THE SPECTACULAR SPIDER-MAN (2008-09)

 

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

In its day SPECTACULAR SPIDER-MAN was one of the more well-lauded superhero cartoons, so much so that when it was canceled, some fans campaigned to bring it back. (Said attempt failed, in part because the Disney corporation acquired the rights to make Spidey cartoons from then on.) SPECTACULAR not my favorite take on the wall-crawler. For one thing, the show's version of Peter Parker, supposedly a high-school junior, looks too young to be close to being a "man," which is a large part of the character's appeal. But it is a much more nuanced series than most Spider-serials, for two reasons.

The majority of the story-lines, with the notable exception of a Venom continuity, derive from the classic Silver Age original by Stan Lee, Steve Ditko and John Romita, privileging most of the classic villains from the sixties rogues' gallery. However, most of those characters were introduced in stand-alone stories and only rarely crossed paths with one another. In SPECTACULAR, villains like the Green Goblin and Doctor Octopus are frequently responsible for bringing other villains, such as The Rhino, into being. The net result of this approach is that, whereas the majority of superhero shows only have villains cross over once in a while, there are so many crook-crossovers here that it's shorter to denote the episodes that don't have them than those that do. For purposes of my crossover files, this is one of the few serials that I would rate as an "ongoing crossover." It also occurs to me that the writers may have taken some inspiration from the nineties SPIDER-MAN comics, which often had various villains employed by or empowered by The Kingpin.

The second notable aspect of SPECTACULAR is that Venom story-line I mentioned. Though I wasn't regularly reading the Marvel Spider-books at the time the infamous "black costume" plot began, I read many of the issues secondhand, and I liked nothing about what I considered a cheapjack ALIEN clone. I still have no good opinion of those stories, but a trio of stories in SPECTACULAR actually employed the Jekyll-Hyde theme fairly well. Because Peter Parker is so often presented as making good moral choices, a reader may sometimes forget that from the first Stan Lee showed that Parker had a number of flaws. He could be condescending, supercilious, and bad-tempered in various combinations. The Venom-trilogy portray Parker's slow seduction into his worst instincts so well that these are the only episodes I would judge to he high in their psychological mythicity.

That said, most of the episodes are just decent thrillers in which Spidey has various super-athletic battles with the Sandman, the Vulture, and the Shocker (given a Southern accent for some reason), so the overall mythicity of the series is just fair. Parker's romance with Mary Jane Watson is strangely played down, emphasizing instead a nerdy Gwen Stacy and a cheerleader version of the minor character Liz Allan. I found it moderately interesting that the high-schooler's romance with secretary Betty Brant never gets started in the cartoon as it did in the comic. Stan Lee somewhat glossed over the fact that in order to work in an office Betty would have been a legal adult as against Parker the high-school student. Yet even though Aunt May herself puts the kibosh on the non-starter relationship, I felt as if it was done for character conflict, not just to avoid a danger zone.

STAR ODYSSEY (1979)

 

 

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

For some reason, I happened to look at a 2012 review I did for two Italian SF-schlock-fests, and I thought that I did a poor job explaining why the second film, STAR ODYSSEY, was crappy. So I re-watched the film on streaming. I wasn't expecting to find anything meritorious in ODYSSEY-- the last-released of four such schlock-fests directed by Antonio Brescia. But I thought that if I ever get round to citing it for THE GRAND SUPERHERO OPERA, I should have something more substantial to say about it.

Here's what I originally wrote, along with an addendum written a little while later:

The most one can say of COSMOS: WAR OF THE PLANETS is that it was probably conceived prior to the success of STAR WARS, so there's few Lucas-isms here.  In contrast, the insanely bad STAR ODYSSEY has all the requisite borrowings-- cute robots, laser-looking swords, and a daring Harrison Ford-like hero.  But where COSMOS at least moves along well, ODYSSEY bogs down from the first and never picks up. 

Avoid except for "so bad it's good" parties.

ADDENDA: I should be a little more specific about the way in which STAR ODYSSEY "bogs down."  I don't mean that it's dull in the sense that nothing happens, but that it's dull because stuff is happening all the time, but none of it adds up to anything.  One hears about some film-shoots where the writers are literally making up the script as they go along.  This tendency may be aggravated in many special-effects films-- even those with little money behind them-- because their makers are always trying to whip up visual scenes that may "grab" the audience.  Brescia and his screenwriters have clearly seen STAR WARS, but they don't seem to have apprehended that the strength of its narrative drive.  ODYSSEY feels more like a knockabout comedy, in which one goofy stunt happens after another.  Appropriately, the only characters who seemed consistent as characters-- even though they were still not very interesting-- were two comic robots.  In a very *tiny* show of originality, Brescia's robots aren't *exact* clones of R2D2 and C3PO.  Instead they're a robot husband and wife who constantly carp at one another throughout the movie.  Again, they weren't good-- but I can remember them a little better than the copies of Han Solo, Princess Leia and Darth Vader.

So, upon watching ODYSSEY again, what more is there to say?

The main plot consists of an unprovoked attack on future-Earth by unidentified invaders (more described than shown). Later the commander of the enemy forces is Lord Kes, who possesses vague mental powers and who looks like someone pressed a waffle-iron to his face. (I thought of this before reading the same description on an MST3K site.) 

Somehow Doctor Maury (Ennio Balbo), the resident genius on Earth (who also has vague psychic powers), determines that the enemy ships are made of the metal "indirium," and that therefore Earth can only prevail if they concoct "anti-indirium." To that end, Maury and his niece Irene assemble a team of rag-tag reprobates to run around on missions that, in theory, have something to do with mounting a defense for Earth. As noted above, this is just an excuse for a lot of knockabout fights, one of which involves some of Maury's agents breaking some others out of space prison. 

The strange thing about this imitation STAR WARS is how little attention Brescia devotes to the young heroes. The biggest name in the cast is Gianni "Sartana" Garko, playing a Han Solo clone with the halfway-amusing name of Dirk Latimer, but he has no real memorable moments even though he can do mental Jedi mind-tricks. The females are a little more liberated than in many Italian space-operas-- a blond chick deals out a karate chop and Irene wields what's supposed to be a cheapjack energy-sword. But all of the heroes are designed to do nothing more than run around having pointless fights with Kes's very small army of blond-haired golden robots. ODYSSEY gives most of its character-moments to acerbic Doctor Maury, who *might* be a minor shout-out to the grey eminence of acerbic Doctor Benson in 1961's BATTLE OF THE WORLDS. 

And that's all I found in my second viewing of STAR ODYSSEY. As before I affirm that the two comical robots are the best thing in the movie-- and you know that you're on Bizarro-Earth when the best thing about an Italian space-opera is its comedy relief.

 

 

ASTERIX AT THE OLYMPIC GAMES (2008)

 

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

I chose the above still to illustrate my review because, even though Asterix and Obelix are indisputably the stars of the show, the centermost performer, one Benoit Poelvoorde, is a big part of why OLYMPIC is the funniest Asterix story I've encountered so far, in any medium.

This is the third of four live-action adaptations of the famed French comics-franchise, and the only one I've screened thus far. International star Gerard Depardieu has played the role of pot-bellied Obelix in all four, but in Film Number Three one Clovis Cornillac replaced the Asterix-actor from the first two movies. Cornillac and Depardieu evince good chemistry together, and all of the support-players are strong in their respective roles, particularly the renowned Alain Delon in his sole outing as the patrician ruler of Rome, Julius Caesar. But the Belgian comedian Poelvoorde sells the film as Caesar's adoptive son Brutus. Reportedly the character from the Asterix comic (whom I have not previously seen in any incarnation) is said to have been remodeled so that Poelvoorde could make him not just as relentlessly treacherous as the historical Brutus, but a conceited moron as well.

I also have not read the original Asterix comic ASTERIX AT THE OLYMPIC GAMES, but Wiki establishes that not only is Brutus not present in that story, there's also no love-story subplot. In the comic, Asterix and Obelix simply get involved in the Greek games simply as another gambit to embarrass the Romans. In GAMES the film, a Gaul named Lovesix competes with Brutus for the hand of Greek princess Irina, and it's decided that she will marry whoever wins the current Olympic contest. The romantic subplot adds extra dimension to what I view as the rather standardized, and somewhat boring, plot of most Asterix tales.

To be sure, most of the jokes revolving around the competition between the Gauls and Brutus (and his various stooges) are probably drawn from the album, particularly those concerning the Gauls' illegal use of strength-potion. Production values are high, matching the actors' stellar performances with excellent costuming and stuntwork, particularly in the concluding chariot-race between Lovesix and Brutus. Unlike many Asterix villains, Brutus is a consummate schemer, and when he's not coming up with ways to cheat in the games, he's setting deadly traps to kill off Daddy Julius, so that he Brutus can take over the Empire. 

GAMES isn't just the best Asterix story I've ever seen, as I said, in any medium. I'd also put this film on my list of best comedy feature-films of all time, along with the best of Preston Sturges and Mel Brooks and the one really good Abbott and Costello flick.

BRAM STOKER'S DRACULA (1992)

 

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

I'm sure others have said this before me, but this film's proper title ought to be FRANCIS COPPOLA'S DRACULA, given how often the director and writer James V. Hart diverge from the famous book. If there's one thing Coppola gets right, though, it's that he infuses this remake of the familiar story a great deal of high-octane action and sensuality. Even though some scenes go off the rails, Coppola's grand-opera version is still truer to the essence of Bram Stoker's blood-and-thunder opus than the many movies whose principal inspiration was the DRACULA stage-play.

Scripter Hart gives Dracula (Gary Oldman) a god-scorning "origin" with only tangential relevance to the vampire-lord's background in the novel. As Vlad the Impaler (whose impalings of enemies are visually compared to vampiric stakings), the 15th-century Romanian count distinguishes himself by defeating an Ottoman invasion of his land. But his beloved bride Elisabeta (Winona Ryder) believes him slain in battle, so she takes her own life. Pious Christian priests inform the grieving count that suicides cannot receive burial, so Vlad drives his sword into a Christian icon to signal his apostacy. The icon, possibly due to Coppola being Catholic, sheds blood, and Vlad blasphemes by drinking it, thus becoming a vampire who rules Transylvania with a heavy hand for the next four hundred years.

In the late 19th century, English solicitor Harker (Keanu Reeves) comes to Castle Dracula to arrange the Count's purchase of Carfax Abbey in England. (He is, incidentally, following up on a botched voyage by another firm-agent, Renfield, which seems to be an example of Hart wanting to reference the well known rewriting of Renfield for the 1931 DRACULA.) Despite the use of some impressive effect during Harker's arrival, reproducing the novel's use of a "St. Elmo's fire" phenomenon, the opening scenes of Harker meeting a powdered, periwigged version of Count Dracula almost sink the film. I don't know what Copppola and company were referencing with this odd imagery, but it seems counter-intuitive. After all, one of the major rewritings of Stoker in this DRACULA is that Oldman's Count is going to be a romantic seducer of Harker's fiancess Mina (also Winona Ryder), so why put your *homme fatale* in powder and wig?

Still, Stoker's material holds up, and Coppola gets good mileage out of the vampire-brides scene and the Count's ability to crawl up a castle-wall like a lizard. The Count departs for England, leaving Harker to the tender mercies of the brides. This actually makes a jot more sense than the novel, where Harker seems largely unsupervised when he finally escapes the castle. Novel-Harker manages to avoid being orally violated by the brides, but he's turned into fang-bang material here-- which may be a way of foreshadowing the fate of his fiancee.

The novel's original Mina is fairly straitlaced, and her friend Lucy, while she memorably fantasizes about marrying three men, is also a "good girl." But before either of the Coppola versions encounter the Count in any form whatever, it's clear that these girls of Victorian England are horny young chicks. As per the standard trope, Dracula preys on the randier Lucy (Sadie Frost) first, though Coppola is probably the first to suggest that Drac takes Lucy in a quasi-werewolf form. Lucy sickens from loss of blood, upsetting Mina and Lucy's three prospective fiancees. leading one of them to summon the help of renowned medical doctor Van Helsing (a tongue-in-cheek Anthony Hopkins). 

But hey, wasn't Drac supposed to be obsessed with being reunited with Mina, whom he believes the reincarnation of his lost Elisabeta? Maybe he just needed a pick-me-up? Anyway, he finally approaches Mina in the London streets, and despite her demure protests she's clearly fascinated with the stranger who wears dark sunglasses and discourses on that new cinematic invention, the Kinetograph. In theory Mina is tempted to "walk on the wild side," though she's not being forced the way her beleaguered fiancee was. Drac's seduction is interrupted when Mina gets news that the injured Harker is being cared for in a Romanian convent, so she goes to him. 

Meanwhile, while Mina collects the dissipated Harker and brings him back to London, Van Helsing discloses the truth of Lucy's condition to her aggrieved boyfriends, and enlists their aid to return the vampirized vamp to her eternal rest. Harker joins the fearless vampire hunters in destroying Dracula's back-up coffins of holy Romanian soil. The Count retaliates by turning Mina into an undead. This backfires somewhat in that both Drac and Mina now share an empathic link, and they can to some extent spy on one another. This parallels events of the novel, in which Mina helps the hunters track the Count while fighting her own attraction to the vamp life, though not to any reincarnated destiny.

Beset on all sides, Dracula flees back to Transylvania. The hunters pursue, and Coppola pulls off a great cinematic version of the novel's equally exciting chase scene, as Drac's gypsies try to get his coffin-bound form back to his castle while the pursuers hope to slay the bloodsucker before the sun goes down. Hart preserves the bloody fight between the humans and their undead enemy, but in deference to his inserted reincarnation theme, this time Mina gets to strike the killing blow, which is also something of a mercy killing to the tormented aristocrat.

Stoker's Dracula was not a charming seducer, but the author's juxtaposition of sex and death throughout the vampire lord's depredations inevitably lent itself to a greater emphasis on romantic conquest. As I said, some scenes are a trifle overbaked, but on the whole I prefer Coppola's operatic approach to the simplification of vampire mythology, as one sees in various Hammer iterations of Dracula. (And don't even get me started on Matheson's I AM LEGEND...)

THE THREE "SIX MILLION DOLLAR MAN" PILOTS (1973)

 

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

Back in the day, when watching the TV-film THE SIX MILLION DOLLAR MAN, I remember mildly liking it, but I never would have predicted that it would spawn a pop-culture icon. 

The origin of America's cyborg with the sunny disposition doesn't start out as blissfully cheery as the episodes of the ongoing teleseries. I have not read the best-selling Martin Caidin source novel, but I would imagine the first pilot follows the book in depicting the plight of civilian astronaut Steve Austin. He's nationally known for being one of the men who walked on the moon, but he's something of a "bad boy," seen first keeping the army brass waiting for his arrival. As many people know from the oft repeated opening of the TV show, Austin is injured while testing an experimental craft, so that he loses an arm, an eye and both legs. His attending doctor Rudy Wells (Martin Balsam) has researched the concepts of bionics for just such an emergency, but it's an expensive operation. Enter Oliver Spencer (Darren McGavin), head of a covert American spy agency. On behalf of the government Spencer gives Wells the authority to rebuild Austin into a six million dollar cyborg-- all, notably, without any consent by the patient.

Austin isn't particularly pleased with the fait accompli, and I assume the script takes away his power to choose to simplify getting from point A to point B. Then, even though Austin didn't make a deal with the devils of the government, Spenser still plays Mephistopheles, coaxing Austin into becoming America's first cyborg agent. After a short period of initial resistance by Austin-- in which he has no visitors from his civilian life, only a hospital nurse who becomes his new girlfriend (Barbara Anderson)-- Austin finally consents. The broad implication is that once he's been given great power, Austin is too much a nature's nobleman not to use the power for good. It's a pretty simple mission-- that of liberating an Arab leader from a desert prison-- given that most of the movie's running time has been used for the origin. The first pilot ends with the implication that Austin will have other adventures, with his nurse-girlfriend at his side.

Not surprisingly, by the second pilot film, the nurse is gone, since she would have cramped Austin's style as he was re-molded into something of a low-rent James Bond. Not only does the hero-- now an Air Force colonel-- get to romance two sultry sirens, played by Britt Ekland and Michele Carey, he faces off against his first formidable opponent. Arms dealer Arlen Findletter (Eric Braeden), despite a risible name, shows great skill at stealing American ordnance for sale to hostile countries. Though the villain's good, the action's less than impressive here. The most interesting thing about the second pilot, winsomely entitled "Wine, Women and War," is that Oliver Spencer is gone, replaced by the more avuncular figure of Oscar Goldman (Richard Anderson). Austin is still semi-rebellious against the agency's authority but they don't give him really serious reason to rebel.

The third and last pilot film, "The Solid Gold Kidnapping," still uses the bouncy Bondian theme song from the second pilot. However, though the action scenes are somewhat better than in the last outing, "Gold" plays down Austin's romantic encounters. The hero's opponent this time is a criminal organization that specializes in kidnapping, and Austin gets on the organization's bad side when he liberates one of their prisoners. The villains themselves are very colorless-- the leader (Maurice Evans) doesn't even have a given name-- but there are numerous familiar actors here, including Leif Erickson, John Vernon, and Luciana Paluzzi.

This final pilot is also the first time Austin is teamed with an ally who follows him into the field: Erica Bergner (Elizabeth Ashley). The agency appeals to Bergner to help them find the cabal's location by accessing the memory of a dead kidnapper, and Bergner can only do this by injecting DNA from the dead man into her own brain. Thus there's some suspense as to whether Bergner is going to lose her mind in her attempt to access the dead man's memories.

There's one decent dramatic interlude in which Austin makes clear that he doesn't really like Bergner tinkering with the human body, since a part of him still resents being turned into an experiment. But this momentary conflict is quickly forgotten when Austin finds the cabal's hideout and liberates yet another of their victims. The ending is anti-climactic, though, since it calls upon Austin to attack the elderly Evans' character before making the escape.

On the whole, I think this concept succeeded not because of the quality of the pilots, but through appealing to the American audience's desire to believe that "their boys" were doing the right thing when they went to other countries on missions of espionage. That's why the Faustian aspect of the setup falls away, and the American government becomes "God" more than "Devil," resurrecting a fallen hero so that he can go on to greater glories.

THE STRANGER (1995)

 

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

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

I have no false illusions about THE STRANGER. It's Clint Eastwood's HIGH PLAINS DRIFTER filtered through the marketing demands typical of direct-to-video martial arts thrillers. but with a female action star played by a renowned lady kickboxer. DRIFTER brings its enigmatic hero to a corrupt small town to guilt them for letting their sheriff be killed by outlaws, and to seek revenge on the bandits, since the visitor himself seems to be the ghost of the dead sheriff. STRANGER is much less ambiguous about the supernatural nature of its heroine, and the story champions the individual's possibility for heroism despite the scuzziness of the outlaws and their townie allies.

Yet, despite many derivative elements, some of which are logically dubious, STRANGER is one of those interesting movies in which journeymen talents put together something better than average. I haven't seen everything from the oeuvres of director Fritz Kiersch, writer Gregory Poirer, and composer Kevin Kiner, but nothing I have seen (or heard, in Kiner's case) grabs me as THE STRANGER does.

So prior to the film's action, a motorcycle gang run by a martial artist toughie named Angel (Andrew Divoff) has decided to make a small western town the base for illegal operations. Bridget Mercer, wife of local sheriff Gordon (Eric Pierpoint), makes an attempt to alert the FBI to the gang's activities, and for that Bridget is raped, murdered, and buried in the town cemetery. The aggrieved Gordon becomes a drunkard, allowing the worst elements of the town to rule the roost.

Then a blonde motorcyclist (Kathy Long) comes to town, wearing an outfit far from the wardrobe of Clint Eastwood or martial-arts heroes in general: tight leather trousers and a bustier. Initially, at least, this wild outfit seems designed to draw some of the lesser members of the gang into assaulting her, at which point she kills them dead. Gordon doesn't precisely recognize the mystery woman as a reborn version of his dead wife, but he won't interfere with her vengeance-quest, and she either kills or incapacitates all comers. Maybe-Bridget works her way up the food chain until Angel himself comes to town, along with hench-cyclists played by such familiar faces as Danny Trejo and Faith Minton. There's a cool, well-scored beatdown at the end, concluding with the Stranger bashing her maybe-rapist's skull to pieces against the gravestone of Bridget Mercer.

Not all the action set-pieces are as good as the climax, but a lot of them offer solid tough-girl action, and if Kathy Long isn't the most expressive actress, she excels a lot of her competition in that department, as well as being to sell all the kicks and punches. The ghost-cyclist also gives new life to both Gordon and a young girl who witnessed the murder, even though by that time the rest of the town has fled for the hills.

In addition to the cathartic climax, STRANGER boasts two scenes of greater symbolic import than one finds in the average chopsocky. Toward the beginning, after some set-up scenes, the viewer sees the Stranger park her motorcycle at a gas-station. A truck passes in the foreground, and as the viewer sees the black-clad female in the background, she "fades" from sight intermittently, as if the truck's passage revealed her true insubstantial nature.

Another scene occurs late in the film, after the avenger has taken out several bad bikers, Angel's in a camp outside town, preparing to ride in. While all of Angel's men are asleep and he's doing martial arts "kata" positions, Maybe-Bridget appears on a nearby hill and begins "mirroring" all of Angel's moves. For me this implies, without putting it into clumsy words, that the vengeance-seeking spirit of the murdered woman needed something as a model for her new form.  Thus she imitated her murderer in terms of conveyance, skills and flamboyant attire, the better to hoist him on his own petard. When this stranger rides off into the West, she's explicitly going to a well deserved rest from earthly travails-- though only after taking a lot of evil spirits with her. 

HONOR ROLL #168

 Strange things happen when KATHY LONG comes to town.

It took six million dollars and three TV-movies to make LEE MAJORS a superhero icon.

Don't give Bram Stoker credit-- or even blame-- for GARY OLDMAN's Dracula.

Et tu, BENOIT POELVOORDE?

The odyssey is definitely oddball with heroes like YANTI SOMER along for the ride.

What was spectacular about this Spider-series was that it actually made me like VENOM.

IRON MAN (1994-96)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*

MYTHICITY: *poor*

FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*

CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological, cosmological*

I barely saw the 1990s IRON MAN cartoon in its original broadcast, but a recent DVD compilation of its two seasons spurred me to check it out in detail.  It proved a tough slog.  In another review I said that AVENGERS: EARTH'S MIGHTIEST HEROES did an excellent job of translating the appeal of Marvel comic books into animated TV adventures.  IRON MAN's first season is so bad that it's very nearly the polar opposite of AEMH, though the balance of the second season brings the whole's rating to merely mediocre.

I have no idea who thought it was a good idea to take a cartoon titled "IRON MAN" and have the main hero share the stage with a group of Marvel heroes who enjoyed their own not-especially-successful comics-series around the same time, FORCE WORKS. I don't know why anyone would've thought that a cartoon about Iron Man had to mirror the events of the character in the comic books (Iron Man had formed the Force Works team around that time).  Did someone think that they could spin FW off into its own TV series?  The world may never know.

The presence of the FW heroes (Hawkeye, Scarlet Witch, War Machine, Spider Woman and a portentous deadhead named Century) isn't the only thing nearly crowding Iron Man out of his own cartoon.  The main villain is Iron Man's old foe the Mandarin, who maintains a small division of super-villains torn from the pages of Marvel comics.  The villains, like the heroes, are tedious and lacking any of the character touches that helped make Marvel the leader in its field. A particular awful adaptation is the super-villain Modok, a world-beater in the comics, but turned into Mandarin's dim stooge for the sake of an easy comic relief.

The stories of the first season are almost uniformly flat and unexciting, to say nothing of their being crudely animated.  Most stories deal with Mandarin and his thugs making some sort of attack on Stark Industries, only to be beaten back by the Armored Avenger and his costumed coterie.  Most of the character's origins and backgrounds are ignored, and of the few characters who do get an origin, the Mandarin gets his before Iron Man does!  (More on the sociological undertones of the Mandarin's origin later.)  Once or twice the series makes some facile comment on Tony Stark's character flaws, but it's like a bad imitation of even the most simplistic Marvel melodramatics.

The second and last season had nowhere to go but up, and evidently a new animation team decided to eject most of the Force Works characters from the series, though two of them, War Machine and Spider Woman, remained present in their civilian identies and only rarely donned superheroic garb.  The stories, though no better than average, observed basic story-construction principles and made some effort to explore Tony Stark's nature as a "lone wolf" hero.  The Mandarin's flock of supervillains were also ditched, and the villain himself was sidelined until the season's climax.  In their place, the series incorporated several of Iron Man's rogues' gallery (Firebrand, Sunturion), and even adapts a few comics-stories tolerably well (the "Armor Wars" continuity).  One could probably watch the episode "Hulk Buster" and get a good sample of the series at its average best.

To return to the matter of the Mandarin's re-imagined origin: the comic-book villain was a standard "Chinese peril" villain-- that is, not made a villain because he was of the "yellow race," but because, being Chinese, he  represented a rival to the growing American technocracy of the period.  In the comics, the Mandarin was a half-Chinese aristocrat who acquired ten super-powerful rings from the alien ship of a dragonlike alien.  In the teleseries, the Mandarin gains his rings from a race of still-living dragon-aliens, one of whom is given what may be Marvel Comics' all-time-cheesiest monster-name: that of "Fin Fang Foom."  This was not particularly resonant, but it wasn't objectionable.  However, the series' scripters were apparently leery that they might be accused of racism if they dared adapt a villain with any link to a "Yellow Peril" past.  Therefore, the new Mandarin is a European who gains the power and general look of an Asian overlord from an ancient Chinese enchantment.  This struck me as a more insidious form of racism: an attempt by the scripters to keep their hands clean by refusing to use an Asian character as a villain for fear of adverse reaction.

Ironically, by doing this the cartoon also managed to accidentally promote another racist stereotype: the Mandarin-origin shows a goodguy-Chinese preparing to sacrifice his life to save two white people from death. The character-- given the awful name of "Wellington Yinsen"-- survives to become a captive of the Mandarin at the same time Tony Stark is abducted by the villain. As a similar "Yinsen" character did in the comics, this one helps Stark make his fabulous armor and thereby escape the villain's clutches-- after which Yinsen dies and the Mandarin obsesses about regaining the armor for his own use.  Happily, the 2008 live-action film showed more intelligence in adapting the Vietnam-era origin of the comics, resulting in a work that was much more affecting.    

SERAPH OF THE END (2014)

 

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


I've been finding that a lot of the fantasy/SF adventure-manga of the 2010s-- with occasional exceptions like the BLACK CLOVER series-- shows a tendency to emphasize elaborate designs over strong characterization and backstory.  SERAPH OF THE END, a two-season anime show (with one OAV I have not seen), is one of these lesser entries, though at least it's not as thoroughly incoherent as DATE A LIVE.

Possibly the original SERAPH manga expounds better on the narrative's post-apoc cosmology than the anime. In any case, I suppose the showrunners didn't think anyone cared about fine details, given that the story starts out by killing off ninety percent of the human race due to a man-made virus. However, the storytelling is so slack that initially I assumed that the story's "villains," a race of effete aristocratic vampires with jokey in-names like "Tepes" and "Bathory," were created by some mutation brought on by the virus. Later episodes indicate that the vampires may have always existed in the shadow of humankind, and that the decimation allows them the chance to emerge and make human beings into their "livestock."

The principal character, Yuichiro Hyakuya, is first seen as a middle-school youth being raised in a vampire-run orphanage, wherein all of the orphans have the same surname, actually derived from that of the orphanage. Yuichiro-- "Yu" for short-- is your typical tough-talking brat, but he's strongly bonded to his fellow orphans despite his pretense to lack of fellow-feeling. However, when the vampires decide to "play with their food," Yu is the only boy who escapes the slaughter. Though there are five other kids in Yu's "family," only one, his buddy Mikaela, gets much attention-- reason being that he's the only one the narrative keeps in a semblance of vampiric life.

Providentially Yu is taken in by the Japanese Imperial Demon Army, which is attempting to break the stranglehold of the vampires' reign. Having lost his family, Yu wants to be a lone wolf striking out at his bloodsucking foes, but the teen's mentor, Guren Ichinose, insists that first Yu must learn to cooperate with a squad of experienced soldiers. The psychological myth here is pretty simple: despite his trauma from losing one family, Yu can only prosper by binding himself to another family, this time made of peers with the power to defend themselves. Further, it's later disclosed that at some point in the past, army doctors experimented on Yu to give him special powers. The experimentation has the unfortunate effect of sometimes changing Yu into a destructive berserker, and again, he has to learn discipline to protect his squad-- to say nothing of experiencing new trauma when his former friend Mikaela, who's continued to dwell with the vampires but who does not bond with their villainous ilk, shows up on Yu's radar once more.

The matter of "special powers" is the weakest link in the SERAPH cosmology. It's loosely implied that the only reason that the Demon Army can fight the vampires at all is because the soldiers have been trained to use big, bad-ass weapons-- swords, scythes, guns, bows-- which channel the power of real, supernatural demons. How humans came to channel demons through weapons is never explained, nor is their any explanaton when the viewer starts seeing vampires use the same sort of fantastic weapons. In fact, it was only through a DVD commentary that I learned that the vampires "feed" their weapons with their own blood, rather than making soul-deals with the resident weapon-demons. This would explain why so much of the serial's melodrama revolves around the human soldiers endeavoring to empower themselves against their enemies, but without turning themselves into demon-possessed vehicles, who would implicitly be just as hard on humanity as the vampires.

Despite all the melodrama, Yu and his support-cast are pretty simplistic types. There's a Loyal Friend to Yu, who duplicates some of the appeal of Mikaela in the hero's new family; there's a couple of girls interested in the ferocious loner; there's the mentor who believes in constantly busting his student's balls to make him succeed. Only one character, a guy named Shiho, doesn't feel too shopworn, in that he's the hero's rival, always quarreling with him about one thing or the other, though inevitably he and Yu become just as strongly bonded as anyone else in the squad.  For that matter, the long-deferred meeting between Yu and Mikaeala doesn't really pull any dramatic heartstrings that I haven't felt in a hundred similar SF-melodramas.

Finally, the closing episodes toss in a handful of poorly conceived Judeo-Christian myth-references. Because of the special experiments performed on Yu, he is the titular "Seraph of the End," which just means that he can call upon a host of new powers. Oddly, he also becomes known as "the King of Salt" because he can turn people into salt or make weapons out of salt, which seems like a rather involved reference to the Old Testament fate of Lot's Wife.

Visually, SERAPH's action and costume design is worth watching. As a story, it's got no new tricks in its bag.

THE INVISIBLE DOCTOR MABUSE (1962)

 

 

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

INVISIBLE DOCTOR MABUSE is the second of the non-Lang German series about the evil mastermind, and the last directed by Harald Reinl. I commented that Reinl's previous entry had a strong blend of real-world verisimilitude and pulp thrills, but INVISIBLE shows the series moving toward pure pulp. That's not necessarily a bad thing, depending on the creative talents involved, but the first couple of sixties Mabuses felt more grounded than the later entries I've seen. But compared to most of the dilatory Eurospy flicks ground out once the Bond craze took fire, any of the Mabuse films seem superior fare.

This time stalwart FBI agent Joe Como (Lex Barker) plays a largely lone hand, investigating a mysterious murder. His inquiries lead him to a theatrical revue, where a young woman named Liane (Karin Dor) seems to be haunted by some unseen specter. But it's not Mabuse himself, even though the idea of the sinister plotter spying on people via invisibility is a natural extension of, say, his use of sophisticated cameras in THOUSAND EYES OF DOCTOR MABUSE. In point of fact, Mabuse himself is never invisible, though he plans to create an army of imperceptible minions with which to rule the world.

No, the unseen specter haunting Liane is none other than her former boyfriend, the inventor of the invisibility device, Professor Erasmus (Rudolf Fernau). Liane thinks Erasmus dead from a car crash, but he survived, albeit with disfiguring injuries, and ever since he's used his mechanism to remain close to his beloved. It's implied that Erasmus doesn't want Liane to see him in his disfigured state, though it's possible that his haunting presence alerts Mabuse's thugs and causes them to swarm toward the theater. Fortunately, Como is there to protect the woman, leading to a few good fights and an assassin dressed up as a sinister clown. Mabuse loses his chance at the device, of course. Wolfgang Preiss appears in a disguised identity but he doesn't have as much to do in this film. When he's in his sanctuary his "real face" remains in shadow, so I guess in one sense he is "invisible."

The Bond movie series loosely parallels the phenomenalities of the German Mabuse series. Whereas the Bond books are almost entirely uncanny or naturalistic (with the marginal exception of DOCTOR NO), the Bond movies-- beginning, like INVISIBLE, in 1962-- quickly souped up Ian Fleming's plots with sci-fi gimmickery. The Mabuse films did the same thing faster and with more extravagance. In fact, INVISIBLE's explanation for the device's principle is that it utilizes "cosmic dust" to block light-waves. This inventive explanation, far from the corpus of H.G. Wells, is my main reason for giving INVISIBLE a "fair" mythicity. It's fun to see the invocation of some space-age gobbledygook, especially since Fritz Lang, Mabuse's creator, made his own "race for space" movie in 1929, the supremely dull WOMAN IN THE MOON. 

TEMPTRESS OF A THOUSAND FACES (1969)

 

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological*

I've assigned this lightweight super-crook outing the "psychological" function because its writer seems to be borrowing from the playbook of the 1960s FANTOMAS film series by having the same actor play both the devious criminal and the crusading hero. 

As the film begins, we witness a major jewel theft by a respected Hong Kong citizen, who is actually the disguised super-thief The Temptress of a Thousand Faces. Apparently the Temptress has been bamboozling the local cops for a long time, but female officer Ji Ying (Tina Chin-Fei) publicly challenges the Temptress to a confrontation. (If the screenwriter saw the first entry in the French FANTOMAS series, this opening gambit might well be derived from a similar one, in which the film's reporter-hero falsifies an encounter with Fantomas and gets dragged to the villain's lair.)

Quick as a bunny, the Temptress's minions capture Ji Ying and take her to their underground hideout, in which bare cave walls alternate with various technical devices. Ji Ying meets the Temptress, albeit with a veil over the latter's face, and defies the villain. The Temptress sics her henchmen and henchwomen on Ji Ying, who gives a good account of herself before being beaten. However, for some reason the Temptress doesn't just kill the pesky cop, but decides she's going to humiliate Ji Ying in a variety of ways-- including subjecting the lady officer to what looks like electroshock. (Unlike some of the Fantomas entries, the Temptress's arsenal remains fairly low-tech and therefore uncanny in phenomenality.)

The Temptress then pulls off a major crime disguised as Ji Ying, and for some reason Ji's fellow cops don't believe in her innocence despite the well documented incidents of the super-crook's other impostures. But of course if the HK police believed Ji, she wouldn't get the pleasure of playing a "lone hand" in her quest to bring the Temptress and her (mostly female) gang to justice. I say "lone" advisedly, for Ji does have a cop-boyfriend, but he only renders martial aid once or twice. In fact, at one amusing point the Temptress, still dressed as Ji, seduces and sleeps with the guy, moments before the real thing bursts in and catches the couple in flagrante, leading to a rousing battle of the Tinas.

Given that this isn't a straight kung-fu film, the fight-choreography is stellar, and Tina Chin-Fei makes an admirable heroine and villainess. In fact, this is one of those films where it's difficult to determine which of the two is the star, though I lean toward the titular character. However, unlike Fantomas the Temptress meets a bad end and never returned for any sequels known to me.

KONG ISLAND (1968)

 

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

The moldy jungle-adventure KONG ISLAND—which sports neither any islands nor any entities named Kong—is moderately lively. though Roberto Mauri’s direction is sloppy in the extreme. Burt Dawson (Brad Harris, famed for peplum and Eurospy flicks) participates in a payroll robbery, but he’s betrayed by his partner Turk and left for dead. The vengeful Burt—who becomes the film’s de facto hero despite his unsavory past—tracks his enemy to Kenya, where Burt begins stumbling across other old colleagues. One is middle-aged Theodor, who has a grown son and daughter, the latter being at once sexy and innocent. Despite his daughter’s evident affection for hunky Burt, Theodor finances an expedition into the Kenyan jungle. Ostensibly the seekers—who include not only Burt, but Theodor’s two kids as well—is supposed to look for a creature whom the natives dub “the Sacred Monkey,” but Burt’s real purpose is to find Turk.

Unfortunately, Turk is now working for a mad scientist named Muller—ALSO an old colleague of Burt’s—and Muller’s current project is to insert computer discs into the heads of gorillas to create obedient ape-servants. Theodor’s son is killed and the sexy daughter is kidnapped, but Burt escapes. While roaming the jungle, he stumbles across a mute jungle girl who’s apparently the Sacred Monkey herself. He calls her Eve and persuades her to lead him to Muller’s compound, where the scientist has operated on one of Eve’s ape-buddies. In the big low-budget climax, Theodor shows up to reveal that he’s Muller’s secret backer, Eve catfights a little with a henchwoman, and Burt somehow destroys Muller’s installation. It’s all pretty stupid, but might have been fairly diverting with better photography. Significant only as one of a handful of Euro-jungle films of the period.

THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING (2001)

 

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

I won't waste time effusing about the many virtues of Peter Jackson's LORD OF THE RINGS film trilogy. Once all three parts had been unveiled to the public, Jackson's opus became something of an "instant classic," in contradistinction to the vastly inferior HOBBIT trilogy, which I've reviewed here but about which I have little more to say. Since I have now devoted blogposts to each book in Tolkien's trilogy, though, I will go over some of the ways in which each film departs from or plays into its source novel, starting inevitably with FELLOWSHIP. (I plan to review only the extended editions.)

Many of the changes are entirely logical when translating a prose work into a medium that is entirely time-dependent. Thus it's no surprise that Frodo, as played by Elijah Wood, does not take months and months to depart the Shire on his mission to take the One Ring to Rivendell, nor does the Fellowship remain at Rivendell for yet more months, as if waiting to make sure that the heroes depart on their quest in the dead of winter. Movie-Frodo does not sing funny songs at the Prancing Pony and then horrify the spectators with his invisibility act. Yet even though that scene played into what Tolkien was saying about the insidious nature of the Ring's power, the loss of the scene does not undercut the moral message common to both novel and film.

In some cases, Jackson and his collaborators made some interesting substitutions. In the book, Gandalf's confrontation with Saruman is meant to emphasize the soulless "scientism" of the corrupted wizard, but Jackson's scene between respective actors Ian McKellen and Christopher Lee, only emphasizes Saruman's determination to seek temporal power. However, Tolkien only alludes to the foul methods Saruman uses to bring his mutant Uruk-Hai into being, while Jackson is perfectly free to "get his Frankenstein on," so to speak. (As a side-note, I believe this might be the only time that Lee, who began his career as a horror-star playing a version of Shelley's Monster, essays a role like that of the Monster's creator.) Arguably these scenes add more conviction to the possibility that Saruman might somehow eclipse the power of Sauron, whereas in the book Saruman usually comes off as "Sauron Lite."

Though there are probably differences in details, Jackson entirely fulfills the sense of how the fractious clans of Middle-Earth have allowed the power of Mordor to grow. If anything, the playful rivalry of Legolas and Gimli is better than in the book, as are a number of scenes that the actors make their own, particularly McKellen "I am not trying to rob you" moment, which remains merely functional in the prose work. Tolkien did work moments of comic business in for Frodo's Hobbit friends Sam, Merry and Pippin, as well as for Gimli. I think both the movie-script and the actors build impressively on the humor. This allows the serious players of the Fellowship, particularly Frodo, to seem more fraught by impending doom. Sean Bean's Boromir, who does not survive this installment of the story, illustrates the poisonous allure of the Ring nearly as well as does the nearly absent Gollum, who gets his chance to shine in the next two sections.

In my book review I noted that two regal feminine figures bookended the novel. One, the near ageless Galadriel, is well essayed by Cate Blanchett, who remains letter perfect to the role. Excised from the film are both Tom Bombadil and Goldberry, whose presence would have simply slowed the film. But Jackson and company manage to build up the relatively simple book-character of Arwen, so that her incarnation by Liv Tyler becomes FELLOWSHIP's other major female figure. In contrast to the many politically correct films that have shoehorned female characters into adaptations to ill effect, Arwen's inclusion seems natural and unforced, and this increases the resonance of her relationship with Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen), whereas the book-version of the romance is rather thin.

Lastly, whereas Tolkien mastered many talents as a writer, he was only middling in terms of choreographing battle-scenes. Jackson's crew provided some excellent fights in FELLOWSHIP, but the best was yet to come.

HONOR ROLL #167

 Never ask ELIJAH WOOD to just give you a ring.

No Kong and no island, but the film does have sexy ESMERELDA BARROS.

Contrary to the movie's title, TINA CHIN-FEI doesn't display more than two or three faces.

KARIN DOR just can't see the villain of the piece.

In a future dominated by vampires, YUICHIRO HYAKUYA stakes out his own territory. (Except I don't actually remember if he uses stakes or not.)

Which is worse: IRON MAN's premiere foe The Mandarin getting a green makeover in the hero's first cartoon, or being turned into an old white guy in IRON MAN 3?

TEEN TITANS: THE JUDAS CONTRACT (2017)

 

 

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

Though I had assorted criticisms of the original JUDAS CONTRACT  from the Wolfman-Perez NEW TEEN TITANS run, I considered it a solid work of melodramatic action-adventure. Not so this DTV adaptation, the second adaptation of the Titans made within DC's Original Animation line (though this JUDAS is at least better than the Titans' previous outing, the underwhelming JUSTICE LEAGUE VS. TEEN TITANS).

Adaptations can rarely avoid changing elements of the source material, and one may argue that total fidelity is not even desirable. That said, there should be a good reason for every change made. An example of an acceptable change can be viewed in JUDAS's opening scene. The opener has nothing to do with the main story, just giving the viewer a quick introduction to how the Earth-based Titans first made the acquaintance of the alien member-to-be Starfire. Of the five Earth-heroes seen in this short sequence, four are Silver Age members-- Speedy, Beast Boy, Kid Flash, and "Dick Grayson Robin." The fifth member is Bumblebee, a Black superheroine who appeared only briefly in the Titans franchise during the 1970s before the successful reworking of the concept into the Wolfman-Perez iteration. Given that Bumblebee is only there for a few minutes, no longer than Kid Flash and Speedy, I speculate that she's just a placeholder for Wonder Girl, who over the years was so often revised that the writer may've wanted to avoid that briar patch of associations. 

Some members for the main narrative are changed as well. Since the original comics-story provided the transition in which Dick Grayson took on the mantle of Nightwing, he appears largely unaltered. Like Wonder Girl, Cyborg is missing, but Raven shows up with barely any intro, though admittedly she got a lot of exposition in the previous DC Titans-cartoon. That flick also brought in the "Damian Wayne Robin," so it's understandable that he too is inserted into the JUDAS narrative. Damian-Robin is tolerable, but sadly, LEAGUE-TITANS also placed "the Jamie Reyes Blue Beetle" on the team as well, and his separate arc (he wears alien armor that sometimes gives him problems) drags every time he's on screen. (I've read a small sampling of the comic-book original and find him underwhelming in that medium too.) Beast Boy is present but he seems to have undergone a humor lobotomy, and of course the "judas" of the story, Terra, has a substantial presence. More about the changes to her later.

In the original comic, Deathstroke has a grudge against the Titans because he thinks they caused his son's death, and that's why he convinces Terra to join the super-group in order to betray the heroes. Deathstroke's grudge was always a weak motivation, so in its place the writer inserts an equally weak one. This time the villain resents his having been ejected from the criminal organization founded by Damian's father, so he has a hate for Damian. 

In the comic, once Terra betrays the Titans to Deathstroke, he sells the captured heroes to the HIVE organization, whose leader plans to drain off the heroes' powers, killing them and using those powers for some vague purpose. As it happens, that trope wasn't too far from a scheme by another Titan-foe, Brother Blood, who'd appeared in issues just prior to JUDAS CONTRACT, so the movie's writer excises the HIVE and puts Blood in their place, but to no great effect. It does make the JUDAS-movie a different sort of "villain-crossover," though. 

Original-JUDAS also introduced new member Jericho, a virtuous son of Deathstroke, but here he's demoted to some minor action, almost getting killed but surviving. Thus Nightwing alone is responsible for rescuing and freeing his teammates, though the resulting fracas may be one of the most desultory in the history of DC's animated features. (There sure were a lot of heavily shadowed scenes for a superhero cartoon.) Deathstroke and Terra have a falling out for a different reason, but Terra dies in more or less the same way.

And now we get to the Matter of Terra. I remarked in my comics-review that Marv Wolfman makes her a total "bad seed," who's evil just for the hell of it. The script for JUDAS doesn't follow this trope, choosing instead to suggest, albeit not very well, that Terra was traumatized by Bad Stuff that happened to her in her chaotic native country. 

Wolfman also made it clear that Terra had enjoyed sex of some sort with Deathstroke, which traumatized some readers and raconteurs so much that some authors attempted to retcon the event. I would not have been surprised if writer Ernie Altbacker had just not bothered to raise the question, and in some ways that might have been preferable to his actual strategy. This time out, Terra urges Deathstroke to sleep with her, and he refuses for vague reasons. One might accept that the senior villain might have had a moment of morality, or even that he just didn't want to piss where he ate, so to speak, and maybe mess up his master plan. But late in JUDAS, Deathstroke betrays Terra to Brother Blood, and tells her that it's too bad they DIDN'T sleep together. I think I prefer an outright leap into transgressive material over such pointless equivocations.

Though Wonder Girl doesn't actually enter the diegesis, a coda suggests that she, or someone who looks like her, may take Terra's place in future stories-- though as yet no further TITANS animations have appeared from the DC folks.

BATTLE QUEEN 2020 (2001)

 

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

Time sure flies after you've made bad movies. The makers of BATTLE QUEEN 2020 thought that a mere nineteen years would leave them enough room to have the Earth transformed by a marauding comet, so that their movie could show human society transformed into a world of the "haves" and the "have nots." Wait, don't we already have that? Oh, but the world of BATTLE QUEEN supplies all the "haves" with out-in-the-open prostitutes and no busybody law enforcement involved. 

The presence of institutionalized prostitution is the only sociological difference between BATTLE QUEEN and a million other futuristic tyrannies, and neither director Daniel D'or nor any of the three scriptwriters has the slightest idea as to how to deal with the oldest profession in sci-fi terms. It is, to no one's surprise, just a gimmick so that main character Gayle (Julie Strain) and a bunch of other hooker-characters can strut around nude or half-nude, while not performing unimaginative softcore sex scenes. 

The pace of BATTLE QUEEN is pretty much like your average softcore sex-film. Characters more or less drift from place to place, and every scene not involved with sex is desultory in terms of visuals and dialogue. Following a narration that lays out some basics of the new 2020, Gayle provides some narration as well, though nothing much about her personal history. Implicitly she's one of the underclass who were trained in prostitution to serve the corrupt "Elite," and she was so good that she can pretty much strut around anywhere she wants without much opposition. At some point she befriends revolutionary Spenser (martial arts-actor Jeff Wincott) and they try to figure out some way to overthrow the Elite, albeit with barely any sense of urgency. And as uninteresting as Gayle and Spenser are, the villainous dictators are even more pathetically colorless. 

An adventure-film need not have a stunningly original plot to grab an audience, but it does need to have action. By 2001 Wincott had ample experience serving up butt-kicking scenes, but BATTLE QUEEN is centered around Strain, who drifts around the majority of the scenes showing off her goods. She has one scene beating down two guardsmen that just barely qualifies this film as a combative adventure-- though it's not clear where a future-hooker got martial fighting-skills-- but a later scene almost cancels out what heroic presence she earns. When Gayle spars with Spenser, the intent is to portray her as a badass, when in fact it's obvious to any viewer that she's just fending off pre-choreographed blows and kicks. There's one other kung-fu hooker, whose non-speaking role is played by one Eva Dawn Nemeth, and she looks far better in her stunts than Strain does-- though of course Strain had by 2001 somehow become known as a major "B-movie queen." Personally I get little out of the Strain films, though at least, unlike some softcore sex symbols, she has no compunction against at least partial nudity, and so is giving at least some audiences what they want.

REAL MEN (1987)

 

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


REAL MEN was the only directorial effort of Dennis Feldman, who is best known for writing such formula action-films as THE GOLDEN CHILD and the 1999 VIRUS. It's one of those comedies that some viewers will swear to be outrageously funny, while it leaves others cold. My reaction was lukewarm at best.

Feldman's script makes no pretensions to making his scenario even mildly believable. An agent of the FBI has just made contact with an alien visitor, but said agent is killed by an assassin. Despite the agent's death, somehow he communicates to his superiors the essence of the alien's needs. In exchange for a very minor item-- a simple glass of water-- the alien is willing to give Earth one of two major gifts: either a "big gun" capable of blowing up a planet, or a "good package" that can help the government eradicate a major pollution menace. The good agents of the FBI want the "good package," but there's a rogue element in the agency that wants the gun, and so do various Russian agents.

Because the rogue element has left the good FBI drastically lacking in resources, the chief assigns one of his loyal agents, Nick Pirandello (James Belushi), to seek out a man who looks exactly like the murdered agent, so that the substitute can finesse the trade without incident. However, the lookalike is wimpy civilian Bob Wilson (John Ritter), so Pirandello must find a way to draft the unwilling citizen to serve the FBI's ends.

REAL MEN is little more than a basic buddy-comedy, in which Pirandello manipulates the confused Wilson into serving his purposes. The only interesting psychological motif in the story is that once Wilson does become committed to the mission, he takes on a macho attitude-- just as Pirandello, not coincidentally, begins to decline in his balls-to-the-wall masculinity. This comes about in part because the agent encounters a sadistic torturess-- apparently not one of the opposing agents-- who forces him to confess his vulnerability and weakness to her. However, like most of the jokes in the film, this one doesn't go anywhere. Feldman's script shoots for broad irony, not least with the basic setup of the aliens-who-just-want-a-glass-of-water. Yet the story fails as an irony, largely because it's too invested in the idea of giving wimpy Wilson a macho upgrade so that he can trounce bullies and such.

Neither the heroes nor the villains utilize any marvelous weapons against one another, though I've decided that the villains' desire to acquire a marvelous weapon lends them a marvelous phenomenality, even though the closest they personally get to the metaphenomenal is a lame joke where some of the bad agents dress up like clowns for no particular reason.

THE RETURN OF DOCTOR MABUSE (1961)

 

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

Fritz Lang's final film, THE THOUSAND EYES OF DOCTOR MABUSE, was the only one in the loose series that I judged to be in the combative mode. Though Lang had worked in the adventure-genres several times during his career, I find a number of his works a bit on the fusty side. This may be because Lang had a strong investment in naturalism. Sometimes naturalistic touches improve adventure-stories, giving them greater immediacy. Other times, they can inhibit or even incapacitate the genre-tropes.

THOUSAND EYES proved successful, so German producers ended up making five more movies about the reborn criminal mastermind. Harald Reinl, whose works I do not know, directed the first two, and without making a one-on-one comparison with EYES, I would say that Reinl finds as good a balance between fantasy and reality as Lang ever did.

Two of the major players from EYES return in essentially the same roles. The policeman viewpoint character (Gert Frobe) is named Lohmann this time instead of Kras, but Lohmann takes the same tough-minded approach to the Mabuse mystery, including the question as to whether some modern-day individual (Wolfgang Preiss) has taken up the mastermind's mantle. A new romantic pair, played by Lex Barker and Daliah Lavi, take the place of the pair from EYES, and Barker eventually edges out Frobe in the subsequent installment.

This time the master criminal ventures into science fiction territory, using a mind control drug to turn ordinary men into zombies, whose ultimate aim to destroy a nuclear power plant. For all the comic-bookish sound of this plot, though, Reinl and scripters Fodor and Behm handle Lohmann's pursuit more like a police procedural, so that the extraordinary events seem more disconcerting than they would in a formula comic book. Indeed, this juxtaposition of the real and the unreal bears a minor similarity to Gordon Douglas's 1954 big-bug film THEM! Though Preiss does not have as many scenes in his Mabuse identity as the character did in the original silent films, he projects a greater super-villain intensity here than he did in EYES, where he seemed a bit too much like a metaphor for evil.

IRON WARRIOR (1987)

 

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

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

IRON WARRIOR, according to online sources, was made by both a different director and production team than the people who made the first two ATOR films. WARRIOR has a lot of the same loopy imagery seen in director Alfonso Brescia's cheapjack space operas, like STAR ODYSSEY. Yet there's more coherence in this sword-and-sorcery opus, which may be due to Brescia's co-writer Steven Luotto. The Brescia-Luotto abandons even the loose continuity of the first two films and designs a completely new origin for heroic Ator (Miles O'Keeffe).

Like many films of magical fantasy, WARRIOR emphasizes a generational conflict that leads the hero or heroes into their operatic destiny. Ugly old witch Phoedra (Elisabeth Kaza) seeks out two young boys playing ball in a labyrinth (standing stones courtesy of Malta's tourist attractions), and she steals one of the boys. Shortly thereafter, Phoedra is called on the carpet by her fellow sorceresses, who employ the spinning-hoop effect from Richard Donner's SUPERMAN while they rail at her. According to the backstory related by chief good witch Deeva (Iris Peynado), the sorceresses seem to have been around for centuries, guiding the destiny of mankind with the aid of a "Golden Chest of the Ages" that isn't mentioned again for a long time. Phoedra, though, gained control of a mortal kingdom and ruled it tyrannically. Later the old harridan will say that her kingdom was stolen by the "father's father" of the current king, but Phoedra also blames Deeva for driving her from power. 

Why does Phoedra wait two generations to begin her dire plot of vengeance? Since all of the witchy "sisters" seem to have prophetic powers, maybe Phoedra knows that Deeva has future plans for Phoedra's former kingdom, plans that involve the two boys, Ator and Trogar. Deeva claims in the dubbed movie to have "created" both kids, which maybe makes her sort of a "good mother" as against Phoedra's child-stealing "bad mother," though I'm not sure either one is worth writing home about. Phoedra won't tell the other witches where she's hidden the boy Trogar (whose name sounds like a part-anagram of Ator), so they remove her power to kill and banish her, though Phoedra doesn't seem very restricted in her ability to cast spells and move from place to place.

Eighteen years pass, during which time Ator grows to manhood, while Phoedra molds his brother into a skull-headed warrior, The Iron Warrior of the title. In addition, Deeva says that she's made certain that the current king of the unnamed kingdom has conceived an heir, though again she doesn't specifically say that she mothered the king's heir, Princess Janna (Savina Gersak). Deeva wanted both Ator and Trogar to be Janna's protectors, so Phoedra, knowing this, subverted Trogar to be her pawn against the reign of Janna.

Phoedra visits the court of heir apparent Janna and makes dire predictions echoing those of Sleeping Beauty's Bad Fairy, though Janna is nothing but courteous while her father wants the witch dead. Phoedra, more impatient than the Bad Fairy, brings forth the Iron Warrior, who slaughters the king's tiny number of guards while Phoedra's magic kills the king. Though the monarch manages to send his daughter away, she's next seen running along a cliffside all alone, so that she's easily captured by the Warrior and a bunch of gibbering dwarves.

It's not clear where Ator has been all this time-- certainly not at the court protecting the princess! But he's on his way there, possibly prompted by Deeva, since she later appears to him in a vision. Phoedra sees him coming, so she changes herself into a pretty young thing, so that Ator can rescue her from some of Phoedra's own warriors. Ator takes the hot babe to a cabin somewhere, and she sleeps with him, so that he'll fall asleep post-coitus. Then she sets the cabin ablaze, but Deeva wakes Ator up and he gets clear. Possibly she guides him to Janna, for Ator finds his way there just as the Warrior's minions are about to sacrifice the princess. Ator routs the dwarves and battles the Iron Warrior, who obligingly disappears for the time being.

From then on, Ator and Janna fulfill the same pattern seen in the first ATOR, running from pillar to post as they're pursued by the villain's minions. Naturally, the potential of romance blooms, and also like the first ATOR, there's a potential sibling relationship between the two youths. The script isn't hesitant to link this transgression to Ator's having slept with "the bad mother." During one of the duo's peregrinations, Ator experiences a weird vision in which he approaches Janna from behind-- though she's clad in the blue outfit of the hot babe, not her usual red garments-- and when "Janna" turns around, she has the face of Phoedra. The vision ends, but Phoedra's magic has had real effects, as the real Janna's red outfit has also turned blue, and stays so from then on.

Eventually, the twosome find their way to the hidden caverns where Deeva alone holds court. She makes various excuses as to why everything that's happened had to happen, and reveals that the Iron Warrior is Trogar. Though Deeva claimed earlier that her power was secure because she had that Golden Chest of the Ages, now she asserts that Ator and Janna must seek out the Chest in some Atlantis-sounding domain, "the Kindgom Beneath the Waves." Only with the Chest can they defeat Phoedra and liberate the enslaved Trogar.

Ator and Janna journey to the deserted city (played by the famous architecture of the island of Malta) and look for the Chest. They're chased through corridors by what seems an automated defense, a big rolling rock like the one from RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, but able to change directions to chase them. The RAIDERS vibe is reinforced when the heroes steal the Golden Chest, causing the whole place to fall apart (though of course no real buildings were harmed in the making of the film). 

Then Phoedra's warriors show up to fight Ator. Janna gets in one good sword-stab at the enemies herself, and then she and Ator flee the now sinking island. Then Phoedra shows up at Deeva's cave, using her magic to freeze Deeva in a slab of ice and revealing that she already has the real Golden Chest, while Ator and Janna have a fake box holding deadly peril. She doesn't explain why she bothered sending those soldiers to the Wave-Kingdom, nor why, when Ator and Janna arrive at shore, the Iron Warrior's waiting for them. Maybe she just can't resist the irony of having brother battle brother to the death. Ator stabs his possessed brother to death and then mourns. 

Ator and Janna return to Deeva's cave, where Phoedra poses as the good witch and accepts from them the fake Golden Chest, which doesn't end up serving any purpose at all. Ator then takes Janna back to her court, but at some point Phoedra makes a switch again, sending along a fake Janna with Ator. But apparently Fake-Janna reveals herself too soon, causing Ator to go looking for Real-Janna again. Phoedra, instead of killing Janna quickly, torments her by hanging her over the side of a cliff (but only after putting her in new clothes). Ator fights more of Phoedra's mounted warriors-- the only half-decent fight-scene in the film-- and then tries to stab Phoedra to death, without success. He can't kill the Bad Mother with his blade-- and why should he be able to, since she already enjoyed his other "blade" earlier? But since the movie needs Phoedra to die, Ator suddenly guesses that the witch is vulnerable to fire, sticks a torch in her mouth (oral fixation, anyone?), and her flaming body meets the fate intended for Janna, going over the cliff. 

Then, in a tour de force of wacky resolutions, Ator finds Janna, not hanging over a cliff like before, but trussed up on a sacrificial altar again. He frees her, and as symbolic sister and symbolic brother embrace, one seems to hear the cackle of old Phoedra. Has the witch fooled the noble hero once again?

Well, no. We return to the sanctuary of the Good Witches again. Three sorceresses, only seen before in that opener yelling at Phoedra, then explain the ending for the confused viewer. On either side the witches are flanked by Phoedra (or her spirit), imprisoned in those energy-hoops again, and by Deeva, frozen in the same slab of ice in which Phoedra left her. The witches, so exultant at the triumph of good that they explain things to each other, claim that Phoedra couldn't kill Janna directly because of a limitation Deeva placed on Phoedra's powers at the film's beginning. They don't explain why Phoedra, expecting Ator's advent, left Janna where Ator could find her, but they confirm that it's the real Janna, and that if she has a witchy smile as she welcomes her hero, it's because "there is no witch like a woman in love." Good will now rule the fantasy-world for centuries to come, and the world will be better off now that both the manipulative Bad Mother and the manipulative Good Mother are out of the way.

Since I've noted the many mangled plot-lines of IRON WARRIOR, a part of me does not want to rate the movie's mythicity as highly as I feel I must. But even if the story doesn't make much sense in terms of verisimilitude, there is a consistent symbolic discourse going on here, however rough. Luigi Cozzi's 1983 HERCULES ends with the unjustified suggestion that all the women who have assailed the hero are in reality one woman, but Brescia and Luotto keep the one-woman symbolism weaving through their movie like Ariadne's thread in the Minotaur's labyrinth. A few years later, Ator's director/co-creator Joe D'Amato returned to the hero for his last outing in 1990's QUEST FOR THE MIGHTY SWORD. Maybe D'Amato felt challenged by the pretenders to his barbarian throne, for he worked a lot more clansgressive elements into QUEST than were seen in his first two ATOR films. But D'Amato failed to make all the symbolic elements cohere, while Brescia and Luotto succeed. albeit in a very wonky manner. This was incidentally O'Keeffe's final performance as Ator, and he's just as much a wooden block as when he started. Savina Gersak has more range, but the acting honors go to Elizabeth Maza for her sheer gusto in the role of Phoedra-- whose name, despite the variant spelling, is surely meant to evoke the memory of one of Greek myth's most famous bad mothers.