THE TICK, SEASON 2 (2019)

  

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

The second and last season of THE TICK, consisting of ten episodes rather than the twelve from Season 1, proves reasonably entertaining. However, since the first season concluded Arthur's quest to find and defeat the man who killed his father, Season 2 doesn't establish a new arc that maintains strong suspense from beginning to end. Rather, the writers seem to have decided to fill the episodes with "house-cleaning," wherein they elaborate various story-points from Season 1.

The last episode of the previous season hints strongly that the Tick and Arthur, fresh from their triumph over the Terror, will become involved with AEGIS, the same intelligence agency that organized the deceased super-group, the Flag Five. The duo must apply with AEGIS for official superhero status, which is something of a dream come true for Arthur. This spy-agency more or less stands in for the entirety of government interaction with superheroes and their foes, and arguably the revelation of a hidden menace within the agency is the dominant plotline for Season 2.

The next most important plotline involves the Dysfunctional Duo confronting a gang of bank robbers, who somehow command a super-strong lobster-humanoid, nicknamed "Lobstercules" by the press. After the Tick's first inconclusive match with the lobster-being, who rivals the blue-clad buffoon in strength, he's obsessed with finding and defeating his new opponent. However, for reasons I won't reveal, Lobstercules is the innocent pawn of the robbers, and the creature's true nature not only reveals new aspects of the Tick's heroic character, as well as generating some of the season's best jokes.

Other plots are far less rewarding. Walter, the second husband of Arthur's widowed mother and thus Arthur's stepfather, is revealed to have been an AEGIS agent originally assigned to assure the safety of Mrs. Everest. This is only a little more underwhelming than the disclosure of the past history of Overkill's sentient vehicle, Dangerboat.

Perhaps more frustrating that the attempts to build up nugatory characters are the scripts' failures to deliver on characters who were fairly interesting in Season 1. The electrical super-villain Miss Lint adopts the identity of a new superheroine, "Joan of Arc." The scripts suggest that her investment in super-villainy may be waning, that she may be somewhat transformed by the act of impersonating a superhero. Yet she simply reverses her potentially heroic course for no clear reason.

Even less pleasing is the relationship between Arthur's sister Dot and Overkill. Though no actual romantic arc takes place in Season 1, they're clearly intrigued with one another. In Season 2, Dot begins molding herself in the image of a costumed crusader, studying Krav Maga and suddenly manifesting a psychic power. But Overkill seems more concerned with the fact that, in Season 1, the Tick made him promise not to kill any more criminals. This was a promising idea, as the writers could have shown Overkill tying himself in knots to spare crooks he'd rather exterminate. Instead, Joan of Arc resorts to some flummery to justify Overkill cancelling out his vow to the Tick-- but then, nothing happens as a result of this twist, either to justify Overkill's bloodlust or to show him becoming more merciful of his own accord. Further, the potential romance also goes nowhere.

Superian, the patron saint of costumed heroes, gets more involvement, but the main plot-- that he can't accept criticism from any of the citizens of Earth-- is predictable and unsatisfying. His presence does make for some good jokes at the expense of the Christopher Reeve super-series, like having Superian consider hurling all nuclear missiles into the sun or causing time to turn backwards. The last episodes make clear that had there been a third season, a new menace would have shown up on Earth, hunting Superian.

So this season's weaker overall than the previous one. But some of the joie de vivre I mentioned still survives. Although AEGIS is infiltrated by a corrupt agent, the writers of THE TICK don't subscribe to the politics of revenge seen in CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE WINTER SOLDIER, where the writers abolished SHIELD as a way of skunking the real-word CIA. But in THE TICK, the fantasy of a "good spy organization" is allowed to endure. I don't know if a third season would have stepped things up, got out of Season 2's "cruise mode." But I'd rather have seen a Season 3 for THE TICK than for INVINCIBLE.

AWESOME LOTUS (1983)

                               PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny* 

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

                                                

           

AWESOME LOTUS looks to be the equivalent of a standup comic trying to hone his talents in dunghole comedy-clubs where, as the saying goes, "no one sees you being bad." I assume most of the participants were amateurs, given that hardly any of them did anything beyond this movie. However, though the director David O'Malley didn't score with this attempt to execute the anarchic comedy of 1980's AIRPLANE, he did end up working as writer and/or director from the eighties to the 2010s. In fact, he wrote and directed (probably with some input from Sam Raimi) the underrated biker-comedy EASY WHEELS.                                                                                               

 The scattershot script is just one problem, co-written by one of the main actors, Peter Schuyler. But none of the actors do anything more than speak their lines correctly. Lorraine Masterson starts out the film as simple farm-girl Emily Anne. She gets torqued at her three older brothers, takes a kung-fu correspondence course (complete with instructional record), beats up her siblings, and leaves the farm. (Silly as it is, this is the strongest scene in the form.) When the viewer next sees her, apparently several years later, she's wearing a Chinese robe and a matching hairdo, and is calling herself "Awesome Lotus." Somehow she's become a master assassin, as well as a trainer of assassins, and her whole philosophy seems to be about confronting death, which would be fine if the script got any humor out of the subject. (She does have one decent line: "There's nothing like death to start your day.") The representative of a silk company (whose company name is the anagram SISSI) claims that his models are under attack by an evil organization, FART. There's some talk of it being a conspiracy to advance the fortunes of rayon in the fashion industry, but later the truth comes out: the evil mastermind Basset (made up to slightly resemble Hitler) resents the silk industry because vicious silkworms killed his beloved basset hound. Yeah, there's a lot of jokes like that one.                                                           

Aside from the opening scene, the script just barely finds energy in the film's middle to have Lotus lead her two allies-- her blind mentor Tofu Caca (Schuyler) and a blonde guy who hits his foes with a tennis racket-- against Bassett's compound, where they have comic fights with ninja guards. This looks like something that should have happened as the movie's climax, because the one they filmed really blows, even in comparison to all the other bad scenes. But to pursue my comedy-club analogy to the bitter end, since arguably at least one graduate of this "club" got better, I guess AWESOME LOTUS served a purpose.                                                                                                                                                              

THE DOOR WITH SEVEN LOCKS (1940)

 

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

THE DOOR WITH SEVEN LOCKS was the second English adaptation of an Edgar Wallace novel to reach American shores, and it shows an attempt, if not always a successful one, to craft a British-made thriller considerably less fusty than those of the thirties. Director Norman Lee, who's currently not remembered for much beyond DOOR, does a good job of keeping the mise-en-scene fairly lively despite having to execute loads of mystery-oriented talking-head scenes.

Since I'm not likely to ever read the 1926 Wallace mystery, I did glean a few details about the source material from Goodreads. The movie seems to be faithful to Wallace's concept. On his deathbed, an English lord bequeaths a hidden treasure to his heirs, but they can only get the riches under assorted complicated circumstances, including the use of seven special keys designed to open the door to the treasure. The keys enter the custody of an executor for roughly the next ten years, so that a foreign heir, who knows nothing of her blood relation to the lord, has time to grow up and became young June Lansdowne (a striking Lilli Palmer). A friend of the family somehow learns of June and contacts her about the legacy, so she and a comical girl-friend fly to Great Britain. The two ladies arrive just in time to see an organized conspiracy by some of the heirs-- including sinister Doctor Manetta (Leslie Banks of THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME) A young local cop, Dick Martin (Romilly Lunge), gets drawn into June's troubles, patently because he fancies June. 

What's surprising is that in content this quasi-Gothic mystery is identical to dozens of others from the period, this is one of the few to qualify for the combative mode, in that Martin has a lively battle with a burglar who breaks into June's room, later battles Manetta's mute servant, and finally fights the evil doctor at the film's climax. Possibly the novel is just as comparatively violent, given that some reviews intimate that Dick is the main character in the source novel. In the original story Dick and June have to contend with some sort of mad scientist. But the scripters of DOOR, one of whom was also the director, chose to place more emphasis on the character of the conspirators' leader Doctor Manetta. Without reading the novel I can't be sure, but I don't think it's coincidence that Leslie Banks' most renowned character, Count Zaroff, displays a sadistic mindset, while Manetta claims to be a descendant of the Spanish torturer Torquemada. Zaroff also had a mute servant, as does Manetta. Manetta also keeps a roomful of exotic torture-devices, but there doesn't seem to be any evidence that he uses them on innocent victims. Still, the torture-room is the site of the end-fight, and one of the devices, an iron maiden, plays a decisive role in the fight's conclusion.

Lunge, an actor I'd never encountered before, does nicely with his heroic role, but Palmer and Banks are the most magnetic performers. The funny girlfriend isn't very amusing, but there are a few good lines. An elderly cop is asked whether or not he can read, and he replies, "Not in the daytime. I took a reading-course at night school." 

AVATAR: THE LAST AIRBENDER : BOOK TWO, EARTH (2006)

  

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical, sociological*                                                                                                                          Season Two is a considerable improvement over Season One, though the more intricate plots would not have been possible without the scaffolding provided by the earlier episodes. This season also has twenty episodes, all under the rubric "Earth," since the trio's main mission is to find an earth-bending master able to bring forth Aang's talents in that department.                                                                           

  In Season One the viewer didn't see very many scenes of Aang being trained in water-bending by his female companion (and possible romantic interest) Katara. The same pattern prevails in Season Two with respect to Aang's earth-bending trainer, the young blind girl Toph. Whatever training Toph gives Aang is mostly off-camera, because when she joins the group, her main purpose is to shake up the ensemble character-wise. Whereas Katara's brother Sokka provided (and continues to provide) comedy relief with his sarcastic remarks and foolish antics, Toph has a more caustic attitude, despite being no older than the rest of the teens. Because of her blindness, Toph's royal parents sought to shelter her from the world, though her earth-bending talent gives her a "sixth sense" to perceive her surroundings in a general manner. She joins Aang's group in part because she supports their cause, but also in order to enjoy a life of adventure. Because she, unlike the other three, was raised as an aristocrat, she's occasionally able to help them negotiate social situations outside their experience.                                                         

 One such situation involves mustering other tribes to carry the fight against the Fire Tribe. The foursome spend a lot of time in Season Two seeking to gain the help of the Earth Kingdom, which means that they have to oust an oppressive "grand vizier" type at the same time. For a time, they're spared the pursuit of Prince Zuko, whose obsession with the Avatar dims thanks to the benign influence of his uncle (voiced by the actor Mako in one of his last roles). However, Zuko's power-hungry sister Azula, only seen a few times in Season One, becomes a major player. With the help of two talented female confederates, she also infiltrates the Earth Kingdom. She also finds Zuko and plays on his filial responsibilities, so that he joins her in a big climactic assault upon Aang's group.                                             

  Two episodes stand out as more mythic than the rest of the season. It's often not clear to what extent the human inhabitants share their world with mystical entities, but the episode "The Library" is an exception. Sokka persuades the others that they need more historical perspective on the Fire Tribe, so they seek a unique library, overseen by a talking owl-man, Wan Shi Tong. At the library Sokka does learn of a comet due to pass the world, one that will bestow great power on the fire-benders and give them total dominion. In addition, he learns that the Fire Tribe also has a vital weakness-- but the owl-man takes exception to their using his precious tomes to gain military advantage. The heroes just barely escape the library with their lives, but by coincidence desert raiders abduct the sky-bison Appa, bringing all sorts of heartache to the teens, particularly Aang, until they eventually find their beloved pet.                                                                                          

Thanks in part to Appa, the quartet make contact with a guru named Pathik. Though Aang has not yet mastered fire-bending, which is necessary for his ascension to Avatar status, he's had some bad experiences whenever he assumed an incomplete Avatar state, resulting in his going berserk. Pathik puts Aang through a series of exercises based on the yoga-discipline of "opening chakras," and while these exercises are partly made-up for the purposes of this fantasy-world, the writers kept a basic sense of the symbolic associations for the seven power-centers of the body. In fact, when Aang reaches the highest center, he's required to renounce his earthly affections, much like Luke Skywalker in THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK. Luke interrupts his training but doesn't really pay a price for this failure. Aang loses a battle at the end of Season Two, but I don't yet know if there's a more long-range penalty to come in the third and final season. 

DEATHSTROKE KNIGHTS AND DRAGONS (2020)

 

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

I could have copied for my illustration one of DEATHSTROKE's more violent scenes, but instead I chose this talking-head shot, to clarify how bland the animation style is when no one's being shot or stabbed. Possibly his blandness has something to do with the DTV's origins as a web-series prepared for a subdivision of the CW company.

I can't fault the script of Marc de Matteis in finding the most efficient way to boil down the relevant elements of the Deathstroke property so as to exclude his origins in the TEEN TITANS book. KNIGHTS contains most of the characters germane to the cosmos of Slade Wilson, a.k.a. the masked mercenary of the title: his estranged wife (and former combat-veteran) Adeline, his son Joseph, his daughter (by another mother) Rose, and his assistant Wintergreen. In the comics Deathstroke works for the criminal cabal H.I.V.E. rather than fighting against them-- at least in early narratives-- but since KNIGHTS is in effect independent of DC continuity, this change is not important. De Matteis creates a new villain (as far as I know) named the Jackal who's one of Deathstroke's opponents, and he throws in a couple of stooges who are funhouse-mirror versions of their DC-counterparts, Lady Shiva and The Bronze Tiger.

The big problem is that the film-script emulates Marv Wolfman's Deathstroke-of-the-comics far too well-- which may be a selling point for some viewers, but which was a turnoff for me. In the comics Deathstroke originated as a TITANS villain in his early-1980s appearance, though he enjoyed a starring DC series from 1991 to 1996. Conceptually the character followed closely in the footsteps of hyperviolent crusaders like Wolverine and Punisher, in being utterly unrestrained in terms of striking his enemies with unrestrained violence. This approach would not have been extraordinary if Deathstroke had remained an unregenerate evildoer. However, even in the mercenary's first appearance, Marv Wolfman sent mixed signals. Deathstroke was merciless, and yet he possessed some vague nobility. He was a mercenary who killed people for pay, but he had some code of professionalism that supposedly distinguished him from the average assassin. 

These mixed signals, Marc de Matteis produces impeccably for KNIGHTS-- but they don't make Deathstroke as compelling a character as either Wolverine or Punisher at their respective bests. Slade Wilson becomes the costumed Deathstroke as the result of a military experiment, and he uses the powers he gained from the experiment-- rapid healing, super-fast reflexes-- to become a mercenary. At the same time that he's a ruthless mercenary, he's also a family man, marrying Adeline and spawning young Joseph-- though during some foreign-based adventure, he also sleeps with another woman, who gives birth to an older female, Rose. These movie-characters have next to nothing in common with the comics-originals, for their purpose is the same as Adeline's here: to give Slade Wilson grief for his past sins. Yet the script is spongy on the subject of what those sins were, aside from sleeping around.

KNIGHTS tries to make Deathstroke sympathetic in that in one exploit, he's seen confronting one of his targets, but informs the guy that he's just killed the man who ordered the target's death and now demands that the target pay Deathstroke for the hit. This is meant to suggest that Deathstroke somehow manages to make his murders serve an altruistic purpose. Frankly, this is so phony that when The Jackal takes the contrary position in one monologue-- to the effect that there's no real meaning in violence beyond the acquisition of power-- the villain sounds more authentic than the hero ever does.

The characterizations of the supporting characters are no better; they come on stage, air their grievances, and press their attacks on long-suffering Deathstroke. There's a lot of competently executed violence, but without a protagonist whose violent obsession feels roughly justified-- again, paging the Punisher-- the violence alone is likely to make some viewers want to go watch a PUNISHER movie instead. 

  

SCREAMERS: THE HUNTING (2009)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, sociological*                                                                                                                                In my review of the original SCREAMERS, I said that the movie's least effective aspect was building on the original story's use of the "who's-the-alien-among-us" trope. So of course, when someone decided to do a sequel fourteen years later, that's what the creators decided to build on, to Carpenter-esque heights.                                     

   The script doesn't grapple with the sociological issues set up by Dan O'Bannon's script, but at least it does follow up on the ambivalent ending of the 1995 film. The last survivor of the Screamers' devastating attacks on Sirius 6b was seen trying to return to Earth in a one-person shuttle, but he made the mistake of taking along a memento, one that was a Screamer-robot in disguise. According to HUNTING, the survivor detected the intruder's presence and blew up the ship so that the robot would not reach Earth and propagate his kind at the expense of humanity. Several years pass until the time of HUNTING's events. Earth receives a transmission from Sirius, claiming that human survivors are still alive there. One might expect the military to take such a distress call with an avalanche of salt, given that no one on Earth can be sure that the Screamers aren't still extant. But after some lame excuse about how the machines' "batteries" must have run down, a military detachment wings its way to Sirius. Lieutenant Bronte (Gina Holden) is more or less the viewpoint character, and she gets a tad more development than the other unremarkable grunts in the story. She's said to be the daughter of the survivor who blew up his ship-- but the script does nothing interesting with this. For the ninety minutes of the film, the soldiers play tag with Screamers disguised as humans, and they meet a scientist (Lance Henriksen) who claims to have invented the self-propagating mechanisms. The only two pluses to this routine outing are (1) good production values overall, and (2) the fact that the sentient robots themselves talk about their ability to evolve, a minor point of the short story that the 1995 film did not address. But everything else is purely-- er-- mechanical in nature.    

HONOR ROLL #273

Scream along with GINA HOLDEN.                                                           

I don't care what this dumb DTV says: both Deathstroke and his enemy THE JAGUAR are both deep-dyed dastards.                                     

No sibling rivalry between KATARA and SOKKA.                                     

ROMILY LUNGE takes the plunge.                                                               

 LORRAINE MASTERSON failed to master action or comedy.               

 GRIFFIN NEWMAN suffered from a nervous Tick.                                   

BLOODSHOT (2020)

 

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

I may have read one or two of the 1990s BLOODSHOT comics from the Valiant stable, but if so nothing stuck with me. I saw this 2020 film months ago and had little to say about it. Then, a little after reviewing KICK ASS 2, I looked over the credits of that film's writer-director Jeff Wadlow and noticed that Wadlow co-wrote this film-- and that gave me the impetus to see if I detected any interesting Wadlow-isms.

My conclusion is that in a proportional sense BLOODSHOT the movie is probably better than the comic, just as the KICK ASS 2 movie is better than the comic. However, BLOODSHOT-- which I keep wanting to call "Bloodspot" due to the circular red bullseye on the hero's chest-- is still pretty ordinary.

While Golden Age comics are replete with soldiers. living or dead, who are given super-powers, the nineties UNIVERSAL SOLDIER series is probably the proximate influence on subsequent stories about bringing dead military men back to life with enhanced abilities. As the film opens, we seem to see the evolution of one such soldier, U.S. Marine Ray Garrison (Vin Diesel) into the experimental entity Bloodshot. After demonstrating his skill in the field by defusing a terrorist threat, he goes on leave with his wife Gina. A mercenary gang captures both of them, and after failing to get vital information from Ray, kills them both. 

Ray is brought back to life by a military facility, RST, and is told that he's one of their few successes in total resuscitation of a dead man. Project director Harting (Guy Pearce) introduces Ray to other "wounded warriors" at the facility, particularly therapist KT (Eiza Gonzalez), and they begin examining the various powers Ray has gained via his transformation: primarily super-strength and the ability to regenerate his organs. Then Bloodshot (not sure he's ever called that in the script) gains intel on the man who killed him and his wife, so he's off on the vengeance trail.

However, it's all a shadow-show. Bloodshot has experienced numerous "deaths" before this, always in order to motivate him to use his skills in killing off various targets, whom Harting wants dead. Only this time, KT helps Bloodshot break his customary programming, and then the hero is loaded for bear against his real enemy.

There are one or two humorous moments that reminded me of KICK ASS 2, and a few lines in which Harting argues that Ray ought to accept his authority because that's what good soldiers do. But all of the characters are too thin to sustain any meaningful sociological dialogue about the dynamic between generals and grunts, so most of the character interactions are forgettable. The action-scenes are well done, and Vin Diesel gives a solid performance. However, it's hard to know if this first live-action outing of a Valiant Comics character would have succeeded at the box office on its modest merits, since it debuted during the first year of the pandemic.

To date there have been no announcements of further Valiant live-action projects.

EDGE OF TOMORROW (2014)

 

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

Aside from sporting a name that sounds like a sixties soap opera, EDGE OF TOMORROW is a decent adaptation of the Japanese light novel ALL YOU NEED IS KILL, by Hiroshi Sakurazaka. I read KILL five or six years ago, and I remember only two items. The novel concerned (1) a human soldier who was projected into a recurring time loop thanks to accidental contact with a "Mimic," one of the inhuman creatures who've invaded Earth, and (2) the time loops allowed the hero to master a particular martial skill by dint of multiple repetitions, which was loosely compared to the way samurais practice their sword-swings over and over to attain superiority.

I can't speak to the characterization of the main hero, but William Cage (Tom Cruise) has a refreshingly unlikeable personality at the outset. Even though humanity is threatened with extinction by the Mimics, Cage has wangled an officer-position in the army's publicity department so that he can avoid risking his neck in combat. However, a commanding officer takes such a dislike to Cage that the officer frames Cage with desertion and rewrites his military history so that Cage is scheduled to ship out with the infantry. And Cage perish in combat-- except, as noted above, he's exposed to the blood of a particular type of Mimic. He then gets a temporal reprieve from his own death, for he's absorbed the Mimic's unique ability to reboot its own timeline. From then on, every time Cage is killed, under any circumstances, he simply shifts back to the point when he was inducted into the infantry. This allows him all the time he needs to self-train, so that he remembers all of the experiences in his previous "lives." More importantly, he realizes he's not the only human who went through this experience, and that the Mimics control a power that will inevitably doom humanity.

For the film's first hour or so, the script shows great facility with the permutations of the hero's "Groundhog Day" predicament, challenging the viewer to guess how Cage will find some way to master his situation. As in the novel, Cage learns that a famous fighter of the resistance, Rita Vrataski (Emily Blunt), went through a similar experience, but lost her time-shifting ability over time. Rita also gives Cage the benefit of her combat experience, with the unusual habit of temporarily "killing" Cage whenever he's too incapacitated to continue fighting, so that he'll reboot again and compensate for past failures.

EDGE is largely a two-character film, and Blunt does her best to play off Cage as he develops greater altruism, while still keeping his breezy charm. Still, EDGE is structured mostly as a star turn for Tom Cruise, and it does that reasonably well. Still, the script begins to run out of steam in the last half hour, despite continuing to throw new developments at the viewer. EDGE is a solid piece of craftsmanship, and made good box office thanks to the Cruise name, but having watched it twice, I doubt I'll ever do so again.

 

ARTHUR AND MERLIN (2015)

  

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical*                                                                                                                                                 Director Marco Van Belle's ARTHUR AND MERLIN looks like what John Boorman might have produced, had he been forced to make EXCALIBUR on MERLIN's budget. The Boorman comparison also applies in that Van Belle also sought to approach the familiar tropes of Arthurian myth in an idiosyncratic manner. However, Van Belle and his collaborators weren't even close to having organized their idiosyncrasies into a pleasing whole.                         

  One big change is that Merlin and Arthur (who are given archaic Celtic names that I'm not going to type here) are roughly the same age. We first see both of them as kids, fifteen years before the story proper. Merlin is a child born with a caul, and his mother tells him that this is a mark of favor from the ancient (never seen) race of the Tuadann. (This is patently a derivation from the Celtic faerie-folk sometimes called "the Tuatha de Danaan.") Young Merlin's mother tells him that the Tuadann still exist and intervene in a never-ending war between "good pagan gods" and "bad pagan gods." As if to confirm the ongoing conflict, the druid Aberthol (Nigel Cooke) shows up on the doorstep of Merlin's tribe, demanding to sacrifice one of the tribesmen, and selecting Young Merlin for the honor. Since Aberthol is backed by the authority of King Vortigern, no one can stop the execution. However, Young Arthur, a minor byblow of a royal family, has come along with Aberthol's retinue, and Young Arthur makes possible Young Merlin's escape. The future wizard disappears into a haunted forest where no one will follow him.                   

 Fifteen years later, Arthur (Kirk Barker) is a twentysomething warrior in the service of Vortigern. The monarch has become addled with age and is still under the control of Evil Aberthol. Arthur becomes convinced that the druid is truly allied to the invading Saxons, and that he plots to get as many Celts killed as possible. When Aberthol gets the king to exile Arthur-- and even to turn against Vortigern's own ward Olwen (Arthur's secret lady love) -- Arthur decides that he needs magical help. He delves into the forbidden forest and eventually finds the adult Merlin (Stefan Butler) -- though the wizard has become a bit addled himself, as he's been given invisible tutelage in the magical arts by those never-seen Tuadann. Long story short, Arthur finally manages to convince the sorcerer to leave his comfort zone and join the fight against Aberthol.                                                     

 The joined heroes make one important discovery: Aberthol isn't working for the Saxons. Rather, he wants to kill as many people as possible in order to summon forth one of the dark gods-- though it's not clear if the druid does so for personal gain or for religious obsessions. This plotline resembles Robert E Howard more than Thomas Malory, but that's less a problem than Van Belle's inability to come up with compelling melodrama. ARTHUR AND MERLIN is not an awful movie. But Van Belle, who basically had only done shorts before this film, simply creates too many dead-end plot-threads. Here's one interesting "dropped thread": Arthur nobly rescues a Saxon woman from rape by Arthur's own Celtic kinsmen. The thugs fling her Christian cross into a nearby pond, but before they can do anything else, Arthur arrives and chases off the malcontents. The woman asks the hero to retrieve her cross from the pond. Arthur does so, and in taking that action, he finds a magical sword-- albeit one never called Excalibur. The sword does show the future king visions, though, and those visions lead him to Merlin, making it possible for the duo to defeat the evil druid. This was an odd confluence of Christian and pagan elements, but it might have given rise to good mythicity in the hands of a better storyteller. But most of the movie is mediocre, ending with only the suggestion of how the muddled mystic will lead the reluctant youth to his kingly destiny.

COWBOYS VS. VAMPIRES (2010)

 

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

Even if these two projects didn’t start off with names evoking the big-budget COWBOYS VS. ALIENS, both ended up copying the title but, for once, not the exact content. For one thing, while the earlier film actually took place in the Old West, pitting Daniel Craig against extraterrestrials, these two low-budget flicks stayed in modern times—though the first one at least benefited from use of a famous movie-set used to film a lot of westerns.

Johnny Dust (Jasen Wade) is an actor who’s supposedly come to fame playing almost nothing but westerns. (That alone tells the viewer that the actor must live in some alternate world where westerns didn’t die out in the 1980s.) However, Johnny’s cinematic glory days are behind him, and now he pays the bills by enacting western-playlets for an Old West theme-park. Implicitly he’s in his forties, as is his ex-wife Sarah, by whom he has a teenaged daughter, Kim. Johnny continues to angle for a cinematic comeback, which brings a younger woman, Gloria, into his orbit. This incites Sarah’s jealousy, who refers to Gloria as a “kid.” (Age stats: at the time the Gloria-actress was pushing thirty, while the Sarah-actress was pushing fifty. Not exactly a huge transgression there.)

For some reason, a vampire decides to make the tourist trap his stomping-grounds, and proceeds to vampirize various locals, including Gloria. Writer-director Douglas Myers seems so preoccupied with his celebration of the West in the person of Johnny—who is, of course, not a real cowboy in any way—that he devotes nearly no attention to the vampires and their modus operandi. Eventually, amid Johnny’s family and career problems, he notices the presence of real bloodsuckers. Instead of heading for the hills, Johnny decides to play his role of “western hero” for real.

As of now VAMPIRES is Myers’ only movie credit. It’s nothing special, but it’s a better timewaster than a lot of other pedestrian efforts, if only thanks to actresses Angelique Celaya and Shannon Whirry.

TEEN TITANS, SEASON ONE (2003)

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      

                                                                                                              PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*

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

Based on my having re-watched the first three seasons of TEEN TITANS, I find that my overall mythicity rating must be "fair," as it is for most serial groupings. However, so far I've yet to find any episodes that rate as outright "poor," in contrast to most full seasons I've reviewed here. Even the well-regarded BATMAN THE ANIMATED SERIES had a lot more poor episodes, though it's arguable that's because the raconteurs on that series attempted a wider range of subject matter than TEEN TITANS did in its five seasons. But in many ways I found this cartoon adaptation more engaging that the Wolfman-Perez comic book that spawned the idea.                                                                                                          Because there's not as much variation, it seems easiest just to review all the "fair" episodes together, and the same for the "good" ones.                                                                                                      FAIR                                                                                                    "Final Exam"-- this was the first episode, introducing the five young heroes-- Robin, Starfire, Cyborg, Raven and Beast Boy-- in their HQ, Titans Tower. Since complete newbies had to become familiar with the characters over time, the writers made all five sympathetic by having them getting kicked out of their home. Under the command of the mystery mastermind Slade, the three super-villains of "H.I.V.E."-- Jinx, Gizmo and Mammoth-- eject the heroes, and they have to summon their fighting-spirit in order to triumph.                                                                                        "Sisters"-- Starfire's conniving older sister Blackfire visits Earth, allegedly to bond with her younger sibling. However, this episode was good for establishing the (never consummated) romantic arc between Starfire and Robin, since one of the first things Blackfire does is to hit on the Teen Wonder, as well as making Starfire think her friends like Blackfire better. But as in the comics, Blackfire never does anything without an evil ulterior motive.                                                                                                                                              "Divide and Conquer"-- The Titans' attempt to bring super-crooks Plasmus and Cinderblock to justice goes awry when alpha males Robin and Cyborg argue about who has authority in the group.                                                                                                  "Forces of Nature"-- Slade hoaxes two immortal beings, Thunder and Lightning (also from the comics), into running amuck, and the Titans have to make these wild god-children understand the consequences of their actions.                                                                                                                                                                "The Sum of His Parts"-- Cyborg's mechanical parts suffer battery failure, and he gets some timely aid from a scientific genius named Fixit. Unfortunately, Fixit's permanent solution to the hero's problems is to get rid of all those unnecessary biological parts. The original-to-cartoon villain Mumbo also debuts.                                                                                                                                     "Switched"-- The cartoon's version of the comic's Puppet King seeks to transfer the heroes' souls into his special puppets. He succeeds with the males, but the spirits of Starfire and Raven get switched into one another's bodies. The two females are forced to understand one another's powers, as well as their emotional natures, in order to overcome their adversary.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         "Deep Six"-- In one of the weaker stories, the Titans descend into the deep blue sea in pursuit of a merman-criminal named Trident. The heroes receive aid from new hero Aqualad, but Beast Boy feels threatened by the aquatic adventurer.                                                                                                                                                                   "Mad Mod"-- in a conscious updating of a moldy oldie comics villain, the evil Brit megalomaniac Mad Mod (voiced by Malcolm McDowell) introduces himself to the Titans by abducting them and forcing them to attend a school of hard knocks.                                                                                                                                         GOOD                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        "Nevermore" -- Raven's team-mates barely know anything about her, least of all her involved demonic heritage. Cyborg and Beast Boy trespass in Raven's private room and get sucked into a magical mirror that she uses to suppress her human emotions. In the mirror-world, the two heroes encounter various simulacra of Raven's emotions-- anger, timidity, gaiety-- as well as the deadly image of Raven's father Trigon. Though Raven had to rescue her partners from peril, she gains some interesting insights into her own emotional complexities.                                                                                                                                                         "Masks"-- though Slade was visually modeled after the comics-villain Deathstroke, this master manipulator is barely comparanble to the idiotic comics-character. Since Slade has repeatedly hurled menaces at the Titans but has always escaped retribution, leader Robin becomes obsessed with the goal of capturing the evildoer. To that end, Robin goes "deep cover" without informing his friends of his plans. The young hero assumes the identity of a costumed crook, Red X, and confounds his partners in order to fool Slade into enlisting Red X as a henchman. The gambit not only fails, it drives a wedge between Robin and his team-mates.                                                                                                                             "Apprentice"-- The two-part final episode of Season One shows cool customer Slade attempting to "one up" Robin by forcing the young crusader to be his apprentice. Though Batman's name is never mentioned, and his history with Robin is only indirectly suggested, clearly Slade has a devilish desire to be an anti-Batman, corrupting Robin just for pure Schadenfreude. Robin is forced to serve the master villain for a time to preserve the lives of his friends, but he still manages to save them and thwart Slade in the end. Slade's plotting, however, would attain more epic proportions in the second season.                    

DOCTOR SATAN AND THE BLACK MAGIC (1968)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical*                                                                                                                                                 Joaquin Cordero returned for the last outing of Doctor Satan, but not so director Miguel Morayta, who lent the 1966 b&w movie such strong atmosphere. MAGIC, the color-filled follow-up, was helmed by Rogelio Gonzalez, today best known for the daffy SF-comedy SHIP OF MONSTERS. Ostensibly the writing-staff was the same for both movies, so I don't know why one was really tightly constructed while the other dithers about with lots of talking head scenes for inconsequential characters. On the positive side, though, there's still no lame comedy relief here either.                                     

  At the end of the first film, Satan had been placed in a cell by Interpol, but he simply disappeared with no explanation. At the beginning of MAGIC, that little old zombie-maker has apparently descended to the infernal domain of his master King Devil. The setup loosely implies that Doctor Satan has died, maybe as a result of going to Hell, and that he expects to pass on to "eternal peace." (As in the first flick, the Devil King's sphere doesn't seem to be in line with one's expectations for Hell as a place of punishment.) King Devil informs Satan that he needs to complete a mission on Earth before he can know peace. A scientist has invented a way to transform any metal into gold, but another super-villain, name of Yei Lin (Noe Murayama), has stolen the secret and plans to use it to advance the cause of his master. The master's name is "Lucifer" in the dub I saw, and apparently no writer thought this could be a source of confusion for viewers, given the fact that Lucifer and Satan are interchangeable names for the Christian Devil. Anway, whatever Lucifer wants to do with the gold, King Devil wants Doctor Satan to prevent it by killing Yei Lin. The doctor rather reluctantly accepts his new mission, and in no time King Devil has apparently set up his minion with his own ritzy office in a swanky buidling. When we see Satan there, he's already turned a hot young woman into one of his obedient zombies, and after a short interview with a new employee, a second hot girl is added to Satan's ranks. These henchwomen are the only minions Satan gets, and they're not as obviously dead people compared to the villain's earlier servants. To be sure, the title character's opponent doesn't exactly have a pocket army either.               

  Yei Lin duplicates the main traits of Doctor Satan, being both a scientist and a user of black magic. In fact, Yei is also a vampire of the Stoker brand: he can walk around in daylight without consequence, but he only manifests vampire powers at night. In addition to three or four male henchmen, Yei also has Dea, a female assistant who's also a girlfriend-type. It's never clear how Yei and Dea will use the gold-making process to gain power, so I guess it's just the old standard: "whoever has the gold makes the rules." Yei and Satan spend the whole movie trying different gambits against one another until a climactic mano-a-mano combat at the end. Though the energy of the proceedings weakens sometimes, there are still some diverting scenes. Two standouts are (1) Yei gets the drop on Satan and simply shoots him to death, though Satan is preserved by King Devil's power, and (2) Yei infiltrates the room where Satan's zombie helpers lie in state, and when he bites them for the purpose of turning them against their master, he fails to have any effect on the two undead women.                                                                       

  There are also a few Interpol agents buzzing around in search of the stolen formula, but they never have any effect on the plot. Though this time viewers are in a brightly colored world with lots of mundane shots of people driving cars and the like, MAGIC still works pretty well because actors Murayama and Cordero put a lot of moxie into their villainous roles. And though Satan doesn't canoodle with his lady zombies as Yei does with Dea, the dour servant of King Devil does make sure to send the females on to their eternal reward when he Satan doesn't need their services. Not surprisingly, Satan doesn't remain unscathed after defeating his foe, and so he too apparently dies a real death-- which proves a fitting end, with no Fu Manchu-esqe predictions for recrudescence.         

HONOR ROLL #272

 Doctor Satan meets his match in NOE MURAYAMA.                                         

 STARFIRE becomes starry-eyed over her role in the Titans cartoon.              

JASEN WADE: he's an old cowhand, with a stake in hand.                           

      Who you gonna call for a road-company Arthur and Merlin? KIRK BARKER and STEFAN BUTLER, that's who.                           

       At least in "Groundhog Day" Bill Murray didn't have to get killed to do a reset, like TOM CRUISE did.                                                 

 ELIZA GONZALEZ: "Do my eyes look Bloodshot?"                               

LEGO DC SUPER HERO GIRLS: BRAIN DRAIN (2017)

 

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

The first of two LEGO-ized versions of DC SUPER HERO GIRLS avoids one of my main criticisms of the regular franchise by concentrating on just three heroines: Supergirl, Wonder Woman and Batgirl. 

Like all of the other LEGO films I've reviewed, BRAIN DRAIN is a comedy first and an adventure second. However, the jokes aren't on a par with the best humor of Lego's versions of Batman and Justice League. This may be because the writers were too narrowly following the very limited cosmos of the "straight" HERO GIRLS series, which is a little bit like the old idea of "copying the shadow of a shadow."

BRAIN DRAIN does have an intriguing opening. The three main heroes investigate a burglary and find that the culprits are their schoolmates Katana and Bumblebee. Then all three girls wake up and it seems that they just dreamed the whole thing. However, they've all lost 24 hours of time, during which they apparently committed various offenses against other students and against Principal Amanda Waller.

After this promising start, though, things soon settle down into a routine meet-and-beat. The trio tracks down the author of their troubles, Lena Luthor from the second "straight" telefilm, and she's made common cause with Eclipso, one of the two main evildoers from the first telefilm. Again, the two villains are using a combination of "open a dimension portal to gain power" and "enslave regular people and superheroes alike with a mind-control thingie." But reducing the number of super-foes down to two is also a big improvement, and Lena Luthor gets the movie's best lines.

Even though the animators here are dealing with "brick-mation" rather than drawings, the LEGO raconteurs map out much better fights than were seen in the two adventure-oriented movies. Aside from that, it's just another routine Lego-flick.   

BRUCE, KUNG FU GIRLS (1975)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*                                                                                                                                                        The most demanding thing about this goofy romp-- originally titled FIVE PRETTY YOUNG LADIES-- is trying to decide if it's more comedy than adventure. But as dopey as the concept is-- five young Chinese girls, wearing matching skirts, boots, and halter tops, volunteer to capture an "invisible thief"-- I'd say the movie sells thrills more often than jokes. And really, when the Chinese make a thoroughgoing comedy, one's not likely to be fooled by lots of subtlety.                                                                                                   

  The five girls-- billed on HKMDB as "Pretty Girls 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5"-- are headed by two "name" stars-- Polly Shang Kwan and Elsa Yeung-- while the other three actresses, according to said database, barely did anything else but BRUCE. The five characters are almost indistinguishable from one another, except that the youngest wears pigtails and sometimes acts childishly. The quintet become involved with crimefighting when some hoods chase a handsome young scientist into the girls' gym. The girl-gang's leader (Shang Kwan) has an uncle on the local police force, so the ladies manage to insinuate themselves into the investigation of the scientist's relevance to an invisible thief plaguing Hong Kong. The scientist, whom the Shang Kwan character fancies, used "moon rocks" to concoct an invisibility formula, and the gangsters who attacked him work for a lady gang-boss (Betty Pei Ting). There's no pretense of detective work here. The girls just show up wherever the script needs them to do so and start kicking Bad Guy ass with their kung fu, though top-billed Shang Kwan performs the best stunts. When the girls aren't on screen, BRUCE is a stone bore-- though sadly, I have seen many films worse than this one.