SUPERVIZED (2019)

 

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

Past a certain point in the lives of sentient human beings, age becomes strongly associated with being a time of suffering, regrets, and tragedy. And for those very reasons, old age is immensely funny, though different viewers will have different mileages in that regard.

Yet, though I've seen or read thousands of superhero narratives, I've never come across an overly laugh-worthy take on the trope of "old superheroes." It sounds like it ought to be a winning combination: icons of vitality and sexual attractiveness, being humbled by the ravages of Father Time. But most "old superheroes" I've seen have been lame and obvious when played for comedy-- not that the list of good superhero comedies, in any medium, is all that long either.

SUPERVIZED is the exception to that tendency. I won't say that every age-related joke lands, for exactly the mileage-reasons mentioned above. Yet I'm surprised that the story is so focused, because when I look at the credits of the three writers, nothing I've seen by any of them strikes me as noteworthy. As for director Steve Barron, who's not credited with scripting duties, his best-known comedy in the U.S. would be the dismal 1993 CONEHEADS, though he scored rather better with adventurous fare like 1990's TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES and 1998's MERLIN teleseries.

Like most superhero stories, this one's set in a modern urban world akin to the one occupied by the audience. We don't see much of that world, though, since extra sets cost money, and this project, shot in Ireland and the UK, ponied up for three actors who were, in their respective days, fairly well known for action-roles: Tom Berenger, Louis Gossett Jr, and (to a lesser extent) Beau Bridges. Most of the story takes place at Dunmanor, an Ireland-based "old folks' home" for former superheroes, where heroes in their "golden years" have to deal with infirmities physical and mental and with being forgotten by the public. 

The three major characters are Ray (Berenger, formerly "Maximum Justice"), Ted (Bridges, formerly "Shimmy," kid sidekick to Maximum Justice), and Pendle (Gossett, formerly "Total Thunder"). They and numerous other retired superheroes still remember their glory days fondly, but their powers don't always work as desired, and it's strongly implied that Dunmanor may be the government's means of keeping tabs on these hyper-powered individuals-- though the government is not expressly involved. All the authority devolves to the home's manager Alicia (Fiona Glascott). Alicia seems the epitome of the cheerleader for the superannuated, but eventually the audience learns that she holds a Damoclean sword over the heads of the occupants. If any of these ex-supers misuses powers, the administration can have those powers artificially removed.

Ray, however, sees some things going on at Dunmanor that don't track for him. All of his friends think he's merely paranoid, as does a late entry to the institution: Madera Moonlight (Fionnula Flanagan). An extra irritant to Ray is the presence of a former Russian super-villain, known only by the name of "Brian" (Elya Baskin), who received special treatment for having narced on a bunch of other super-villains. All these roadblocks aside, Ray can't let his conspiracy theories go, even though he puts his own super-powers in danger by his actions.

Is there a real conspiracy going on? If you think the answer is going to run counter to the film's continued refrain of "Sympathy for the Geezers," guess again. But the Big Reveal is just an excuse for a wealth of clever old-age jokes, many of which stem from the ultimate absurdity: getting old. What I particularly like is that SUPERVIZED never looks cheap. It looks inexpensive, but that's not the same. The various super-stunts are naturally more limited in scope than in a comparable superhero comedy like the 2006 ZOOM. But the stunts often capture, in comedic terms, the appeal of having super-powers like Total Thunder's super-speed or Moonlight's "power to warp reality." Ray is more or less the linchpin of the ensemble-- we become acquainted with Ted, Pendle and Moonlight through their interactions with Ray, because he's the representative "cranky old man" that the script wants you both to laugh at and laugh with. Nevertheless, it's a good ensemble, with Flanagan's white-haired warrior-woman standing out as one of the best comedic superheroines.

Up to this point, if I'd had to choose the best live-action superhero comedy, I might have gone with 1994's amiably goofy BLANKMAN. But sorry, Damon Wayans-- the Really Old Guard has taken away your pride of place.

ECHO (2024)

 

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

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

I didn't see all of HAWKEYE, the Disney streaming series wherein the MCU version of Marvel character Echo debuted. But this wasn't strictly necessary, in that (1) Echo was a side character, and (2) the five-part ECHO series recapitulates the essentials of her HAWKEYE arc, The character of Echo (she has a "regular name" but I'll omit it for sake of clarity) follows a few aspects of her debut comic-book arc. If I had not read the 2011 sequence PARTS OF THE HOLE, I would not have known how much of the Hawkeye arc was derived from the comics-story. In the latter, The Kingpin befriends Echo's father, kills him, and then frames Daredevil for the crime, so that the super-athletic Echo-- who regards Kingpin as a surrogate daddy-- goes after the Man Without Fear. After assorted fight-scenes Echo finds out the truth and takes an Oedipal vengeance upon her bad dad, shooting him in both eyes.

It's just as well I did not attempt to follow what happened to the comic book version of Kingpin after Echo's vengeance, since I strongly suspect that the ECHO series went its own way from then on. One divergent direction was that the ECHO show, like 2022's MS. MARVEL, was meant to celebrate a marginalized culture within America, that of an Amerindian tribe. (Echo is of the Cheyenne tribe in the comics but in the live-action show she becomes Choctaw for whatever reasons.) ECHO proves considerably better at the representation task than the 2022 program, for all the scenes with the supporting Choctaw characters are pretty good. It's just a shame that, as with so, so many MCU serials, the show-runners had no idea as to how to craft a compelling protagonist.

As I noted in my PARTS review, Comics-Echo is no great prize. The ease with which Kingpin tricks his surrogate daughter into believing Daredevil is her father's murderer does not reflect well on Echo's brain power. However, she's still got a basic heroic persona. TV-Echo is absurdly over-complicated in that respect.

Daredevil isn't in the HAWKEYE series. In the TV show, Kingpin sets up Echo's father to get killed by the Avenging Archer, rather than bringing about the father's death through Kingpin's own agency. At the end of HAWKEYE, TV-Echo shoots Kingpin, but only in one eye. The first episode of ECHO recapitulates this history. It's implied also that Kingpin was responsible for the death of Echo's mother when Echo was a small girl, and that this somehow caused Echo's dad to flee the reservation to work for Kingpin in New York. In that bailiwick, separated from neighbors and family members, Echo "echoes" the Kingpin's ethics, becoming hard and ruthless as she works for one of the crime-lord's gangs. In that first episode, she has a big fight with Daredevil when the latter raids one of Kingpin's businesses, but the Man Without Fear has no direct effect on the course of Echo's story. Five months after shooting Kingpin and going on the run, Echo returns to her rez-home in Oklahoma.

However, the first three episodes dispelled any sympathy I might have had for MCU-Echo. Not only does Echo nurture fantasies of taking Kingpin's place as a gangland "queenpin," she immediately expects the members of her family to join her in fighting Kingpin's forces. Her uncle Henry, brother to Echo's late dad, attempts to dissuade her, but she endangers the people in her orbit with her bull-headed agenda. She's particularly unsympathetic in that she won't even make contact with her cousin Bonnie, though Bonnie repeatedly tried to keep in contact with Echo in her absence.

The writers finally have Echo re-discover a little of her humanity after she almost gets Bonnie and Henry killed. But the heroine suffers so little remorse that she almost seems like another incarnation of the MCU's favorite trope, "the conscienceless girl-boss." Also, Echo belatedly discovers that she's inherited a vague mystic healing-power from both her mother and an ancient cultus of female shamans, so she has to confer with her estranged grandmother to find out what's going on. Echo's selfishness isn't validated as much as that of Wanda Maximoff in WANDAVISION, but the Choctaw female's eleventh-hour conversion to heroism is still unconvincing. She makes contact with ancient Amerindian spirituality and more or less gets Kingpin out of her life without following the path of vengeance-- which had to be the MCU's path too, since they had future plans for the villain.

In the comics Echo's name came from her ability to emulate other fighting-styles, an attribute dropped by the MCU adaptation. In the TV version, the fourth episode finally rationalizes her superhero name by stating that she "echoes" the deeper cultural matrix of her people. While this wasn't wildly original, it could have worked, because all the Native American support-characters are well cast and decently written. But Alaqua Cox's one-note performance as Echo defeats the trope. The actress performs her fight-scenes well, so her casting wasn't a total loss. Too bad, for given that the original story isn't anything special, the MCU for once had a chance to be "better than the book."

THE APOCALYPSE (1997)

 

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

You know, I can live with a low-budget film that has characters behave like idiots, as long as it's diverting to look at. But when the look of the film is repulsive, that's another thing entirely.

Curiously, the writer credited with THE APOCALPYSE co-wrote, in the previous year, a serviceable space-adventurer in TIMELOCK, which even shares some similarities to the later film in featuring what I called a "tough girl/weak guy teamup." But TIMELOCK also had a different director, which may be the reason the look of that film didn't bug me. It's one thing to stage the whole film in a series of grey-metal corridors that are supposed to be the insides of space vessels. But does every actor in the film have to be wearing brown, black and white garments?

The setup: The Agamemnon, a ship carrying a cargo of unstable materials, is taken over by an insane computer hacker named Goad (Laura San Giacomo). After causing the deaths of the crew, she sets the ship on a collision course with Earth and records, for a non-existent posterity, a series of password requests for anyone who might want to override the ship's course, all of which messages are quotes from Shakespeare. Then I guess she offs herself, since she's never seen except as a computer-representation.

On Future-Earth, cargo pilot J.T. Wayne (Sandra Bernhard) is drinking at a bar, wanting to be left alone for some unspecified reason. Bartender Lennon (Cameron Dye) makes some overtures about wanting a berth on her next run, and she shoots him down. Another barfly spills a drink near Wayne and she slugs him, obliging the bartender to shoot her down, with an entirely modern-looking stun-gun. 

An associate named Noel bails Wayne out of jail and talks her into captaining a salvage mission to reclaim the supposedly dead vessel Agamemnon. For some reason Noel wants Bartender Lennon to go along; I never figured out why, unless it's because it was in the script. Not only does Wayne have to tolerate this exigency, Noel informs her that the only other crewmen he can get are associated with Wayne's former boyfriend Vendler (Frank Zagarino). Wayne accepts this condition even though, as she'll later reveal to Lennon, she knows Vendler's a rotter and his crewpeople are likely to be rotters too.

Sure enough, once the salvage ship nears the Agamemnon-- everyone still unaware of the ship's pre-set course-- Vendler and his buddies take over the ship and kill everyone not on their side. Wayne and Lennon manage to avoid the assault and keep clear for a while, and in the meantime Vendler's crew boards the death-ship. Vendler's computer-tech interacts with the ship's computer and starts trying to work his way through the password-challenges, which depend on the programmer's knowledge of Shakespeare. (These sequences provide the film's only moderate entertainment.)

Eventually, the programmer finds out that he can't crack the computer's override protection and tells Vendler that they have to leave the ship before it collides with Earth. And here's the film's really stupid part: the obsessed villain won't let his own crew save their lives, and most of the other henchpeople follow his lead. In fact, Vendler beats up a blonde henchwoman-- his new girlfriend-- when she defies him, and then lets one of the other henchwomen kill her. At least in TIMELOCK, the villains, a bunch of prison escapees, were seeking freedom at any cost.

Lennon, to his credit, does prove useful to Captain Wayne a few times, so he's not a complete weakling. But the funniest scene in the movie takes place after Vendler captures the duo and locks them in what looks more like a lion's cage than a brig. Knowing that Vendler will get ticked off by seeing Wayne have sex, the two heroes pretend to be humping-- though neither of them takes any clothes off, particularly where it would be absolutely necessary to do so.

The funny scenes are too few and far between to dispel the boredom though. Dye and Zagarino are competent in their roles, but Bernhard is one of those performers who's totally unable to play roles not set in her own timeframe. Arguably she's even harder to watch in this role than the ugly attire and scenery, even though she tries to put a certain gusto into her part. I assume the film went straight to home video, because I can't imagine anyone trying to make patrons pay for this mediocrity. 

LUPIN III: PURSUIT OF HARIMAO'S TREASURE (1995)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*

MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*

CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*                                                                                                                                                  This LUPIN III TV special is, as the title suggests, a treasure-hunt story. In fact, in keeping with several callbacks to the James Bond franchise, there's not much of the marvelous phenomena common to many other LUPIN-tales of the period. Even Goemon confines himself to one quasi-marvelous feat, that of using his sword to cut slabs of street-concrete out from under a fleet of cop-cars. The period in the history of things Lupin-esque seems dubious too, for though Lupin and Jigen are working together, Goemon doesn't seem a regular part of the team, and continually makes remarks about being a "part-timer" who expects to be remunerated on an hourly basis. The Lupin Gang's status with respect to Fujiko seems standard though, and Lupin even remarks that Fujiko dealt herself in to get the others' help in finding the booty, in contrast to the more frequent situation where Lupin calls on the seductive siren for special reconnaissance.                                                                                       

  The desired treasure is a cache of gold and precious metals hidden by a Malaysian bandit, Harimao, who during WWII ripped off the English and the Japanese alike. Two competitors for the prize are the British lord Sir Archer-- strongly implied to have been a real agent on whom the fictional stories of James Bond were based-- and his super-competent granddaughter Diana. The treasure's location is hidden in three separate statues, and when Archer gets one of the statues, Lupin consents to work with Archer and Diana to find the trove. One of the special's best moments is the revelation of how Harimao forged the valuables into a vehicle of sorts, suggesting that he might have anticipated a not dissimilar episode of the SPEED RACER teleseries.                                                                                       

 Of course it wouldn't be a Lupin adventure if there weren't "bad thieves" to play off the "noble thieves." In this case, there's a gang of Neo-Nazis who also want Harimao's riches, and the foremost henchman is a brute named Goering, who stomps the usually athletic Lupin in each of their altercations. Strangely, though the original Nazis were not precisely welcoming of alternative sexualities, these goose-steppers are led by a rouge-wearing cross-dresser whose punny name, at least in his mastermind identity, is "Herr Maffrodite." Given that he hates women but plays up a feminine appearance, Maffrodite might have been a major Lupin antagonist had the script built him up better. However, he comes off as little more than a cartoon of a cross-dresser and so proves no more than a curiosity. The script devotes much more attention to Lupin's constant attempts to grope and/or or court Diana. She usually kicks his ass in response, and while Fujiko shows mild jealousy of Diana in just one scene, most of her time in the movie is taken up being ogled by Dirty Old Sir Archer. So I can just barely label this item as participating in the "fighting femmes" category. TREASURE is a mildly entertaining romp with more naughty jokes that one would ever find in an American heist film, nothing more. Oh, and Zenigata's in the story, but is only used for occasional comedy relief.                                                                     

BABES IN TOYLAND (1997)

  

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

As my review of the 1934 BABES IN TOYLAND should show, I'm not overly enamored of that film, and the same goes for every other adaptation I've seen of the 1903 operetta. However, I have to give the original story some credit for being one of the first crossovers of the 20th century, even if the crossover-characters are all figures out of fairy tales and Mother Goose rhymes.

Aside from charting the similarities between original and adaptation, this 1997 film has little to recommend it beyond an assortment of celebrities voicing the characters (Christopher Plummer, Bronson Pinchot, Jim Belushi and Charles Nelson Reilly, the latter voicing "Humpty Dumpty," who might not have appeared in any TOYLAND iterations before this). And to be sure, no movie adaptation has faithfully adapted version of the operetta, either in its original or revised form. TOYLAND '97 mostly copies the plotline of the 1934 film, except that it brings in two kids as viewpoint characters to the wonders of Toyland, as well as being the niece and nephew of their cruel uncle Barnaby (Plummer). That, and one song by Victor Herbert (the redoubtable "Toyland"), are probably the only elements taken from the operetta.

In the absence of comedic stars Laurel and Hardy, the centricity shifts to the young couple, with Mary (of Little Lamb fame) acing out Little Bo Beep, though Tom Piper is still the male lead. The script does away with a fatherly Toymaker, but Mary, in deference to girl-boss models, runs the toy shop for her late father, and Tom is her employee. There's a slight attempt at characterization, as Mary is briefly seen as officious and Tom as scatterbrained, but little comes of it. Tom arguably is melded with 1934's "Stannie Dum," since the Piper's Son constructs the same troop of giant toy soldiers. This time, though, Tom just makes the soldiers because he wants to, in contrast to the way Stannie Dum made his giant toys after misinterpreting an order put in by the shop's major client, Santa Claus.

Barnaby's motivations are more envy-driven this time. He doesn't want to marry Mary; he just wants to take over her toy shop in order to keep children from having toys, since he never had any as a child. This time around, he's given the surname "Crookedman" to align him to the old poem, but as far as denoting his characterization, his last name should have been "Grinch."

Tom, Mary and Humpty are the only major nursery-rhyme crossovers here; others just appear in background scenes, like the Three Blind Mice and the Gingerbread Man. Barnaby's two comic henchmen (modeled on the imagery of Laurel and Hardy) from the 1961 adaptation are shoehorned in to provide some alleged comedy. Their only important action is obeying Barnaby's order to deliver the two kids (who have witnessed their uncle's schemes) to the cannibalistic goblins, but the kids and the two henchmen are rescued by Tom and Humpty.

Since I didn't think Barnaby's climactic action in the '34 movie-- somehow drawing the goblins into attacking Toyland-- made a lot of sense, I might argue that in this movie, the villain is a little better motivated to destroy Toyland, in that he's been frustrated of his scheme to take over the toy shop. I've also argued that the conflict in the '34 film between the goblins and the giant toy soldiers was too brief and desultory to sustain the combative mode, but this cartoon provides more relatively spectacular scenes of soldier-goblin combat. Barnaby's given one more opportunity to demonstrate his black heart by threatening his niece and nephew again, but he ends being chased out of Toyland by a horde of aggrieved goblins. In some versions of the story, Tom stabs Barnaby at the end. Here, since Tom made the soldiers, the combative victory still goes to him, albeit indirectly.

One last note is that the two kids are named Jack and Jill, but they seem to have come to Toyland from the real world, and nothing indisputably connects them to the Jack and Jill of nursery rhymes. 

SEVEN MINUTES TO DIE (1969)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*                                                                                                                                                  This late entry to the Eurospy genre, co-written and directed by Ramon Fernandez, currently occupies the lower rungs of that category. I've often complained about how Eurospy movies often downplay the villains for whatever reasons, but SEVEN MINUTES TO DIE is unique in that I could hardly keep track of the villain's ID or his plot. I know that early in the movie he eliminates another agent and takes his identity and then plots to sell a list of undercover agents to a power hostile to the democracies.  US Secret Service agent Bill Howard (Paul Stevens, a couple of years after he starred in the superhero fantasy FLASHMAN) trundles around Europe, trying to locate the list and getting into a few desultory fights. (I slightly liked a scene where the hero is attacked on a dock by thugs dressed in judo-gis and headbands.) He encounters a few pretty women but doesn't romance them. There are two diabolical devices in the movie. Howard, escaping from pursuers in his car, releases an oil slick from said car so that his foes skid off a cliff to their doom. Later some enemy or other traps Howard and his secretary in a room with crushing walls, but he breaks out with the use of explosives (without causing harm to either himself or the secretary). Oddly, the photography's pretty good, but everything else about the movie is humdrum as hell.    

HONOR ROLL #262

 NIEVES NAVARRO prospered more in giallo movies than in the last of the Eurospy flicks.                                                                                   

TOM PIPER gets his elf-self off the shelf.                                                 

"The name is Archer, SIR ARCHER-- and no, no relation to the guy with the mommy issues on FX."                                                            

The most apocalyptic thing about SANDRA BERNHARDT here was her acting.                                                                                             

To the extent that an echo is a lesser copy of an original phenomenon, that describes the ALAQUA COX character perfectly.            

FIONNULA FLANAGAN shows that there can be fire in the spandex even when there's frost on the cowl.                                                

LEGO DC SUPER HEROES: THE FLASH (2018)

 

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

As I may be the world's greatest despiser of JUSTICE LEAGUE: THE FLASHPOINT PARADOX-- and not much more sanguine about the comic-book plot that birthed it-- I may not be the best audience for even a Lego Flash flick with a time-travel theme. Obviously, this production is not burdened with pretentious doom-and-gloom, since all the Lego movies keep things light. But still, for me The Flash works best having contemporary adventures against evil aliens and dastardly super-villains, not messing around with time-paradoxes.

Though this movie doesn't sport the "Justice League" banner, much of the story revolves around Flash's place in the League. The short version: Professor Zoom, an evildoer from Earth's far future, forms a massive hate for 20th-century super-speedster The Flash, and devotes his life to ruining the hero's life. The first part of Zoom's plan involves subjecting Flash to a series of "deja vu" experiences, and later he takes over Flash's role as Earth's favorite speed-hero, as well as making the rest of the Justice League look bad. 

As is often the case with the Lego movies, the main plot is fleshed out with one or more subplots. Here, one involves the induction of the size-altering Atom into the League, and in deference to his debut here, he gets a fair-sized amount of attention (such as his shrinking down to atom-size to change the makeup of the Joker's laughing gas). In addition, there's a pointless interpolation of a "League of Super-Pets," consisting mostly of Superman's Krypto, Batman's Bat-Hound, and Aquaman's sea-horse Storm. 

A tangential plotline involves Flash solving his problems by appealing to two of DC's wizard-types, Doctor Fate (given a voice like Berry Gordy for some reason) and Zatanna. They tell Flash that he was given his power by "The Speed Force," as if it were some metaphysical entity. That may well be current DC canon, but this sort of notion is a little abstruse for a comedy-oriented cartoon.

LEGO FLASH is fairly ordinary of its type; not too good, not too bad, not too-- FLASH-y.

UNMASKING THE IDOL (1986), ORDER OF THE BLACK EAGLE (1987)

 

 

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

UNMASKING THE IDOL is one of two films made by the same producer, director and writers, most of whom didn't do much of anything afterward, though director Worth Keeter found a lot of work on the Americanized versions of several POWER RANGERS serials. That accidental connection seems fitting, for both of these films, while superficially aping the James Bond franchise, are just about as off-the-wall as any of the feverish fantasies from Japan's sentai series.

In both films Ian Hunter-- who also disappeared from the moviemaking profession after making the second film-- plays Duncan Jax, Interpol agent. Despite looking somewhat like Chevy Chase and sounding like Ray Walston, Jax goes around fighting huge armies of goons, blowing things up, and pulling things like an instantly inflating balloon out of his ass. But this Bond-act is mitigated by the fact that Jax covers up his tuxedo with a ninja outfit. Why does Jax dress like a ninja? The script does not say, though one must admit that James Bond is so often seen doing spectacular stunts with his bare face hanging out that he ought to be ruined as a "secret" agent. Jax seduces one babe early in the film and makes the usual witless double entendres, but his true love seems to be his pet baboon "Boon," whose presence brings a new level of lunacy to an already goofy movie.

Interpol assigns Jax and a small group of tough guys to infiltrate a remote island and take out Goldfinger and Doctor No-- er, Goldtooth and the Scarlet Leader. The former is hoarding gold for some big world-conquering coup, and the Scarlet Leader, who always goes around in a red ninja-suit, is going to use an ancient idol to unleash an occult power. The idol doesn't wear a mask, so I don't know why the title talks about "unmasking" it, though there is a minor revelation when the Scarlet Leader is unmasked. Maybe the writer got the two confused? Or maybe he just thought two buzz-words together might make the concoction sound tastier to trash-film devotees.

To be sure, there's some money behind this wack-a-doodle project, so that stunts and sets are at least competent compared to the real bottom of the barrel stuff. But when one of my main characters is a baboon who goes around wearing a little karate-outfit when he gets in a fight, any attention to verisimilitude has pretty much gone out the window.

After IDOL's "everything and the kitchen sink" approach, Jax's one and only sequel couldn't help but seem fairly restrained, more on the level of your average "Nu-Image" action-flick. Jax is more Rambo than Bond or even Ninja-Bond this time, as he and a whole new crew of mercenaries plunge into the wilds of South America to battle a Neo-Nazi cult, who are also holding prisoner an Interpol lady agent with the winsome name of Tiffany Youngblood. There aren't as many wacky lines as in IDOL, though we do get a tough girl mercenary (Anna Maria Rapagna) state that she hasn't had so much fun since Nicaragua.

One can't fault the villains here, though, for they're just as fanciful and derivative. Baron Tepes, a fat guy with an eyepatch, leads the Neo-Nazis as they plan to dominate the world with a proton-ray satellite. But Tepes himself won't be the leader of the New Order, because he's got Hitler himself on ice and ready to be revived.

Again, a lot of stuntmen go flying from planted charges as the heroes go around blowing things up. Boon the Baboon doesn't appear as much, though he does get a scene in which he pilots a small tank (with a shark-face) against the Nazis. Jax himself has a few distinctive moments, like when he uses a metal wire to saw his way out of a prison, and later uses the same wire to set a trap that cuts off a Nazi motorcyclist's head. But just in case anyone in the audience gets too comfortable with the prowess of the good guys, there's a scene in which the lot of them try to push a big truck down the road to get its engine started, and end up pushing the vehicle off a cliff. (Hey, now we know where the MCU got its model for incompetent heroes!)

Both films have enough goofy action and dumb lines to furnish "so bad it's good" entertainment, and in comparison to the many deadly-dull excuses for adventure-flicks, that's nothing to sneeze at. 

A CHINESE ODYSSEY: CINDERELLA (1995)

 

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

Well, Part 2 isn't nearly as good as Part 1, particularly with respect to the trope of "love vs. higher duty." But the second film exceeds the first one in one respect: the folkloric reference in the subtitle makes ever LESS sense. 

So at the conclusion of PANDORA'S BOX, Joker, the 500-years-later mortal reincarnation of Monkey King has been caught between a rock and a hard place, consisting of two demon-sisters who want from him information on his earlier self. Joker falls in love with one sister, Jing Jing, while his associate Pigsy accidentally impregnates the other sister, Spider Woman, though the whole topic of this demon-mortal pairing just gets dropped in Part 2. Jing Jing commits suicide, but the goddess Kuanyin gives Joker a time-travel box that might save Jing Jing's life. But after a couple of misfires, the box hurls Joker back 500 years. Though the audience sees many of the same myth-figures that existed in this time-- Monkey's allies Pigsy and Sandy, and enemies Bull King and Princess Iron Fan-- Monkey himself does not appear, perhaps having been banished or confined by the goddess. Monkey's absence will eventually open the door for Joker to eventually retro-incarnate himself, re-assuming his godlike identity in place of the mortal one.

Jing Jing and Spider Woman both exist in this time period as well, though neither has ever met Monkey's mortal form before. So does Joker get to approach Jing Jing and seek to convince her of the true love they share?

Ah, no, Joker meets a totally different woman, the fairy Zixia (Athena Chu). She knocks Joker around, takes his time-travel box from him, and declares him to be her slave. Joker keeps trying to recover the box, and over time Zixia begins to show evidence of the Takahashi Rule: "knowing that the guy belongs to someone else makes him interesting." It helps that she has a special sword that only her true love can pull from its sheath, and guess who unsheathes the sword without even knowing he's doing something special?

So there's no impediment to Zixia falling in love with Joker, even though she like Jing Jing has a mean sister who shares the same body (nothing interesting is done with this). But why does Joker fall out of love with Jing and in love with Zixia? Writer-director Jeffrey Lau utterly fails to sell this new relationship, even though he once more has the services of the two actresses who played the demon-sisters in the first film. 

Meanwhile, Bull King is still around in this archaic period, but his current project is to put aside his first wife Princess Iron Fan and to get married to the fairy Zixia. Joker, who's not yet conscious of his having fallen for Zixia, gets pulled into this comedy of errors. This includes the development that Iron Fan recognizes Joker as the reincarnation of Monkey, and since she once "dated" Monkey, she tries to get Joker to rendezvous with her.

Longevity Monk is around too, and Bull King wants to devour his flesh in order to become immortal, just as he will 500 years in the future. Joker finally becomes resigned to the fact that in order to save the Monk and defeat Bull King, he must retro-incarnate and become Monkey King once more. However, that means subsuming his later identity so that he once more assumes all the historical duties of Monkey King, such as protecting the Monk on his journey to the west. He must also don a special metal ring around his head that causes him pain when he tries to return to his old romantic habits-- which doesn't exactly sound like the idea of Buddhist enlightenment to me.

Though there's a cool battle between Monkey and Bull at the climax, the ending is very confusing. I think Monkey journeys back to the future, where Jing Jing and Spider Woman have become mortals and are married to the descendant of Pigsy (maybe the baby got erased by time-alterations?) and a mortal version of Zixia is married to a descendant of Joker. Sad, sad, sacrifice for the hero of the story, roll credits.

Stephen Chow is uniformly good even acting through the monkey-makeup, and glamorous Athena Chu provides strong support even though her character is underwritten. But whereas Part 1 benefited from its similarity to the popular "White Snake" narrative, Part 2 doesn't hold together. I still give it a fair mythicity rating because the story touches on the trope of "love vs. duty," but it isn't as affecting this time around. 

DESPICABLE ME 3 (2017)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological*                                                                                                                                               While I thought DESPICABLE ME 2 was funny, the decision to make Felonious Gru a full-time family man and an agent of the Anti-Villain League didn't play to the strengths of the original character. Possibly the writers of #3 sensed that on some level, since the film begins with Gru (Steve Carell) and his new wife Lucy (Kristen Wiig) acting as agents for the AVL and getting fired when they fail to capture the latest new super-villain, former child actor Balthazar Bratt (Trey Parker). Unfortunately, after the former super-villain and his wife get fired, the whole story becomes mostly about their trying to redeem themselves with the ungrateful agency and become super-villain fighters once more. I think this was short-sightedness on the part of the writers, since Gru and Lucy could just as easily gone into private consultation on the prevention of super-villainy or something.                                                                                               

  The writers, though, weren't terribly interested in originality, since for #3 they resurrected one of the moldiest of moldy-oldie plotlines: the guy who finds out he's got a secret twin brother he's never known about: a twin who's opposed to the original in some way. In Gru's case, he learns that when his parents split, the father (who I guess is deceased in the story) took with him a twin named Dru, while the mother kept Gru. Gru became a famous super-villain in reaction to his mother's negligence, but Dru's father wanted Dru to become a villain. Unfortunately for the dad, Dru was a light-hearted schmuck with no talent for villainy. When circumstances bring about the reunion of Gru and Dru, what Dru wants most is for his twin to school him in the art of the skillful super-heist artist. Gru obliges, but only as a means of catching up with Balthazar and nailing him so that Gru and Lucy can get their jobs back.                                             

The interactions of Gru and Dru are pretty hokey, but the notion behind Balthazar Bratt is leaden to the point of distraction. The concept is that as a child he had a successful TV show about a naughty kid super-villain. When the show was cancelled, Bratt decided to become a real malefactor, complete with all sorts of kid-themed super-weapons. I suppose the kid-audience #3 was aimed at might have enjoyed the spectacle of a forty-something man sprinting around like a juvenile, but none of that alleged humor worked for me. There's a subplot about Lucy trying to learn how to be a mother to Gru's three adoptees, but that too proved forgettable.  


 

THE REBEL BOXER (1972)

 

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

This chopsocky is currently streaming with the title SA MU CHEN, which is the name of the heroine essayed by star Nancy Yen. Since that title isn't very catchy I'm substituting one of the English alternative titles, even though the "boxer" here is more a revenger than a rebel.

BOXER is a shot-back-to-back sequel to another film, FURIOUS SLAUGHTER, about a fellow named Yung, a folk-hero who opposes an evil band of criminals, the Axe Gang. (One guess as to the miscreants' favorite weapon.) At the end of SLAUGHTER, Yung is blinded by lye and killed. BOXER claims that he didn't get killed but went into hiding, though he still has to recover from the blinding. Miss Ma, Yung's sister, hears about Yung's supposed death and investigates, though her main profession is that of a doctor and her proficiency in martial arts is not explained (though possibly her brother taught her). The Axe Gang not only traps Ma, they lure forth her brother (played here by Jimmy Wang Yu). After lots of fighting, Ma devastates the Axe Gang, though her brother dies anyway.

This is one of the most straightforward chopsockies I've ever seen, with no side-characters and only one bit of comic byplay, wherein a nasty gangster tries to get lady doctor Ma to examine his nether regions. From what I can tell BOXER was one of Nancy Yen's first starring roles, though I know the actress only for support-cast performances. She handles the close-up, non-doubled fight-scenes quite well, and does nicely with one or two scenes in which she has to emote about her missing brother. Still, if the producers hoped to mold Yen into another kung-fu diva, BOXER was probably too mild a concoction to impress the HK audiences.

The Axe Gang enlists two outsiders to help fight Ma, one a swordsman and the other a monk with a peculiar but non-uncanny weapon: a short staff he uses as a club, with a human skull mounted on the end. The only uncanny weapons here are the chosen weapons of the Gang. There would be nothing weird if the villains simply carried around ordinary axes, as seen in depictions of Tong wars. But most of the gang use axes that are attached to the end of long chains, which they even use to "net" Ma in the scene shown above. I find it unlikely that any professional gang ever made use of axes on chains, which seem only a little less impractical than flying guillotines.

PLANET TERROR (2007)

 

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

I remembered enjoying Robert Rodriguez's PLANET TERROR pretty well when I viewed it as part of the GRINDHOUSE ensemble-feature, but for the past fifteen years I was never tempted to pull out my copy of the film and re-watch it on the small screen. Now, having watched TERROR on streaming (along with Rodriguez's faux-commercial for MACHETE, which spawned a real two-film series). And now, without seeing TERROR as part of the whole love-letter both Rodriguez and Tarantino wrote to seventies exploitation movies, this overbaked zombie flick has little more than gore effects to recommend it.

To be sure, zombie movies weren't a huge part of the seventies movie culture, but took fire more in the eighties in response to George Romero's big-budget zom-com DAWN OF THE DEAD in 1978. Of course it could be argued that the seventies were also the decade in which American filmmakers began making greater use of advances in makeup-appliances, and TERROR is replete with lots and lots of melting faces and whatnot. TERROR also resembles certain seventies sexploitation films in having a large ensemble of characters who each have separate story-lines that may or may not be brought together by some common peril.

I found that though I'd been able to disregard Rodriguez's flat characters in my first viewing of TERROR, they were far less interesting this time around. Some of them are not meant to be anything more than comic relief, like a barbecue chef who keeps telling his sheriff-brother he'll never give up his special barbecue recipe. I didn't expect much of those minor characters. But I found myself profoundly bored with the acrimonious relationship of the dysfunctional married couple, played by Josh Brolin and Marley Shelton. All we know is that Shelton's character wants to leave Brolin's character because he's some sort of violent control freak. But the wife is also a bisexual who apparently committed to the male doctor and had a child by him, and who plans to leave her husband for a former female lover. What then made Shelton commit to Brolin the first time? Rodriguez's script is too insubstantial even to give a hint.

The central relationship, though, is that of a mysterious gunman, El Wray (Freddy Rodriguez) and his former girlfriend, go-go dancer Cherry Darling (Rose McGowan). Rodriguez at least built up the failure of their relationship somewhat better than he did with the dysfunctional couple, but here too there are missing details that get plowed under as the zombie apocalypse begins, after which El and Cherry are forced to flee the brain-eaters and form a caravan of other fugitives.

Even less interesting are the schemers who created the apocalypse, bioengineer Doctor Abbington (Naveen Andrews) and rogue military man Lt. Muldoon (Bruce Willis). Muldoon still commands a presumably illegal operation oriented on recovering the chemical that unleashes the zombie plague. But since the plague is in the process of dooming the civilized world, Muldoon's activities don't have much resonance. At one point the detachment captures Cherry and some other women, and two soldiers, one played by Quentin Tarantino, attempt to rape Cherry. The best thing one can say about Tarantino's performance is that he's intending to place a one-dimensional scumbag, and so, aside from one very corny line, he accomplishes his task.

Since El Wray is so vague as to become inert, the only strong persona is that of Cherry Darling. Unlike the others, her character arc gets substantial development within the context of an exploitation film. When the film starts, she's a dancer disenchanted with her profession, and she even considers trying to branch out as a standup comedian. A zombie assault changes all of Cherry's plans, as one undead freak rips off the dancer's left leg. El Wray improvises to give her an artificial limb, first consisting of a table leg, and later, a machine gun. The image of a go-go dancer who can shoot enemies with her artificial gun-leg is the only part of TERROR that equals the most delirious of seventies exploitation cinema, and to my knowledge McGowan has never given a more three-dimensional performance.

I don't take  most of the sexual politics of TERROR seriously, though one could argue that all the "heroic bloodshed" is meant to escape the usual masculine priorities so as to pull in a feminine sensibility. But even speaking as a viewer who was never big on zombie-films, I think a lot of the zom-stomping becomes routine and therefore dull. And so I think it's unlikely I'll ever give TERROR another full viewing, be it in fifteen years or fifty.

Note: TERROR is a very minor crossover film in that it recycles Michael Parks' "Earl MacGraw" character from Rodriguez's FROM DUSK TO DAWN.

HONOR ROLL #261

 FREDDY RODRIGUEZ was a long way from Fred Jones when he visited a planet called Terror.                                                                    

SHAN MAO is frankly just a placeholder since I've already done an entry on this movie's star Nancy Yen.                                                       

At least the name of BALTHAZAR BRATT gives an honest warning.        

ATHENA CHU doesn't have any Cinderella moments here.

 

The movies of IAN HUNTER would make good illustrations of a book titled "Bond for Dummies."                                                           

LEGO FLASH puts his best feet forward.                                               

                                               

BATMAN: MASK OF THE PHANTASM (1993)

 

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

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

So, I'll get one thing out of the way: the mysterious crook-murdering Phantasm's identity is Bruce Wayne's lost love Andrea Beaumont. (Readers of this blog ought to be used to my disregard for guarding secrets if they get in the way of analysis.)

PHANTASM was the first, though not the last, animated Batman film to make it into theaters, attempting to profit from the sterling reputation of the 1993-95 Batman cartoon show. It's far from the best animated Batman feature, but it does have the distinction of being the first cartoon to ask the question: what if Batman suffered a "last temptation" moment, giving up his dedication to crimefighting for family life? 

Of course, every time this temptation has arisen, whether in comics (1987's SON OF THE DEMON) or in film (2008's DARK KNIGHT), some exigency must come up that pushes Bruce Wayne's nose back to the Bat-grindstone. Here, the script by two animation pros (Paul Dini, Michael Reeves) and two comics-writers (Martin Pasko, Alan Burnett) claims that early in his career, Bruce fell so hard for Andrea that he almost did give up the cowl-- but one such exigency caused Andrea to depart suddenly, and so Gotham City did not lose its "dark knight." However, in current times Andrea returns to Gotham--and at the same time, a masked figure, the Phantasm, begins killing off the criminals who harried her father, one of these being none other than Batman's favorite fiend, the Joker.

I don't mean to make too much of the non-mystery of the Phantasm's identity, since I don't believe I guessed it on my first viewing. But although PHANTASM delivers the goods as far as lots of high-octane action with the Bat taking on two costumed killers, I didn't buy the dramatic aspect. Dini and the other writers try to make Andrea Beaumont seem so witty and resourceful that the viewer believes that she's "the one" for Bruce Wayne. But the truth is, they knew Andrea/Phantasm was a one-off character, and her psychological makeup is no more detailed than an animation cell.

Still, in addition to good action, PHANTASM offers yet another venue for the assemblage of the show's talented voice cast, with the usual list of standouts: Kevin Conroy as Batman, Mark Hamill as the Joker, and Efrem Zimbalist Jr as a delightfully acerbic Alfred.

DESPICABLE ME 2 (2013)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological*                                                                                                                                               I've screened DESPICABLE ME 2 a couple of times before this and have usually thought it was just "more of the same" as the first film. Yet on my third screening, I still laughed in four or five places, which usually doesn't happen once I've seen a comedy.                                                                                                                                    As a result of Felonious Gru (Steve Carell) forswearing his former career of villainy for his three adoptive daughters, he's taken up the life of a single dad in suburbia. Because he is a bachelor, though, an annoying neighbor lady keeps trying to fix up Gru with one of her unattached friends. On a more heartfelt note, the youngest girl shows a need for a mother she's never had.                                                              

Enter new romantic candidate Lucy Wilde (Kristen Wiig), an agent of the Anti-Villain League, a cadre of villain-fighters seen absolutely nowhere in the first film. On the orders of her superior, Lucy abducts Gru so that the AVL can seek Gru's expertise in villainy, to figure out who might have stolen a government-made mutagenic agent. Lucy also brings along a couple of Gru's Minions, apparently for no reason except to give them the chance to giggle at the name of the AVL leader, "Ramsbottom." (You know it's a kids' film by the fact that only the "bottom" part of the name amuses the Minions.) Gru refuses to help the AVL at first, so they return him to his home. However, Gru's longtime aide in infamy Doctor Nefario (Russell Brand) announces that he's leaving Gru's respectable employment to hook up with another villain. Gru changes his mind and decides to help the AVL, possibly to ferret out Nefario's new boss, and Ramsbottom teams Gru up with Lucy. The three daughters encounter Lucy and immediately decided that she ought to become their new mom.                                                                                                           

  Despite several slapstick mishaps, Gru proves integral to the investigation when he recognizes a supposedly honest restauranteur as a former villain-believed-dead, El Macho (Benjamin Bratt). However, the AVL targets another supposed villain as their suspect, and terminates Gru as their agent while ordering Lucy to take a new assignment in Australia. Gru soon realizes that despite the many ways Lucy aggravates him, she also has a special charm. Maybe it's the fact that they both share rather prominent proboscises?                                                                                                                                                                                             If DM2 has any major failing, it's that El Macho is too derivative of Gru himself, since Macho's main plot involves using the stolen mutagen to turn Gru's mild-mannered yellow servitors into bloodthirsty, near-invulnerable monsters. Gru must find a way to reverse these brutish transformations and to rescue Lucy from the clutches of El Macho, which more or less duplicates his rescue of his future adoptive daughters from their kidnappers in the first film. It's a more pleasant follow-up than many sequels, so that's at least a minor win.          

SNAKE IN THE CRANE'S SHADOW (1978)

 

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

This title is horribly generic, but I suppose it's slightly preferable to the Taiwanese one, translating to something like "Adventure of the Heaven Mouse."

SNAKE is a slackly plotted "hunt for the valuable object" tale, in which two martial artists with disabilities try to keep the object and the treasure it leads to out of the hands of assorted ne'er-do-wells. This main plotline competes with a B-plot in which three goofballs with no martial skills get in the way of the female fighter and even try to become her students. One of the doofuses is played by familiar face Dean Shek, but the facial recognition doesn't make up for a lot of stupid so-called comedy.

As for the "heroes with disabilities," one is a cripple known as Unicorn (Wen Chiang-long), who's missing a leg, and the other is the blind Dragon Lady (Lung Chung-erh). Damned if I could figure out why either of them devotes their talents to protecting the pieces of a map from various bad guys, but that's what they choose to do. The fights are okay, but the only somewhat memorable moments are when one or more of the villains use noise to mess with Dragon Lady's acute senses. The oddest such method is some sort of net studded with hooks, capable of slashing an enemy's face if it makes contact. I believe the enemy wielding this diabolical device was known as the Eight Steps Killer (Lung Tien-Hsiang), but I wouldn't swear to it.

Ironically, some months after this dud, Lung Chung-erh once more portrayed a martially skilled blind woman in the much more entertaining SECRET MESSAGE, aka NINJA MASSACRE. 

CYBORG COP II (1994)

 

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

All three CYBORG COP films are bad even compared to most of the merely formulaic efforts of DTV action-films. But so far as one can make a measured choice between bad, badder, and baddest, Number Two is right between Number One and Number Three. And all of them create the same dissonance with their titles, since they are not about cops who ARE cyborgs, but cops who FIGHT cyborgs.

The strongest elements of the first film were (1) John Rhys-Davies' performance as a rather impish mad scientist, and (2) maverick cop Jack Ryan's middling motivation to get the bad guys because they turned his brother into a cyborg. This time, the villain is just one of Ryan's old enemies (Morgan Hunter) converted into a cyborg, who plays his role as a colorless monomaniac, and Ryan's maverick-cop doesn't have even the tiny moral compass he did in the first film. Bradley's just as bad an actor here as in the first film, but his histrionics are more noticeable because he seems like a complete dick.

Though a lot of DTV films seem to think it's easy to make an audience sympathize with a cop who makes his own rules, it's actually a balancing act that can easily lose a given character audience-sympathy very easily. I'm sure that a lot of filmmakers would like to think that action-film lovers will just line up as long as there are plenty of explosions and fights. Director Sam Firstenberg had made one or two decent action-movies by that time, but here he's just grinding things out. Bradley, whose only assets are his skills at fake-fighting for the movies, also doesn't bother blocking the fights out competently, so that it looks like every time he fights a normal human, the other guy's practically racing to hit the floor.

In the movie's final third Ryan gets a weapons upgrade, and that allows him to take out the evil cyborg, variously called "Starkraven" and "Spartacus." Frankly, not having seen CYBORG COP III in many months, I can't absolutely swear that one's worse. But I could see some viewers getting entertainment value just by bagging on Bradley's terrible performance-- as indeed the Rifftrax comedians did, calling him something like a "wannabe RENEGADE."