ZEBRAMAN (2004)

  

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

Though I've seen a lot of comments calling Takashi Miike's ZEBRAMAN a comedy, I think it conforms more to the literary mythos called "irony." Comedies are generally very straightforward about exploiting human discomforts to engender laughs. But Miike, who directed from a script by one Kankuro Kudo, seems to be constantly stressing situations that undermine the viewer's certainties of what to take seriously-- or even, what not to take seriously.

(EDIT: Kankuro Kudo is the scriptwriter of record for the movie, but apparently both he and one Yamada Reiji co-created an earlier ZEBRAMAN manga, which the movie partly adapts, and which I have not read.)

Although some costumed crusaders like Zorro and Superman fake weakness to conceal their true strengths, there's no shortage of heroes, especially from the Golden Age of Comics, who start off as meek and mild, and only toughen up after being suffering humiliation or adversities. Miike clearly wants the viewer of ZEBRAMAN to see the movie's protagonist as a "real Clark Kent." Teacher Shinichi Ishikawa (Sho Aikawa) not only gets zero respect from the grade-school students he deals with, he also rates zero with his family. His son Kazuki, who attends said school, is tormented by other kids who think Shinichi is totally uncool, while the teacher's wife appears to be carrying on an affair and his teenaged daughter Midori is dating older men, possibly to express her contempt for her real father. (I say "possibly" because none of Shinichi's unlikable family members get a lot of screen time.) The teacher's only escape from dire reality is being a fan of a short-lived tokusatsu TV show from his childhood. This show concerns a fantastic, alien-fighting costumed hero, Zebraman. Shinichi even creates his own Zebraman costume as an escape from reality.

But is reality all that certain? It's the year 2010-- just six years from the time of the film's actual release-- and 2010 is also the future-year in which the TV show was set. Current news broadcasts carry stories about the strange behavior of animals and maniacs on the loose in Yokohama. Covertly, Japan's defense agency studies the mysterious appearances of mutated creatures, apparently the result of extraterrestrial tampering. 

At school Shinichi meets a transfer student, Shinpei, and Shinpei's mother Mrs. Asano. Shinpei has his own debilitating backstory, having lost the ability to walk after finding the corpse of his suicidal father. By chance Shinichi learns that Shinpei also has an enthusiasm for the Zebraman show, even though the boy only saw the program through the Internet. Shinichi develops an affection for this family, so much more appealing than his own. He decides to show off his costume to the wheelchair-bound boy-- but while skulking through the streets in costume, he comes across a crime: a woman just slain by a maniac in a crab-mask. Shinichi contends with the crazy man, and to his surprise learns that he suddenly possesses fantastic athletic prowess. Further, when slain the crab-man proves to be an alien mutation, as well as (perhaps not coincidentally) one of those older men that Shinichi's daughter is shown having dallied with.

There's an explanation of sorts, though Miike isn't interested in all the fine points. Some decades ago, a UFO crashed near Yokohama, and unbeknownst to humans, one alien survived and masqueraded as a human. The same school where Shinichi works is constructed on the site of the UFO crash-site, and the alien somehow becomes the school's principal. Further, the principal, knowing that his people plan to invade Earth in 2010, manages to launch the TV show ZEBRAMAN as a surreptitious warning of the coming invasion. I guess the show, which was canceled after seven episodes, had the desired effect, because it reached just one ardent fan, who was capable of taking on the powers of a superhero. How Shinichi gets transformed is one of those vague points; he merely talks about the power of belief, symbolized by the phrase "anything goes." So when, late in the movie, Zebraman needs to manifest the ability to fly, he's able to do so by a major effort of the imagination, much like Peter Pan asking children to believe in fairies.

Shinichi eventually triumphs over the alien invaders and wins approval from both his real kids and his substitute family (though the script stops short of letting the protagonist hook up with Mrs. Asano). Yet Miike and Kudo throw in a lot of weird scenes to keep ZEBRAMAN from seeming like a straightforward adventure-story. After learning that Mrs. Asano is a nurse by profession, he has a vivid dream in which he (as Zebraman) loses an arm in combat but grows it back when given medical attention by a costumed doppelganger of the widow, "Zebranurse" (complete with a gigantic syringe). And it certainly has a comical effect when the hero does the "zebra back kick" of the TV program and leaves a hoof print in a mutant's forehead. So even though Miike champions the power of belief, he clearly also favors the power of absurdity as well.

THE FANTASTIC ADVENTURES OF UNICO (1981)

  

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

I had seen the two 1980s UNICO films back in that decade but was then unacquainted with the Osamu Tezuka source material. Online sources finally gave me the chance to peruse this short-lived manga series, as well as getting a sense of how the animators switched a few things up.

The screenwriter for ADVENTURES essentially took just two stories from the Tezuka canon and merged them into a longer, if somewhat jumbled, narrative. As I commented in my review, the Tezuka tales are essentially stand-alones. On the command of the goddess Venus, the West Wind transports the innocent unicorn to other realms to get the little creature out of Venus' way. Unico then interacts with some unhappy people, fixes or tried to fix, their problems, and then gets whisked off to some other realm for another adventure. Not surprisingly, the screenwriter wanted something a bit more unified.

The writer made an odd choice, though, The very last Unico story deals with the unicorn befriending a demon, only to get yanked away, leaving the demon, Beezle by name, disconsolate for the loss of his only buddy. I don't know why Tezuka ended his manga-series on such a sad note, but the writer of ADVENTURES chose to give Beezle more closure. The very first place the West Wind deposits Unico-- on the orders of all the gods, not just Venus-- is at the end of time, thinking that he will be utterly isolated. But after the formation of the friendship between the unicorn and the demon, the West Wind takes it on herself to transport Unico to a different realm.

This new realm involves a forest full of animals, one of whom is a vain cat named Chao. Unico, who's forgot the existence of Beezle, makes friends with Chao. However, Chao wants to become a witch's cat in order to become powerful, while Unico tries to talk her out of it. The drama builds to a situation where Chao is transformed into a pretty human female, and she thinks that the Baron of the forest may be interested in marrying her. However, she soon finds that the Baron is an evil slayer of animals, and Unico has to use his powers to defend Chao and slay the Baron. The West Wind conveniently decides to return to the end of time for no particular reason and thus makes it possible for Beezle to participate in the rest of the story.

These adaptations are decent, but like most of the original stories, aren't much more than simple melodrama. Unico had one more exploit in which the little fellow got propelled into other realms, but in that sequel, the writers did not return to the idea that the Greek gods had some grudge against the single-horned savior. 

DC SUPER HERO GIRLS: LEGENDS OF ATLANTIS (2018)

 

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

For the last of the DC SUPER HERO GIRLS movies, we're back to the adventure-mythos and the writers and director associated with the first two telefilms. Nevertheless, the last movie in the series shows marked improvement over the first two. Like the two LEGO comedies, there's just one main threat and the heroines aren't tripping over one another this time. Some LEGO influence might also be present in that the script allows for better humor, even though the story employs the old chestnut of heroes having their respective powers switched around just as the new threat presents itself.

In this case, two sisters from an other-dimensional water-world steal a magical book from the high school, planning to use it to invade Atlantis and take control of the underwater city by stealing the trident of Poseidon from the current king, a young-ified version of Aquaman. In the comic books, one of the two sisters is Mera, an iconic member of Aquaman's ensemble in that she eventually marries the Sea King-- but in this universe, she and Aquaman have never met before. Mera's sister Siren is the main villain, forcing Mera to commit crimes for their supposed mutual benefit, and she's a much later addition to the Aqua-verse, established as a villainous sibling to Mera around 2010. Once this version of Siren defeats Aquaman and acquires the magic trident, she launches war upon the surface world and tries to inundate Metropolis in seawater. 

In due time the superheroines (and a few male heroes like Flash and Beast Boy) make an ally of Mera, whom Siren imprisoned because she didn't like sharing power. Though we're back to having about a dozen heroes uniting to fight the menace, there's not as much of a sense of overcrowding. Some additional humor is provided by a version of the emotionally restricted Raven-- making her only appearance in any of the movies-- being forced to interact with the wacky Harley Quinn. I could have done without a subplot in which as a child Wonder Woman encountered some of Siren's horrific monster-pawns and thus became traumatized by the experience. But the action is also the best in all the "serious" movies in the series, so the series, as a whole, finishes on a relative high point. Mera also goes off to be admitted to Hero High, with only the slightest implications of a future encounter between her and Young Aquaman.

CYBORG COP (1993)

 

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

In the first of three DTV flicks devoted to cops who fight cyborgs (not, as the title suggests, a cop who is a cyborg), the lead hero is one Jack Ryan, who’s also in the second but not the third film, and is played both times by David “Second American Ninja” Bradley.

Jack is a former DEA agent who just can’t follow the rules of the game, and so gets forced out of the organization when he antagonizes the great enemy of all action-heroes, the bleeding-heart American press. His brother Philip, also an agent, tries to carry on the fight against a drug-cartel, but the craven commander of Philip’s task force refuses to commit his whole forces to an invasion of the drug-lord’s island HQ. Jack thus has a mad-on for the whole world and makes plans to rescue his brother. On the way he accidentally falls in with an annoying lady journalist. Despite his less than winning ways, she becomes his main squeeze.

The targeted drug-lord, Professor Kessel, is also a designer of cyborgs for sale to third-world countries, and he uses the body of the slain Philip for one of his projects. Kessel, being enacted by John Rhys-David, provides the only bright spot in this predictable thriller, for the script gives the actor the attitude of a winsome child who’s endlessly pleased with his own cleverness. Aside from a mildly interesting villain, it’s a lot of shooting and fighting, a little better photographed than the average action-film—certainly better than Firstenberg’s two American Ninja films.

Bradley, who had attempted to play a stone-faced hero in his “ninja” efforts, goes to the other extreme with his irritable protagonist, but never proves sympathetic at the best of times. Oddly, though Firstenberg never directed any of Bradley’s ninja-outings, he did previously helm a flick devoted to Bradley as an “American Samurai.”  

GHASTLY PRINCE ENMA, BURNING UP! (2011)

 

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

*SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS*

I hadn't heard of Go Nagai's manga "Dororon Enma-kun" or any of its reboots until stumbling across this subtitled 2011 series on streaming, mostly derived from the 1973 original. Since most of the other Nagai works I'd encountered didn't seem as well-organized as GHASTLY, I read the '73 manga online, only to find that it was like a lot of other Nagai productions. tons of transgressive scenes of sex and violence, with an insubstantial plot that pooped out at the conclusion. Therefore I credit the writer-director of the anime series, Yoshitano Yonetari, with having firmed up the weaker aspects of the source material.

Nagai still deserves high marks for the inventiveness of the basic scenario. In the Hell of Japanese belief, the ruler King Enma becomes irate that certain demons have escaped his domain to wreak havoc on humanity. Caring more about his proprietary rights over his subjects than about human suffering, the monarch assigns his nephew Prince Enma to corral the escapees. To this end the king gives Enma a fire-staff weapon and three helpers. Two are just minor figures, a kappa-spirit named Kapeuru and a living hat named Chapeujie, while the third is a powerful snow-woman, Princess Yuki. Enma and Yuki have a thing for one another, though Yuki plays hard to get while Enma is an unswerving perv, always ready to peep on her or feel her up. (The Yuki of the original manga is not nearly as forceful as the one in the 2011 anime, since 2011 Enma frequently gets his ass kicked for his molestations.)

The early episodes are very "monster-of-the-week," as the four-person "Demon Squad" begins the task of tracking down various vicious demons. In the manga they get aid from a human boy, but in Yonetani their aide is a human girl, Harumi, who's frequently grossed out by the licentiousness and irresponsibility of these "good demons." Many of the fugitive demons also inflict absurd curses on humanity, like making them unable to stay on the feet, or causing a "fattitude plague" in which almost everyone on Earth becomes fat enough to roll along like a beachball. 

One structuring addition by Yonetari is that he interpolates a character from one of the ENMA reboots, one who was originally a female version of Enma named Enpi. In the manga Enpi was much like another Enma character, Kekko Kamen, who went around semi-naked most of the time. Yonetani makes Enpi a separate character, the older sister of Enma, and gives her a quixotic mission. Enpi constantly undermines the Demon Squad's efforts because she wants to make the whole world "overflow with titillation and delight."

Another added wrinkle is that 2011 Enma, unlike the 1973 version, wears a piece of metal headgear called a "Fire Crown." A number of demons want to remove the crown for whatever reason. Enma doesn't remember the crown's purpose, except that his vanished mother and father gave it to him, but of course he's willing to burn to ashes anyone who tries to take his things.

The third and last improvement is that, while the manga-version of King Enma has no big plot in mind when the series commences, Yonetani's version is working hand in glove with the denizens of Heaven. Both parties need to power their realms with "psychowatts" derived from human beings, and the easiest way to gain that power is to bring about a major cataclysm that ends most of human life. This sort of chaotic apocalypse occurs in a lot of Nagai manga, though it's only suggested at the end of "Demon Prince Enma."

Yonetani manages to tie together Enpi, the Crown and the collaboration of Heaven and Hell in a pleasing way. Enpi eventually reveals that the siblings' parents created the crown to control Enma's lusfulness, which had become so pronounced that he apparently tried to sex up his sister. It's not clear why Enpi became more oriented on promoting disorder later on. Still, she's instrumental to showing how Enma can unleash the power of lust to rebound upon both angels and demons. Instead of bringing about humanity's destruction, the denizens of Heaven and Hell become so horny that they have a mass orgy. As it happens, the orgy unleashes so much energy that Heaven and Hell no longer need to kill people to get psychowatts for their realms, and so humanity gets to live.

So Yonetani succeeds in making all of the grossness and weirdness of the series' twelve episodes work together coherently, as well as giving the viewer all of Nagai's characteristic sex and violence. (At times the two get combined: in two separate episodes, the boobs of female characters become so large that they can be used as bludgeons.) All of this wackiness is given a serious undercurrent by the end theme song, which starts off singing, "Sooner or later, everybody's gotta die," but concludes with the life-affirming "We are still alive!"

  

STAR PILOT (1966)

  

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

In the sixties director Pietro Francisci wasn't getting big important assignments like 1952's QUEEN OF SHEBA, and STAR PILOT was probably his career low point, even though PILOT reunited him once more with SHEBA star Leonora Ruffo.

PILOT roughly resembles one of those captivity-narratives by Jules Verne, like MASTER OF THE WORLD, but with a lot more sex and violence. A UFO lands in the wilds of Sardinia. An Italian professor, accompanied by two hunky assistants and his dippy actress-daughter Luisa (Leontine May), sets up a small expedition to investigate the supposed landing. 

The explorers enter a deep cavern and find an alien construct, but don't know what to make of it. Leaving, the Italian quartet get ambushed by three gun-toting "men in black," who are Asian spies of some sort. (In the movie's only memorable bad line, the spies are very careful to specify that they are "Oriental" but "not Chinese.") The two assistants get into a brawl with the spies, in which the smaller Asians hold their own pretty well, However, the occupants of the alien spaceship-- the buried construct in the cavern-- choose this moment to emerge and capture everyone with their ray-guns. 

Kaena (Ruffo) is the captain of the ETs, consisting of just two hunky males, one of whom is played by former peplum-hero Kirk Morris. She tells the Earth-people that her ship came to the planet to monitor the humans' usage of nuclear power, lest they threaten Kaena's people. But the ship had mechanical difficulties, and Kaena needs the professor's help to repair the craft. She and her men hold Luisa hostage while the prof and his assistants do whatever they need to do. 

Francisci, one of the credited scripters, was clearly not interested in making up fake science to put across the sci-fi illusion. His main interest is in "the sexy," for Kaena is somewhat attracted to one of the assistants while Luisa has the hots for the Morris-alien (whose name is rendered both as "Belsy" and "Balsy.") The version of PILOT I watched fortunately interpolated some Italian subtitled dialogue left out of the American dub. Otherwise, I would not have known that Balsy tells Luisa that in his culture, the rulers' procreation is strictly monitored to keep their breed strong, while only the lower classes mate as they please. Luisa does not find this proposition romantic.

After repairs are completed, Kaena decides to abduct all of the explorers and to take them back to her world. During the trip, the Earthmen fight the hunky aliens and gain control of the spaceship. However, when they return the ship to Earth, they learn that in their absence nuclear war has decimated the planet. Having nowhere else to go, the whole troupe goes to Kaena's world. Surprise, surprise: nuclear radiation has compromised that globe too, though not as badly. The elitist rulers have deserted the world, leaving the hoi polloi to breed as they please, and the two groups of travelers realize that joining with this savage but egalitarian race is now their destiny.

Clearly Francisci didn't know how to properly build up to the sort of "philosophical reveal" that characterizes many of the best sci-fi films, and so his cross-mating scenario seems less than profound. I suppose Leontide May is the only performer who comes off well, but only because she's playing a sexy clown. However, if I had to decide what character occupies the centric role of Francisci's dull space-ride, I suppose it's Kaena, who represents her people and the "wrong turning" they took vis-a-vis eugenics.  

HONOR ROLL #256

 When they told LEONTINE MAY she'd be in a movie with big stars, she didn't think they'd be painted on a backdrop.                                            

Given the monstrous hero's monstrous proclivities, his show would have been better titled, "PRINCE ENMA, Feeling Up!"                  

                                                                                                            From "Indiana Jones" to "Cyborg Cop" was a pretty big slide for JOHN RHYS-DAVIES.                                                                                                        

                                                                                                               The last shall be first, this time being the last of this franchise being the first one cited on this site, with the evil SIREN as the representative.                                                                                                          

                                                                                                               UNICO hates to horn in, but...                                                            

                                                                                                                 Show us your best, SHO AIKAWA.                                                                                                                                                                 

                                                                                            

LEGO BATMAN: THE MOVIE-- DC SUPER HEROES UNITE (2013)

  

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

In contrast to "regular" cartoons, I think it's impossible to make a Lego animation work in any other literary mythos but that of comedy. That said, this movie-- UNITE for short-- is probably the closest a Lego story could come to duplicating a "straight" adventure of Batman and Robin teaming with Superman to fight their mutual foes Joker and Luthor, just like a Silver Age issue of the WORLD'S FINEST comic.

Though some other DC heroes appear near the conclusion, and assorted Bat-foes are scattered throughout the tale, the aforementioned three heroes and two villains provide the main plotline. Luthor, though busy running for President, finds out that Joker has formulated a means of duplicating a Kryptonite-like substance. The evil scientist knows that he can use this substance to fuel his "deconstructor" ray, which makes objects dissolve into constituent parts (a.k.a. "bricks.") Luthor breaks Joker out of Arkham and the two decide to eliminate their mutual foes, while at the same time rigging the election for Luthor's benefit. (Or so Luthor assumes.)

UNITE was the first film to actually use the title "Lego Batman Movie," even though the film given only that title appeared four years later. In my review I noted that Batman (Will Arnett) was played like "Richie Rich as superhero," constantly calling attention to all the toys he could buy with Bruce Wayne's vast wealth. That characterization isn't present here. Instead, Batman is just extremely diffident toward Superman and other heroes, not trusting anyone to render aid in his war against crime. Even the crusader's partner Robin gets short shrift in the praise department, so that the Boy Wonder suffers from an inferiority complex. Naturally, by the movie's end the Gotham Guardian reaches out and brings the Justice Leaguers together to fight the villains' giant Joker robot. As in Silver Age comics, both villains and heroes display a strong ability to think ahead and trip one another up. The voice-work is uniformly good, but Christopher Corey Smith's Joker stands out nicely. Extra points for working in a joke involving the Batcave's giant penny, and for the repeated uses of music from live-action Batman and Superman movies to add a sense of the epic.

GEN 13 (1998)

  

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

I suppose if I were trying to impress new viewers with an animated adaptation of a concept I had created-- particularly about a group of intertwined characters-- I would have favored the old "who they are and how they came to be" approach. Yet it's not a certainty, since I would have to make that decision knowing that two live-action movies adapting comics' FANTASTIC FOUR-- one of my all-time favorite franchises, BTW-- had taken that approach and had utterly failed to capture the appeal of the series. As a reader, I didn't follow GEN 13 from its beginnings in 1993, and only started picking up issues a few years later. While the series was never even close to the excellence of Classic FANTASTIC FOUR, it was a better than average formula superhero feature, so maybe an "in media res" strategy would have worked better.

The one-shot animated film GEN 13, though, goes the full origin route-- though it cuts down the membership of the team from five adolescent heroes to three. These teens belong to a group of "lab rats" who agree to let "Gen 13," an isolated scientific facility, research their reactions to a series of tests and training, without knowing that the administrators plan to instill super-powers in these subjects. The only three who get "Gen-Active" powers-- better known as "automatic X-Men mutations"-- are Caitlin, Roxy, and the comically nicknamed "Grunge." Caitlin, a skinny bookworm-girl, is the first to undergo transformation into a super-strong muscle-babe, and as soon as she does, all three of these tentative friends find themselves fighting for their lives against the evil manipulations of the Gen 13 bosses.

This plotline means almost the whole story is either action, or scenes leading up to action. The animators handle the kinetics well enough, though I can't say anything stood out for me. I appreciated that the script allowed for a few "adult" touches-- Roxy sneaking smokes, a few seconds showing Caitlin's boobs when she grows out of her clothes-- but for the most part the story is standard tame superheroics. The climactic fight allows the trio to get clear of Gen 13 with the help of a potential mentor-figure, which conclusion could have set up either a sequel or an ongoing series.

The least interesting aspect of GEN 13 is a character named Threshold, who works for Gen 13 and has super-powers himself, though he has a rather obvious secret familial relationship with one of the heroes. He's a dull character either as an outright enemy or as one of the facility's victims. Threshold may have appeared in some of the GEN 13 comics I didn't read, but he didn't deserve even this much exposure. Curiously, two regular members of the original team make token appearances in the video, with Bobby Lane getting only a visual cameo while Sarah Rainmaker gets a cameo with a couple of lines.

DARKSTALKERS (1995 ), NIGHT WARRIORS: DARKSTALKERS' REVENGE (1997-98)

 

 

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

DARKSTALKERS started out as a fighting-game from Capcom, who attempted to expand on the franchise twice, first with an American series aimed at kids, and then with a Japanese OVA series. Neither was overly successful and the franchise seems to have languished, apart from the occasional nostalgic comic book revival.

The 1995 show, lasting 13 episodes, quite naturally cut out any sexual or ultraviolent content. The game's original concept was that of an Earth which now harbors diverse monsters because the Earth-dimension began to merge with a demon-world, which wasn't a particularly good explanation for the existence of simple science-anomalies like the show's resident "Frankenstein," the bolt-necked "Victor von Gerdenheim." The TV show alluded to a panoply of elder races on Earth, which at least explained the super-hirsute people of the character Bigfoot and the ruins of Atlantis, inhabited by mer-folk and ruled by their king Rikou (named for Ricou Browning, the performer who did all or most of the swimming for The Creature from the Black Lagoon). But the other characters had occult origins: European vampire Dimitri, Chinese vampire Hsien-Ko, succubus Morrigan, werewolf John Talbain, cat-woman Felicia, mummy Anakaris, zombie rocker Lord Raptor, cursed samurai Bishamon, and monster-hunter Donovan Baine. For good measure, the American writers worked in a couple of Arthurian characters. Morrigan was descended from Morgan Le Fay and new insert-character Harry Grimoire was descended from Merlin. And all twelve characters were, in one episode or another, were pitted against the forces of the alien fire-being Pyron, who wished to press-gang the monsters-- i.e., "Darkstalkers"-- into becoming his soldiers in a plan to conquer Earth. Pyron did enlist Dimitri and Morrigan into his service, but the other Darkstalkers were so much trouble that Pyron probably would've been better off just going forward with his Earth-conquest schemes.

It's faint praise to state that I've seen many worse cartoon-shows than DARKSTALKERS, but I can see why the series flopped. In the first episode Felicia bonds with teenaged Harry, and they're usually the viewpoint characters through whose eyes the audience watches the latest designs of Pyron and his allies. But twelve characters, even though usually only four or five appeared per episode, were probably too many for kid-audiences to identify with, particularly since one could not "play" them as one could in the fighting-game. 

All the characterizations are one-note, though occasionally the writers threw in nuggets of sprightly humor to compensate for flat characters. (At least three times, different characters comment that Rikou, unlike his Gill-Man model, is uncannily handsome for a merman.) The show kept at least some sense of shifting loyalties, for the samurai Bishamon starts out serving under Pyron's general Dimitri but splits off when Dimitri acts without honor. The monster-hunter Baine takes an early dislike to Felicia, despite her being the least "monstrous" of the Darkstalkers, and to his last episode he still wants to duel her to the death.

The animation was rudimentary, though I did notice that the animators did come up with some good choreography for the many fight-scenes, and that they sometimes gave the characters interesting new powers. But the characters simply couldn't move well enough to impress even an audience that didn't have high expectations. The show's most interesting aspect was that in my opinion all the titular Darkstalkers, whether allied with or opposed to Pyron, form the ensemble of the series, instead of the "heroes" being the stars to whom the "villains" are subordinate.

Though there's not a lot to like about the 1995 TV show, I still preferred it to the OVA series. Once again, Pyron is the invader who puts the Earth in peril, though, as if seeking to confuse the narrative, the script also claims that the vampire Dimitri has somehow occluded the light of the sun so that it does not reach Earth. Neither the Pyron-plot nor the Dimitri-plot really contributes much coherence to the narrative. As if the writers sought to emulate the game, most of the sequences are just setups for different fight-scenarios: Felicia vs. Lord Raptor, Dimitri vs. Morrigan, and so on. Even after I listened to a podcast by a reviewer who liked the four OVA episodes more than I did, I still felt that nothing about the story hung together properly. The animation was many times better than that of the American show, but there was next to no attention paid to making even one character interesting. 

Ironically, both American and Japanese comics did better renditions of this grab-bag of monster-mash characters, so it's probably for the best if the franchise stays confined to that medium for the duration.

THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME (1979)

 

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

For my one or two previous viewings of THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME, I took the same sardonic view of the movie as most critics-- that it was just a dumb STAR WARS rip. And I'm not going to argue that it's any sort of neglected masterpiece. But for all its missteps-- some of which do relate to emulating George Lucas-- it's not nearly as bad as most penny-ante space operas of the seventies. If anything it hearkens back to the wide-eyed, gosh-wow SF-serials, such as BUCK ROGERS. SHAPE has nearly nothing to do with H.G. Wells' Pollyanna-paean to socialism, though there's one element of SHAPE that slightly resembles the battle of scientific adventurism vs. cultural conservatism in Alexander Korda's 1936 THINGS TO COME.

It's the far future, and a "robot war" has somehow resulted in most of the Earth being polluted by radiation. Though most of humanity has escaped to build an advanced civilization on the moon, the script loosely implies that all humans on Earth or on Luna need continual treatments for radiation sickness by a drug called Raddic-Q2. Almost none of the film's action takes place on Earth aside from a very brief side-trip, so humanity is entirely represented by the colony on the moon and a colony on a distant planet, Delta 3. Said planet is the sole source of Raddic-Q2, which may indicate that one or more of the writers did a little reading into DUNE, a science-fiction novel rumored to have inspired George Lucas.

The representative of lunar conservatism is the unenviably-named Senator Smedley (John Ireland), who wants to shut down a new moon-defense vessel, Starstreak. The voice of adventurism stems from John Caball (Barry Morse, whose character-name was borrowed from the Wells book), who argues that the ship is necessary. And with remarkable alacrity, Caball is proven right. The reigning governor of Delta-3 (Carol Lynley, also given an unimpressive name, that of "Nikki") has been forced into exile by a new tyrant in town. This is Omus (Jack Palance), and he presents two threats: cutting off Luna from its supply of the anti-radiation drug and attacking with a small coterie of robots.

Exposition-pause: I fully admit that these are very dumb-looking robots, once described as "oversized popcorn poppers," But to the extent that the flick brings up memories of cheesy serials, this is no worse a failing than a certain 1940s mechanical man Firesign Theater once described as "an enraged water heater." I could have lived without the film's comic-relief robot "Sparks," who falls in love with the leading lady and calls her his "dark lady of the sonnets."

When cautious Smedley won't take immediate action, Caball launches the Starstreak, crewed only by his son Jason (Nicholas Campbell), his maybe-girlfriend Kim (Anne-Marie Martin of SLEDGE HAMMER fame), and the silly robot. There's a short sojourn to Earth, apparently just to establish that there are radiation victims still there, though said victims don't look any more disease-wracked than the lunar denizens. For the most part the last half of the film drops the radiation angle and concentrates on humans fighting robots. Caball enjoys a heroic death, but Barry Morse gets a nice scene talking about how he was influenced by the "imagination" of the Greek philosophers. Then Jason has to take the fight to Omus for a distinctly underwhelming conclusion.

One thing the writers definitely did not take from Lucas is the colorlessness of its younger actors. Campbell and Martin have nothing interesting to do, and the script even gives Carol Lynley better scenes, to say nothing of placing so much emphasis on Morse and Ireland. Palance chews the scenery nicely, but he's just another routine tyrant. I can't say that the direction is anything special, but maybe SHAPE just hit a rare soft spot I occasionally have for cheap, clunky space operas.

JUNGLE HELL (1955)

  

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

I won't say that I burned with desire to see JUNGLE HELL. From everything I read, it was just a cheapjack "potted-plant jungle" flick from the mid-1950s, set in India but with a few moments of a flying saucer edited in to grab a potential SF-audience. But I kept  a weather-eye out for a free showing of the movie on streaming or on Youtube. Imagine my completist's outrage when I viewed a copy on Youtube, and it left out the lousy flying saucer!

Nevertheless, I'm counting HELL as a marvelous film even if I didn't see the marvelous content, because there are numerous online testimonies from others who saw the full inanity, such as this review of a DVD pairing of this film and an unrelated Sabu flick. Apparently HELL started out as a pilot for a "Sabu the Jungle Boy" series (which would have been in production during the last years of the "Bomba the Jungle Boy" film series), but no producers bit. I  don't know if credited director Norman Cerf was involved with the original project, but I find it interesting that this was his only directorial credit, and that almost everything else he did was related to editing. The first movie-version of the TV-footage definitely called for tons and tons of editing, for Cerf loaded at least twenty minutes of stock footage of various scenes from India, particularly of elephants doing stuff (including one lady elephant discreetly giving birth). Later, other hands apparently took Cerf's work, shortened it, and edited in the flying saucer stuff, with some voice-overs to explain what effect the saucer-people were having on the jungle, given that no aliens meet any of the characters, or even animals.

Far odder than the inserts is the fact that if you strip away the inserts and the stock footage, the "story" that was allegedly a TV pilot is an absolute mess. In both films and TV shows of the fifties, jungle-tales followed a very simple template, in which the heroes and villains are quickly established, as are the stakes over which the opponents are fighting. Impoverished though almost all the JUNGLE JIM movies and TV shows may be, at least they make sense as they trundle along from Plot Point A to Plot Points B and C. Maybe the incoherence proves that Cerf, credited also as the writer, WAS involved in the original project.

The basic conflict, such as it is, is the opposition between the superstitious ignorance of primitive Indian natives and the enlightened knowledge of White Bwanas, which was a common trope in many other jungle-genre works. Interposed between the two worlds is diaper-clad Sabu the Jungle Boy, who lives with his primitive people (though we never see a village as such) but standing foursquare with the Bwanas. The sole representative of Good White culture is Doctor Morrison (David Bruce of MAD GHOUL fame), though he's later joined by lady doctor Pamela (K.T. Stevens from MISSILE TO THE MOON). 

The exposure of a local kid to radioactive uranium sets up the conflict. Tribal wise man Shan-Kar (essentially an Indian version of an African witch doctor) merely fakes trying to cure the boy with mystic jargon (which I think is at least real Hindi). Sabu, a sort of local culture-hero, takes the boy to Morrison, who immediately cures the child of radiation poisoning, no muss, no fuss. But Morrison has a guest, a Russian named Trosk (for "Trotsky," no doubt). Unlike most Communist provocateurs in fifties flicks, Trosk is totally without any thug-backup, but somehow he wants to get his hands on the uranium and ship it back to his people. One would think that Trosk would eventually contend with either Sabu or his White Friends, but he never does. He lurks around, suggests an alliance between him and nasty know-nothing Shan-Kar, but nothing comes of that. Eventually, when Trosk is out in the jungle trying to steal the uranium, he's attacked by stock footage of a tiger (and a stuffed tiger) and he dies.

Actually, the only combative scenes in HELL take place between Sabu and fellow native youth, Kumar (Robert Cabal, later "Hey Soos" from RAWHIDE, who was seven years older than thirty-something Sabu). An odd bit of dialogue suggests that Sabu's title of "Jungle Boy" is some honorary title that isn't exclusive to him, since the hero tells Kumar something like, "When you're Jungle Boy, you can make the decisions!" At no time does the shaky script suggest that Sabu lives apart from other humans as Bomba did. There's one scene in which he summons an elephant, but there's no suggestion of any communion with animals. It would be easy to believe that Sabu the fictional character was simply a mahout, an elephant-handler, as indeed Sabu the actor had been-- though that wouldn't explain the elevated title.

The sloppy script doesn't really even bring home the lecture on the importance of converting ignorant natives to Western ways, and a romantic subplot between Morrison and Pamela may also be the worst romance ever seen in a jungle flick. Sabu is the movie's only asset, but thanks to the tons of stock footage, even the actor's fans will find this HELL particularly torturous.

On a side note I also watched the feature that joined HELL on the DVD, a 1951 production from Lippert Pictures called SAVAGE DRUMS. This item had no metaphenomenal content, aside from showing how the Asian "fire-walking" trick might be done. But this formula film, directed by a fellow who also helmed a handful of JUNGLE JIM entries, at least had the sort of A-B-C storytelling of which Norman Cerf could only dream.

ALADDIN (1992)

 

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

In some retellings of the Aladdin story, the protagonist is incredulous when he's sent into a room full of treasure (what the Disney ALADDIN script calls "the Cave of Wonders") and is instructed to bring back only a plain old lamp. 

I feel similarly nonplussed at the way the Disney ALADDIN swipes bits and pieces from the 1940 THIEF OF BAGHDAD, a copyrighted film released by United Artists, particularly since Disney is so litigious about anyone emulating any of their copyrighted works. But along with that puzzlement comes relief. All the things the Disney writers swiped were piddling oddments-- a sultan who likes to play with toys, a villain named Jafar (albeit with the spelling changed), and a hero's buddy named Abu (albeit changed from a human to a monkey). These elements in THIEF have great roles to play in the entire story, which I consider not just one of the great fantasy-films, but one of the great films of all time. But what Disney does with these elements is to change them into minor curiosities in a script with only modest ambitions. To mix metaphors a bit, it's as if someone stole a heap of gold from a treasure-room, but in the act of stealing it, changed it into a small pile of tin.

(Hmm, without getting into all the controversies that the opponents of "Orientalism" raised about this 1992 film-- how'd they miss that the scripters took a name that was originally applied to a Character of Color, played by an Actor of Color, and used the same name for a monkey?)

All that said, ALADDIN has its virtues. I'd like to think that the bravura opening isn't a swipe. In said opening, villainous Jafar tries to get the genie-bearing lamp from a Cave of Wonders that manifests as the head of a giant lion made of sand. In a movie brimming with nonsense-fantasy jokes, mostly stemming from a genie versed in Anachronism 101, the lion-headed treasure-cave is one of the few times ALADDIN tries to sell the viewer on pure wonder, the sort of fabulous strangeness that made Enlightenment Europe go nutty for the Thousand Nights and a Night. 

The rest of the movie is a cute love story with engaging doggerel-songs, fair action-scenes, and lots of zany comedy. This Aladdin, if he was at all borrowed from any THIEF-movie, is closest to the gamboling Douglas Fairbanks Sr from 1924, at least in terms of wanting to tweak the nose of authority. Disney-Aladdin is also a thief, but like Abu from 1940, he's willing to share his booty with those less well off than he is. Still, his yearning for better things takes us back to Fairbanks, who's redeemed from his lowly status by falling in love with High Society. His beloved from the good side of the tracks, Princess Jasmine, is more one-note, but then, most Arabian Nights princesses are not much better.

One interesting thing about the meet-cure of Aladdin and Jasmine-- who meet while Jasmine is going about incognito, not unlike the historical Haroun al-Rashid-- is that Aladdin defends her when she, like he, unthinkingly shares someone else's possessions with the less fortunate. Aladdin saves the princess with his fast-talking street-smarts, but later, once he's got hold of the genie, he wants to remake himself into his idea of an Ideal Man for the High-Society Set. So in a sense he's still running a con of sorts, and he has to learn the lesson that Honesty is the Best Policy, particularly in romance. 

I appreciate some of the script's verisimilitude-details. Unlike some of the original retellings of the tale, Jafar can only get the lamp if he uses a pawn with a particular strength of character, so that his selection of Aladdin is pretty well motivated. Jafar's ideal of marrying Jasmine to gain the throne comes out of left field, but I'm certainly glad the script didn't impute real romantic feeling to this very flat villain, in contrast to the "real" 1940 Jaffar. And there's good byplay between the evil vizier and his hench-parrot Iago, voiced by the inimitable Gilbert Gottfried.

I can't say the same for the "good" support-characters. A little of the monkey Abu went a long way, and when the film also introduced a sentient flying carpet, a tiger, and (late in the game) an elephant, I felt I was drowning in sidekick-schtick. Robin Williams' Genie of the Lamp is a slightly different kettle of fish. He's not only the source of most of the manic humor; he's also the dopey friend who sometimes says wise things, and so he's more crucial to the Reformation of Aladdin. I could have lived without the B-plot of Aladdin promising to release Genie from bondage, though.

ALADDIN was a feel-good success, spawning two sequels and a TV show, so in a sense it's somewhat immune to criticism. But just for the accomplishment of translating the appeal of Robin Williams into animation, I'd give it high marks in the realm of fantasy-comedies.  

HONOR ROLL #255

"Mister ALADDIN, sir, what will your pleasure be?" (Aside from swiping from THIEF OF BAGDAD...)                                                  

DAVID BRUCE only thought that making "Jungle Hell" was like real hell.

NICHOLAS CAMPBELL wasn't responsible for shaping a bad movie from a bad book. 

Good and bad monsters formed the ensemble known as THE DARKSTALKERS.                                                                             

       

Though I'm listing all the members of GEN 13 for this entry, the one called Fairchild was the one who commanded the greatest fannish enthusiasm.                                                                                              

Where Lego Batman goes, can LEGO JOKER be far behind?                 

SPAWN (1997)

 

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

I never read more than random issues of the 1990s SPAWN comic when it broke sales records of the day. However, I've viewed a podcast which makes a pretty good case that over the years the series-- whether executed by creator Todd MacFarlane or by other hands-- never really climbed out of its rut. With that in mind, the live-action SPAWN perfectly represents its source material, though that doesn't make it any easier to slog through.

In essence, the SPAWN concept is the story of a sinner stuck between Heaven and Hell, whose "purgatory" consists of a never-ending war against Hell's minions. Al Simmons (Michael Jai White) is a government hitman, but you know he's a potentially good guy because he's handsome, has a hot wife named Wanda(Theresa Randle), and wants to quit killing people for a living. (I don't think he expresses any regrets for his targets though.) He takes his orders from corporate scumbag Jason Wynn (Martin Sheen), but Wynn decides that Simmons is a dangerous wild card and has Simmons shot and burned to death by another agent, Jessica Priest (Melinda Clarke, playing a character original to the film). 

The spirit of Simmons manifests in the Hell of the demon Malebolgia, who offers the dead man a deal: that he will be allowed to return to Earth if he accepts the bargain to lead an army of demons against Heaven. Why Malebolgia thinks Simmons to be such a great catch is not elaborated. Simmons accepts the deal, but it comes with some hidden clauses. Simmons does get some snazzy "necroplasm" armor that he can manipulate with his mind, including being able to whip a long red cape whenever, er, the budget permits it. But his flesh remains burned all over, and in the earth-world five years have passed. After her husband's death Wanda re-married so that her child Cyan would have a father, and the new hubby/dad is none other than Simmons' old partner Terry. 

Frustrated by this turn of events, Simmons, now known as Spawn, starts bumming around a demimonde of homeless people. There he becomes the bone over which two "dogs" fight. One is the obscene clown Violator (John Leguizamo), a servant of Malebolgia and a fellow who's taken elocution lessons from Michael Keaton's Beetlejuice. The other is the mystic Cogliostro (Nicol Williamson in his final film role), a former Hellspawn who now serves Heaven. However, there's not much to their ethical quarrel, and Spawn is still motivated only by the lust for vengeance. This dubious hero is eventually turned to serve the forces of good, but the conversion never seems like anything but a forced plot point.

Direction and special FX are pedestrian, but an imaginative script still might have salvaged something from this farrago. However, the only slightly imaginative scenes are those in which Violator is running his mouth, uttering various PG-rated blasphemies. When this character isn't on screen, everything slows down, even the action scenes. 

SPAWN was one of several films in which Hollywood adapted superheroes not produced by the more high-end Marvel and DC. Perhaps the studios were seeking properties that didn't cost much up front. However, the next-year success of the minor Marvel franchise BLADE might have convinced the money-men to pay more on the front end, since the early 2000s would focus almost exclusively in Marvel or DC properties.

PRINCE OF SPACE (1959)

 

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

It's a personal preference that on this blog I never review "compilation films," that is, feature-length films made by cannibalizing either the chapters of a longer serial or episodes of a television series. I will probably make an exception if I encounter a situation where, say, an original chapterplay has been lost and the compilation is all that's left of it. And someday I may choose to review the four films made from a Japanese TV-show, SUPERGIANT, because it's extremely unlikely that I will ever have access to dubbed or subbed episodes of the series.

PRINCE OF SPACE is a slightly different animal. There was a TV show running in Japan's late 1950s, though the actual title was more like "Prince Planet." However, the makers of the teleseries also released two separate short movies, both reputedly an hour in length, to Japanese cinema in 1959. I have heard it said that the Japanese producers sold both short films to the U.S. and that someone over here spliced both movies into a dubbed version, also running just under an hour. This English-language version is apparently the version that MST3K utilized when they spoofed the movie. But before writing this review, I came across a Japanese version of PRINCE on Tubi, but with English-language subtitles-- which is what I'll review here.

Like the slightly later INVASION OF THE NEPTUNE MEN, the most interesting part of PRINCE is the dreamlike way in which the superhero of the title comes into being, sans anything like an origin. And like NEPTUNE, the film's opening foregrounds a little bit of "launch envy" on the part of the Japanese culture of that period.

So three adults and three kids sit around the dinner table. I think one of the kids belongs to a youngish couple there, but the only people necessary to remember are the other adult, an older man named Doctor Maki, and the other two kids, a boy named Ichiro and his sister Kimiko. After some incidental conversation, another adult shows up, name of Waku (Tatsuo Unemiya). Confab establishes that Waku is an unmarried shoeshine man who for some reason has been granted custody of Ichiro and Kimiko, even though they are not related to Waku. The talk quickly shifts topics as the young woman remarks that, thanks to Doctor Maki's great new rocket fuel, "the world's first ever rocket is going to be launched from here." In other words, in the film's world Japan has stolen a march on both Russian and U.S. space programs, though Maki generously credits a U.S. scientist with providing "materials."

Then, as the kids try to watch TV, their reception-- and that of everyone in Japan, if not all Earth-- has to listen to a rant from "Ambassador Phantom of Planet Silver." Phantom asserts that he and his crew will land near Tokyo shortly, and that he will brook no interference from the locals. Naturally, a (very small) crowd of reporters and military men show up at a landing site. However, as soon as the alien ship lands, so does a smaller saucer-craft. Out of the latter ship steps the mask-wearing Prince of Space, who warns the aliens away. Inside his ship Phantom orders his ship to fire on the Prince, who easily nullifies the weapon. The Planet Silver ship flees and eludes pursuit by the Prince's ship.

After that initial exchange of hostilities, the film settles into a series of similar short conflicts between the Prince and the Silverites. It comes out that despite the Silverites's spacefaring technology, they want to steal Doctor Maki's rocket fuel formula. The closest anyone comes to dealing with this discrepancy is that someone suggests that the invaders just don't have enough fuel, but if they had Maki's formula, they could fuel a whole flotilla of ships instead of just one.

I've left out one visual aspect of the aliens (whose planet is named "Krankor" in the English dub): they're all humanoids with long beaked noses. Some, particularly Phantom, wear ruff-like collars, and this appearance led the MST3K jesters to make lots of chicken jokes. Without this wacky touch of alien physiognomy, probably PRINCE would never have been as rife for spoofing. Compared to the uninhibited wackiness of the slightly later kaiju films, or later superhero shows, PRINCE is pretty dull, with very brief fight-scenes and lots of talking heads. I assume most Japanese kids would have guessed that mild-mannered shoeshine man Waku is in reality the world-protecting Prince of Space, particularly when the Prince gives "his" kids a signal-device with which to contact him. But in the two versions I've seen, the Prince never decisively unveils his true identity, and there's no clue as to where he gets his technology.

The most remarkable thing is that, though one would expect the subtitled version to run longer than the MST3K entry, they're about the same. Also, whatever extra scenes the subbed version may contain-- and I didn't attempt a side-by-side comparison-- the sub does NOT contain the climax on Planet Silver, wherein the hero rescues captive scientists from Phantom and defeats a giant humanoid. The subbed version just sort of peters out after an inconclusive battle between hero and villain. I can only assume that the subbed version on Tubi was prepared by the Japanese for some other market, but that they didn't have access to that climactic footage for some reason. And that's a very small pity, since the confrontation on Silver/Krankor is the best part of the original film.

ADDENDUM: Thanks to making inquiries on the Classic Horror Film Board, I've learned that the version on Tubi streaming is most probably the first of the two "Prince Planet" movies, subbed for the fan-market. This explains why the Tubi item contains no scenes from the second film. That short movie, technically titled "Prince Planet: the Terrifying Spaceship," has not as yet been subbed for the fan-market, so that as of this writing, one can only see second-film footage in the recut American version from the 1960s. Therefore, my review really applies to the short film "Prince Planet," while the title "Prince of Space" should really apply only to the American recut. But I probably won't change the title of this review unless "Spaceship" comes into my purview.