government.  Yet at the same time, once each rebel is drafted to fight the Good Fight for the government, both times by supervising NSA agent Gibbons (Samuel Jackson), their actions must be framed in terms of the patriotic protection of the very government they tend to defy.

To be sure, these are both big, loud action-films wherein the details of the plots only lead the hero from one violent encounter to another, so neither film pursues any ideology very deeply.  Of the two, the second is perhaps a little more complex than the first, simply because it must attempt to frame a Black American protagonist within the demands of the superspy subgenre.

The first XXX film stars the Caucasian actor Diesel as Xander Cage, a civilian “extreme sports” devotee constantly at odds with the law.  The NSA drafts him to serve as an undercover agent in a “Russian Mafia”-type operation involving—what else?—extreme sports.  As is often the case when rebels are called upon to serve their countries, the hero has more in common with the villain than with his superiors.  Xander Cage clearly identifies with the gang-leader’s desire to run roughshod over societal mores, and is more than a little taken with the Resident Babe in the gang (Asia Argento).  In due time, though, Cage finds out that the villain has an apocalyptic scheme to unleash a super-virus that will abolish the oppressions of government, and of course, this is a little too “extreme” for the hero.  There’s a great deal of screaming metal and wild stunts, though surprisingly no major mano-a-mano fights.  Diesel’s character is paper-thin but he manages to project a fair attitude of laid-back cool.  The conclusion includes Diesel trying to counter the villain’s machinations with the use of a very Bondian super-car, chock full of flamethrowers and ejection seats, and finding that the car is absolutely useless for his needs.

REPTILIAN (1999)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*

MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological*


The announcement of the U.S. version of GODZILLA stimulated other producers to try their hand at the giant monster genre.

Released in South Korea the year after the debut of the Americanized monster, REPTILIAN was a very broad re-interpretation of South Korean's only giant-monster of the 1960s, YONGARY, MONSTER OF THE DEEP.  The earlier film emulated the popular Godzilla franchise in most respects, having a titanic prehistoric creature resurrected by atomic testing. On the whole, that film was small beer next to the work it imitated.

In contrast, REPTILIAN, crewed by South Koreans but acted largely by Americans, easily ups the game of the sadly derivative 1998 GODZILLA. I remarked in my review that even though the film had a fair share of violence, it couldn't be called combative, because Ameri-Godzilla spends so much of his time running away from jet planes and other modern technology. The American producers, it seems, simply couldn't countenance the idea of a giant animal that could ward off rocket-fire.

The new version of Yongary-- usually rendered "Yongarry"-- is full of combative action, and should satisfy the hardcore Godzilla-lover in that the big critter easily withstands the bullets and bombs hurled at it. To be sure, the creature is under the control of evil aliens, and they've provided their big pawn with a force-field. So maybe the producers threw that in as a sop to modern disbelief. Nevertheless, the visual effect of Yongarry's near-invulnerability beats any comparable scene in '98 GODZILLA.

The human characters are largely forgettable, and are supplied with some truly risible dialogue Yongarry is resurrected along with an ancient written prophecy, though I never figured out who authored the prediction-- not only that Yongarry would arise, but also that he would fight another big monster like himself. Toward the film's end an American soldier frees Yongarry from the aliens' control, so the invaders unleash another big creature on the city. Yongarry wins the contest and the aliens depart.

It's a very silly monster-flick, but because it's done with a lot of energy, it's a much better salute to the Golden Age of Kaiju than the American outing.

THE ETERNALS (2014)

 

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

This adaptation of the Neil Gaiman-John Romita Jr. limited series, reviewed here, is for the most part faithful to the original. I don't know anything about the genesis of the project, or why it was divided into 10 segments of loosely 15 minutes apiece, though the segmentation doesn't hurt the storytelling.

Like WOLVERINE ORIGIN the adaptation reproduces the art of the original comic with extremely limited animation. Despite my high regard for the comic that gave birth to the cartoon, I called ORIGIN an "empty shadow show," largely because the comics-rendition offered a skillful fusion of art and dialogue that the animation entirely missed.

Strangely, though I didn't think the Gaiman-Romita comic was nearly as good as the Wolverine comic, the ETERNALS cartoon comes off somewhat better. Possibly that's because Gaiman's script was at base just your basic reboot of a property that had largely fallen by the wayside, so the story wasn't as ambitious from the get-go. In addition, the art of the 2006 ETERNALS comic amounted to Romita Jr. getting his Jack Kirby on, emulating the grandeur of the Kirbyscapes, albeit through what might be seen as a "Frank Miller filter," and this painterly art, which didn't emphasize movement as much as did the Wolverine art, didn't lose as much in translation to limited animation.

Aside from those observations, there's nothing more to say about the animation that I didn't say about the original comic.

HERCULES IN NEW YORK (1969)

 

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

I panned the hell out of the script for 1953's THE NEANDERTHAL MAN, which was particularly bad considering that the same writing-team, Aubrey Wisberg and Jack Pollexfen, produced THE MAN FROM PLANET X in 1951.

HERCULES IN NEW YORK, solely credited to Wisberg (his last such credit), is far worse than NEANDERTHAL MAN. Yet I must admit that HERCULES is superior to the earlier film in one respect. Since NEANDERTHAL appeared during the height of the 1950s SF-craze, its "Doctor Jekyll and Mister Caveman" storyline might have had some potential to be good.

In contrast, there was almost no chance that a comedy about the demigod Hercules descending to Earth would be any good at the time when it showed up on theater-screens. Despite the fake movie poster seen in the still above, Italian muscle-hero films had fallen out of favor by 1969, and I'd be surprised if any of these creaky epics had appeared in theaters during the five years previous.

NEW YORK is even cheaper and creakier than the Italian muscleman films, and is remembered today only as an early role for Arnold Schwarzenegger, over ten years away from his breakout success with 1982's CONAN. At the time Arnold's only fame stemmed from winning a "Mister Universe" contest, and he's billed here as "Arnold Strong," probably as a play on the name of his co-star Arnold Stang. In addition, because his Austrian accent was deemed overly thick, Arnold is sometimes dubbed over.

Centuries have passed since the days when the Greek gods were worshiped. Yet for some reason, when 1969 rolls around, the demigod Hercules, who's apparently been tooling around the halls of Olympus with the other gods throughout those centuries, gets the idea that he wants to visit Earth again. I'd be a little curious as to where Wisberg got his basic plot, since it seems to me that I've encountered earlier stories where Hercules harbored the same wish, and got the same negative reaction from Big Daddy Zeus, who wants his son to stay put. However, this Zeus is particularly dumb, for when Hercules annoys Zeus with a lot of whinging, the god-king zaps Herc with a thunderbolt. (It looks like a jagged pipe-cleaner, by the bye.) The effect is to dump Hercules down on Earth (technically, in the ocean near New York). This might seem to be a classic reprise of the old "don't throw me in the briar patch" schtick, except that Herc doesn't expect the result and Zeus barely comments on his goof. Once Herc is on Earth, Zeus just pettishly watches for a while from his cloud. So does his wife Juno, who still resents Hercules as being the fruit of some other woman's loins after Zeus did some planting therein.

For a while the Olympians watch from beyond while Hercules makes his way to New York. Though the Greek hero magically speaks English, he doesn't understand Thing One about American customs. Enter Stang's character "Pretzie," playing a basic 98-pound weakling, who guides Herc through the rigors of modern life. Surprisingly little is made of the physical disparity between the "two Arnolds." Less surprising is the script's inability to provide any reason why Pretzie befriends Hercules, who acts as if everyone should know him on sight as the Son of Zeus, and who repeatedly clobbers anyone who doesn't show him the proper deference. Maybe Wisberg's idea was that Herc represented a fantasy-ideal to Pretzie, doing the kind of things Pretzie would like to do-- which is about as psychological as this lame film gets.

Once the two Arnolds have teamed up, Herc's muscles get them into the Big Time, earning the Greek muscleman accolades for athletic accomplishment. He also gets noticed by some gangster-types, who force Pretzie to sell them Herc's contract, though the audience barely sees Herc doing much of anything by which a gangster might make money. Mostly the hero keeps butting heads with confused New Yorkers-- including a bear escaped from the zoo-- until Daddy Zeus has had enough.

Zeus orders Nemesis to execute his will; to consign Herc to the deathly realm of Pluto. This sounds like filicide, but apparently it's just a temporary punishment. Juno, however, wants Herc dead for real, so she persuades Nemesis to slip the hero a mickey to remove his super-strength. Herc loses his strength at a critical moment and costs his gangster-bosses some dough. So then it's a race, if you can call it that, to see whether Herc gets killed by the crooks before his Big Daddy can give Herc back his godly strength.

In addition to being entirely predictable, the ending is flat and without much emotional effect. I can only imagine this film being popular with filmgoers who hate Arnold Schwarzenegger, because it's nearly the only film where one can see Arnold beat down to the ground by a bunch of ordinary-looking schnooks.

HONOR ROLL #131, JUNE 29

Of the two Arnolds in this Herculean comedy, ARNOLD STANG's fame would soon be eclipsed by that of his co-star, whose overnight success would only take the next twelve years.

What a pity that a nice girl like THENA should lose her "A" in the comics biz.

"No! Not Yongary! YONGARRY! You're supposed to r-r-roll the double R's!"

After getting so little to do in XXX, ASIA ARGENTO headed back to the greener fields of Europe.

Nothing "cool" about KIM BASINGER's animated sex-queen.

For once, a "Zorro" finds in GIANNA MARIA CANALE a female who can cross swords with him.

THE FIST OF DEATH; THE FURY OF THE KARATE EXPERTS (BOTH 1982)

 

 

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

The last two movies starring the original Santo are really one movie on the same subject matter, with the same director and most of the same cast-members. Both FIST and FURY take place in some unidentified jungle (possibly somewhere in Asia, since two character have Asian-sounding names), where a small cult of devotees center their religion around a glowing rock from outer space. A flashback establishes that this cultus originally boasted twin priestesses, one of whom has the Spanish-sounding name of "Queria" while the other has the Chinese-sounding name of "Kungyan." You can tell that Queria is the good twin because she wears white, while Kungyan is destined to be the villain because she wears black. (Both are played by the same actress, buxom burlesque performer Grace Renat.)

The cause of the sisters' disaffection, however confusing, is the only scene in the two films that has even minor mythic content. Apparently these are alien entities linked to the magical stone, for they decide to send an emissary to Earth known as "Jungle Girl." She appears on Earth as a little girl of perhaps two years, and although the priestesses find her in the jungle, they don't raise her themselves, but allow her to be raised by a local tribe of friendly wolves. It almost seems like the author was seeking to mash up the Immaculate Conception with the story of Tarzan.

 Queria and Kungyan also learn that when Jungle Girl matures, she's destined to marry a local prince named Cheng. For some reason, this pisses off Kungyan the Black, so she leaves the cult with her hulking henchman (played by another wrestler, Tinieblas). But she considerately waits until Jungle Girl grows up and is about to marry Cheng, at which point Kungyan and her allies-- some of whom are demons-- abduct Jungle Girl (who can't do crap to defend herself) and steal the magical stone. So Queria calls in the Mexican hero Santo to sort things out.

While this rocky storyline might have given birth to some demented fantasy-material during Santo's heyday, FIST just meanders around in between extremely lackluster fights while the priestesses utter New Agey dialogue. FURY is pretty the same thing, and almost the same plot (Kungyan just goes back and steals the magic stone again). The actor playing Santo, then in his sixties, understandably doesn't have much of his old mojo, and Cheng, the only actual "karate expert" in either film, doesn't distinguish himself either. One distinction of the second film is that a minor character is played by Rene Cardona, best known for directing at least two dozen luchadore flicks, some of which starred Santo.

I find myself wondering who the filmmakers thought was their audience. Did Mexican kids of the eighties really care about a sixty-year-old icon blundering his way through a silly jungle-setting? It may be that aging Mexican baby boomers were the real target, though there's damn little in either film that would engage forty-something adults. It's a strange conclusion to the career of Santo (except for a later cameo in another movie), though at least it sports a few curiosities that lift it above total formula.

BEAUTY AND THE BEAST: SEASON ONE (1987-88)

 

Here I’ll plunge into the episodes straightway, denoting any that possess high mythicity with a * before each title. To any readers who desire background, they may find some here.

*“Once Upon a Time in New York”—Catherine Chandler, grown daughter of a widowed lawyer-father and comfortable mixing with the rich elites of New York, suffers life-threatening injury when hired thugs mistake her for their intended target. Vincent, a man who looks a bit like Cocteau’s leonine “Beast” from the 1946 film, finds Catherine’s discarded body and takes her to the World Below to be healed. During her recuperation Catherine becomes empathically bonded to Vincent, even after she learns of his freakish appearance. Returning to New York, Catherine rather rapidly gains the position of Assistant District Attorney and begins investigating the men who attacked her. As a mark of her will to become a hero, she even gets trained in street-fighting by Ron “Superfly” O’Neal. Inevitably Catherine tracks down the crooks, but her distress brings Vincent racing to her rescue. Catherine alone witnesses him claw all of the hoods to death. Afterward a police detective swears that he’ll find the killer, but though Vincent knocks other undesirables in the course of the first season, there’s no sign that anyone in the NYPD takes further notice of the claw-murderer.

“Terrible Savior”—As if to reflect Catherine’s repressed fears of Vincent’s beastly nature, a mysterious vigilante begins haunting the subways, clawing evildoers to death. Since only one suspect is presented, the true killer’s identity is not hard to guess.

“Siege”—This time Vincent, not Catherine, initiates the do-gooder action, as he intervenes to repel ruthless thugs attempting to eject residents from rent-controlled apartments. During this episode Catherine meets recurring character Elliot Burch, a handsome millionaire, and is drawn by his charms, incurring Vincent’s resentment. However, the possibility that Burch may have criminal ties cools Catherine’s ardor.

“No Way Down”—Vincent is wounded and hunted by a street-gang and can’t reach any of the vantage points to return to the Tunnels. Catherine seeks to help him, as does another young woman, despite being initially horrified by Vincent’s beast-visage.

“Masques”—On Halloween Vincent can walk the streets of New York with impunity, and so he shows up at a party feting an Irish writer whose work he admires. By coincidence Catherine becomes aware that violent Fenians are planning to assassinate the writer.

“Beast Within”—One of the inhabitants of the World Below, a cherished childhood friend to Vincent, deserts the cooperative in order to work for a mob boss. When the traitor leads a gang into the Tunnels, Vincent is forced to take extreme steps.

*“Nor Iron Bars a Cage”—Catherine is offered a more prestigious job that would take her out of New York City; a rough translation of the fairy-tale motif in which the Beauty temporarily deserts her Beast. Catherine still loves Vincent but feels the need to take some precipitate action, so she accepts the job. Vincent refuses to reveal his torment to her, but his emotions make him careless. He’s spotted in the world above by Hughes and Gould, two university scientists who use trank guns to subdue and capture the beast-man. Both men are hoping to use Vincent to boost their academic fame, but Hughes becomes distraught when he realizes Vincent is an intelligent humanoid. Father approaches Catherine when Vincent is missed, and as she goes looking for him, she realizes that her feelings for him transcend any mundane advancement goals. She finds Hughes and almost convinces him to release his captive, but the obsessed Gould turns violent, resulting both in his death and that of Hughes. The intense dialogue between Hughes and Vincent—who refuses to speak in front of Gould because he senses Gould wouldn’t give a damn—is some of the best in the series, as is the choice of a quote from Wordsworth to round out the episode.

“Song of Orpheus”—Father, whose former life aboveground is a mystery to Vincent, makes the Orpheus-like journey from the underworld, seeking to learn the fate of an aged “Eurydice,” who turns out to be his former wife from an annulled marriage. But a schemer seeking to control the old woman’s wealth kills off her lawyer, and Father is charged with the crime. Vincent and Catherine expose the real killer. Father’s real name is revealed to be “Jacob Wells,” which is a clever play upon an archaic association between wells and the Biblical patriarch.

“Dark Spirit”—Catherine investigates a voodoo curse that apparently slays an accused murderer. The priest behind the curse then places a similar curse on Catherine, and though he uses a psychedelic drug to inflict horrific visions on the Beauty, there’s some suggestion that the priest too may be working with “psychic magic.” Catherine is so filled with fear that she even sees Vincent as a demon, but Vincent gets even when he finds the malevolent mystic—who dies in a fire in the belief that Vincent really is a voodoo loa. Tunnel-dweller Narcissa (oddly named for the Greek legend) displays what may be precognitive skills.

“A Children’s Story”—Ruthless criminals seek to exploit orphan children in a modern-day “Fagin” operation, and Catherine enlists Vincent’s help to stop the abuse.

“An Impossible Silence”—A young woman from the World Below, deaf but capable of speech, witnesses a murder. Catherine must find a way to get her to testify in court without compromising Vincent’s domain.

“Shades of Grey”—Mouse, who supplies much technical know-how for his fellow Tunnelers, is ostracized by them for stealing things from the upper world. Then both Father and Vincent are trapped by a cave-in, and Catherine must enlist Mouse to rescue both men. The “shades of grey” may refer to the shady Elliot Burch, whose help Catherine must seek in order to effect a rescue.

“China Moon”—A young Chinese woman has been promised in marriage to the son of a powerful Tong lord, but she loves another man. Her uncle is one of the surface-world “helpers” for the Tunnelers, and so at first Father does not want to intervene to help the aggrieved couple. But the spurned lover gets into a fight with the true love and is accidentally killed, so the World Below gives the couple refuge. The Tong leader invades the World Below with a small army, but Vincent stalks them all, killing some while others die by bad fortune.

“The Alchemist”—This episode introduces the series’ first recurring villain, Paracelsus, who was clearly designed as an evil double for Father, given that many of his innovations made the Tunnels’ colonization possible. However, his greed for gold caused him to cast out from the society of outcasts, and now he’s synthesized a new hallucinogenic drug from underground mushrooms, which he sells above-ground. Catherine, investigating the drug trade, finds out that the supplier comes from the World Below and alerts Vincent. When Vincent confronts the villain, Paracelsus uses the hallucinogen on him, causing Vincent to revert to a beast-like mentality. Catherine manages to “tame” the beast, after which Vincent again seeks to levy justice. Paracelsus apparently dies, but not for long. The story’s “alchemist” conceit is not well executed—the villain wants gold coins for his drug, but that’s not much like the alchemist’s stock-in-trade—but actor Tony Jay made a great villain.

“Temptation”—Catherine’s colleague Pete is romanced by a lady lawyer from a firm with whom the D.A.’s office is in conflict. Sure enough, she’s been assigned to undermine Pete by luring him away from prosecuting crimes, and when her attempt fails, her criminal bosses try to frame Pete. While all of this goes on, Vincent ventures into the Crystal Caves to find a gift for the anniversary of his meeting with Catherine. Narcissa is mentioned but not seen.

“Promises of Someday”—Devin, a new employee in Catherine’s office, arouses her suspicions. She soon learns that he’s a former dweller from the World Below, who kept the dwellers’ secret but ceased living among them, preferring to jaunt around the world. Though Devin and Vincent were best friends in youth, Father always treated Devin as if he could do nothing right, thus inculcating Devin’s resentment of “favored son” Vincent. Father belatedly reveals that Devin is his natural son, though Father’s reasons for concealing the relationship seem strained at best. In the end Devin goes back to world-traveling but has put some of his past ghosts to rest.

“Down to a Sunless Sea”—Despite the title’s invocation of Coleridge and the reading of some lines from “Kubla Khan,” the episode is a dull “deranged killer” tale. Catherine re-connects with Steven, a former boyfriend, but though he no longer means anything to her, Steven has other ideas. Vincent has some uneasy premonitions about Steven that don’t stem from jealousy, but not until Steven reveals his plans for Catherine does Beast race to the side of Beauty.

“Fever”—Mouse unearths a buried ship full of priceless treasures from a cavern, and many of the dwellers begin to remember the feverish allure of easy money. Even as the Tunnel-people fall out over the treasure, one of their number, Cullen, absconds with a jeweled prize and tries to sell it to an unscrupulous dealer. The dealer forces Cullen to take him into the World Below, but with Vincent’s help Cullen turns the tables, and the thief plunges into a mysterious abyss compared to Hell.

“Everything is Everything”—After a charming gypsy boy steals Catherine’s wallet, she becomes involved in helping him prove his father’s innocence of a crime that caused the boy to become an outcast.

*“Ozymandias”—The title refers to Elliot Burch, who has invested heavily in a new building-project. Some activists think it’s just gentrification that will hurt the poor, but Catherine knows that if the project is completed it will expose the World Below. Elliot proposes to Catherine. Though she does not love him, Catherine considers accepting his proposal in exchange for his cancelling the project. Vincent’s heart is torn asunder not just at the prospect of losing Catherine but also at her entering a loveless marriage. Fortunately for the heroine, Elliot is so invested in the ego-boost of his project that he won’t accept her terms. Later, Catherine realizes that she dodged a bullet because Elliot was involved in illegal attempts to harass his political opponents. In a rare denouement dependent on Lady Justice rather than lion’s claws, an injunction dooms the building-project, saving the Tunnels and leaving Elliot with nothing—whereupon the Shelley poem “Ozymandias” is read aloud by a narrator to underscore his desolation.

*“A Happy Life”—In a rare episode involving no crime elements, Catherine suddenly becomes woeful for the memory of her mother, who died when Catherine was ten (and who has not been substantially referenced in prior episodes). Catherine becomes so obsessed that she talks to a psychologist, admitting that part of her psychic dilemma is that she cannot be with the man she truly loves. Implicit to the drama is the knowledge that she and Vincent have known one another over a year by this time, and now the impossible love has become more torturous, particularly because she envies the normal life her mother and father had. This is expressed by Catherine’s overt envy of the normal life a college friend has with her husband and child. For the first time Catherine considers deserting the normal world for the Tunnels, proposing that she join Vincent in the World Below, if only on a trial basis. Vincent nobly refuses her notion, claiming he knows she can’t really leave the normal world. Catherine takes a leave from her job and joins her college friend for an extended visit—but in a tear-jerking finale, she realizes that she wants Vincent more than normalcy. The conclusion still leaves the love in its impossible configuration, though.

THE WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH (1999)

 

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

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

As in the previous Brosnan-Bond film, the villains are fairly down to earth in terms of their technology-- once again, involving an attempt to unleash a nuclear bomb, though this time, the villain is out to create a capitalistic hegemony rather than to foment war between nations. However, Bond's super-car is back, complete with a surface-to-air missile, which is enough to boost the movie into marvelous territory. Bond himself has a new gimmick, a flash-bomb inside a pair of glasses, and in the film's rousing opening action-scenes he pilots a submersible boat in pursuit of an assassin.

WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH is the first and last Bond film directed by Michael Apted. It's also the last Bond writing-credit for Bruce Fierstein, after he received sole billing for TOMORROW NEVER DIES. For whatever reason, Neil Purvis and Robert Wade, who share screenplay credit with Fierstein on WORLD, apparently became the new favorites of the producers, for the two of them remained attached to the franchise all the way through 2015's SPECTRE.

WORLD shows some of the ambitiousness of GOLDENEYE in terms of redefining Bond for the nineties. As in GOLDENEYE there are some attempts to tweak Bond's image as a ladykiller, while still allowing him to bed three women in the course of the film. Yet the film emphasizes Bond's role as a spy engaged in battling real-world terrorism, which in this case is entwined with a particular capitalistic enterprise. In the aforementioned opening scenes, Bond, seeking to learn who killed a MI6 agent, is used as an assassin's pawn in killing British oil magnate Robert King. Moments before King is slain, Bond sees the tycoon conclude a meeting with Bond's superior M (Judi Dench), and a past romantic vibe between M and King is strongly implied. Despite a long pursuit of the person responsible for the bomb, the agent is unable to keep the assassin from taking her own life, ostensibly out of fear of a mysterious "him."

MI6's investigation suggests that Robert King was killed by terrorists targeting a pipeline under construction in Azerbaijan. Further, M had an involved professional relationship with Robert King in addition to any unverified personal attachment. Years ago King's daughter Elektra was kidnapped, and King came to M for help. Instead of liberating Elektra, M sought to use Elektra as a means of trapping her kidnapper, noted terrorist Renard. M failed to trap Renard, though a later attempt on the head terrorist left a bullet in the man's brain, while Elektra managed to get free sans M's help. Now Elektra King (Sophie Marceau) has inherited her father's firm, and Bond suspects that Renard may seek to attack her and her company once more.

The ambivalence of the Greek name "Electra"-- which I'll address shortly in more detail-- may give the game away early. Bond, as he so often does with women he seeks to protect, falls into bed with Elektra, but in a reversal on TOMORROW NEVER DIES, he finds out that his new conquest was previously seduced by a villain, in this case Elektra's former captor Renard. The two are both partners in romance and in crime, and their long-range plan is to trigger an atomic meltdown to eliminate other pipelines in the vicinity, so that Elektra's hegemony will be unchallenged. Elektra willingly collaborated in the slaying of Robert King, partly because she blamed him for not ransoming her (she also blames M, and comes close to snuffing her as well), partly because the British magnate "stole" the Azerbaijan oil-lands from Elektra's mother, though we never hear much of anything about this alleged theft. Bond, aided by a requisite Good Girl (Denise Richards), leaps through a series of action-hoops to head off the holocaust, though in terms of stuntwork, none of the set-pieces equal the one at the film's opening. However, in terms of emotional resonance, none of Bond's athletic actions prove as grueling as his fatal confrontation with Elektra, in which, in contradistinction to his normal gallantry, he's forced to shoot her dead to keep her from launching the nuclear option.

In some quarters Elektra King was touted as movie-Bond's first "head villainess," as opposed to a henchwoman like Pussy Galore or Xenia Onatopp. However, Elektra doesn't really have the mojo to full that role. Part of her failure as a villain lies in the fact that her vengeance is set into motion by a more experienced male terrorist, even though there are a few moments in which Renard becomes somewhat subordinate to Elektra. Moroever, actress Sophie Marceau just doesn't have the talent to pull off a role of such emotional depth. Both Brosnan and Robert Carlyle (who plays the bitter, doomed terrorist Renard) act Marceau under the table.

Authors don't always use Greek words to reflect their original associations, but I think Purvis and Wade had some knowledge of both the Greek myth of Electra and the appropriation of the name by psychology. In the latter discipline, an "Electra complex" was one in which a grown daughter has become fixated upon her father, whether emotionally or erotically. Carl Jung coined the term as a response to Freud's "Oedipus complex," and the reference grew out of Electra's role in Greek myth. In this myth-cycle, the Greek lord Agamemnon returns from the Trojan War in triumph, only to be murdered by his wife Clytemnestra and her lover Aegistus. Only Electra, daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, seeks to avenge her father, manipulating her younger brother Orestes into slaying the two people responsible for Agamemon's death.

Interestingly, Purvis and Wade turned the original Electra situation on its head. In their hands, Electra honors her mother and views her father as a thief, though this orientation probably came about after Robert King, on the bad advice of M, failed to save Elektra. Thus the daughter-figure in WORLD resents both the father and a "bad mother," reversing Electra's focus on her mother and a "bad father." This is probably as far as the parallels were meant to go, though Bond does serve Elektra's ends the way Orestes does those of his sister. Renard bears no strong comparison to anyone in the Greek tale. However, since he's probably named for the folkloric trickster-fox Reynard, he might be seen as an embodiment of Elektra's own treacherous nature.

This is also one of the few Bond films in which the villains have some human dimension, with the result that M's ruthlessness with regard to innocents doesn't leave her looking very heroic.  The darker aspects of the storyline bid fair comparison with the similarly doleful 1997 espionage-teleseries LA FEMME NIKITA.

RAVEN TENGU KABUTO (1992)

 

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

I read a handful of stories from the late eighties manga KABUTO. Originated by mangaka Buichi Terasawa, the series crossed the then-popular ninja-adventure genre with some basic Japanese mythology. I wasn't exposed to the animated TV series, but this stand-alone OVA was easily circulated to American shores in the nineties. I had seen it before but had no real memory of the item.

Subtitled "The Golden Eyed Beast," the story doesn't bother to tell the audience anything about Kabuto, the ninja hero who has some special powers from his membership in the ranks of the raven (or in some translations "crow") clan-- including the ability to sprout wings from his back and fly. The script just dumps Kabuto into the middle of a feudal quarrel, in which innocent Princess Ran has been captured by the forces of an evil demon incarnate, the often nude Madame Tamamushi. Kabuto attacks the demon forces, while another group tries to rescue Ran. There's a lot of running around and explosions and not much else. The script's level of historical commitment is shown by the fact that the demon-mistress has a "gadget-making" servant who whips up such items as helicopters, a robot elephant and a giant vacuum cleaner. 

Replete with shoddy TV animation and lame references to spaghetti western visuals, this OAV is at best a timekiller, and then only if you're in the mood for magical ninja hijinks.

INDEPENDENCE DAY: RESURGENCE (2016)

 

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


The strangest thing about INDEPENDENCE DAY RESURGENCE is not just that it didn't appear until twenty years later, nor that it was, like most sequels, a rather passionless reprise of the original. What's surprising is that even though this follow-up invasion once more takes place on July 4th, the 20th anniversary of the Harvesters' victory, the script doesn't even try to duplicate any of the first film's patriotic rhetoric or its use of visual icons.

Instead, it's another military soap opera, with aliens. Dylan Hiller, stepson of the Will Smith character (written out of the series by an off-camera death), has a grudge against fellow pilot, "lone wolf" Jake Morrison. Jake lost his parents in the first invasion but has somehow managed to become the boyfriend of Patricia Whitmore, who is both a fellow pilot and the daughter of former president Whitmore. This "male bonding" is one of the sequel's weakest elements, though the romance between Jake and Patricia is at least passable. Other new characters, like an African warlord and a lady pilot from China, don't even register on the charisma-meter.

Somewhat stronger is the script's re-framing of the older characters from the first film. Russell Casse remains dead, but Doctor Okun, apparently killed in DAY, "surges" back to life, evincing a psychic rapport with the returning aliens. Thomas Whitmore, whose contact with the Harvesters in the first film was far briefer, nevertheless also feels a tingle from his "alien-vibe sense." David Levinson and his quirky dad are also back, and though I could've done less with Judd Hirsch, the other three actors-- Goldblum, Spiner and Pullman-- seem to have the most fun with their roles.

Aside from a big crowd-pleasing end-scene with a giant Harvester-queen, the invasion-FX are generally dull. There are also no standout lines of dialogue, either for good or ill. The only improvement is that, whereas as DAY tended to show women in roles of "standing by their men," RESURGENCE does put two female characters, Patricia and the Chinese pilot, into combative positions.

Though I've categorized a lot of the "alien-invasion" films I've reviewed as "dramas" because such films often focus on the "pathos" of the world's near-demise, these two films fit better into the Fryean mythos of invigorative adventure.

THE SPELL (1977)

 

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

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS (Really. Don't read unless you've seen the flick)

There's no question that this 1977 telefilm owes its existence to the successful 1976 film-adaptation of Stephen King's CARRIE. At the same time, the Brian Taggert script does exert itself to ring a few changes on the material, so that THE SPELL is not a total knockoff. Aside from some nice acting moments here and there, those changes are the only thing worth discussing about this low-intensity barely-a-shocker-- ergo, massive spoilers.

Jagger and Richards penned the song "Sympathy for the Devil," and it wouldn't be much exaggeration to sum up THE SPELL as "Sympathy for Carrie's Mom." CARRIE is first and foremost a horror story about a child who suffers abuse from a domineering mother. As a result of the mother's browbeating, Carrie possesses few psychological resources for dealing with the torturous rituals of high school-- though as it happens she does possess superior psychic resources, which eventually make Carrie into a monster who slays all of her tormentors.

THE SPELL is nowhere near this ambitious, and if anything, Rita Matchett's status as a young monster-in-bloom is compromised throughout the story. Fifteen-year-old Rita is somewhat tormented by other girls at school, but their dislike and contempt of Rita isn't explained by anything but their conviction that Rita is "fat." Given that the actress (Susan Myers) playing the part is at best merely chunky, even this reason seems unconvincing, especially compared to the motivations Stephen King gives to even his most routine villains.

As for the situation at home, Rita really doesn't seem to have all that much worth complaining about. Her dull father Glenn shows a tiny bit of favoritism to Rita's younger sister Christina, but he's not exactly sentencing Rita to live under a stairwell. The girls' mother Marilyn (Lee Grant) is actually quite sympathetic to Rita's travails, though she does enforce a strict but sensible code of behavior on the tempestuous young girl, and the sister doesn't do anything particularly offensive beyond taking away attention from Rita..Ironically, though Myers' character Rita is technically the focal point of the story, Marilyn gets most of the best lines, probably in deference to Lee Grant's formidable thespian experience/ Thus the story sometimes skews toward that well-traveled TV trope of the "aggrieved parent with a problem child."

Whether one thinks Rita fortunate or not, people around Rita start to have bad fortune: a young girl breaks her neck, an older woman burns alive for no apparent reason. One would assume that this is Rita's psychic power at work, consciously or not, but then the script brings in references to witchcraft and occult techniques. So it would appear that unlike Carrie White, Rita has gone out of her way to use her power to become a practicing sorceress.

However-- SPOILER #1--

While Carrie White had a girls' gym teacher who sympathized with the young girl's plight, Rita's gym teacher is also her mentor in malefic magic, She's the true culprit in the murders, which is the film's first "big surprise," as well as a means of exculpating Rita so that she doesn't meet Carrie's tragic fate.

As for the other big surprise, aka SPOILER #2:

At the very end, Marilyn reveals that she too is a psychic/ witch, and she uses her own powers to school Rita so that she learns not to abuse her powers in future.

This non-tragic ending is not particularly engrossing, and Taggert drops the ball on any opportunity to play with some of the popular tropes of "witch-cinema:" like "witchcraft as female empowerment" or even "witchcraft as lesbian bonding." There's the slight possibility that Rita's gym teacher--given the gender-ambiguous first name "Jo"-- may have designs on the high-schooler. Yet Jo never makes a pass, and the two characters fall out for a not very compelling reason: Jo wants to build a coven of similarly powered witches, and Rita doesn't like that-- not for any altruistic reasons, but because such a gathering impinges on her feelings of uniqueness. Perhaps there was some notion of Jo playing the part of the "bad indulgent mom" as opposed to Marilyn's "good strict mom," but even that small psychological myth doesn't come to life.

As I mentioned earlier, there's not much horror in the telefilm's supposed shock-sequences, and though there are a few adequate dramatic scenes, THE SPELL's greatest debit may be that the central character is just not very interesting, either as a monster or an innocent.

HONOR ROLL #130, JUNE 27

 LEE GRANT headlines but does not star in the story of a witchy "anti-Carrie."

LIAM HEMWORTH wishes he could get hold of his bro's hammer when those pesky aliens come calling again.

No one these days is "raven" about KABUTO.

SOPHIE MARCEAU does her part for women's lib by providing James Bond with his first female evil mastermind.

RON PERLMAN's one of the GOOD monsters.

GRACE RENAT had the fortune to be the last in a long line of evildoers quashed by the Silver Mask.

JUSTICE LEAGUE: THE FLASHPOINT PARADOX (2013)

 

 

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

When I saw FLASHPOINT years ago, I wasn't aware at the time that it launched the franchise known as the "DC Animated Movie Universe," which is a subset of all of the (mostly if not entirely) direct-to-video animated films featuring DC Comics characters, a set of movies dating back at least to 2007. I don't remember whether or not I read the original comic on which the story was based, but the video is said to be true to the source, which also inspired one past adaptation in episodes of the FLASH teleseries and may figure into a future live-action movie if those plans bear fruit-- all of which means that the original story impressed others more than it did me.

In essence, FLASHPOINT is just another iteration of the "butterfly effect" of time-alteration, as put forth in Ray Bradbury's 1952 short story "A Sound of Thunder." In most of these "time gone wrong" stories, someone or something alters the established course of history, almost always making things many times worse than in the original history. Flash, the central hero of this Justice League tale, accidentally causes a "time boom" with the exercise of his super-speed. As his perpetual enemy Professor Zoom explains, this phenomenon has the same effect as a sonic boom, disordering the entire timeline. Thus, one day Flash, in his secret ID of Barry Allen, wakes up to a word that at first seems only different in small, personal ways-- his dead mother is alive, his former wife is married to someone else. But the personal expands into the cosmic. The whole world is now ravaged by an insane war between Wonder Woman's Amazons and Aquaman's Atlanteans. Many of Flash's old comrades in this reality are radically changed as well. From the instant of his landing on Earth, baby Kal-El has been confined to a military lab for study, rather than becoming the hero Superman. Batman still exists, but Bruce Wayne was slain in Crime Alley, while it's his mourning father Thomas Wayne who became a Robin-less Caped Crusader.

The voice actors do a creditable job with this downbeat drivel, particularly Justin Chambers as Flash and Kevin McKidd as Thomas Wayne. But though Jim Krieg has some good scripts to his credit, he can't do anything to relieve the thudding tedium of this really bad alternate history, which I tend to lay at the door of the original comics-writer. Possibly the worst conception is that the war between Amazons and Atlanteans doesn't start from any believable sociological cause, but as a result of a romantic grudge: married Aquaman has an affair with Wonder Woman, and his wife Mera gets killed by the Amazon Princess during a confrontation. I assume the original writer thought this was tragic; I just thought it stupid. There's never any real psychological substance behind the characters' actions, not even in Flash's realization that he must let his mother die to save the universe, in marked contrast to a similar trope in the classic STAR TREK episode CITY ON THE EDGE OF FOREVER. 

The only virtue of this overbaked twaddle is that its success led to other, better entries in the DC Animated Universe.

 

ONCE UPON A SPY (1980)

 

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

Ted Danson completed this failed TV-pilot about two years before he was cast for CHEERS, so I' ll bet few people were happier than he was when the show did not result in a series. Much as I like to give unmade series the benefit of the doubt, a "Once Upon a Spy" show probably would have tainted the careers of any up-and-comers associated with it.

Jack Chenault (Danson) works for an American spy agency as a computer expert, but one day he gets called into "field work" despite his lack of training by the all-knowing agency head "The Lady" (Eleanor Parker, stuck in a nothing role). It seems that the agency is investigating a stolen NASA computer and suspicion has fallen upon eccentric scientist/millionaire Marcus Valorum (Christopher Lee). Chenault has a history with Valorum, in that the former once beat the latter out of some high-level science-award, and the agency figures that Valorum might let something slip to an old enemy out of bragging rights-- I think. Eventually 'twill be revealed that Valorum has taken a permanent ride on the crazy train, having invented a shrinking ray with which he plans to shrink Hoover Dam, just to cause lots of chaos and be generally a mean guy.

Since Chenault is not a field guy, he's teamed with a total of one field agent, Paige Tannahill (Mary-Louise Weller). Tannahill is in theory extremely skilled in both gunplay and hand-to-hand combat, but the script skimps on action in favor of far too much romantic chatter between the teammates, so the viewer has no chance to be impressed by the lady agent. Even Tannahill's climactic fight-scene against a small coterie of henchmen in the standard "villain's maze" is underwhelming.

Writer Jimmy Sangster was far better known for horror than for adventure, but he'd done far better than this knockoff in 1967's DEADLIER THAN THE MALE. As for director Ivan Nagy, I'd previously noted that his CAPTAIN AMERICA II TV-film was a little better than the previous TV-film with the hero, and SPY is a letter better than either of those. But it's a measured choice at best.

LEGEND OF THE SEVEN GOLDEN VAMPIRES (1974)

 

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


LEGEND OF THE SEVEN GOLDEN VAMPIRES had a couple of "firsts" to its credit, in that it was the first collaboration between Hammer Studios and Shaw Brothers, and the first British attempt to meld the elements of their horror-films with elements of the kung-fu genre. (The latter might not be much of an accomplishment, since earlier in the same year, Hammer had released a horror/swashbuckler, CAPTAIN KRONOS VAMPIRE HUNTER.) However, the film's "lasts" may prove more historically significant, since it was the last Hammer film of the original period to feature either Dracula specifically or vampires generally. And LEGEND was one of the very last films made by Hammer before its 1970s demise (its later reincarnation being a separate matter).

Hammer films were never known for being scrupulous about internal continuity, and LEGEND follows the same pattern. The film begins with a prologue set in 1804, wherein Dracula has been, for vague reasons, confined to his castle. For once, Hammer's Van Helsing can't be blamed, for it's 1885 when the vampire-hunting doctor encounters the king bloodsucker in HORROR OF DRACULA, so this particular Van Helsing can't have been alive in 1804, unless he was remarkably well preserved. In fact, the continuity of HORROR and its sequels seemed flatly contradicted by the following events. A Taoist monk named Kan enters Castle Dracula, asking for the vampire-lord's help. It seems that for some time a group of vampire-lords, the Seven Golden Vampires (so called for their golden masks) have existed in rural China. However, the Seven have fallen into deep slumber and need aid from the master of vampires. Dracula (John Forbes-Robertson) arrogantly rejects the simple request for help, but apparently sees in Kan an escape from his imprisonment. Over the monk's objections, Dracula possesses Kan's body-- certainly a vampire-talent never before revealed-- and in that form journeys all the way to China, where he joins the Seven and terrorizes the Chinese, often kidnapping young women for blood sacrifices, more Taoist than Transylvanian in nature. To the hardcore continuity-bug, this makes it impossible for Dracula to be in either Transylvania or England in 1885-- for when the prologue ends, the film proper starts in 1904.

A version of Professor Van Helsing (Peter Cushing) lectures on vampire legends at a Chungking university. It will later come out that this Van Helsing knows all about Dracula, though there would seem no way that the two could have met, even though they seem to know one another at the conclusion. The doctor also knows about the stories of the Seven Vampires of China. Though this Van Helsing doesn't seem to be busy tracking down any undead, he clearly believes that they're real. The audience of skeptical Chinese students don't hold any faith in old legends, not even when Van Helsing regales them-- and the film's  audience-- with a highly detailed narrative about a humble farmer managing to steal a magical talisman from the Seven.

One listener, Hsi Ching, believes Van Helsing, and asks the scholar to join a quest to root out the evil of the Golden Vampires. Hsi Ching brings along his six brothers and one sister, who are all kung-fu experts, while Van Helsing brings along his grown son Leyland and a beautiful young widow, Vanessa.

Once the expedition begins progressing through the Chinese countryside, any resemblance to the British style of heavily-plotted drama vanishes. The film was jointly directed by Roy Ward Baker and Chang Cheh. But since only the latter had experience in handling kung-fu scenarios, it seems likely that he influenced the bulk of the film's action-scenes. There are some minor emotional subplots, such as a blossoming interracial romance between Hsi Ching and Vanessa. which was somewhat daring for a 1974 British horror-film. But most of the film is just one attack after another by the Golden Vampires and their zombie-like hordes, followed by the heroes' counterattacks. Dracula/Kan doesn't have much to do, and the Seven Vampires are even more routine as villains than Hsi Ching and his siblings are as heroes. To be sure, Layland and Vanessa are not well-developed either, so it seems likely that Shaw Brothers realizes that Cushing's Van Helsing had to be in the forefront to help sell the film in the West. The action-scenes are good fun, though there's something of a sameness about them. Van Helsing has a final face-off with Dracula, who once more assumes his Transylvanian form, and while it's just an average fight-scene, it does have the distinction of being Hammer's final battle between the two characters-- even though one could argue that these aren't "the real ones."

I assume that the visual motif of "masked evildoers" stems from Chinese folklore and/or popular fiction, since four years later, Chang Cheh used this motif in one of his biggest hits, THE FIVE DEADLY VENOMS.