LAS VAMPIRAS (1969)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical*                                                                                                                                                 LAS VAMPIRAS was the second feature film to star wrestler-actor Mil Mascaras, but by the end of that decade, director Frederico Curiel had devoted more than a fair share of his career to luchador-movies, having turned out a generous sampling of Santo and Neutron flicks, not to mention THE SHADOW OF THE BAT, which was IMO the best of the Blue Demon films. VAMPIRAS is also noteworthy as one of a handful of Mexican films made by John Carradine. Had I paid anything for the price of seeing this, Carradine alone would have been worth the price of admission, for the veteran performer overacts wildly, possibly confident that none of his countrymen would ever see any of his south-of-the-border efforts.     

  Though Mil Mascaras is the hero, he doesn't have very many memorable scenes, in terms of either dialogue or fight-scenes. This may be because Curiel wanted to justify his title by concentrating on the female bloodsuckers of the title, who dwarf Carradine's vampire character "Branus" in terms of screen-time. Mil comes to Some Mexican City to engage in a wrestling-gig, but he learns that his opponent, like other sports-figures in the city, has been mysteriously abducted. Mil himself witnesses a car crash in which the drivers disappear, and he sees only bats flitting away. I don't think the vampire cult tries to abduct Mil, but while he's researching vampires, he makes contact with a reporter named Carlos (Pedro Armendariz Jr) who has a passion for the subject. Mil and Carlos team up to investigate a local cemetery, but rather than finding the cult, they unleash a female vampire imprisoned there, who joins up with the cult right away.                                                                               

  It's not easy to piece together the order of events here, but prior to the movie's story, the original Dracula was slain by mortals, possibly the same ones who imprisoned his wife Velia (Maria Duval) in the tomb. When Velia shows up at the cult's hideout, the bloodsucker in control is not Count Branus (Carradine), but a new leader named Aura (Marta Romero). She controls about a dozen female vampires, all garbed in green tights, but aside from Branus the only males in the group are the kidnapped sportsmen, who have been turned into slaves. As for Branus, Aura has confined him to a metal cage. Somehow a splinter of wood got lodged in Branus' brain, so that he now acts erratically and seems to have lost his powers. Branus does act oddly but it's not certain that Aura just wants him sidelined so that she can control the others.                                                                   

 Although Velia and Aura are rivals for the throne, they make common cause to get rid of Mil and Carlos. Their opening stratagems fail, but when the heroes manage to access the hideout, the two females are fighting for supremacy (oddly, with torches). Then the ladies decide that they want the two humans to fight one another to see who's worthy to join their ranks. Mil and Carlos fake a battle until they get the chance to use their weapons to destroy the whole clutch of vampires, including Branus. This description might sound a bit bare-bones, but Curiel tosses in a number of interesting comic touches. For instance, even in human form all the vamp-girls have batlike wings that hang down behind them, and when the henchwomen aren't doing anything in particular, they let their arms rise and fall, as if their instinct is to keep flapping their "wings." There are some peculiar bits of dialogue too, often from Carradine. But since I didn't write anything down, the interested reader will have to check out VAMPIRAS' loony charms for himself.  

TERMINATOR GENISYS (2015)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, sociological*                                                                                                                          The slight improvement I saw in the fourth TERMINATOR film, TERMINATOR SALVATION, was not maintained when the franchise shifted to a new production company. The creators hired by that company then sought to extend the already muddled mythology into the idea of alternate timelines, which had been implied in the third movie in the series. This resulted in a summer blockbuster that made a lot of money-- at least partly due to Arnold Schwarzenegger's return to the role of "T-800 As Protector" that had resonated so well with nineties audiences-- but GENISYS also increased the franchise's reputation for being less a meditation on the evils of technology and more a funhouse mirror designed mostly to distract and disconcert.                                                                                     

In fairness, part of the attraction of JUDGMENT DAY was that it reworked the pitiless, implacable image of the original Terminator into an almost-human protector to Young John Connor. The change of the formerly helpless Sarah Connor into a skilled master of combat was almost as extreme, but in that reworking, James Cameron managed to give emotional depth to his extension. Both the third and fourth films failed to formulate strong storylines, but they still had occasional flashes of said depth. GENISYS is the first TERMINATOR iteration I found to be almost completely without any emotional intensity, even though one of its key re-imaginings is that, for some reason never clarified, a T-800 (Schwarzenegger) travels back to the era when Sarah was a young girl and becomes her de factor father from then on (she calls him "Pops") after a T-1000 kills Sarah's parents.                                                                                 

   Possibly there was some explanation for this anomaly that was lost in the shuffle, but in the future-world of Grownup John Connor (Jai Courtney), the events of the first TERMINATOR transpire just mostly as expected. But just before Kyle Reece (Jason Clarke) begins his time-trip, John Connor is attacked by an entity from the almost defeated Skynet. Somehow this creates an alternate timeline for time-traveler Reece, so that he journeys to the timeline where Grownup Sarah Connor (Emilia Clarke) has been raised by "Pops" to become a gun-toting badass. This Sarah is fully aware that she's supposed to mate with Kyle to produce John, but all of those emotional storms are lost when John, now mutated into some sort of Nano-Terminator, also travels to the time when the Terminating Trio are attempting to nullify Skynet-- although now that time is 2017, and Skynet is part of Genisys, a sort of glorified Iphone network.                 

The many convolutions of the plot don't matter given that the film has no meaningful center. The "man is too dependent on machines" trope gets dusted off for another outing, and eventually, even in the midst of Things Blowing Up Good, Kyle and Sarah more or less get together. The two (unrelated) Clarkes do as well as they can with these limited roles, but ostensibly GENISYS was not a happy shoot, so that experience may have colored their performances. Arnold gets a fair number of decent lines, but nothing as memorable as his work in T2, while Courtney makes a bland villain. J.K. Simmons, playing an older version of a minor character from the 1984 film, provides a few light moments. Despite good box office, GENISYS failed to generate further iterations of this timeline and the franchise was again rebooted to 2019's DARK FATE, which I have not yet seen but for which I don't have high expectations.

THE TITANS (1962)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical, psychological*                                                                                                                         SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS                                                                                                                                                           THE TITANS-- given the spoofy title MY SON THE HERO in an American release-- isn't representative of what the Italian peplum-subgenre was, but I sure wish it had been. Duccio Tessari hit this one out of the park in his first directorial outing, though to be sure he had scripted or co-scripted about a dozen historical-adventure movies before TITANS. Possibly he decided he was going to throw his best efforts with respect to action, comedy and pageantry into this film, which ended up being his last real contribution to the subgenre. It's possible that Tessari's collaboration with long-time writer Ennio de Concini, who'd also labored in peplum-fields, resulted in the superior script. (They'd also collaborated, along with several other authors, on the above average GOLIATH AND THE DRAGON in 1960, but IMDB lists only De Concini and Tessari as co-writers for TITANS.)                                                                           

 In my peplum-reviews I've often picked at movies that jumbled mythological motifs. However, TITANS messes with a lot of archaic stories but produces a story that's logical on its own terms. In Greek mythology, Cadmus is a culture hero who founds the city of Thebes, and he marries Harmonia, a female occasionally given associations with ill luck. In TITANS, we first see Cadmo, King of Crete (Pedro Armendariz) and Ermione (Antonella Lualdi) in a subterranean cavern filled with mists. This is apparently the legendary Cave of the Sibyl. The two newly married royals have brought along two others: the dead body of Cadmo's previous wife and the infant daughter she birthed before Cadmo murdered the mother. The Sibyl knows exactly what the sinful couple have done and asserts that the gods of Olympus will destroy them. Further, the Sibyl claims that when the king's daughter Antiope grows to womanhood, her lover will slay Cadmo. Also, the king will die if he kills his daughter, so he, like the villains of the Jason and Perseus myths, must allow the seed of destruction to grow-- though Cadmo plans to keep Antiope cloistered so that she cannot meet men. (Parenthetically, in some variations Antiope is the name of Cadmus's mother.) And to block the possibility of immediate vengeance from Jove on high, Cadmo and Ermione bathe in the waters of the subterranean cave, becoming invulnerable to harm, as Achilles was rendered by the waters of the River Styx. (Incidentally, a minor character in TITANS is named Achilles.)                                                                                               

 Though Cadmo compounds his crime of murder by setting himself up as the God of Crete, Jove in his heavens tolerates this impiety for the next twenty years, until the babe Antiope grows into a nubile princess (Jacqueline Sassard). At this point Jove decides to liberate one of the heroic Titans whom he Jove condemned to Tartarus. Said hero is the youngest and cleverest Titan, Krios (Guiliano Gemma), though he isn't told that he's supposed to fall in love with Antiope.                 

  To get close to Cadmo for the purpose of wreaking holy vengeance, Krios becomes one of the king's gladiators. This allows him the chance to "meet cute" with Antiope. The young Titan wins the court's favor by overcoming a boulder-shouldered Black African combatant named Rator, but the generous hero also asks the King to spare Rator's life. But then Evil Cadmo decides he wants to stage his own version of "The Most Dangerous Game" with Rator as the quarry, and though Krios seeks to temporize, Cadmo's pursuit finally corners Rator near a cliffside. At this point Krios has to reveal his mission to condemn the king to Hades. Ermione shows up with reinforcements, and since Krios' sword just breaks on the flesh of the invulnerable king, the Titan and his new buddy are forced to jump off the cliff to escape, seven years before Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid did the same. (By an odd coincidence Gemma and Tessari collaborated that same year on a western comedy, and an American marketer retitled it "Sundance Cassidy and Butch the Kid.")                                                                                         

  Since Krios has taken his best shot at doing things the mortal way, he then starts seeking to use supernatural weapons. From Tartarus he acquires an invisibility helmet and infiltrates Cadmo's castle, but his main mission is to find Antiope. Krios learns that his love has been moved to an island guarded by a Gorgon, complete with petrifying gaze, so Krios has got to do a Perseus to get past her. Krios rescues his princess, but Cadmo and Ermione get the upper hand again. Krios prays to Jove for help, calling Jove his "father" (maybe metaphorically?), and Jove releases the other eight male Titans from Tartarus to render aid. The big confrontation returns to the Sibyl's Cave, as Cadmo mounts one last defense, and Krios essentially performs the function of Jove by sending the evildoer to Greek Hell. Before watching TITANS, which I only saw once before some thirty years ago, I would have said Tessari's 1975 ZORRO was his best work. But now TITANS is my fave Tessari work, my favorite peplum, and will henceforth appear on my list of the hundred best magical-fantasy films, if I ever compile one. (Addendum: I included the category "clansgression" for this movie because of a line in which Antiope claims to be "consecrated" to her father the God of Crete, but this doesn't imply any incestuous intent on Cadmo's part, as I don't even think Cadmo and Antiope even have scenes together.)                                  

THE BRAWL BUSTERS (1978)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*, 
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological*                                                                                                                                                       The streaming title for this Korean-made revenge-fest is the horribly generic DRAGON FROM SHAOLIN. However, the American title THE BRAWL BUSTERS, while meaningless, at least doesn't sound like a million other kung fu flicks. That said, there's almost nothing else to say about BUSTERS. The identities of the characters and their motives are barely sketched out. An older kung-fu fighter named Tien holds his province in a grip of terror. But a strange female, usually called "The Mistress of Purity Manor," starts knocking off Tien's henchmen with the help of a coterie of female kung-fu fighters. This formidable woman is named (I think) Shao  (Seo Yeong-Ran), and several years ago, Tien killed Shao's father. Fortunately, a wandering Shaolin priest finds Baby Shao and teaches her martial arts so that she can take vengeance. A couple of male fighters get involved in Shao's quest, but their motives proved impenetrable. As one of the very few reviews online observed, the only notable aspect of BUSTERS is that it tosses in a lot of weapons: a scarf that can lengthen to a yard long to strangle a victim, a room with closing walls, and circular saw-blades that can be flung at enemies but will zoom back to the thrower's hands like boomerangs. Oh, and there's one scene in which Shao is attacked by ninjas in differently colored garments. This is significant only because one of the BUSTERS producers was Tomas Tang, who became infamous in the eighties for unleashing on videostores a horde of cheap ninja flicks, which also often contained multicolored ninjas.  

SERENADE FOR TWO SPIES (1965)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *irony*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological*                                                                                                                                              SERENADE is one of the few West German Eurospy films that has a strong Germanic character, though Italy had something to do with the production. Most of the major characters are played by German actors, with only minor contributions from "names" like the American Brad Harris and Italian Tony Kendall, and even though large parts of the story take place in the United States, it's very much a European's treatment of "America as exotic locale." The rambling narrative even wanders from San Francisco to Nevada just so that the hero can contend with guys in cowboy hats.                                 

  The story begins in a farcical mode as John Krim, Agent 006 1/2 (Helmut Lange), gets his assignment, with lots of daffy references to James Bond and Goldfinger. But SERENADE isn't really a comedy with lots of joke-setups, but what I consider an irony, devoted to loosely satirizing the tropes of the superspy genre. Director/co-writer Michael Phlegar doesn't come up with a very pointed satire, but I have the impression that he was focused on inverting just one major superspy trope: that of the spy as a Don Juan who never gets tied down to one woman. To counter this favored trope, the story puts Krim more or less in the hands of the mystery girl Tamara (a radiant Barbara Lass). Is she an ally who keeps giving Krim romantic overtures, but still plays coy, or a foe working for the villains? She seems to want to vex and confuse the hero, and there's even an amusing scene in Nevada where Tamara dresses up like a cowgirl and lassos Krim, just to mess with him. Since Lass's Tamara is so central to the plot-- essentially a co-star to Lange's Krim-- I'm not giving much away to say that she's one of the good guys. But her real threat is not that she's going to murder him, but to marry him, and the goofy ending implies that Krim's going to get hog-tied by matrimony no matter what. A lot of spy-flicks loosely end with the secret agent bonding with his leading lady, so that there's at least the possibility of connubial bliss, but few if any really show the hero getting dragged to the altar.                                                                             

  There's also another duplicitous damsel whom Krim names "Goldfeather" because she never mentions her actual name. She shows up in his hotel room as a maid and delivers him an exploding breakfast roll (which is the most uncanny thing we get in the film). But it's not clear that she knew the roll was really a bomb, and later on she saves Krim from death, so maybe she's one of those bad girls who turns good due to the hero's sex appeal. It's almost impossible to follow who the villains are, and though they're said to be pursuing some sort of "laser rifle" tech, we never see so much as a prototype, so I think the script just threw in a laser reference because there was a laser in the GOLDFINGER movie. Though Krim doesn't have any secret agent devices, he can fight passably well, though an early sequence shows him running from a rumble with a bunch of garishly clad henchmen. Toward the end there's a hallucinatory scene in which Krim and a few allies seem to be standing around on the floor of a lake with no ill effects, shooting it out with enemy spies, but this is clearly just the director's brief visit to Surrealism Alley, with no relevance to the main story. I can't say I found SERENADE as funny as I think its creators thought it was, but I have to appreciate that this is one time the male spy doesn't get to be the cock of the walk-- though Goldfeather does get a pretty good look at an unclad Krim in his bathroom.               

GIANTESS BATTLE ATTACK (2022)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological*                                                                                                                                               This same-year sequel to ATTACK OF THE 50 FOOT CAM GIRL might be considered a tiny improvement, to the extent that I smiled at one or two of the jokes. The main appeal remains director Jim Wynorski's attempt to out-bosom the oeuvre of Russ Meyer, with a side-dish of giantess-fetishism.                                                   

One improvement is that the first film got the dull setup stuff out of the way. We find out that a couple of people who got giant-ized earlier have returned to normal size, but Beverly Wood (Ivy Smith) is still a fifty-foot freak, though the scientists who created the growth substance are still working on a cure. Last time Wynorski borrowed the main plot from 1958's ATTACK OF THE 50-FOOT WOMAN, right down to the infidelity angle. But this time he takes a leaf from the 1933 SON OF KONG, wherein promoter Carl Denham suffers numerous lawsuits because of the destruction Kong wrought. But here it's "Monstrous Beverly" who loses her shirt (so to speak) trying to make up for the damage she caused. Her boyfriend Mike gets her a job working construction, but a sleazy con artist talks Beverly into staging a catfight with another giantess for the cam-audience.           

It just so happens, though, that a warrior-woman from a planet of giantesses decides to descend to Earth and challenge Beverly to single combat. The new arrival's name is Spa-Zor (Kiersten Hall), and I confess I didn't catch the pun until one of the Earthwomen mispronounced it on purpose. Thus, the film culminates in a three-way fistfight between Spa-Zor, Beverly, and Beverly's intended opponent, "Anna Conda," though as a fight it's as bland as the one from the first film. The writer throws in a couple of SF-media jokes that don't land, one from STAR TREK and the other from THIS ISLAND EARTH, but I must admit the sex-humor involving "spelunking" provided the movie's one clever moment.     
      

HONOR ROLL #269

 Attack of the Fifty-Foot Alien Giantess, KIERSTEN HALL (the one throwing the punch, I think).                                                                         

Serenade for Two Actors Whose Names End in "L": HELMUT LANGE and BARBARA LASS.                                                            

Is SEO YEONG-RAN an also-ran?                                                            

PEDRO ARMENDARIZ only wishes he had a son as heroic as a Titan.                                                                                                           

Two CLARKES, JASON and EMILIA, for the price of one.                       

MARIA DUVAL is one of the evil "vampiras" distressing the many faces of Mil Mascaras.                                                                                    

 

BATMAN: YEAR ONE (2011)

 

 

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

Though Frank Miller's BATMAN: YEAR ONE was published the year after his classic work THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS, I've never thought that the second Bat-project held up as well. ONE dealt with Batman in his youngest crimefighting years, just as RETURNS dealt with him returning to the fray in his more advanced years. I respect ONE for accomplishing its fairly limited aims, but to this day I've not reviewed it, since I don't have much to say about it.

The DVD adaptation of ONE is arguably stronger than the DVD of RETURNS, given that the earlier graphic novel was packed with many convolutions and bits of business that the adapters felt constrained to omit. In contrast, the storyline of ONE was very straightforward and so required less tailoring.

Miller's careful parallelism between Bruce Wayne (Ben McKenzie) and James Gordon (Bryan Cranston) is maintained from the start, in that both characters arrive in Gotham at the same time. For Wayne, his advent is a return to the painful site of his parents' murder after 12 years' absence, during which he has been training himself to become a scourge of the underworld. For Gordon, Gotham is a refuge after some unspecified departmental conflict at his previous position as a police lieutenant Somewhere Else. 

While Wayne's only contact in Gotham is his butler Alfred, who knows of and abets his master's plans, Gordon brings with him his pregnant wife Barbara. Gordon hopes to build a new life for his wife and future child, but he's almost immediately dismayed by the unremitting corruption of the Gotham police department. He encounters this corruption mostly in the form of the present commissioner Loeb and his flunky Arnold Flass, both of whom are deep-dyed villains from start to finish. Slowly, over the course of Year One, Gordon carves out his own niche in Gotham as a honest cop who gets some of the police force and the local newspapers on his side-- though this means, in part, beating the hell out of Flunky Flass.

By contrast, Wayne knows what he wants to do, but not how to do it. He's not yet had his "I shall become a bat" moment. This transpires only after he's made a disguised foray into Gotham's red-light district-- a foray which bombs spectacularly. But once he assumes the role of Batman, Wayne's ability to handle crises seems to expand exponentially. Inevitably, even honest cops regard this caped vigilante as a lawbreaker, so that Batman spends a lot of time dealing with cops of all types, particularly the corrupt ones who work hand in glove with organized crime. He uses a number of low-level uncanny gimmicks most of the time, but at one point activates a sonic beacon that calls dozens of bats to help the hero confound the police-- the only marvelous element in the narrative.

Gordon not only tries to bring down Batman in, he comes close to discovering the masked man's double identity. But Gordon also succumbs to temptation, cheating on his pregnant wife with an attractive policewoman. This plot-thread helps to humanize Gordon but doesn't add much to the overall story.

The least cohesive element in ONE is a subplot about Selina Kyle. The DVD plays down her status as a hooker, though she still "meets" Bruce Wayne when he's still in his pre-Batman phase-- a meeting in which the two of them exchange kung-fu blows in the street. The series didn't explain why a prostitute possessed superlative martial arts skills, and did even less to account for why, upon beholding the costumed vigilante, Kyle should suddenly decide to dress up in a cat-costume and commit cat-burglaries. This was the weakest part of the original comic, so it's also just as ill-conceived in the adaptation.

If the actual story is just adequate, the voice-work by Cranston, McKenzie and Eliza Dushku (as the future Catwoman) is extremely good. (Three years after this DVD, McKenzie would take on the role of a Young Jim Gordon for the 2014 teleseries GOTHAM.) The animators successfully duplicate the spare, clean artwork of the series-artist David Mazzucchelli. It's a good basic adaptation of a basic story with some narrative problems, and nothing more.

DRACULA: SOVEREIGN OF THE DAMNED (1980)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical, psychological*                                                                                                                        As much as I admire the Marv Wolfman-Gene Colan epic that I've termed THE FALL OF DRACULA, I never would have thought anyone would have selected it as the first feature-length adaptation of a Marvel story. After all, one reason Marvel allowed Wolfman and Colan to devote the last three years of TOMB OF DRACULA to the vampire lord's tragic demise was that the comic's sales had declined. Many comics-fans esteemed the feature, but who in the early eighties cared what comics-fans thought?                                    

This ninety-minute feature (give or take a few minutes) premiered on Japanese television first and appeared in American venues like cable and video stores a couple of years later. I speculate that Toei Studios weren't so much engrossed with the TOMB OF DRACULA iteration as with the possibility of forging profitable working arrangements with Marvel Comics. To be sure, the name of Dracula certainly commanded its share of attention among Japanese audiences, just as had the name of King Kong back in 1966, when Toei produced a version of the great ape's adventures for American television. It's of passing interest that the very next year after SOVEREIGN, Toei produced a TV-film that freely adapted Mary Shelley's FRANKENSTEIN, supposedly "licensed by Marvel Entertainment," though I saw no resemblance between the TV-film and Marvel's 1970s take on the Monster. Apparently around the same time, Toei had something to do with the rather charmless 1981 SPIDER-MAN cartoon, so a relationship did develop, even though SOVEREIGN probably didn't contribute anything more than a "trial run."                                                                                                            

So how does SOVEREIGN rate next to the excellent source material? Well, apparently some literal-minded studio boss instructed writer Tadaaki Yamazaki to boil down almost everything in the last three-year run into ninety minutes, possibly trying to impress Marvel with Toei Studio's fidelity. Given that impossible task, Yamazaki deserves credit for a yeoman effort. Naturally he doesn't keep such franchise-characters as the Silver Surfer, who made a brief appearance in the long comics-arc, and though Dracula's daughter Lilith makes an appearance, someone renamed her "Layla" even though she keeps the same comic-book attire, and she's not said to be Drac's progeny, at least in the English dub. Yamazaki radically simplified the vampire-lord's origins from the comic as well. Dracula still starts out as the 16th-century warlord Vlad Tepes, a man who commits extreme cruelties to defend his country. But in SOVEREIGN, Vlad dies and Satan himself raises the warlord from death to become his agent of evil. In the comics-story Satan played a much less active role in Dracula's travails.                      

In FALL, Dracula wants to build a base of power, in part to better deal with his vampire-hunting enemies: the wheelchair-bound Quincy Harker (renamed "Hans" in the anime), Rachel Van Helsing, and Drac's distant relation Frank Drake. To this power-gathering end, Dracula finds his way to a Satanist cult, one which is about sacrifice a virgin bride to the demon, and he impersonates Satan in order to control the worshippers. Yamazaki brings in new motives: Dracula resents Satan's manipulations and intends to kill the devil's bride, named Dolores in the anime, just for spite. But after abducting Dolores, the vampire and the aborted sacrifice fall in love within mere minutes. The script does not dwell on what passes between them, but somehow the undead count begets a son on Dolores. I suppose nine months pass until the boy is born, though I'm not sure why Satan, pissed at having his bride stolen, is willing to wait that long for vengeance.                                                                               

  However much time goes by, things come to a head when the three vampire hunters overtake Dracula, while Satan instructs his followers to slay the vampire and his bride. Before Dracula can kill all the Satanists, one of them unleashes gunfire that kills the newborn. The distraught parents bury the unnamed child, but this time Heaven apparently intervenes. The babe is brought back to life, becoming a golden skinned adult who calls himself Janus, and he fights with Dracula in the name of Heaven. (A later section implies that Dolores brought Janus to life with some hidden power, but this doesn't affect the plot at all.) In the comic Janus' conflicts with Dracula go on for a while, but the script races on to the next high point: Dracula contending with Satan himself.                                       

Satan plays his trump card and removes Dracula's powers, making him into an ordinary mortal. In this form the vampire hunters won't attack him, but Dracula is desperate to recover his lost status. In New York he tries to get Layla to bite him and re-vampirize him, but she kicks him to the curb. Drac travels to Transylvania seeking help from the other vampires there, but a new lord has arisen in the meantime, and a mortal Dracula has to fight him. Drac gets his powers back, but the vampire-hunters show up, and Harker sacrifices himself to destroy the vampire-lord for all time, The End.

   

Obviously SOVEREIGN has far too many plot-threads to give any of them proper development, and no one who didn't know the source-material would be able to navigate the flood of barely explained characters and incidents. But Yamazaki does succeed in one department: he, like Marv Wolfman, makes the monstrous central character both noble and ruthless in a compelling manner.  The animators do a fine job translating the Colan images of the Count into limited movement as well-- though all of the other characters suffer by comparison, in terms of both art and writing. In the final analysis, this first feature adaptation of a Marvel comic must be judged a failure. But at least it's an interesting failure. 

NINJA CHEERLEADERS (2008)

  

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

Despite the title, there's not a lot to distinguish NINJA CHEERLEADERS from a lot of light-hearted adventure flicks. The best comedies try to keep up a constant barrage of jokes and pratfalls, but writer-director David Presley seems to think it's side-splitting just to have three hot girls running around beating up guys and wielding katanas. Oh, and they get dressed up in ninja outfits at times, which is the only metaphenomenal content here.

The "cheerleader" part is misleading. The three girls-- April, Courtney and Monica-- are indeed freshmen who perform a few cheerleading routines at a community college (do those institutions even have football teams?) But they spend more time earning college money dancing at a go-go club run by an old fellow who's both their boss and their sensei Hiroshi (George Takei). Given the fact that their cheerleading has nearly nothing to do with the story, why not NINJA GO-GO DANCERS? 

The girls don't have any real challenges for their great fighting-skills beyond punching and kicking mooks who get fresh with them. (One of them is seeking to get accepted by a good college, which subplot will rate a big Who Cares from everyone who would watch a film with the title NINJA CHEERLEADERS.) Then a crime-boss (Michael Pare) gets out of prison and he wants to reclaim the go-go club. He kidnaps Hiroshi, so the girls seek to rescue their mentor, when they can find time away from championing Girl Scouts against rude customers. The ninja-girls clobber a lot of Mafioso types, very rarely getting hurt in the fights, so the crime-boss enlists one female Asian fighter (Natasha Chang) to take on all three ninja-girls. The henchwoman does very little until the climax.

There's nothing noteworthy about the fight-scenes, but at least Presley provides a fair number of them, so that puts him ahead of the putz behind SOUL OF THE AVENGER. There's a little nudity, naturally not provided by the three main actresses, zero characterization, and a couple of moments where the script just throws continuity-logic out the window. For George Takei and ninja completists only.

BEOWULF AND GRENDEL (2005)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological, sociological*                                                                                                                          Sturla Gunnarson's take on the medieval poem "Beowulf" is never less than diverting, not least thanks to the film's gorgeous cinematography of the stark but beautiful Icelandic locations. It's deliberately an inversion of the moral certainties of the poem, wherein Evil is identical with physical monstrosity. The script's take might have been influenced by John Gardner's 1971 book GRENDEL, which told the Beowulf story from the POV of the monstrous titular man-slayer.                                                                     

   BEOWULF is constructed much like the sort of mystery in which the audience sees a crime committed and then watches to find out how and when the hero will dope out the truth. Twenty years before the story proper, the Danish king Hrothgar (Stellan Skarsgard) leads some of his men to chase down a petty thief, a big hairy man whom the Danes consider to be a "troll." The big man flees the hunters in the company of his young son Grendel, but when they are both cornered on a cliffside, the father orders his son to hide in a crevice. The "troll" then faces the Danes and is killed by their arrows. Hrothgar spies the hiding boy but does not reveal his presence.                                                   

  Grendel grows into a savage beast-man (Ingvar Sigurdsson), and finally initiates a war against his father's slayers, killing twenty men in the king's mead-hall. Hrothgar is now old and befuddled, and he half suspects the origins of the killer. News of the murders reaches the tribe of the Geats, and their great hero Beowulf (Gerard Butler) journeys to Denmark with his retinue of warriors. Unlike the hero of the poem, this Beowulf is intensely curious as to the origins of Grendel. He's perplexed that the savage man simply avoids fighting with the Geats, while continuing his crusade against the men of Hrothgar.                                        

A new character, a witch named Selma (Sarah Polley), provides some of the answers to Beowulf's questions: that Grendel refuses to engage with the Geats because they, unlike the Geats, have done him no harm. It's strongly suggested that Selma's claim to witchy powers is a pretense to give her some immunity from attacks by brutish men, for she tells Beowulf that she was forced into prostitution by evil slavers before setting up her witch-hut. She, as much as Grendel (who rather clumsily raped her at one point, but in ignorance of his crime), is an outcast from the rude Scandinavian society that recognizes only physical strength as a virtue.                                                                                                                                                                                                            Even after Hrothgar confesses his past offenses against Grendel, Beowulf remains committed to ending the savage's rampage. In the poem the hero is mighty enough to rip the monster-man's arm from his body, but since no one here possesses supernatural powers, this Beowulf sets a mechanical trap that tears off Grendel's limb. Dying, Grendel flees to the sea, where his body is claimed by his mother, billed as "The Sea Hag." Later, when the prideful Danes hang up Grendel's arm as a trophy, the Hag emerges at night, kills various warriors, and steals the arm as well. Beowulf pursues the hag to an underground cave, and the monstrous woman, who possesses fangs and great strength, almost kills the hero. Beowulf only triumphs (slightly as in the poem) because he acquires a sword from the Hag's treasure-trove and kills her with it. Though the script isn't able to assert the true nature of the Hag and her son without breaking out of its own continuity, I think it's implied that both are offshoots from humankind, whom the primitive tribesmen mistake for "trolls." The tone of BEOWULF is uniformly dour, and the warriors' limited knowledge about the world's nature provides some dramatic moments. But as a whole this Grendel-sympathetic take on the poem is just fair in terms of its symbolic discourse.                                    

 

SCREAMERS (1995)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, sociological*                                                                                                                              I only watched SCREAMERS once before this recent re-watch. Given that the primary adaptor was ALIEN's Dan O'Bannon, I tended to assume that he had translated Philip K. Dick's short story   "Second Variety" to repeat his ALIEN-tropes: isolated group under siege by a relentless monster. Even the idea of the group being the pawn of governmental forces appears more in SCREAMERS than in the short story. (Note: another writer revised some or all of O'Bannon's dialogue for the finished screenplay, but O'Bannon claimed that his plot and characters were substantially unaltered.)     

 I freely admit that the "Screamers"-- the name given to the metamorphic robots from the Dick story-- don't even come close to the mythic appeal of The Aliens. However, I appreciate that O'Bannon reworked the Cold War aspects of the Dick story to something closer to the milieu of Vietnam. This time, the opposed parties reside not on the moon but on a colonized mining-planet named Sirius 6b. The Earth-based corporate combine known as "The New Economic Block" sends miners to Sirius to harvest valuable minerals. However, the mining activities unleash fatal radiation (more or less taking the place of the original tale's nuclear fallout). The miners refuse to keep mining, so the NEB starts a war to force their compliance, radiation or no radiation. For twenty years the Sirius-based Alliance contends with the forces of the NEB, and the former manage to come up with a counter-measure-- albeit one that's a double-edged sword. The Alliance (taking the place of "the Americans" from the prose tale) manufactures robots called "Screamers," robots that tunnel beneath the earth and attack anyone not wearing a protective screening-device, which device only the Alliance soldiers have. However, the Screamers start producing new varieties of their species on their own, and they have no loyalty to their creators if they find them out in the open without their protective devices.                                  

   Alliance commander Joe Hendricksson (Peter Weller) desperately wants to see an end to the stalemate conflict, with the hope that he might return to the planet of his birth. He's briefly buoyed up by news that the NEB back on Earth may be seeking a detente, but this proves to be a lie to keep the proxy war going. Meanwhile, a new source of minerals on another world renders the conflict on Sirius irrelevant. Disgusted, Hendricksson decides to seek out the NEB compound, presumably to negotiate a separate peace. Hendricksson takes along an eager-beaver young soldier who's completely naive about the realities of the war, and the script gets a lot of mileage out of the "young pup/old dog" badinage. On their way, the two soldiers find a ragamuffin boy, and they take him with him to the NEB compound. One of the NEB men shoots the child, proving that it's just a new model of Screamer (so called, by the way, they emit screaming noises when they attack).                                                       

 No detente discussions ensue. The NEB forces--two soldiers and female civilian Jessica (Jennifer Rubin) -- recently lost most of their forces to another infiltration by a human-looking Screamer. Hendricksson and his aide escort the other three back to the Alliance base, only to find it too has been overrun by Screamers. There are various Carpenter-like moments where humans accuse other humans of being robots, but these don't develop into anything compelling. The script does play into Hendricksson's desire for normalcy by having him fall in love with Jessica, presumably the first woman he's seen in many years. When the survivors have been narrowed down to just the two of them, Hendricksson tries to make Jessica use a one-person emergency shuttle to go back to Earth-- an action that loosely parallels the conclusion of the Dick short story. And as in the Dick story, the only female turns out to be one in a series of robotic human pretenders. However, in a turnabout ending that I'll bet resembles NOTHING in the Philip Dick oeuvre, the Jessica-Screamer reciprocates Hendricksson's feelings, fights another model of her type, and makes it possible for Hendricksson to escape-- though there's an indication that even now, he may not be alone. Though all the performers are good, Weller is the glue that holds the whole apparatus together-- though, to be sure, the Screamers comprise the main icon of the film. Despite SCREAMERS' commercial failure, years later there was a sequel-- though I'll surprised if it works that well without being able to draw from the wellspring of Dickian paranoia.                                                       

KING OF THE WILD (1931)

 

 

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

I've seen very few serials from the era of silent cinema, but my impression is that a fair number of silent chapterplays dealt with fairly mundane threats, like accused men trying to prove their innocence. It's not surprising, then, that the hero of this early sound serial, one Robert Grant (Walter Miller), is mostly an ordinary guy trying to clear his name after he's accused of killing an Indian prince. Grant's quest for justice forces him to pursue one of the real criminals to the jungles of Africa, where the majority of the action takes place. In Africa Grant ends up foiling the schemes of big-game hunter Harris as he tried to move in on a diamond mine owned by a brother and sister, the latter becoming the leading lady of the tale. For twelve chapters there's lots of fighting and running around, as well as a handful of forgettable cliffhangers, until Grant finds the evidence that exonerates him.

Aside from its minor place in serial history, there are two points of interest in this somewhat creaky Mascot production. One is the narrative's sole source of metaphenomenality, in that the evil Harris picked up a most unusual henchman in his travels: a hairy ape-man named Bimi. There's little discussion of Bimi's nature, but he's immensely strong, seen bending metal bars in an early scene. Since he's not an animal despite being very hirsute, I think the writers' intent was that Bimi was some sort of "missing link," and in my system that aligns him with other types of "freakish" forms of life. I concur with reviewer Jerry Blake that the script doesn't go the obvious route and make Harris tyrannize and torment his apish pawn. Though Harris remains a cad, he treats Bimi fairly well during all of their scenes, which makes the missing link's loyalty relatively believable. 

The other point of interest is that even though only old-movie buffs will recognize most of the actors, such as Dorothy (PHANTOM EMPIRE) Christie and Mischa Auer, WILD gives Boris Karloff one of his juiciest pre-Frankenstein roles as conniving Arab Mustapha. I can't claim that Mustapha is any better as a character than dozens of other Karloff heavies from the period. But at least Dear Boris gets enough screen time to strut his stuff, in contrast, say, to 1927's TARZAN AND THE GOLDEN LION, where one has to look hard even to make him out.

HONOR ROLL #268

It's WALTER MILLER time!                                                                               

Who knew JENNIFER RUBIN was a Screamer?                                         

"A Norse is a Norse, of course," sings INGVAR SIGURDDSON.       

Three names to perish in obscurity: TRISHELLE CANNATELLA, MAITLAND MCCONNELL, and GINNY WEIRICK.                           

There ain't no DRACULA like the Marvel Comics bloodsucker.              

Young Batman would never have made his crimefighting bones without help from Young JIM GORDON.