DARKMAN II: THE RETURN OF DURANT (1995)

 

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

Five years after the theatrical release of DARKMAN, Universal brought out two DTV sequels, both directed by Bradford May.

Though Peyton Westlake keeps the same "Phantom of the Opera" digs he had in the previous film, his former girlfriend never manages to locate him, so she's out of the picture for the duration. Unfortunately, thanks to the workmanlike script, Darkman's first opponent Durant managed to survive his helicopter crashing into a bridge, losing no more than a few months in a coma. On top of this good fortune, Durant's thespian counterpart Larry Drake got top billing for RETURN over the actor now essaying the bandage-wrapped crusader, Arnold Vosloo.

By a staggering coincidence, though Durant doesn't go looking for Darkman, his next business venture causes their paths to cross once more. Durant's criminal empire fell apart during his coma, so he decides to look up a mad scientist, Hathaway, who has been working on particle beam-weaponry for sale to the highest bidder. Since Hathaway needs a workshop to perfect his weapons, so Durant picks an existing laboratory and decides to muscle the owner, another scientist named Brinkman, into signing away his property for a song. 

Though Durant kills the stubborn scientist, Westlake just happens to have approached Brinkman to collaborate on Westlake's pet project: to perfect the artificial skin that he hopes to use to cover his damaged features, which is also the substance he uses for his masquerades in his Darkman persona. So Darkman is not just pissed that Durant is back, but also that the evildoer has ruined another of the hero's chances for normalcy.

Darkman has two allies this time out. One is a crusading lady reporter who helps the hero expose Durant's return, and the other is the sister of Brinkman, who's tempted to sell the lab to Durant until she finds out the truth about her brother's murder. Neither of them is any more interesting than Durant and his thugs, though it's of some significance that the actress playing the sister is Renee O'Connor, who would sign on to play Gabrielle on the XENA WARRIOR PRINCESS show. Once all the plot points are set up, director and writers shake vigorously with multiple shootouts, fistfights, and deceptive masquerades.

One minor political joke shows up amidst the supporting villains. Durant's first customer for the beam-weapon is an ex-army vigilante hungry for fight crime, but he unlike Darkman is demeaned because he's said to be both "far right" and a "Nazi," as well as Durant's patsy to cull rival crime-overlords. Durant himself seems apolitical, but one of his goons just happens to be ex-KGB, making him the only halfway memorable henchmen. It might have been a decent joke if the writers had pitted the "Nazi" army guy against the "Commie" henchman, but instead they waste even the minor comic potential by having the army guy hurl his "Commie" insult against the also apolitical scientist Hathaway. 

SOMETHING IS OUT THERE (1988)

 

 

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

Cross "My Favorite Martian" with ALIEN and it might look something like this two-part television miniseries.

When police detectives Jack Breslin (Joe Cortese) and Frank Delio (George Dzunda) investigate mysterious killings, Breslin alone sees evidence that the killer may be something superhuman. He doggedly seeks to follow his few leads, though his hot rich fiancee Mandy-- daughter of the police commissioner-- constantly seeks to make the raffish lawman act more respectably in anticipation of their marriage.

The trope of the man who suspects that he's about to marry a subtle ball-buster-- a trope also seen in the first episodes of I DREAM OF JEANNIE as well-- is quickly followed by the guy's introduction to a ethereal female who both liberates him from convention and places even greater demands on him. One of Breslin's leads is an alien artifact, though he doesn't recognize it as such. The artifact's owner, a lissome blonde named Ta'ra (Maryam D'Abo), comes looking for the item and fights with Breslin over it. When the cop subdues the intruder, she admits that she's an alien med-tech, chasing down a rapacious "xenomorph" that's responsible for the killings. Ta'ra warns that Breslin can never find and destroy the xenomorph without her help. Instead of turning the sexy blonde over to the federal government, Breslin makes the highly difficult decision to let her move in with him-- though this means constantly being forced to explain Earth life to this feminine "fish out of water," and having her read his mind every time he has a sexy thought about her.

For a TV-film, the producers put some real money into the project, coming up with a passable ALIEN-clone as well as staging the duo's alien-hunting rather well. But the monster is of minor importance; he's just there to force Breslin and Ta'ra into compromising positions, eventually breaking up Breslin's engagement, though not in the comic manner of JEANNIE. D'Abo and Cortese display good chemistry, though for my money George Dzunda delivers the best performance, as a cop who's deeply invested in his partner's welfare and ends up perishing because of Breslin's secret mission.

The mini-series was followed by a very short-lived teleseries, which predictably did not have the same budgetary largesse and so ended up looking barely more competent than THE POWERS OF MATTHEW STARR. Though producer Frank Lupo made a fair number of metaphenomenal TV shows, he had his greatest success with naturalistic heroes like those seen in HUNTER and THE A-TEAM. 

SHADOW OF CHINATOWN (1936)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *poor*

FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*

CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*


Writer-director Robert F. Hill had the chance to work on a number of adventure-films adapted from other media, starring such heroes as Tarzan, Flash Gordon, and the somewhat less famous Blake of Scotland Yard (though Hill managed to helm both the silent 1927 Blake-serial as well as the sound Blake-serial of 1937!)  But his one encounter with actor Bela Lugosi-- whose flamboyance often gave birth to mythic film-icons-- didn't lead to anything more than a road-company version of Fu Manchu.

It's a shame, because SHADOW OF CHINATOWN has a little more potential than most sound serials that touch on Asian themes.  One positive aspect is that a fair number of real Chinese actors were used for the Chinatown scenes.  The most-used Asian character is Willy Fu, manservant to the film's hero, but Willy is consistently portrayed as reasonably resourceful and likeable. 

Further, the film focuses on the disenfranchisement of Chinese merchants on the American West Coast, at the hands of some unnamed European company.  The company orders local Eurasian "shady lady" Sonya Rokoff-- described as half Chinese, half Russian-- to find some way to terrorize the Chinese into fleeing the equally-unnamed West Coast city.  To this end Rokoff (Luana Walter) enlists mad scientist Victor Poten (Lugosi), also a Eurasian, to begin the terror campaign.

Unfortunately, at some earlier point in his life Poten was so badly treated by both Caucasians and Asians that he decides to elevate the campaign into a general war on both.  Whereas some versions of Fu Manchu emphasize the battle of "the East" to subjugate "the West," Poten is the victim of bigotry from both of the ethnicities making up his background. 

Granting that an adventure-serial would never have exploited the dramatic potential of this setup, as one might see to some extent in Capra's 1933 BITTER TEA OF GENERAL YEN, Poten's conflict could still have been used for some very exciting adventure-scenarios.  The problem seems to be that SHADOW, a production of Victory Pictures, was supervised by Sam Katzman, whose notoriety for extreme cost-cutting would later lead to such cinematic absurdities as THE GIANT CLAW.  Thus at no time does the mad doctor unveil any apocalyptic schemes capable of eradicating both hated ethnicities.  His fearsome gimmicks include:

--a stationary "automaton" that can grab victims who get close enough, and then drop said victims into a pit
--the usual "hydraulic walls" seen in countless serials
--a poison needle inserted in a telephone's earpiece
--the usual poisonous gas
-- and, most comically, a "sinister ray" that is no more than a goldfish-bowl set so that it will concentrate the rays of the sun and burn a hole through a victim's head.

One suspects that at no time did Fu Manchu watch the serial and feel envious.

To be sure, Poten has one other weapon: in keeping with earlier Lugosi characters, Poten can exert hypnotic influence upon some if not all victims, which is certainly handier than the light-focusing fishbowl.

Once Poten makes his first strike against Chinese merchants, he largely forgets about them and focuses on destroying the people trying to strike back against him: the police, Rokoff (who turns on Poten when he goes bat-nutty), and local writer on Things Asian Martin Andrews (Bruce  Bennett, fresh from playing a serial-version of Tarzan). Andrews gets drafted into villain-hunting by spunky lady reporter Joan (Joan Barclay), who wants Andrews to help her get a great story on Poten.  They fall in love, if one can call it that, during which Andrews constantly berates Joan and finally does succeed in getting her to quit journalism and marry him.  If the film has a better-than-average attitude toward Chinese Asians, it goes out of its way to deride then-current feminine liberation. 

The action is stodgy at best: strapping hero Bennett gets into a few fights but none are well-choreographed, though there's one nice cliffhanger-moment where it looks as if Poten succeeds in hanging the hero.  None of the characters are overly sympathetic, and the serial often burns up time having Poten trying to kill or utilize defecting allies like Rokoff and one of Poten's own henchmen.

All in all, aside from the generally friendly portrait of Asians (in the last chapter Poten flees the law and bypasses a Chinese lion-dance ceremony), this is a very low-energy adventure serial.  Its only other point of interest is that it's one of those in which the villain is more the narrative center than the hero.

THE PHANTOM EMPIRE (1935)

 

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

Of this Mascot serial lyzmadness wrote:

It’s rather difficult to know how to react to The Phantom Empire’s tacit contention that the financial security of Radio Ranch is more important than the destruction of an ancient civilisation and its technological marvels.

This put me in mind of something I wrote in reaction to UNDERSEA KINGDOM, a 1936 Republic serial I thought derivative of EMPIRE:

Flash Gordon's Mongo is a great though utterly inconsistent dream-world, where any sort of weirdness is possible.  The producers of UNDERSEA KINGDOM seem strangely in a hurry to dispose of their dream-world, as if its presence threatened the hegemony of their real world, not just the serial's version of reality.

If anything, the creators of Mascot's subterranean fantasy-world seem even less interested in the way that world works than were the creators of the Undersea Kingdom. Said "empire" goes by the name of Murania, a name cobbled together from "Mu," a 19th-century name for a sunken, Atlantis-like continent, and "Urania," a Greek word connoting "the heavens" as well as the name of the Muse of Astronomy. Murania is your basic scientifically-advanced pocket civilization that has managed to stay utterly isolated from every other culture on Planet Earth. And, like most such civilizations, it exists to provide a contrast to the younger, more vital world of humanity, represented in all its glory by-- Gene Autry?

I should note that I've no experience with Autry's work outside of this serial. Further, since I don't have a taste for "singing cowboys" in general or their type of music, Autry comes off as pretty charmless in EMPIRE, even allowing for the fact that it was only his second film performance. All the audience knows about his character-- who bears the same name as the actor-- is that he runs a dude ranch, given the name "Radio Ranch" because it's from that site that Autry and his fellow singers make radio broadcasts of their music every day. The radio-show gimmick is tied to that venerable western trope, "Losing the Old Homestead," for to satisfy his contract with his sponsor, Autry must make a broadcast every scheduled day at a pre-appointed time, or he loses his ranch. (We never meet the insidiously clever bankers that worked out this deal.) Making said broadcasts becomes increasingly hard for Autry, for not only do some surface-dwelling villains frame the singing cowboy for murder, he has to deal with the fact that Murania believes that surface people-- including the aforesaid villains-- are threatening the realm's isolation. So all through the serial, Autry is mostly on the run from assorted enemies.

Fortunately for Autry, he isn't aided only by dopey comedy relief sidekicks (though a couple of them are around). Radio Ranch also plays host to a whole bunch of young kids, possibly school children on holiday, though at least two of them act as shills to promote the business. These two somewhat older kids are a brother and sister, Frankie (Frankie Darro, almost twenty at the time) and Betsy (acclaimed trick-rider Betsy King Ross), and the two of them-- both more charismatic than Autry-- learn about the menace of Murania before Autry does. In fact, there's a weird parallel between the horse-riding servants of Murania, who are dubbed "the Thunder Riders" by no one in particular, and the horse-riding gang of kids who decide to co-opt that name for themselves. They too do a lot of running around as they try to help Autry out of his troubles, though being kids, they can't do very much.

The serial has gained a certain cachet thanks to juxtaposing the theoretically "realistic" world of singing cowboys with that of a super-science kingdom, and thus one can reasonably expect that the serial's best scenes occur when the principals-- Autry and the two youngsters-- end up in Murania. None of the trio are particularly wowed by the wonders of Murania or the charms of its queen Tika (Dorothy Christie). In Chapter 5, Autry says of Murania that "the dampness and dead air of your world is more suited to rats and moles." In Chapter 9, Tika plays host to the two kids and asks them how they find Murania, and Betsy finds it "stuffy." William Wordsworth wrote that "the world is too much with us," but in the case of the three principals of EMPIRE, "the ranch is too much with them," for they can think of nothing else but saving Autry's ranch from financial ruin. Tika wants the ranch gone because she has some vague fear that Autry will uncover Murania's existence, but just to make her world more of a threat, a usurper makes an attempt to overthrow Tika so that he can (possibly) make an assault upon the modern surface-world.

This opposition between ancient and modern worlds is more interesting than any of the catchpenny fights and special effects of EMPIRE. Indeed, the fated doom of Murania is anticipated-- possibly by mere coincidence?-- in a cowboy song, "Uncle Noah's Ark," that humorously described the inundation of a previous era in favor of a more modern existence.

A long long time ago
As all you folks should know
Uncle Noah built himself an Ark
(Now that's a boat folks)
For forty days and nights
The rain was quite a fright
The animals nearly tore the Ark apart

The song doesn't say anything about the world that the flood is destroying, but the conclusion of PHANTOM EMPIRE provides all the destruction one could possibly desire.

 

 

TRANCERS 3 (1992)

 

 

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

I don't know if the producers of TRANCERS 3 wrote out the character of the hero's wife because the actress who'd played her, Helen Hunt, had just rocketed to the Big Time with the teleseries MAD ABOUT YOU-- with this installment marking Hunt's last contribution to the series. But irrespective of the precise reasons, Tim Thomerson's hero Jack Deth works much better when he's not happy, so the loss of a stable love-life was an improvement. 

Even before a new conflict begins, Deth is having marital trouble with Lena (Hunt). Then he gets his mental essence summoned back to his native time, the 23rd century, because yet another evil genius has started unleashing the zombies known as "Trancers," this time in the hoary old year of 2005. It's not clear to me as to what happens to the body Deth was occupying when his future-self vanishes, but I guess Lena views his leave-taking as desertion. When Deth makes it to 2005, he learns that in the meantime Lena divorced him and married someone else. She appears just long enough to tell the hero how happy she is, and then Deth's nicely pissed off for his next battle with evildoers.

This time the villain is the risibly named Colonel Daddy Muthuh (Andrew Robinson), so named because he's been both father and mother to all the soldiers under his command. Muthuh has some notion of conquering his timeline with his small army of super-strong zombies, though most of them just look like ordinary gym-rats, including a female fighter (Dawn Ann Billings). Robinson has a nice time chewing the scenery and up to this point essays the series' best villain.

Deth gets diverse help from Movie #2's character Alice (Megan Ward), a big alien goon he calls Godzilla, and a female Trancer-cop called T.J. (Melanie Smith). But Deth's the whole show here, even if it's pretty much a road-show in terms of its meager FX budget.

THE INHERITOR OF KUNG FU (1983)

 

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

This bargain basement Taiwanese production is mostly notable for teaming up two of Hong Kong's notable martial arts talents, Ti Lung and Chang Ling. 

Unfortunately, it's hard to talk about the movie for a couple of reasons. One is that the English dub seems inconsistent about attributing the characters with names. Chang Ling is Princess Chin Chin, at least to my ears, but I think Lung's character is called both Chin and Shu. I'll use "Shu" just because it doesn't sound like the other character's cognomen.

Shu meets the princess when she and her handmaid are traveling alone in Shu's country. Brigands attack the two women, and Shu tries to defend them, only to get beat down because his kung fu is no good. However, Chin Chin's is excellent, and she routs the bandits all by herself.

After praising Shu for really trying hard, she reveals that she represents a foreign clan, and that she wants to establish good relations with the head of Shu's clan, who is both Shu's kung-fu trainer and his father. However, Shu's father believes that Chin Chin's people are devoted to "devilish arts," so he refuses her diplomatic mission. Chin Chin and her servant take their leave, and the father punishes Shu for getting things wrong.

While in isolation, Shu falls down a rabbit hole (or something) into a snowy domain. He meets a weird old monk who trains him in kung fu, and then leaves. Then Shu's father summons him, claiming that for some reason he thinks Shu has a priceless book of mystical kung fu practices. Shu tries to prove himself innocent, and when his father tries to kill him, he flees. Then fighters from other lands assail him, particularly one sneering creep who apparently can do real magic, since he briefly takes on the form of Shu's beloved sister.

Chin Chin appears to help Shu, and eventually the hunt for the book leads to a major battle between clans. The payoff, such as it is, is the reveal that Shu's father was hoping to use the mystic techniques to dominate every one else. In a subplot that probably suffered some sizable cuts, Shu's sister loses her mind Ophelia-style for some reason, and she "accidentally" causes her evil father to fall on a stake and impale himself, while he apologizes for causing her insanity-- I think.

Aside from the magical masquerade, the only other fantastic content is a moment when Chin Chin and an opponent fight each other while gliding across the surface of a river. This one's purely for devoted fans of the two principals.

HONOR ROLL #150

 TI LUNG inherits yet another medieval chopsocky mishmash.

MEGAN WARD was less than entranced with-- oops, used that one.

How to Kill an Ancient Civilization in One Easy Lesson, by GENE AUTRY.

Another duel with an evil Bela Lugosi for imperiled heroine JOAN BARCLAY.

JOSEPH CORTESE gets shanghaied into alien hijinks by alien babe, film at eleven.

It's back to the Darkman mill for seasoned villain LARRY DRAKE.

THE LONE RANGER (2013)

 

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


It would be pointless to attempt a plot-based review of Gore Verbinski's LONE RANGER. That's not because it doesn't have a plot.  But as with many over-the-top summer blockbuster adventure-films, the movie's plot is secondary to its breadth of spectacle.  And Verbinski does deliver heaps of wild spectacle, as wild as those found in any other adventure-film, from RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK to RIKI-OH.

However, Verbinski's RANGER is not an adventure-film, which may be a partial reason that audiences of this 2013 summer rejected it at the box office.   Many moviegoers probably wanted a straightforward revival of the "Masked Rider of the Plains and his faithful Indian companion." Alternately, some might have welcomed an exclusively comic sendup of the characters, something along the lines of Tim Burton's spoofy 2012 retelling of the teleseries DARK SHADOWS.

RANGER does contain many scenes, successful and otherwise, designed to provoke laughter, but the movie is not a comedy any more than it's an adventure-story.  Verbinski's RANGER belongs to the literary type Northrop Frye terms an "irony," a state of being where the protagonist's power to take effective action is at its lowest ebb.

"Nature is out of balance."  Johnny Depp's deranged Tonto states this many times in the film. The line's reasonably effective in drawing laughs.  But though Tonto is crazy, he's not wrong.  RANGER is full of images of disarray and chaos, far beyond the level seen in most adventure or comedy films.  There's the broken pocket-watch that Tonto obsessively carries with him, a symbol that time itself is out of joint.  There's the horse Silver, whom Tonto believes to be a messenger from the spirit-world, but a very stupid one, because the horse chooses the wrong man to be the heroic emissary of justice.  There's a hooker who has, not a heart of gold, but a leg of ivory, and there's the chief of the Comanches, who tells the Ranger that his people are already "ghosts," not long before they are wiped out by a dead ringer for General Custer.  This is, in short, an insane world in which human action is meaningless, constantly undercut by uncertainty and outright deception.  This is not a world in which an altruistic white man and a noble red savage can become brothers, and can represent progressive justice with a gleaming silver bullet. In this world the Ranger is a clueless, good-hearted bungler and his reluctant companion is a crazy man who constantly tries to feeds the dead bird he wears on his head.


In a pure adventure, the world is renewed when Indiana Jones-- with a little help from his sidekick, God-- exterminates a band of blasphemous Nazis.  The world of Burton's Barnabas is more ludicrous, but even here, Barnabas and his family triumph over the bane of their line, the witch Angelique.  In the world of the irony-- as well as that of irony's more serious sibling, the drama-- virtue and meaning rarely enjoy such clear-cut resolutions.

Nothing in RANGER shows more ambivalence than the Ranger himself.  The traditional Lone Ranger is a pillar of rectitude, surviving death to appoint himself the incarnation of western justice, and the traditional Tonto joins him to illustrate the potential brotherhood of white man and red man,  Verbinksi gives us a Ranger whose iconic aspects-- the mask, the silver bullets-- are almost all dreamed up by Tonto's fevered brain.  But Tonto has almost nothing to work with.  Verbinski's "John Reid" bears less kinship with the Lone Ranger than with Voltaire's "Candide," the eternal naif who keeps trying to believe in human goodness no matter how much evil he witnesses.  And John Reid is not only naive; he's established as smugly self-righteous and foolhardy in his first encounter with Tonto.  He can barely shoot; all of his "trick shots" are pure lucky accidents, and his ability at hand-to-hand combat is modest at best. His only claim to being a mythic hero is that the horse Silver-- who propels this western into the marvelous realm by displaying feats and intelligence beyond the ken of horse-kind-- believes that he is a hero.  And because the spirit-messenger believes it, Tonto tries to believe it, though he would rather have worked with John's courageous-but-dead brother Dan.  Hence he calls John "kemosabe"-- "wrong brother"-- yet another indication that even the spirit-world is, like nature, out of tune.

Now, the fact that I've endeavored to explain Verbinski's work by categorizing it as an "irony" does not mean that I necessarily consider it a GOOD ironic work.  Some of Verbinski's ironic touches-- a sole bird of prey peacefully skimming the skies before and after the slaughter of Dan Reid's ranger unit-- are entrancing, thanks in part to dynamite locale-selection.  Other touches are less beguiling.  Verbinski seems to think that all he must do is pile on more and more excessive set-pieces in order to keep the audience happy and buffaloed.  But though American (and other) audiences have embraced films far more noisy and incoherent than this LONE RANGER, they usually will not do so unless they feel that the director has let them in on the joke.  Even the Ranger's basic appearance sets up a confusing-- and not at all intriguing-- puzzle: "Yeah, he's got the white hat and the mask, but why's he wearing the clothes of some eastern dude?"  No matter how often the musicians crank up their version of the William Tell Overture, there are too many discontinuities in LONE RANGER for even young audiences to embrace John Reid as their Lone Ranger, even to the extent that some audiences of the 1960s embraced the somewhat-ironized Batman of the ABC teleseries as "their Batman."   The narrative is also further confused by a framing-device, in which the main story is narrated by an eighty-year-old Tonto in the year 1933. The device proves a waste of time, though it's a nice touch to set it in the year when Tonto and the Ranger were "born."

Problematic though Verbinksi's IRONIC RANGER is, it is more entertaining than most of the mediocre "straight" adaptations, such as the plodding 1981 LEGEND OF THE LONE RANGER and the disastrous 2003 telemovie.  Then again, none of them can touch the mask of the real Lone Ranger.

FOLLOW-UP: On re-viewing the film, it belatedly occurred to me that it never explicitly affirms whether or not the marvelous happenings of this "Ranger revision" happen the way their narrator says they did. When the aged Tonto tells his version of the "Lone Ranger and Tonto" story to a young boy who only knows the canonical narrative, this framing-sequence is all that we as viewers know of the film's "reality." At the end the boy asserts that Tonto's version is "just a story." Tonto replies that the story's reality is "up to you," which is implicitly Verbinski's response to anyone who might not like his irony-ranger.  Verbinski's script then tosses out two highly dubious confirmations of the story. First Tonto, just before he departs the Wild West exhibit, hands the boy a silver bullet. Then, as a pay-off to all the sequences in which crazy Tonto kept trying to feed the dead blackbird on his head, the boy sees a living blackbird appear in the exhibit-- though this is still pretty ambivalent "evidence." In no way does it approach the level of the conclusive evidence for the marvelous seen in 1947's MIRACLE ON 34TH STREET.

The 2013 LONE RANGER, then, is the first film I've reviewed in which a "fallacious figment" takes the form of a narrative propounded by a "real" person. The closest I've come was in my review of 1952's HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN, and I found that to be a naturalistic version of this trope. In this review I said:

In my phenomenological system, a film qualifies for the status of “uncanny” if it presents dreams with such fidelity that they have their own reality within the film’s diegesis.  HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN does not do this... In terms of my system, a bunch of stage-players enacting a play with fantastic content uses my trope “delirious dreams and fallacious fantasies” purely in a naturalistic manner, since in such scenarios the real-life framing-story nullifies the fantastic content. 

I need to modify this statement a little with respect to the telling of stories, a more controlled form of "dreaming." At no time does the viewer of ANDERSEN see the story performed in the ballet take on its own independent identity: the ballet is always secondary to the primary, realistic narrative. But in LONE RANGER, it's arguable that the fantasy-story related by Tonto is really the primary narrative, and that the frame-story is just there to make its fantastic content somewhat dubious.  A similar, though not identical, situation evolves in the 1987 PRINCESS BRIDE. There's no doubt in BRIDE that the people reading/listening to the story are real, but nevertheless it's the dream of a world with monsters and fabulous swordplay that is the primary attraction.  Though LONE RANGER is ambivalent about the fantastic narrative's factuality and PRINCESS BRIDE is not, what renders both "uncanny" is this focus on the primacy of the fantasy.

VAMPIRE JOURNALS (1997)

 

 

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

Three years after the cliffhanger conclusion of BLOODLUST: SUBSPECIES III, and one year before mastermind Ted Nicolaou concluded the SUBSPECIES, Nicolaou helmed a "spin off" within his vampire cosmos. There's nothing in VAMPIRE JOURNALS that directly connects it to the SUBSPECIES films, but the writer-director worked a few JOURNALS characters into the fourth and last SUBSPECIES film, though only in a prequel-ish sense, since two of those characters had been killed in JOURNALS.

Regardless of the time-frame, JOURNALS is, like Nicolaou's other vampire-films, set exclusively in Romania, ostensibly in Bucharest. As in the first SUBSPECIES film there's a principal female character from America, in this case a young pianist, Sofie (Kirsten Cerre). Her piano performance attracts the attention of a "music-loving" master vampire named Ash (Jonathon Morris), and he sets plans to draw her into his web of sin, even though he already has a substantial coterie of mostly attractive vampires, principally one Cassandra (Ilinca Goya). He first approaches her with a well-traveled move, a single rose (to whose thorns Sofie loses a little blood), but when that doesn't win Sofie immediately, Ash arranges for a human servitor, Iris (Starr Andreef) to set Sofie up with a private concert.

Fortunately for Sofie, Ash is being stalked by vampire hunter Zachary (David Gunn)-- and when I say "vampire hunter," I mean it in both senses of the phrase: Zachary is a vampire who hunts vampires. Years ago the reluctant bloodsucker was "sired" by one Serena, who turned Zachary and executed his lady love. Zachary destroyed Serena, his "mother," and then decides to go after the vamp who sired Serena, who could be termed Zachary's symbolic father, though the two have never met. Zachary is also immediately attracted to the youthful Sofie-- though Zachary, unlike Ash, does not seem to be the centuries-old type of undead. Zachary stalks Ash to kill him, but ends up seeking to save Sofie from perdition. He succeeds in the first goal, slaying Ash with a legendary sword once owned by Ash himself (symbolic phallus, anyone?) But there's a downbeat conclusion in that Sofie does get turned at the conclusion, and must join Zachary in his dismal existence.

Though Nicolaou's formulation of vampire mythology is just as derivative as it is in the SUBSPECIES films, JOURNALS benefits from a clearer conflict, even if one doesn't invest in the Freudian "jealous father" trope. Oddly, while the SUBSPECIES series pursues the trope of the "repulsive vampire"-- the trope that most informs the original Stoker DRACULA-- JOURNALS is wholly invested in the trope of the "pretty vampire." Both Morris and Gunn portray glamorous male vamps, so that in theory the female viewer may find Sofie's predicament suitably enthralling no matter who wins. There are some odd myth-touches throughout, principally the name of the legendary blade: "the sword of Laertes."  In Greek myth Laertes is the father of Odysseus, and he has little mythic presence of his own, while Odysseus is only tangentially connected to "unquiet spirits" through his adventure in the underworld. Though there's no support for it, I'm moved to speculate that Nicolaou may have thought about borrowing from the more apposite Oedipus myth, which would have led to a "sword of Laius," named for the Greek ruler killed by his own son. But this is just an enjoyable side-notion.

FURY IN MARRAKECH (1966)

 

PHENOMENALITY:  *uncanny,*
MYTHICITY: *poor*

FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*

CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*

FURY IN MARRAKECH, though an Italian production, fares much better in its Bondian efforts. In the print I saw the agent is called "Bob Dixon," though the original idea was apparently to make FURY one of the "Bob Fleming" series, the last in the series before this being KILLERS ARE CHALLENGED. But this film has a sprightlier feel to it, and it doesn't mind undercutting some of the spy-genre's serious tropes.

This time there's a plot to flood the European market with counterfeit money, and there's a big bad guy, Karl Kuntz, behind it all, who has a SPECTRE-style conference with other big-time crooks in order to coordinate their efforts. However, there's a fly in the ointment: a female thief infiltrated Kuntz's organization and stole some of the fake money. Kuntz wants to recover the money and kill the thief, but Dixon's organization has already found out about the operation. So Dixon wants to find the girl and use her to find Kuntz, and the printing-plates used to make the fake dough.

That plot set-up out of the way, FURY is then free to send its hero traipsing through the Caribbean, the Swiss Alps, and, of course, Marrakech, During his travels he fights with the henchmen of Kuntz, which includes a tough blonde girl who not only uses a little karate but is also seen beating up a bound victim with her fists-- rather an unusual sight in the 1960s. The film's clever about its spy-gadgets-- a pocket flamethrower, a pen that shoots around corners-- but sadly, Dixon can't use the souped-up car devised by the Q-like technician, because-- he has to travel by plane!

There's a lively chase-scene in the snow-covered Alps, capped off by a bizarre bit of humor, when one of Dixon's female assistants reveals, for no reason save a concluding gag, that "she" is really a "he" (even though it's still a "she" playing the role).

RUNNING DELILAH (1993)

 

 

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

Two raconteurs on this failed TV-show pilot-- director Richard Franklin and writer Ron Koslow-- collaborated with far more success on the pilot episode for the eighties BEAUTY AND THE BEAST. To say that RUNNING DELILAH does not catch the same creative lightning would be an understatement.

The star and her main support-character are played by Kim Cattrall and Billy Zane, both of whom would go on to greater fame elsewhere, so the failure of the pilot was all to the good for them. They're American agents spying on the activities of a suspected weapons dealer, with Delilah (Cattrall) going undercover at the dealer's place of business. Delilah rendezvouses with her handler Paul, and they go back and forth about how she's the only woman in the unit with whom Paul hasn't slept. However, the next night the villain uncovers Delilah's identity and has her killed.

The grief-stricken Paul takes Delilah's body to the laboratory of his agency, where one of the scientists has a special process for making dead people into cyborgs. After a recovery period, Delilah becomes more than a little torqued that she's become mostly machine, with only her head and a shoulder still being human. She rails against her unfair destiny for a while, but eventually Paul and the department head Judith (former "Emma Peel" Diana Rigg) get her to come around and use her powers to take down the man who killed her and his operation.

In comparison to light-hearted productions like SIX MILLION DOLLAR MAN and BIONIC WOMAN, DELILAH makes an effort to show the heroine grappling with the realities of losing most of her human parts-- not least her sexual organs, which she implicitly will never get to use with Paul. (At the end there's a sort of cyber-ability that compensates slightly for lack of the naughty parts, but I have a feeling this would have been glossed over had this become a series.) However, Franklin and Koslow are so preoccupied with showing Delilah's travails that the main conflict gets shoved to one side until the heroine's ready to deal with it. There's very little decent humor to mute the tragedy. except for a moment when Delilah alludes to the breakthrough feminism of Emma, I mean Judith. And most of Delilah's action-scenes fall into the context of her training. I have to admit that BIONIC WOMAN's simpler approach had the advantage of not stinting on the adventure elements.

TRANCERS 2 (1991)

 

 

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

Since I already did a writeup of the "Trancers" concept here, I'll move right into the essentials of the sequel's setup.

One good thing about TRANCERS 2: not nearly as many "duck out of water" bits, since by this time future-cop Jack Deth (Tim Thomerson) has been spent the last six years living in present-day Earth with his present-day wife Leena (Helen Hunt, making her second appearance in the series).

The menace this time is virtually a repeat of the Whistler character from the first film, so much so that Wardo, the new guy unleashing Trancer zombies for some reason, is said to be Whistler's brother despite having a different last name. Wardo is nicely played by long-time villain-actor Richard Lynch, but both the villain and his project are forgettable. He does at least get better screen time than many of the familiar faces scattered throughout the flick, such as Jeffrey Combs, Martine Beswicke, and Barbara Crampton.

However, one other support-character gets the best scenes in the sequel: Megan Ward, playing a modern-day ancestor to Jack Deth's deceased wife Alice. Alice's mind gets downloaded into the modern woman's body, with the result that "Alice" starts throwing herself at her long-lost husband (whose 20th-century body just happens to look just like future-Deth). Leena is to say the least torqued by the entrance of a "first wife," calling Deth a bigamist. It's also an issue that Alice's new body is that of a teenager, whereas that of Leena is, well, not a teen. 

The action-scenes are also largely forgettable, except for Deth killing off Wardo with a pitchfork.

MOLE MEN AGAINST THE SON OF HERCULES (1961)

 

 

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

Phenomenality first: the main reason this Maciste movie-- in which the "Son of Hercules" is actually called by that name, or something close to it-- qualifies as "marvelous" is because it posits a race of humans living underground who have become albinos allergic to the sun's rays, just like in 1956's THE MOLE PEOPLE. Without that element, almost everything else would fall into the domain of the uncanny-- though I must admit that the climactic destruction wrought by Maciste (Mark Forest) and his Black Bestie "Bangor" comes pretty close to the marvelous.

Wherever the story takes place, both White and Black tribes live in the vicinity, since the Mole Men-- initially all albinos clad in white-- raid slaves from both groups. Maciste interrupts one such raid, saving Bangor (Paul Wynter) from captivity. Despite being just as hefty as Maciste, Bangor's not too keen on following the raiders into  their underground lair, but Maciste talks him into it. 

Down in the subterranean caves, the Mole Men-- no albino Mole Women are in evidence-- are ruled by a grandiose but discontented queen, Hallis Mojab (Moira Orfei). Despite being queen, Hallis's main destiny is to turn out another generation. The smarmy high priest (Gianni "Sartana" Garko) keeps nominating his son for the job, but Hallis isn't too fond of that idea.

The viewer is also shown the reason for all the slave-taking: a mammoth mill-wheel that the mole-people need lots of slaves to turn, in order to churn out "gold and diamonds." I suppose the mill is supposed to be a colossal mining-device. Yet, given that the Mole Men don't seem to be trading with other countries, one wonders what good they get out of gold and diamonds. Maybe they're just symbols of wealth? And the mill is so titanic that I tend to associate it with the magical mill of the Finnish sorcerers of the KALEVALA-- though I suppose the Biblical "Samson at the Mill" trope is the more likely influential.

Then Maciste and Bangor barge in, wanting to liberate all the slaves, starting with a local princess. For once the innocent princess does not become a romantic interest for the main hero-- she gets fobbed off on some minor side-character-- and even old Bangor gets to chat up a cute Black girl-slave in the court. For once, though, the hero's exclusive love-interest is the domineering queen-- and also for once, the guy doesn't look like he's entirely unwilling to hook up with the gorgeous tyrant, in exchange for liberating all the slaves. 

However, the high priest interrupts the love-talk by coming in like a lion-- or, more specifically, he lets a real lion in on the couple. This naturally breaks up the party, and Maciste decides to concentrate on restoring the princess to her people first. Having done that, he returns to the underworld to see what he can do for the other slaves. Hallis doesn't know his intentions, though, so she goes above ground, intending to personally kill him. 

This skillful division of the romantic characters allows for two good effects. While Hallis is above ground, her retainer belatedly reveals that she has nothing to fear from the sun, because she's not of their mole-ish blood. The Mole Men also stole her as a child and placed her on the throne for reasons unknown, possibly just as breeding stock. This is a thunderbolt revelation for Hallis, who's long desired the freedom of the above-ground world-- which she only gets to enjoy for a short time before she's overtaken by cruel fate.

Back down below, Maciste and Bangor liberate various slaves and start a revolt. They finally decide that they need to break the power of the Mole Men by destroying the big mill that makes the slaves useful-- and the two muscle-men do so by forcing the mill against its grooves until its central pillar shatters-- one of the most fascinating FX-scenes in sixties peplum cinema.

This one has some moments of rough poetry, but sadly, not quite enough to elevate it to the level of a similar sword-and-sandal like THE GIANT OF METROPOLIS.

HONOR ROLL #149, OCTOBER 14

 Hah, I got my honor roll selections out of order and didn't notice till now. That's why I skipped A-H in the last two of those posts.

_________

PAUL WYNTER lends his bulk to the beefcake of Maciste.

MARTINE BESWICKE can still entrance viewers even in a Trancers movie.

KIM CATTRALL enjoyed no sex in this movie-city.

STEPHEN FORSYTHE gets furious in Marrakesh.

Look in the journals of the vampires and you'll see DAVID GUNN providing the coda.

It wasn't ARMIE HAMMER's fault that they stuck him with a looney version of The Lone Ranger.