THE ADVENTURES OF THE AMERICAN RABBIT (1986)

 

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


There's not much intrinsically interesting about this American-Japanese kiddie-film, co-directed by animator Fred Wolf.  It's an undistinguished attempt to meld the basic idea of Superman (with special reference to the successful Salkind Brothers live-action adaptations) with a simple liberal message about encouraging young people to speak their minds and protest big business.

The film opens with a scene out of the Sleeping Beauty folktale.  An infant named Rob Rabbit is born to a humble rabbit-couple, but a mysterious guest predicts that he will have a special destiny.  Later, when Rob reaches teendom, he meets the mysterious stranger again.  Rob learns that he's one of many incarnations of a being called "the American Rabbit," destined to fight evil by changing into a star-spangled hero whose only attire is a pair of roller skates.  As the American Rabbit, Rob fights a gang of evil bikers led by a nasty buzzard villain, suffers a few reverses, and finally wins out.

Only one joke in RABBIT is a trifle funny, when the villain reveals his master plan to dominate the world by taking control of the world's chocolate.  The design of the hero would be risible even without the roller skates, but one wonders what animator came up with them.  Perhaps the Rabbit's creator didn't get the memo that the fad for roller-skating entertainment had peaked during the disco era?  Unfortunately, as foolish as the main hero appears, the entire film is played tediously "straight" and so qualifies, however badly, within the Fryean category of adventure. 

FUTURE KICK (1991)

 

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

My fuzzy memories of this Roger Corman production didn't bode well for the re-viewing, but my main motivation wasn't entertainment. I decided that in the near future I ought to view one of the movies featuring kickboxing-champ-turned-actor Don "The Dragon" Wilson in order to represent him on THE GRAND SUPERHERO OPERA. Given that motive, I decided I might as well review Wilson's first "superhero-adjacent" movie.

In contrast to the majority of martial-arts prodigies who have taken a shot at acting, Wilson showed a natural charisma early on, when Corman featured him in two made-in-the-Philippines martial arts films, BLOODFIST and BLOODFIST II. Presumably Corman or someone in his organization was impressed enough by box-office returns to fast-track Wilson into a cheapjack SF-adventure, co-written by Catherine (BLOODFIST II) Cyran and the FUTURE KICK director Damian Klaus (his only movie credit to date).

The setting is a future-Earth in which the wealthiest people have committed the ultimate upper-class flight, emigrating to a moon colony. The script doesn't say why this move causes the rest of the world to fall apart, so that Earth consists mostly of titty bars, street-gangs and criminal businesses, one of which deals in illegally obtained body parts. But specifics aside, KICK is an obvious retread of every SF-tale involving "haves" and "have nots" since METROPOLIS.

Wilson plays Walker, a "Cyberon" (cyborg) who was originally designed to fight crime. However, in film-time Walker's the last of his kind, for the organization that created the Cyberons found them threatening, possibly because the cyborgs were a little too law-abiding to overlook corporate perfidy. Walker alone escaped destruction, and though there's the implication that his former masters would like him killed as well, this never becomes important to the story. Though there's no reflecting on Walker's day to day existence-- it's not even clear if he needs to eat-- he maintains his existence as a bounty hunter because that gets him involved in the principal conflict.

It's a pretty muddy conflict, though. On the moon a VR scientist named Howard, married to wife Nancy (Meg Foster), takes a shuttle to Earth to consult with his employers (who DIDN'T emigrate to the moon, I guess). He contacts bounty hunter Walker for some reason, but then Howard gets randomly killed by a thug who harvests organs for "New Body." (If this were an intelligent movie, some comment might've been made about the poor feeding on the rich for once.) When Nancy doesn't hear from her husband for a while, she comes to Earth to investigate. Facing indifference from overworked cops, she finds Walker and hires him to avenge her husband.

All of these badly edited scenarios exist just to set up kickboxing scenes between Walker and various gang-bangers, a martial artist played by Chris Penn, and the organ-stealer. The fights are watchable but aren't even the best from the oeuvre of Don Wilson, and there's no attempt to generate chemistry between Wilson and Meg Foster. There's a final "trick ending" suggesting that maybe the whole exploit was the creation of VR tech, though this too is sloppily delivered, so that it's confusing instead of arresting.

If FUTURE KICK was a bag of popcorn, it would be one where all the kernels either got burned or failed to pop. The only glimmer of quality appears when the taciturn Walker gets a little talkative with Nancy, reflecting on how the other Cyberons were his only family. Wilson puts some feeling into these lines, and his ability to convey simple but strong emotions may have more to do with his long B-movie career than his kickboxing skills.

X-MEN: DARK PHOENIX (2019)

 

 

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

Since I have a suspicion that the MCU will screw up the X-Men worse than anything in the Singer-verse, I wanted the last one-- written and directed by Singer's sometime collaborator Simon Kinberg-- to be exceptional, at least in some small way. And I guess that's what I got, though there weren't that many little things to like.

It sounded promising when I first read that Kinberg wasn't happy with X-MEN: THE LAST STAND, the franchise's previous adaptation of the "Dark Phoenix saga," on which he Kinberg had collaborated. However, PHOENIX displays many of the worst problems of the Singer X-Men: a cavalier disregard for carefully building the appeal of the ensemble characters and the over-emphasis of particular fan-favorites at the expense of the whole. (At least by 2019 Hugh Jackman had done LOGAN, ostensibly concluding his run with the role of Wolverine, but that doesn't keep Kinberg from shoe-horning Michael Fassbender's Magneto into a story where he really has no coherent part to play.)

Thanks to the reboot of the first X-Men continuity in DAYS OF FUTURE PAST, Kinberg could ignore Jean Grey's previous incarnation of the Phoenix. However, he also pole-vaults over X-MEN APOCALYPSE (set in 1983) by setting PHOENIX in 1992. In addition to the indispensable Jean Grey, the script keeps Cyclops, Beast, Mystique, Storm, Quicksilver and Nightcrawler, as well as the actors portraying them. But jumping ahead so far also liberates Kinberg from the need to say what happened to other X-members from APOCALYPSE, like Psylocke, Jubilee, Havok and Angel. The result is that the viewer doesn't really know where the characters stand at the film's opening, with the exception of Jean Grey. 

For Jean we get an extended flashback showing how as a child she accidentally killed her mother, which resulted in her father spurning his daughter by consigning her to Xavier's school. The script hammers in the point that Jean's been made psychologically unstable by her trauma, and later she'll contend with her "new father" Charles Xavier for manipulating her to become a member of his superhero team.

One small pleasure of the opening, though, is that in 1993 the X-Men have redeemed themselves enough that when they board a rocket to rescue astronauts on a damaged space shuttle, the populace actually cheers for them. To be sure, Kinberg only dangles this moment of traditional heroism in front of the viewer in order to snatch it away later. 

In the process of saving the astronauts, Jean is irradiated by a mysterious cosmic force that amplifies her power to godlike levels. She confronts the father who deserted her, causing both the X-Men and the local cops to attempt stopping her. Jean's interference with the cops puts her on the law's wanted list, while during Jean's altercation with her partners, Mystique is accidentally killed. 

Mystique's death provides a very anti-climactic conclusion to the long running arc of how her character was the "bone" over which Xavier and Magneto competed, but it does provide Kinberg with a reason to squeeze the master of magnetism into the flick. Jean, overflowing with both power and grief, seeks out her former foe, who out of nowhere is suddenly running the mutant colony of Genosha. Magneto doesn't want to give Jean a haven, so although he does defend her somewhat from armed pursuers, Jean flees once again.

During all this, the audience has seen some mysterious persons scoping out Jean, and these turn out to be the remnants of an alien race, the D'Bari. This race had a minor role in the comic-book "Dark Phoenix" continuity, but the film elevates them into antagonists. They reveal to Jean that she's become the incarnation of a cosmic force, the Phoenix, which years ago destroyed the homeworld of the D'Bari. The survivors of that catastrophe dogged the trail of the Phoenix until the cosmic force invested itself in Jean, at which point the aliens convince Jean to transfer her power to one of their number, Vuk (Jessica Chastain). However, when it's revealed that the D'Bari intend to use the Phoenix-power for evil ends, the X-Men must enter the fray.

The basic plot is serviceable, but none of the character bits are compelling, and so even "big events" like Mystique's death and the conflict of Jean and Xavier fail to impress. Sophie Turner does a creditable job with Jean, but at least some of her success stems from the fact that she gets more scenes than any other performer. Extremely consequential questions like "what exactly is the Phoenix" are ignored as if the audience doesn't care as long as there are a lot of fight-scenes-- though the relatively low budget of PHOENIX keeps these from even coming up to the level of APOCALYPSE. One last small pleasure is that PHOENIX, like most of the X-films, largely eschews the Progressive ideology of the MCU productions, though there is one banal moment where an irritated Jean Grey remarks that the group ought to be called "The X-Women."

MORTAL KOMBAT (1995)

 

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

I've never played video games, so I only know of their success through their iterations in other media. I won't echo the tedious critical observation that the games' emphasis on action and spectacle might retard their potential for meaningful discourse; it's obvious to me that this concentration on spectacle has dominated much of the adventure-genre in many eras. Most serial films from 1940 onward are stripped-down narratives whose only purpose was to provide thrills and spills, and that tendency certainly can't be blamed on video games.

There were only three major live-action video game adaptations before 1995's MORTAL KOMBAT and it's my memory that none of them did as good a job as the team of director Paul W.S. Anderson and writer Kevin Droney (to say nothing of the fight choreographers and musician George S. Clinton). I would tend to assume that the "universe" of the KOMBAT game was pretty simple, and that Droney probably didn't expand on the basic rules of the game. But his contribution may not be so much "world-building" as "world-justification," in that he made the responses of the main characters to their extraordinary situation credible, at least within the context of an action movie.

Of the three "mortal" heroes who get roped into the Mortal Kombat tournament, Liu Kang (Robin Shou) is given the greatest reason to succeed, while the motives of Johnny Cage (Linden Ashby) and Sonya Blade (Bridgette Wilson) are more contingent and less indicative of even their simple characterizations. Liu Kang turns his back on his supposed destiny to fight for Earth in the tournament because he's become "Americanized," so that he brushes the martial tradition off as ancient Chinese superstition. Because he ducks out on his responsibility, his younger brother tries to take his place but is slain by the sorcerer Shang Tsung (Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa). Shang, who is an Earth-ally to the warlike dimension of Outworld, hosts the tournament, which will make it possible for Outworld to invade Earth if Earth's champions lose this contest. Liu's only initial reason to enter the tournament is to get the chance to avenge his brother, but he also has a fair psychological arc as far as subsuming his personal desires for the greater good.

There's a rumor that at some point Johnny Cage was planned to be the main hero who defeats Shang Tsung, but there's no trace of any such orientation in the finished film. Unlike the humorless Liu and Sonya, Cage is almost the film's only vessel for humor, but the character remains admirable and likable, in contrast to many current films in which "the Ugly American" is made into the designated goat. Sonya Blade really has no psychological arc; she also seeks vengeance for a slain ally, and once she gains that revenge, she really has nothing much to accomplish. However, to keep Cage from being the sole source of humor, the role of the storm-god Rayden (Christopher Lambert) provides some much needed levity as he shepherds the reluctant trio to their destiny.

Also overshadowed by Liu and Cage is the extradimensional humanoid Princess Kitana (Talisa Soto). Her minimal backstory involves her father having been slain by the reigning emperor of Outworld, and for some reason she's been allowed to live even though she's clearly planning to undermine the Emperor's invasion plans. She only has a couple of fight-scenes and her main purpose duplicates that of Rayden, offering sage advice when possible.

As stated, the action scenes are the main attraction. Are they among the best of all time? No, but they're consistently good, and I even enjoyed Cage's conflict with the four-armed monster Goro, for all that the animatronic device wasn't state of the art. Only at the end does the script violate the story's internal rules, for that ending depicts the Emperor making ready to invade Earth despite his side having lost Mortal Kombat. Still, I recognize that the only reason this scene was tossed in was to rev up the viewers' desire for a sequel, and that it wasn't really germane to the main story. Unfortunately, the original film's one sequel did take that scenario seriously, which did not work out very well. 

VAN HELSING (2004)

 

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

In my review of the three Stephen Sommers MUMMY films, I noted that the second in the series was "overstuffed with incidents" but that the movie's "crazed set pieces" played to Sommers' strengths as a maker of lightweight action-adventures. 

Sommers both wrote and directed VAN HELSING, just as he did the first two MUMMY films. (He only produced the third in that series.) However, VAN HELSING lacks even the tenuous moments of human drama that made the wild action of the mummy-movies palatable. Supposedly Sommers claimed to have been a fan of the Universal "monster mashes" of the 1940s, and to be sure, those too are improbable concatenations of monster crossovers. But they had charm and some crude poetry as well. Sommers's script seems to have nothing on its metaphorical mind but trundling one action-scene after another, but in the clumsiest manner possible.

A short prequel scene establishes that Dracula (Richard Roxburgh) has employed Doctor Frankenstein to create a monster. Moments after the doctor does so, only to be murdered by the count, a mob of angry villagers attacks Frankenstein's laboratory. Though Dracula and his three harpy-like vampire brides attack the mortals, the villagers set the building on fire and the newborn monster is apparently destroyed.

A year later, the Vatican-- which maintains an order of holy warriors to exterminate monsters-- summons Gabriel Van Helsing (Hugh Jackman) and sends him to Transylvania to kill Count Dracula, who has some dire plan in store for humankind. Jackman, an amnesiac with a few fragmentary memories-- he seems to remember having fought at Masada in the 6th century CE-- has just finished executing the murderous Mister Hyde, but he's game for this new monster-hunt. 

In addition, Gabriel's supposed to succor a pair of local monster-hunters from an ancient family, Velkan Valerious and his sister Anna (Kate Beckinsale). But shortly before Gabriel arrives in Transylvania, the two sibs successfully trap and kill a werewolf, a minion of Dracula. Velkan is bitten, and he soon transforms into a wolf-man and falls under the thrall of the Count.

Gabriel arrives with a comedy-relief character in tow, and sparks fly when Gabriel meets the feisty Anna. Before they exchange more than a few words, Dracula's harpy-brides attack the village.

After these fragmentary set-ups-- which utterly fail to give any human resonance to either Gabriel or Anna-- the film then falls into a pattern of barely comprehensible set-pieces in which the two of them have fights with the brides or with Hairy Velkan. In between action scenes, it's loosely revealed that Dracula wanted to use the Frankenstein Monster to revivify the vampiric children his brides bore over the years-- all of whom were born dead. Implicitly then Dracula will use his brood to conquer the world, though this is vague at best. Yet the creation of Frankenstein is not dead, and Gabriel's next mission is to keep the vampire from gaining access to the monster. He fails to do so, but Gabriel, Anna and the comedy relief assault the castle in a do-or-die effort to stymie this plot. Oh, and though Gabriel kills Velkan, the monster-hunter is bitten, meaning that he himself is doomed to be a monster now.

There's some garbled explication about how Dracula, despite being able to control werewolves, is vulnerable to being slain by one (did anyone tell Bram Stoker?) But this messy plot-device does lead to the movie's only decent sequence: a kickass battle between Dracula (in a male harpy form) and Gabriel Van Hairsing.  There's also a big reveal of Gabriel's nature-- that he's some sort of immortal who slew the mortal version of Dracula in the 13th century-- but this too is inexcusably muddled and without dramatic impact.

Hugh Jackman was apparently told to play Van Helsing like Clint Eastwood as a monster-hunter, thus giving the actor nothing to work with. Kate Beckinsale comes off a little better as Anna, though her role too is terribly underwritten. Strangely, despite the actress having shown good cinematic fighting-powers in the previous year's UNDERWORLD, Sommers doesn't give the actress any good battle-sequences, just lots of climbing, swinging around, and getting tossed around by vampire brides. On top of all that, the ending's a downer despite the world getting saved.

Once in a while, Sommers' script suggest ways this FX-fest might have been given some characterization, but evidently he thought it was enough to just keep rolling out monster-scenes-- and some of his conceptions include absurdities, like having the Frankenstein Monster pop his artificial top at incongruous moments. The FX pushed the film's cost so high that only a major box office bonanza could have redeemed VAN HELSING, but the film only enjoyed moderate success.

For what it's worth, it's said that Sommers produced a specialty cartoon with Van Helsing and other characters in which the immortal hunter's nature might have been more fully discussed, but I have no information on that short.

HERCULES AGAINST THE SONS OF THE SUN (1964)

 

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

Some of Italy's "Maciste" films were given "Hercules" marketing in the titles alone, while the hero's original name was used in the English dub. This time, the dub is consistent with the title, so that the Caucasian warrior is called Hercules throughout the movie, and at one point he even claims kinship with a heavenly father. However, this version of Hercules shows only an uncanny level of strength.

Hercules gets shipwrecked and ends up in South America. He meets a friendly Inca warrior, Maytha (Guiliano Gemma) and they hang out while Maytha, a prince of a local province, tells the stranger all about how he's leading a small army in revolt against the realm's capital of Tiahuanaco. The leader of the sacrificial cult is King Atahualpa, and Maytha hopes to end the evil monarch's practice of blood sacrifice. Hercules, who immediately decides that Maytha must be a good guy, decides to lend his expertise to the revolt.

Maytha also happens to have a pretty sister, Hamara (Anna Maria Pace), whom Atahualpa hopes to marry even though he already has a queen (a distinctly minor character who gets tossed aside very easily). In this routine film's only good scene, Hamara, marked for sacrifice after refusing the king, lies positioned on a slab while brightly feathered archers shoot arrows at her. Then Hercules rescues her, earning the love of Hamara and the enmity of the Inca king.

SONS is pedestrian in the extreme, and even ideologues looking to carp at such films for "white savior" tropes would barely find anything to rant about. (There is a scene in which Hercules introduces the rebel Incas to the use of wheels, the better to build mobile siege engines, but the script doesn't exploit this development.) Performances are ordinary, with Pace distinguishing herself as one of the least charismatic peplum-heroines ever, so that only a handful of fight-scenes provide some diversion from the tedium.

HONOR ROLL #174

 Don't call ANNA MARIA PACE "Pocahontas."

Hugh Jackman's hero is almost as much a monster as the one played by RICHARD ROXBURGH.

SHOU Fly, Don't Bother ROBIN--

SOPHIE TURNER learned that a Phoenix is a candle you can't burn at both ends.

There's no kicker like a DON WILSON kicker.

THE AMERICAN RABBIT tried his best, but he just couldn't get cast in "Watership Down."

CAPTAIN MIDNIGHT (1942)

 

 

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

Though celebrated stuntman Dave O'Brien had enjoyed assorted starring roles before CAPTAIN MIDNIGHT-- such as 1936's BLACK COIN-- this serial about the popular radio hero was probably the closest he ever got to "the big time."

Regrettably, even though the first movie version of the hero-- who had also showed up in comics by 1942-- has a pretty striking, all-black outfit, as a character Midnight leaves viewers "in the dark." At the serial's outset the audience is introduced to esteemed aviator Captain Albright, who maintains-- for no clear reason-- the double identity of the masked Captain Midnight. As in the radio serial Midnight has a "ground crew" called the Secret Squadron, who were supposed to be the only one in on the captain's secret ID. But the serial's script can't be bothered to say how Albright took on the ID of Midnight, and for that matter, a lot of people in the course of the serial find out the secret rather easily.

Though the story revolves around a gang of enemy agents seeking to snag a new bomb-sighting invention, very little is said about the war itself, nor is there much in the way of morale-boosting here. Main villains Ivan Shark (James Craven) and his ruthless daughter Fury (Luana Walters) are never directly tied to the Axis, and there aren't even a lot of aerial stunts to play off the hero's aviator status. Its weak plot is fairly typical of many serials, but even some of the mid-range chapterplays bring in better moments of melodramatic characterization. Thus, Midnight is a cipher fighting other ciphers-- albeit with very well-staged fight-scenes. Of all the villains Craven does deliver a spirited "Big Bad" in spite of Shark's shortcomings as a master planner.

The one thing that saves MIDNIGHT from total mediocrity is the death-trap shown above. Shark catches Midnight in a room where the hero is imprisoned on a rotating disc, while a great weight descends from above and flames spout from the floor below. It's such a perfect trap that the script has to have the hero saved when Shark's blundering henchmen accidentally shut off the power in the trap-room. This is one of the many oddball-humor asides that director James W. Horne brought to many of his serial efforts, and while contrived, they're preferable to the antics of the two goofball members of the Secret Squadron.

THE DRAGON'S SHOWDOWN (1980)

 

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

Here's yet another chopsocky directed by Geoffrey Ho that isn't significantly more demented than other kung fu films of the time, and which actually has a reasonably linear plot, just like both THE DYNAMITE SHAOLIIN HEROES and GRAND MASTER OF SHAOLIN KUNG FU. 

There's a dollop of sociological myth in the initiating actions of greedy landowner Hu (Martin Chiu) trying to exploit his tenant farmers. But this setup serves solely as a motivation for Hu to slaughter the father and mother of a resisting family, the Lees. Two brothers escape. Chin-Tai the oldest boy, after witnessing his parents' deaths, simply runs away, and when he next re-enters the story as an adult, viewers learn nothing about what happened to him out in the world. Chin-Tung is more fortunate: the family's nanny takes him to a neighboring village to be raised by an unrelated family. As for the Lee's one daughter, Hu capriciously decides to raise her as his own child, unaware of her true parents' fate.

Fast-forward twenty years, and young adult Chin-Tung is first seen having a kung-fu duel with "Shirley" (Cheryl Meng, sometimes billed with the first name Kitty). Chin-Tung's offense is that he referred to Shirley as "sister," which raises her ire because she doesn't think of Chin-Tung as a "brother." The broad implication is that the two may have been raised together, and that, even if they knew they weren't real siblings, Chin-Tung can't really think of Shirley as anything but. In any case, Chin's driving obsession is to gain revenge for his slain parents. The script doesn't say who taught kung fu to the two non-siblings, but Chin-Tung has reached the age that he can no longer shirk his duty to seek vengeance. 

Problem is, Hu didn't hang out in the vicinity, but moved off when he'd made his pile off the backs of the peasants. Chin-Tung initially plans to leave alone, but Shirley tags along in boys' attire. Coincidentally, as word-of-mouth takes the duo ever closer to Hu's current location, Chin-Tai homes in on their mutual nemesis at the same time. 

Meanwhile, over at Hu's new digs, we see that Hu has indeed raised the former Lee girl as his own daughter under the name Chu Cheng, and he's taught her some kung fu as well. This plot-thread suggests that she might end up defending her father against her actual brothers, and indeed there is a minor dust-up between Chu Cheng and her oldest brother Chin-Tai. But her character is quickly sidelined, and she's not present for the climactic battle. For that matter, Chin-Tai is taken out by Hu's henchman Ma. Ma has a weird "magnetic sword" with which he can throw off an opponent's balance by attracting any metal on their outfits, and he does so with Chin-Tai's metal necklace, setting the avenger up for a killing blow. Later Chin-Tung and Shirley come across the dying man and the two brothers become aware of each other's existence just before the older sibling dies.

Though no one seeks out a chopsocky for strong drama, the plot does focus most of all upon the gradual (though completely chaste) romance of Chin-Tung and Shirley. Being away from their common home causes the young man to become more aware of Shirley as a woman, and he even projects his own erotic feelings in the form of fearing that some of Hu's rowdies may rape her. Thus, the hero doesn't really prioritize finding his lost sister as he does hooking up with the woman he's thought of as his sister.

Dragon Lee is one of the better Bruce Lee-imitators, and he projects good charisma in the midst of his fights, particularly the concluding one with "bad father" Hu, wherein Martin Chiu provides a formidable menace. Cheryl Meng executes her fights efficiently enough, but in the acting department she's nowhere near even the middle-level divas like Lily Li. Since Hu is neither a scientist nor a sorcerer, there's no accounting for the provenance of the magnetic sword, or for a kind of badly-explained "strength belt" Hu wears. In the context of other chopsockies with such gimmicks, I tend to think they're meant to be rudimentary extensions of the period's science rather than innovations, and so I judge them as uncanny devices. SHOWDOWN shakes out as a good time-killer with a minor psychological myth at its core.

DEAD IN TOMBSTONE (2013)

 

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

There's the germ of a decent idea in this DTV "weird western," though the idea itself is nothing new and in many ways contradicts the Christian mythology of Satan's influence on Earth. Most Biblical accounts indicate that Satan wants evil to proliferate on Earth, the better to spite God. Therefore it seems counter-intuitive that His Infernal Majesty would do anything that decreases Earth's supply of evildoers.

Nevertheless, the idea of Satan empowering agents who go around harvesting criminals to send them to Hell has persisted in popular culture, at least since 1940, when Timely Comics unleashed one such agent, the original Black Widow. Sometimes there are variations: evil souls escape Hell and Satan's agent has to send them back, as in the 1998 teleseries BRIMSTONE. But DEAD IN TOMBSTONE doesn't bother to ring in any more logical setup.

The film does start off with what almost sounds like an ironic take on the prevalent mythos of the Wild West. The West was not an arena devoted to duels of good and evil, but rather, to conflicts between differing levels of evil. However, nothing in the story follows up on this potential. 

Guerrero de la Cruz (Danny Trejo) is a career outlaw who has led the Blackwater Gang on many a robbery. His sole virtue is that when we see him organize his gang to raid the bank of Tombstone, he tells his men-- including his rash half-brother Red (Anthony Michael Hall)-- that he wants them to pull off the crime with as little killing as possible. However, Red wants to lead the gang, and to that end he talks the other five owlhoots into backshooting their leader.

Down to hell goes Guerrero, and in the interests of budget, all we see of hell looks like a blacksmith's forge, occupied by Satan (Mickey Rourke), though he's billed in the credits as "The Blacksmith." Satan begins gratuitously torturing Guerrero, but by accident or design lets slip that he needs more evil souls to stoke his furnace. This concept is more in line with the evil acts of fairy-tale creatures like ogres, but this potential too is dropped. Guerrero makes a bet with Satan: in exchange for being returned to life, Guerrero will execute all six gang-members and send them to Satan's fires. Satan agrees, but only if the bandit-leader can kill all six in one day, and all by his own hand. If Guerrero fails, he returns to the service of the devil.

The avenger of Hell returns to Earth and proceeds to lay waste to the Blackwater Gang, naturally saving the worst traitor, half-brother Red, for the last. Guerrero gets unwanted aid from sexy sheriff's wife Calathea (Dina Meyer), who wants vengance for the gang's murder of her husband. This complicates Guerrero's quest to ace all six bandits himself, but as one might expect, he does show his inner hero by protecting the feisty femme. In the end, Guerrero kills all of his targets but loses his bet, so that he's consigned to continue as Satan's harvester.

TOMBSTONE is replete with many violent scenes of shooting and fighting, but none stand out. Trejo's performance as the accursed badass is sturdy but similarly unremarkable, while Hall and Meyer do their best with unrewarding characters. Despite the apparent setup for a sequel, it took another four years for Guerrero to get "dead again."

BEAST OF BABYLON AGAINST THE SON OF HERCULES (1963)

 

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

This peplum benefits from a better-than-average grounding in real history and at least three charismatic players, though none of those assets keep the film from devolving into the usual cliches at the end.

The "Babylon" of the title is the Neo-Babylonian Empire of the sixth century, and the "beast" is named Balthazar (currently rendered "Belshazzar") and played by Piero Lulli. There was a crown prince of that name at the time that the Neo-Babylonians fell to the invading forces of Cyrus the Great, but it will come as no great surprise that the script for BEAST plays fast and loose with history.

The Persian king Cyrus gained great repute as a liberator of imprisoned peoples, not least because he released the Jewish slaves kept captive in the Babylonian Empire. The scripters for BEAST, one of whom was the director, turn Cyrus's wave of conquest into a crusade to abolish the ancient custom of slavery, in line with the narratives of liberation common to the strongman-films.

BEAST's strongman-- who of course is not any "son of Hercules"-- is Nippur (Gordon Scott), natural heir to the Babylonian throne. Nippur has been gone from his native city for many years, which he refers to as his "exile." However, since Nippur is said to have enjoyed a close relationship with Persian lord Cyrus in his absence, it seems likely that the script implied that he was gone due to a system of royal fosterage. This comes in handy when Nippur returns to Babylon, doesn't like how things have gone, and whistles up Cyrus to invade and overthrow the bad rulers.

His father the rightful king Sargon is absent as well (apparently imprisoned and kept hostage, though he's never seen). In the absence of both king and prince, Nippur's cousin Balthazar rules as regent, assisted by the high priestess of Ishtar, Ura (Moira Orfei). The script asserts that at some time in the past Babylon had banished both the custom of slavery and the corollary use of slaves for human sacrificial rites, and so Nippur is furious to see that Balthasar and Ura have brought the bad old days back.

Despite his uncanny strength, Nippur can't kick Balthasar off his throne, so he contacts an underground rebel alliance as well sending messages to Cyrus, who shares Nippur's progressive antipathy toward slavery and human sacrifice. Nippur also gets some possible help from Ura, who falls hard for Nippur's nipples and tries to persuade the hero to kill off Balthasar and rule a kingdom of evil beside her. However, Nippur's already fallen for a sweet young slave girl, so Ura gets nowhere with her seductive wiles. 

Once all that has been established, the rest is predictable routine, and only the principals Scott, Orfei and Lulli distinguish themselves from the dullness. Genevieve Grad plays the nice slave girl but she has nothing much to work with even if she does get the hero in the end.

THE DEATH RAY MIRROR OF DOCTOR MABUSE (1964)

 

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

The credits say that Wolfgang Preiss reprises his role as the evil mastermind in the film, but the shadowed figure of RAY's villain may not really be Preiss, though IMDB claims that at least some archival footage of the actor can be found. I confess I wasn't moved to watch very closely.

If the film wasn't part of the Mabuse series, I would find it very easy to deem the star to be its leading-man viewpoint character Anders (Peter Van Eyck, returning to the series in a different role). Only one thing distinguishes RAY from the many James Bond knockoffs that Europe would begin deluging viewers with: RAY is all black and white, while every Eurospy I've seen is a color film.

Anders is out to investigate the disappearance of an important scientist, one Larsen. For some reason Anders' superiors decide to saddle the hero with the professor's daughter Gilda Larsen (Yvonne Furneaux of THE MUMMY), even though she's not any sort of agent and has no means of protecting herself. That said, I'm not precisely complaining, because the rather dippy character of Gilds--  constantly trying to court Anders, acting jealous when he pursues other women-- is one of the few fun things about RAY. 

Though I screened the film yesterday I've forgotten the strategies Anders uses to track down the "death ray mirror" with which Mabuse (or his agents) plan to rule the world. I remember  a shootout in an observatory, and the film's only good scene not involving Gilda Larsen: a well-filmed scuba battle between Anders' allies and the minions of Mabuse. Frankly, I found the crisp black-and-white photography of these scenes far superior to anything in THUNDERBALL.

I have not seen the third and fourth non-Lang movies in the series, but this may well be, as other reviews aver, the least impressive entry, though I should note that director Hugo Fregonese did an admirable job remaking 1944's THE LODGER as 1953's MAN IN THE ATTIC.

MAN FROM ATLANTIS I-IV (1977)

 

 

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

Back in the seventies there was an upsurge in live-action superhero shows. The success of THE SIX MILLION DOLLAR MAN TV-films in 1973 launched the successful series the following year, and 1975's NEW ORIGINAL WONDER WOMAN also spawned its own serial. In 1977 Universal-TV optioned a handful of Marvel characters, but only the first two INCREDIBLE HULK pilot-movies led to a regular show. According to one online source, Marvel's SUB-MARINER was at least considered, and in 1978 a notice did appear in Stan Lee's "Bullpen Bulletins" to the effect that a Prince Namor pilot would be produced-- though no such pilot was ever made. While any number of internal factors could have caused the studio to decline the Atlantean prince, one of those factors could have been that by early 1978 industry insiders *might* have noted that another original-to-TV super-type with an underwater theme was due to be cancelled after four TV-movies and thirteen episodes.

The first film, MAN FROM ATLANTIS, introduced audiences to an amnesiac young man (Patrick Duffy) who's found passed out on the beach. ER doctors can't tell what's wrong with him, but by chance an oceanography expert, Elizabeth Merrill (Belinda J. Montgomery), stops by the ER room and realizes that the fellow's "dessicated lungs" suggest that he may actually be a water-breathing humanoid. Submersion in water does revive the stranger, but he does not know who he is. Through her military connections Elizabeth is able to get the odd man-- who also has webbed fingers-- assigned to her laboratory, where she examines his water-breathing propensities, gives him the name "Mark Harris," and speculates that he may be the last survivor of legendary Atlantis. Though Mark learns English quickly, he understands nothing about surface civilization and usually appears in a state of passive bewilderment. A Navy officer wants to use Mark for undersea missions, and up to a point Mark cooperates, though he's not entirely cool with human disregard for the oceans. 

During one Navy mission, Mark stumbles across an undersea city. However, it's not Atlantis, but a modern construct by an obsessed mad scientist, Mister Schubert (Victor Buono). Schubert is a modern Captain Nemo, so enchanted with the seas that he has no use for humankind and plans to decimate surface populations with the help of his cadre of brainwashed scientists. Mark prevents Schubert's scheme but Schubert escapes to appear in later episodes. A grateful Navy releases Mark from their oversight, and though Mark considers returning to the depths, he's bonded with Elizabeth and a few other surface-dwellers to the extent that he stays with them at the laboratory, investigating oceanic phenomena.

The second outing, "Death Scouts," is possibly the best of the four TV-movies. The audience sees a trio of divers taken over by alien (possibly microbe-sized) beings,  though one of the three perishes. Mark and Elizabeth encounter the two alien-possessed humans and are deceived into believing that they share Mark's origins, partly because they too have webbed hands. The aliens do their best to convince Mark that he's one of them, and that gives the story the most emotional resonance. Mark, despite not being the most emotive individual around, keenly wants to believe that he's found his origins, and he argues with Elizabeth when she points out inconsistencies. In the end the aliens-- whose aims were never clear to me-- perish, as do the bodies of their hosts, leaving Mark with no answers.

"Killer Spores" unfortunately repeats the basic idea of "Death Scouts" with only minor revisions. The titular spores are Earth-organisms that have existed in the sea's depths for generations untold, and though Mark remembers nothing about his own background he remembers having seen the spores conquer animals in the sea. For vague reasons the spores begin preying on surface-humans, whom they can turn into virtual zombies, though sometimes they merely cause strange emotional outbursts. Mark is eventually able to communicate with the spores and talk them into ceasing their assault.

Last comes "The Disappearances," and this one seems to be determined to recycle the "enslaved scientists" trope from the Schubert movie. This obsessed mastermind is the mundanely-named "Doctor Mary Smith" (Darleen Carr), but she isn't concerned with wiping out humankind. She plans to launch an arc into space with her captive scientists in order to colonize a better world, and Mark must find some way to stop her and her gang of henchmen. The daughter of the show's producer has a role as Mary's more virtuous sister.

All of the ATLANTIS movies and episodes were the only items produced by "Solow Production Company," and the regular show's failure presumably led to the company's demise. All of the movies move with a snail's pace because they're horribly underwritten in terms of providing strong plot action and character conflict; the hour-long episodes may be a little better on that score, though I've no real memory of the show from my original viewings. The man with his name on the company was Herb Solow, whose most famous credit was that of a producer on Original Star Trek. Solow was not involved with the creative end of that series in more than minor ways, like suggesting the use of the "Captain's Log" voiceovers. Apparently Solow learned next to nothing from his association with the Roddenberry series, and I must say that my impression of Solow from the "backstage-at-the-Trek" book he co-authored is that he was more concerned with having things run smoothly than providing entertainment for an audience. In these four movies there are only infrequent inspired moments-- the world-weary performance of Victor Buono as Nemo-wannabe Schubert, or the attempt to describe the strange civilization of the Death Scouts. These moments, and a few factoids about the world of the seven seas, keep ATLANTIS from being as brain-dead as a completely ordinary series like THE POWERS OF MATTHEW STARR. But there are not enough bright spots to give these four films more than a poor rating for mythicity.

HONOR ROLL #173

 For PATRICK DUFFY, Dallas proved a lot more profitable than Atlantis.

YVONNE FURNEAUX is a lot more fun that either Doctor Mabuse or his deadly mirror.

GENEVIEVE GRAD, don'cha know the bad girl always has all the fun in movies like this one?

No room for Brat Packers like ANTHONY MICHAEL HALL in a world of zombie gunmen.

CHERYL MENG has a showdown with a purely metaphorical dragon.

DAVE O'BRIEN finds himself in a tight squeeze.

BATMAN AND ROBIN (1997)

 

 

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

After re-screening BATMAN AND ROBIN, my first thought was, "why did audiences reject this film from director Schumacher and writer Goldsman, but not BATMAN FOREVER, the previous film by (roughly) the same director-writer team?" "BATMAN FOUR," as I choose to call it, features the same combination of overbaked action sequences and ham-handed humor as FOREVER. So why did FOREVER make money, while FOUR did so badly that it killed the Bat-film franchise for roughly the next eight years?

It would be useless to look at what professional critics said about FOUR in 1997; critics frequently revile Hollywood's big action movies, and more often than not the mass audiences ignore the scorn and queue up for Hollywood action anyway. FOUR is, if anything, a little better plotted than FOREVER. While there's no emotional core in the Val Kilmer Bat-film, FOUR at least hinges on the news that steadfast butler Alfred (Michael Gough) may perish from an illness soon, giving both Batman (George Clooney) and Robin (Chris O'Donnell) some opportunity for grave reflections-- that is, when they can get their minds off the bewitching Poison Ivy (Uma Thurman). 

Ivy, in her turn as a "noob villain," has a slightly credible reason to work with established super-crook Mister Freeze-- at least more so that Two-Face working with noob villain Riddler in FOREVER. I'm not saying that I liked the script's idea that the vegetable villainess fell in love with the frigid fiend. But at least it's some kind of motive for her to follow Freeze around and try to get him to obliterate humanity with a New Ice Age. When the heroes finally get over squabbling over the hot villainess-- and it's not always certain as to how much they're responding to Ivy's chemical charms-- they finally manage to defeat both Ivy and Freeze. Yet Freeze's technology helps the crusaders come up with a way to preserve Alfred's life, which is a neater plot-twist than anything in FOREVER.

The other debut in FOUR is a new version of Batgirl, who is no longer the daughter of Commissioner Gordon, but the niece of Alfred, who's come to Wayne Manor because she knows of her uncle's fatal disease. I don't begrudge Goldsman's alteration of the canonical character. In none of the Burton or Schumacher Bat-films does the Commissioner (Pat Hingle) get anything interesting to do, so there was no particular reason to build up his character when Alfred was much more consequential to the plot. There's even an early seventies Bat-comic which introduces a niece for the sturdy butler. That said, Goldsman utterly fumbles any motivation as to why Niece Barbara has decided to train herself to become Batgirl, though something is said about her doing it as a commemoration of her dying relative. (Guess that assumes that Alfred blabbed his employers' secret to everyone in the family, since he's totally on board with her taking up arms as a superheroine, yet never broaches the subject in advance to Bruce or Dick.) As essayed by Alicia  Silverstone, Batgirl/Barbara at least shows more moxie than I found in O'Donnell's Robin or in Clooney's smarmy Batman, and she's seen to good effect in a catfight with Poison Ivy. All that said, Batgirl's subplot stretches out an already overburdened story even further.

So what's the thing in FOUR that I think had ordinary viewers giving the movie bad word of mouth, and thus leading to its disappointing box office? I think it was Schwarzenegger's Mister Freeze who most put the hex on the flick. I've liked Ah-nold in a lot of his crowd-pleasing films, but I think even the most devout fan in 1997 would have been cringing throughout the opening, in which the heroes keep dodging Freeze's ice-beams while the villain tosses out putrid puns like "Ice to see you!" Yes, the mass audience usually liked Ah-nold whipping out one-liners, but Goldsman's puns are REALLY bad. 

On a related note, I don't imagine the average filmgoer was aware of how the 1992 BATMAN THE ANIMATED SERIES had re-imagined the cold-themed villain as a man obsessed with his cryogenically-preserved wife. Yet, even though Goldsman had no intention of playing up the drama of Freeze's bereavement, Goldsman still worked the story of the frozen wife into his mess of a script. This ended up making the cold crook seem like a scatterbrain, mourning his poor wife one minute and cracking ice-jokes the next. The mass audience will put up with a lot of silliness to enjoy Hollywood's big budget thrills. But they usually don't like to get the sense that Hollywood filmmakers think that they the filmgoers are stupid enough to buy anything. To be sure, any other actor rattling off Goldsman's nonsense wouldn't have fared any better. But it's my theory that once a favored star like Schwarzenegger was involved in this farrago, that made his presence even less tolerable than Clooney's supercilious starring role. And so the Bat-franchise sank beneath the waves for a time, and FOUR's failure at least guaranteed that Schumacher would get no more shots at superhero properties-- even though Goldsman, over time, seemed to get better, if one can judge from his billing as one of the STARGIRL writers.

BATMAN: THE MYSTERY OF THE BATWOMAN (2003)

 

 

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

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

BATWOMAN was one of the last iterations of the Timm-Dini BATMAN franchise, though BATMAN AND HARLEY QUINN was much later entry in that Bat-world. I didn't originally care for this movie on first viewing, but this time I found it a very efficient opus, with a better sense of the crime-milieu against which the Caped Crusaders (this time with the Tim Drake Robin in tow) must strive.

Originally, I felt that the "Batwoman" of the story didn't add much to the mythos, not being tied to either DC character of that name. But now I rather like that this character-- or characters, to be sure-- are just one-shots. The Big Reveal of BATWOMAN is that there are three female suspects for the new Bat-vigilante in Gotham, and this throws the Big Bat for a while until he realizes that all three women are working together. I'm not sure that this has much utility in the three ladies' main purpose, which is to take down a drug-smuggling ring operated by the Penguin (once more showing his iconic comic-book appearance), a big-wheel named Duquesne, and that jolly muscleman Bane. The alternating masquerade only works to keep Batman from figuring out the game of the Batwomen, and it's not even certain that he would have interfered with their agenda even if he knew their identities.

As one character points out, they really don't have a particular reason to emulate Batman costume-wise, though years ago one woman was rescued by the Big Bat from a conflagration. The appearance of a new Bat-female prompts Barbara Gordon to call Batman and tease him about getting an "older version," a rather racy byplay that suggests future events in the Dini-verse. 

Though the mystery isn't all that engaging, BATWOMAN is quite impressive in terms of spectacle. I have no liking for the villain Bane, but I have to admit that in this film he has one of his best brawls with Batman, either in comics or in animated cinema. Robin doesn't have a lot to do, since the climax has to give three costumed women their own scenes. Alfred gets the movie's best joke, remarking that, "I see from the paper that young Dennis the Menace has taken one closer step to correctional school."

BATWOMAN is also a touchstone in that it was the last hurrah, or close to it, for three of the voice-actors: Bob Hastings (Commissioner Gordon), John Vernon (Rupert Thorne), and Efrem Zimbalist Jr. (Alfred).

The presence of Barbara in a cameo alone would suffice to make the movie a crossover, but the script's inclusion of two major villains, Penguin and Bane, is the more impressive interaction.

BULLSHOT! (1983)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*

FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*

CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological, sociological*

Another "combative comedy" for this review is 1983's BULLSHOT!, the film version of BULLSHOT CRUMMOND, a successful stage-play that spoofing the famous British hero Bulldog Drummond. It might've been interesting had the film spoofed the original prose hero. I've read four of the novels originally printed in the 1920s, and they're a fascinating cornucopia of fascism, racism and brutality.  However, what's being spoofed here is the version of Bulldog promulgated through American cinema, particularly the first sound film, 1929's BULLDOG DRUMMOND, wherein the debonair Ronald Colman essayed a polite, "veddy British" hero that has become the best-known persona of the hero.

In contrast to the lackluster scripts for OLD DRACULA and PANDEMONIUM, BULLSHOT's writers know just the right buttons to push for the laughs-- though I'm not sure how funny the film would be to someone with absolutely no knowledge of the original film-franchise. As in the 1929 film, the noble athlete-hero Bullshot Crummond faces the menace of a foreign criminal, Otto Von Bruno, and his equally Teutonic aide Lenya.  The Germans are trying to wring scientific secrets out of, well, a scientist, though they themselves seem to have technology far in advance of a World War I setting-- such as force fields, of all things. The single best joke plays upon Crummond's "Rue Brittania" assumptions: when Von Bruno predicts that someday the most powerful country will be the one with the greatest oil reserves, Crummond is duly scandalized.

It's no AIRPLANE, but BULLSHOT is a better than average parody.

STAR RAIDERS: THE ADVENTURES OF SABER RAINE (2017)

 

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

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

I feel justified in spilling one plot-point in this DTV flick because it's the only thing that caused me to sit and take notice of the generally vapid goings-on.

To be fair, writer-director Mark Steven Grove's movie with the long-ass name-- SABER, for short-- does at least keep a lot of action unfolding from moment to moment, which is more than one can say of (for instance) the two AVENGERS GRIMM films. All of the action is blandly derivative of the original STAR WARS, but "routine imitation" is still a little better than "original but boring."

Casper Van Dien is the titular Saber Raine. He was once a respected officer in the Star Force (or whatever), but he made some big mistake and got cashiered. Some time later, an evil mastermind named Sinjin (James Lew, whose face remains obscured by makeup or his Vader-mask for the whole film) kidnaps Prince Tyr and Princess Calliope, presumably for some political advantage. The Star Force sends three soldiers to seek out the help of the now mercenary Saber Raine.

Most of the film's scenes take place either on the same forested planet where the soldiers find Raine, or in the cut-rate sanctum of Dark Helmet-- I mean, Sinjin. Sinjin is given the rudiments of some old grudge against the Galactic Empire, but that didn't hold my interest any more than Saber Raine's mostly forgotten misdeed. Both actors have to make do with simplistic, stock dialogue, so it's impossible to know if they could've done better with a better script.

The one interesting plot-point might be seen as a parody of a "mystic seduction" trope suggested in RETURN OF THE JEDI-- for while Prince Tyr (Tyler Weaver Jr) isn't looking, Sinjin persuades Calliope (Sara N. Salazar) to join him in his evil pursuits. Salazar's role is a little juicier than anyone else's, and she comes off as a decent villain, who's still allied with Sinjin in the film's coda. However, her betrayal is, well, betrayed by the shallow acting of Weaver in the role of Tyr.

Despite the flagrant GGI effects, the best-handled scene is a basic swordfight between Van Dien's hero and Salazar's villainess. Top-billed Cynthia Rothrock appears for a couple of minutes near the film's end just to mouth more banal lines, so Rothrock completists beware.

DRAGON AGE REDEMPTION (2011)

 

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

This apparent feature film is actually a compilation of cheaply-but-adequately shot "webisodes" derived from the 2009 DRAGON AGE RPG. REDEMPTION shares roughly the same universe as an animated DTV film, DRAGON AGE: DAWN OF THE SEEKER, which like REDEMPTION also emphasizes conflicts between various heroes on the trail of an evil mage. 

SEEKER didn't have much to say about the status of elves in this fantasy-world, but REDEMPTION makes clearer that they've become a marginalized outgroup, victimized and sometimes enslaved by both human beings and a humanoid species, the "Qunari." The first protagonist one encounters is Tallis (Felicia Day), who's liberated from prison by her Quanari masters to hunt down a renegade sorcerer. The sorcerer Saarebas (whose name sounds like that of the comics-character Cerebus) plans to perform a dangerous incantation. In tracking down one of the mage's henchmen, Tallis encounters a human knight, Cairn (Adam Rayner), and after some squabbling over their common quarry the mage, Tallis persuades Cairn to join forces with her, even if they may end dueling over custody.

In their progress, Tallis and Cairn come to an elf-village from which Saaerebas has stolen a young girl for sacrifice. The girl's boyfriend Josmael (Masam Holden) announces his intent to go after the raiders, so the two more experienced fighters reluctantly allow him to go along. The trio encounter the wizard's forces, which include a gang of fighters called "Reavers." Saarebas escapes again, but leaves behind one Reaver, Nyree (Marcia Battise), and Tallis talks Nyree into joining their force for a greater payoff when the four of them take on the sorcerer's forces.

Naturally REDEMPTION doesn't devote much of its short run-time to world-building, but there's more attention to character conflict than in SEEKER, and the fight-scenes are decent if unexceptional. As D&D flicks go, it's an okay timekiller.

BRIDES OF DRACULA (1960)

 

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

Following 1958’s HORROR OF DRACULA, Hammer’s next exploitation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula mythos appeared in a film with no Dracula, or rather with a Dracula manqué named Baron Meinster, against whom Peter Cushing’s Van Helsing contends.  Scuttlebutt has it that Christopher Lee would not reprise the master bloodsucker for what Hammer was willing to pay.  Thus BRIDES starts off by informing the audience that, contrary to the film’s title, Dracula remains dead but that the vampire cult that spawned him and others remains an ever-present menace.  Possibly CULT OF DRACULA might have been a more appropriate title for this film. The men behind this opus— among whom were two of the key creators of HORROR OF DRACULA, director Terence Fisher and scripter Jimmy Sangster— could not have known whether or not there would be further appearances of the master vampire.  It’s possible they envisioned more encounters between Van Helsing and the far-flung vampiric cult.  Whereas Stoker’s book dimly alludes to a Satanic school, the Scholomance, which may have schooled the Count in his evil, Sangster’s script emphasizes that the vampire cult is a last survival of pagan religion, striking back against the dominant forces of Christianity through the revival of the undead.

The script for HORROR eschewed the novel’s slow build toward Jonathan Harker’s horrified realization of his host’s monstrous nature; instead, the Harker of HORROR is Van Helsing’s “secret agent,” out to destroy the Count before his evil can spread.  As I noted in my review of that film, Harker’s visit to Dracula’s castle duplicates the novel’s Oedipal fascination with Dracula’s wives, albeit cutting it down to just one wife in the film.  Before the audience knows that Harker has come to the castle on a search-and-destroy mission, he seems to be an innocent coming to the rescue of the Count’s maltreated paramour.

What was a deception in HORROR is the simple truth in BRIDES.  Marianne, an innocent young French schoolteacher, passes through a small town in Transylvania on her way to her next employment.  Circumstances come about (possibly through manipulation) in which her stage stops in that town, but Marianne can find no good lodgings until she’s invited to stay at the castle of the aged Baroness Meinster.  At first it appears that the Baroness and her aged female servant Greta are the castle’s sole occupants, but soon Marianne discovers the presence of a young man as well.  The Baroness spins a story to the effect that she confines her son to the castle because he’s mad.  Marianne nevertheless seeks out the imprisoned youth.  Meinster’s soft-spoken demeanor and good looks convince the schoolteacher that he’s unjustly imprisoned, so the young woman comes to his rescue, stealing the key to Meinster’s chains.  Shortly afterward, Marianne learns the truth from the Baroness: that because she was indulgent and allowed Meinster to fall in with an exceptionally bad crowd, Meinster became infected with the disease of vampirism. 

While Meinster avenges himself upon his mother for his years of imprisonment by converting her to the ranks of the undead, Marianne (rather improbably) gets away. She's so traumatized by the events that she selectively forgets what has happened to her.  Thus, when she falls into the company of Van Helsing, who’s been summoned to the area to seek out the solution of a new vampire outbreak, she has nothing to tell him. 

The script’s vague on the matter of Van Helsing's advent. Logically, the vampire hunter had to be in progress some time before Meinster obtained his freedom.  The script does allow one “out” in that prior to being vampirized, the Baroness admits that she satiated her son’s unholy bloodthirst by securing young women for him to consume.  By this method the Baroness could keep her son with her in a semblance of life rather than destroying him as she should have.  However, when Van Helsing arrives at his destination, he only investigates one case of a woman rising from her grave.  What happened to the others to whom the Baroness alludes?  Did she and her only servant manage to put them down before they could become vampires?  For that matter, did the Baroness intend Marianne to become food for Meinster? If so, the Baroness and Greta do a particularly poor job of keeping watch over the schoolteacher, and apparently miss an easy opportunity to drug Marianne during their first and only dinner together.

While Van Helsing investigates, Marianne proceeds to her place of employment, but Meinster follows her to her new ladies’ school.  Soon he’s enthralled Marianne and several other females—the “brides” of the title.  Van Helsing contends with the new vampire-lord and almost gets vampirized himself, but by film’s end the crusader vanquishes the corruption, climaxing with Hammer’s most spectacular vampire-execution.

In DREADFUL PLEASURES James Twitchell takes the hyper-Freudian position that Dracula and all his kindred represent the tyrannical father, always oriented on keeping all the community’s young women for himself.  This might apply moderately well to HORROR OF DRACULA, but BRIDES breaks with the pattern by emphasizing a tyrannical son-figure. Meinster’s youth isn’t even an illusion created by vampiric powers: he really is just a nasty young man who happens to be undead.  The script doesn’t work very hard to portray Meinster as a formidable new villain, and in some ways the psychology of the Baroness is more interesting.  After her husband perishes, does she compensate for the husband’s loss by allowing her son every indulgence?  After he’s become a vampire, the Baroness supplies him with young women.  Are these surrogates for her own incestuous desires?  That might explain her laxity with Marianne, which ends up with the release of her son, who immediately vampirizes the Baroness rather than Marianne.  In her final scenes as a vampire before Van Helsing executes her, she seems rather less than tormented by her fate.  Meinster’s battle with Van Helsing is physically impressive, but he’s such a bland villain that it’s not surprising that Hammer didn’t continue to spawn more “sons of Dracula.”  Within a few years, Dracula himself returned with a vengeance, and any vestiges of a far-flung vampire cult would remain subordinate to his mythic authority.