AQUAMAN (2006)

 

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

I don't know which of the many reboots of the AQUAMAN comics-franchise influenced this unsuccessful pilot for a WB teleseries, but it follows many of the same beats as the popular 2018 feature film. Again we see the hero first as a small child, living amidst surface-dwelling humans with his mother and father, only to have his mother stolen from him by mysterious sea-dwellers. Then, after growing to adulthood with his father as confidante, the hero learns that his mother was a native of sunken Atlantis, and that the Atlanteans are coming back to give him grief. The pilot's biggest change from that template is that this version of Arthur "Aquaman" Curry (Justin Hartley) isn't the product of a mer-woman and a surface-dweller; Arthur's paternal unit adopts Little Arthur and marries his mother after finding them drifting in the ocean.

It's not clear, within the limits of a forty-minute pilot, why Atlanteans start messing in Mature Arthur's life after leaving him alone for roughly fifteen years, but there are both good water-breathers (Ving Rhames) and bad ones called "sirens" who can morph into claw-handed demons (Adrianne Palicki). But the script, by SMALLVILLE's showrunners Michael Millar and Alfred Gough, certainly piles on lots of subplots for development in the ongoing series that didn't happen. Arthur and his dad live in the Florida Keys, just a stone's throw from the mysterious Bermuda Triangle, somehow tied into the underwater city of Atlantis (never seen). There's a government agent investigating the recrudescence of Atlanteans, and a female Navy pilot who ends up "racing" her plane against Arthur, swimming below her in the sea like a human torpedo. A Navy man is found sixty years after he disappeared, but he hasn't aged-- though he doesn't get any older, thanks to an Atlantean assassin. Arthur barely has time to suss out any of these impending plot-threads, but he does get to slay the evil siren who maybe kidnapped his mother. 

In addition to some engaging plotlines, the pilot provided a few nice visual moments showing the wonders of the ocean, albeit on a TV budget. Probably this would have made a good show, certainly better than many of the abortions brought into imperfect life after the WB channel merged with the UPN and begot the horror that was the CW.

DAIGORO VS. GOLIATH (1972)

 

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

I consider this the first "kaiju comedy" feature film. I've heard some critics assign that distinction to KING KONG VS. GODZILLA, but though I've never seen the original Japanese cut, KKVG isn't structured like a comedy, which requires a lot more overt jokes than even an American distributor could have possibly removed.

DAIGORO was a reworking of a failed (and ostensibly serious) Godzilla project, which was to have been a collaboration between Godzilla's studio Toho and the special effects company Tsurabaya. Once the Big G was off the table, the producers shifted gears toward a comedy for small children, quite as if someone said, "Well, if we can't use Godzilla, let's do our own version of the Son of Godzilla, but make him even dorkier." Indeed, the hippo-like visage of Daigoro, a "kid kaiju" like Minilla, seems to be a joke in its own right.

Unlike Minilla, Daigoro is dependent upon human beings for parental guidance. His mother was a subterranean creature awakened by nuclear tests, and after she ravaged Japan, the military killed her. However, she left behind Baby Daigoro. One might expect the government to take charge of the infant kaiju, whether for study or weaponization-- but this would have deprived the kid-audience of the nuclear-family experience. So the government allows one private individual, an inventor named Goro, to adopt Daigoro and keep him on an island. Trouble is. Goro has to pay for the kid-monster's upkeep, and his only way of doing so is to enter Japanese contests for wacky new inventions. However, Daigoro eventually gets to prove his mettle when a more destructive giant monster, dubbed Goliath, descends to Earth and begins tearing things up.

Though most adults will get little out of the humor here, it's at least palatable if one thinks of kids seeing such jokes for the first time. It's at least lively, not repeating the same jokes the way some Gamera-flicks did, and the weird end-scene with the genial kaiju availing himself of a giant privy has to be seen to be believed. The combative action between the giant monsters wasn't much better than that of a SyFy critter-flick. There's an ecology lecture about how human misuse of the biosphere has weakened the atmosphere, thus making it easier for meteors-- and monsters named Goliath-- to descend and wreak destruction.

The one element that's not totally aimed at kids is Goro's niece Yoshiko. She's of marriageable age, but her uncle's reputation is so bad that every arranged marriage she explores falls through. This is an odd side-plot for a kids' movie, especially since it doesn't affect the main plot, though she manages some sort of hookup at the end. Maybe the writers just thought kids of both genders could identify with having to listen to the complaints of older sisters.                   

            

MANTIS FIST AND TIGER CLAWS OF SHAOLIN (1977)

  

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

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

I think I've found my new favorite "crazy-fu" film in this one.

First things first: though there are several characters who utilize kung fu-- the hero, the villains, and all the villains' minions-- there's no mention of anything to do with the Shaolin Temple. There's also no great focus on animal-styles of fighting. "Tiger claw" techniques are verbally referenced once during a battle, and there's no mention of "mantis fist." The film does begin with an odd little lecture in which a narrator talks about the carnivorous nature of the real bugs while two cartoon mantises copulate, and then the female bites off the male's head. Even more oddly, this ends up being relevant to what initially looks like just another quarrel between a noble hero and some rapacious (emphasis on the "rape") villains.

Pai (John Cheung) stops in a tavern for a drink. He sees waitress Shuang (Sarina Sai) getting harassed by the son of a powerful local family, the Hungs, who has a small gang of minions. Pai's superior skills drive off the Hung faction, but as Pai leaves, he mentions to the grateful Shuang that his next destination is the local "orchid house." Later Shuang learns that Pai's motives there are noble as well. At some point in the past, Pai's sister Yu was abducted and sold to a whorehouse (possibly by the Hung family), and Pai has gathered enough money to buy her contract and liberate Yu. 

However, things go from bad to worse for Shuang. Despite a local's warning that women often get abducted in these parts, she wanders into the forest, and the guys from the tavern assault her. They leave her behind afterward, but before they get home they're attacked by some unseen entity who hurls bamboo shoots at them, either impaling or killing them in other ways. In jig time, the Hung Patriarch (Dean Shek) learns of his son's death and decides that he must have been killed by this interloper Pai. Pai's efforts to free his sister are complicated when he's attacked by Hung and his other two sons at the whorehouse. One of the sons has a highly original weapon: a false hump on his back that can sprout metal spikes like a cartoon porcupine. 

Pai suffers some damage from the massed attack and takes refuge at Shuang's tavern. Once Shuang learns of Pai's true purpose, she masquerades as a male customer and spirits Yu away from the house of ill repute. The three of them leave town, but another of the Hung boys, along with some henchmen, attack the good guys in the forest. Yu is killed, and though Pai escapes, Hung-son #2 has Shuang taken to his place of residence, where he does unto her just as his dead brother did. Then he apparently leaves Shuang confined to a room, ventures into the forest with the minions, and most of them get killed by nooses that whip out of the trees.

This misfortune does nothing to deter Hung-son #3-- the one with the spiky hunchback-- from raping Shuang too. (This includes a really weird scene where he rotates on his spike-hump while having intercourse with Shuang.) However, the last son meets his fate at home, killed by an assailant seen only as two huge mantis-arms. 

None of these events keep the elder Hung from obsessively tracking down Pai. The two have a good long battle, which Hung loses. Pai recovers Shuang and marries her. However, a friend of Pai's belatedly learns of a skeleton in the Shuang family's closet. It seems that her mother was impregnated by a mantis (it's not even specified to be a mantis-god or anything), and as a result Shuang is half-mantis. When Pai attempts to celebrate his nuptials, Shuang turns into a mantis-monster, in this case a normal-sized woman with claws and an insect-head. Shuang is killed and spared from any further rampages, though Pai's not exactly a happy camper either.

Hong Kong kung fu films are not exactly anyone's first choice for examining sexual politics. Still, the writer-directors of MANTIS seem to be unusually preoccupied with the disposition of women due to the physical power differential. Women can be raped, abducted and sold to brothels, or even impregnated by mantises, and there's not a lot they can do about it. Pai brings about some retribution by fighting the Hungs. Still, his main concern is his sister, so he might not have ended up battling the Elder Hung had it not been for Shuang taking vengeance upon her rapists. She has to become a monster to accomplish this, though apparently her transformations are unconscious. There's no indication that she remembers her experiences as a mantis-creature, though the writers cheat a little, having her kill off some of her attackers with the use of unusual weapons. 

Shuang and Yu perish, though Pai doesn't exactly end up in a good place either. But I can't claim that the two creators-- most of whose works I've not seen-- intended to make any statement beyond grabbing the public with an arresting story.

EL ROJO (1966)

  

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

The "fair mythicity" rating on EL ROJO isn't at all for the generally routine spaghetti-western plot, but for an assortment of odd little touches writer-director Leopoldo Savona throws into the mix. 

We open on the scene of a wagon-train family arriving at the site of their newly acquired land, where they intend to work a gold mine. Then everyone in the family gets shot dead by arrows-- yet we don't see any marauding Indians about. Years later, four stalwart citizens of a nearby town are celebrating how rich they are before the admiring townfolk. Then a mysterious arrow is shot from an unknown Indian assailant, just missing the luminaries-- all on the very same day that a laconic stranger named Joe (Richard Harrison) arrives in town. Can there be a connection between all of these events?

No surprises here: the four rich guys-- Navarro, Wallace, Laskey and Ortega-- made their riches by killing off the family of goldminers and then by acquiring their mine. However, one member of the family wasn't there to be slaughtered, and it's the laconic stranger named Joe, who's looking for revenge. The Indian sniper, who has no lines in the picture, witnessed the slaughter of the family. Maybe the association of their bloody deaths is why Joe is called "Rojo" just once-- not counting a very oblique reference at the movie's end.

Though Joe has four obnoxious targets for his revenge-- one of whom, Laskey, married a local girl, Consuelo, who was apparently Joe's girl at some time-- director Savona doesn't play up the action/violence scenes as one might expect of a 1966 spaghetti western. Yet ROJO does maintain a curious offbeat charm in some little details Savona throws in. On a couple of occasions, Joe offers cubes of sugar to acquaintances and never explains where he picked up this habit. During one of Joe's revenge-plots, an accomplice-- also a patent-medicine peddler-- sets up a means of distracting the town by offering to burn the Devil in effigy, an odd ritual that the locals immediately embrace. Joe snipes at Consuelo for having sold her soul to one of the rich guys, and the script seems to agree with Joe, for unlike the majority of spaghetti-heroines Consuelo bites the dust.

However, the oddest thing in ROJO is also the only element that makes the film an uncanny western. At one point, a gunhawk comes to town, wearing a black mask over the lower part of his face-- except once, when he removes the scarf and displays an extensive scar that would do Jonah Hex proud. One assumes that one of the villains summoned the outlaw, not least because he's billed as "Nero Burt"-- in English, "Black Bart." Yet Bart (Angelo Boscariol) doesn't make any moves on Rojo. Then, near the movie's end, when Joe has wiped out the last enemy, Bart shows up and utters some cryptic line to Joe about how "the red and the black are together at last." Then the movie just ends, implying-- possibly-- some equivalence between the righteous vengeance-seeker and the Man in Black.

Savona directed four or five westerns I've not seen, some period historicals and one horror movie with the wild-sounding title, "Byleth the Demon of Incest." I may check out other sagebrush sagas in Savona's ouevre to see if any of them are as oddball as ROJO.

ONE PIECE: GOLD (2016)

  

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

A Marxist critic would probably view GOLD as a commentary on the corrosive power of the cash nexus upon human beings. I doubt that the writer had anything ideological in mind when he invented the villain Gild Tesoro (roughly, "golden treasure"), but one could certainly argue that he's one of many evildoers who seeks to hold a godlike control over his subjects, and even explicitly calls himself a god three or four times.

 Gild Tesoro manages Gran Tesoro, a mammoth ship that hosts its own Vegas-like community, entirely organized around the activities of his casino. The Straw Hat Pirates initially view the city-at-sea as a beguiling place of fun and adventure, and they even show off their powers by kicking the asses of some sore-loser pirates who try to rob the casino. Tesoro's lovely henchwoman Baccarat then invites the Straw Hats to enjoy the gambling activities and extends to them a munificent line of credit. However, Baccarat also possesses "luck-luck" powers, and she messes with Luffy's luck to cause the Straw Hats to lose all their credits, putting them in debt to Gran Tesoro.

Tesoro himself is the epitome of the "gladhander" villain: the type who pretends to offer everyone a good time. In truth one of the evildoer's showy stunts is to shower newcomers with gold dust-- dust with which he can then control them, thanks to his "gold-gold power." Everyone, except perhaps Tesoro's henchmen and casino guards, become Tesoro's slaves as soon as they enter the city, and that includes the hero-pirates. To provide his customers with "bread and circuses," he contrives a game to challenge the Hats to absolve their debts before Tesoro executes Zoro. 

 The Straw Hats get some timely assistance from a more landbound type of pirate: professional thief Carina. She's also an old acquaintance of Nami, who has her own larcenous past, and the joined allies try to heist the vast treasures of Gran Tesoro in order to ransom Zoro. Happily, the script doesn't allow the heroes to waste time in a reprise of "Ocean's Eleven," but instead finds a clever way to counteract Tesoro's gold-controlling power. In the big splashy climax, Luffy squares off against Tesoro, Zoro against a big goon, and Baccarat is taken down by three of the generally weaker members of the crew: Usopp, Chopper and Brooke. There's a belated flashback to Tesoro's early life, showing how he became attached to the idea of gaining gold and owning people, but it doesn't make him any more sympathetic, in contrast to Zephyr from the Z movie.

Curiously, though, all of the online sources credit the script to one Tsutomu Kuroiwa, the credits for GOLD assert that the film was based on an original story by series-creator Eichiro Oda. In addition, the brief appearance of a character called Spandam, a villain from an unrelated manga-arc, makes GOLD an example of a villain-crossover.

X-MEN: THE ANIMATED SERIES, VOLUME FOUR (1995-96)

  

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

One odd note about Volume 4 is that although it doesn't contain all the episodes attributed to "Season 4," at least this time every episode on the discs came FROM Season 4. That said, a few had already appeared on the Volume Three collection, and there's at least one Season 4 tale that I assume will show up on Volume Five.

That said, the selections for Four are the same mixed bag seen in earlier volumes. "Proteus" is, despite cast-changes, one of the show's closest emulations of a Claremont-Byrne story, and it even succeeds in putting across some of that tale's horrific tonality.  One, "Sanctuary," was based on a story I'd not read, but it was tolerable, while "Lotus and Steel" is a complete reworking of the history of Wolverine's occasional opponent Silver Samurai, with mediocre results.

 An event of sorts takes place in that Cyclops and Marvel Girl are finally married, with less folderol than in the comics. That said, the wedding gets lost in yet another of the time-wasting time-travel stories to which the showrunners seemed addicted. Cable, Bishop, Apocalypse and Mister Sinister get four episodes devoted to a forgettable outing. The storyline was intended to conclude the series, but if nothing else, the fifth season deprived this mediocrity of that distinction.  

Strangely, the showrunners devote just one episode to disclosing Magneto's paternity of Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch. While I don't fault the adaptors for not translating the many continuity-nuggets from "The Yesterday Quest," at this point the show had only briefly introduced Quicksilver in one episode, as a member of an off-brand version of X-Factor. Then suddenly everyone in the story knows both Quicksilver and his sister Scarlet Witch, and Wolverine provides the X-hero connection while the two siblings encounter both Daddy Magneto and a fanatical version of the High Evolutionary. Niggles aside, it's still a better story than most of those on Volume Four.

HONOR ROLL #308

We certainly don't have "gloom and misery everywhere" when Ororo's style of STORM-y weather holds court.

Three swords make certain there's always a Mark of RORONOA ZORO about.

 ANGELO BOSCARIOT shows us a face only Fangoria could love.

 

 JOHN CHEUNG prays that his wife's "mantis style" doesn't include biting off her husband's head.

Minilla begins to look pretty good next to DAIGORO.

Before playing an ace archer on "Smallville," JUSTIN HARTLEY took a dive at a certain sea king.

HULK AND THE AGENTS OF SMASH, SEASON TWO (2014-15)

  

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

The second and last season of HULK/SMASH is almost indistinguishable from the first. In fact, the first six episodes of Season Two deal with the Smashers getting "lost in space" following events in one of the last Season One episodes. I'm not sure that these agglomeration of Hulks were well-suited to cosmic adventures with the Skrulls, the Silver Surfer and Ego the Living Planet. But the space-stuff doesn't last that long if one doesn't like it.

Much as with Season One, the weakest stories are usually those that try a little too hard to be humorous, like "A Druff is Enough," in which the impulsive A-Bomb takes a cute little alien aboard the Smashers' spaceship, with the expected chaotic results. Two different stories deal with villains seeking to drain gamma energy from one or more of the Hulks. but I confess I didn't notice the plot duplication the first time out. Arguably, there might be slightly less usage of standard Marvel villains this season, concentrating mostly on the Green Hulk's main villain The Leader, the Kree leader the Supreme Intelligence, and The Maestro, an insane time-variant of the Hulk himself. Season Two also includes a version of "Nick Fury's Howling Commandos." who had previously appeared on a contemporaneous SPIDER-MAN episode. But the most noteworthy story involves the Smashers teaming with the Avengers to oppose the Kree, which conflict concludes somewhat after the fashion of the "Kree-Skrull War" from a 1970s AVENGERS continuity.    

There are a smattering of stories about the Smashers feeling ambivalent about being both "heroes" and "monsters," but this conceit doesn't go very deep. The level of characterization is always light and breezy, like many (though not all) Silver Age Marvels. However, there's a less salutary likeness to Sixties Marvel in that the group's one female member gets short narrative shrift, just like certain femmes formidables of the comics, principally Scarlet Witch in AVENGERS and Marvel Girl in X-MEN. Overall, the SMASH series isn't so much notable for doing great new stuff as for not getting things wrong as do many other Marvel animated adaptations.

RESIDENT EVIL: VENDETTA (2017)

  

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

This RESIDENT EVIL motion-capture movie came out long enough after the last in the series, 2012's DAMNATION, that someone in production termed VENDETTA a "reboot." In terms of content, it's indistinguishable from the previous two in the series, but in terms of style, VENDETTA is as impressive as the best of the live-action EVILS.

The main hero here is Chris Redfield, primarily a character known from the RPG. In the EVIL world, illicit experiments have given rise to the T-virus and its variants, which are capable of instantly mutating human beings into ravening zombies. Redfield and his counter-terrorism unit attack the domicile of a known dealer in T-virus bioweapons, Glenn Arias, who has taken captive a female undercover agent. The soldiers are attacked by zombies created by Arias, and then Redfield suffers the sort of trauma that never happened to Chuck Norris. Redfield squares off hand-to-hand with Arias, who looks like a well-dressed day-trader, and the less muscular Arias trounces the bulky warrior. Then Arias leaves his zombies-- including the transformed female agent-- to finish off Redfield, while departing in the company of hottie Maria Gomez and her father Diego, who for some reason has been transformed into one of the bulky virus-mutants called a "Tyrant." Once the villains have escaped, air support flies in and bombs the zombies, saving Redfield.

Four months later, scientist and former agent Rebecca Chambers (also a game character) has succeeded in formulating a vaccine that can keep the virus from spreading. Arias learns about this somehow, and he unleashes his virus on the research facility. Though the other scientists are zombiefied, Chambers saves herself from that fate with her vaccine, after which Redfield and his team extract her. Chambers and Redfield then seek the help of another agent with considerable counter-bioweapons experience, Leon S. Kennedy. Kennedy has some previous trauma bugging him, but he finally agrees to join another assault on Arias after Maria and Diego Gomez attack first, kidnapping Chambers.

Ostensibly Arias wants to nullify Chambers before she can make his bioweapons obsolete. However, unlike the standard Chuck Norris evildoer, Arias also has a trauma in his past, and it's actually more emotionally resonant than Kennedy's. Years ago his estate was carpet-bombed by someone who didn't like his munitions-profession, but as it was the day of Arias' wedding, his bride perished in the holocaust. Now Arias gets the nutty idea that Chambers is going to become his new bride, though he also has some demented idea of somehow transplanting part of the dead bride into the scientist's body. Fortunately, Kennedy, Redfield and a few allies storm Arias' base, resulting in the destruction of his plans and most of the villains (though Maria survives, possibly for later use). 

This is a good kick-ass film, without any great complexity but with a fair amount of emotional resonance. Oddly, though Chambers and Maria are positioned as action-girls, and there's one unnamed female ally in the big climax, this time the guys get all the good scenes (including Redfield's rematch with Arias, which has a more salutary outcome). 

KONG: RETURN TO THE JUNGLE (2007)

  

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

Wow, what a shame that the makers of KONG THE ANIMATED SERIES didn't just hang things up with the first of their two DTV movies, KONG: KING OF ATLANTIS. That big-monkey flick was merely mediocre, but RETURN seems a betrayal of even the small coterie of fans that the show might have garnered.

RETURN, a CGI animation, was produced a couple of years after 2004's THE POLAR EXPRESS, and RETURN shows a similar problem with making living creatures seem alive. All the regular characters I summarized in the KING review look like super-streamlined facsimiles of their hand-drawn counterparts. Kong and his human handlers go through their usual routines, but they have little sense of physical continuity.

The one element that a KTAS fan might like about RETURN is that, unlike KING, the main villain here is the one who appeared in the majority of the half-hour episodes. In most episodes, Professor Ramon de la Porta would seek some evil goal, the Kong group would intervene, and Porta would use stolen tech to create some colossal animal-human hybrid to fight Kong. Porta's career reaches some closure in RETURN, though he has to share the fiend-stage with a new villain, a big game hunter who'd like to put Kong's head on a wall.

The CGI animation also takes away from the big-monster action, and as if the writers got tired of the hybrid-schtick, this time the anthropoid crusader only fights a T-Rex. Maybe someone thought of this opponent as a callback to the 1933 KONG, but I may be giving the producers too much credit. The series and the first movie are at best blips in the history of TV animation, but RETURN doesn't even deserve blip-status.

ACES GO PLACES (1982)

  

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

Though I'm far from being a great fan of Chinese comedy films, I enjoyed the zany slapstick of the ACES GO PLACES series, and the first film in the series did a good job of setting up the three principals, who I believe remained together for all five entries. The basic idea seems to be "what would have happened if the "Phantom" thief of PINK PANTHER joined forces with two eccentric HK cops in fighting crime.

Hong Kong super-thief King Kong (Sam Hui) rips off a diamond shipment and then finds out he's robbed the Mafia. The aggrieved crime-lords send various assassins to HK to avenge their honor, particularly a master burglar named "White Gloves." To apprehend Kong, the HK government calls in an American cop of Asian extraction, Albert Au (Karl Maka). He more or less takes the place of the wacky Inspector Clouseau of the PANTHER films, though his main physical characteristic is his total baldness, a testimony to the popularity of the KOJAK teleseries in Hong Kong. Albert's HK liaison is lady cop Nancy Ho (Sylvia Chang), who's constantly accused of being "mannish," and who does get the movie's best fight-scene.         

There are a number of nice comic stunts, though nothing particularly stands out, but the film has too many car chases and crash-ups. The finale contains the only metaphenomenal element, when King Kong counters a fleet of Mafia automobiles with a collection of tiny, remote-controlled toy cars, each loaded with explosives. I tend to doubt anyone in 1982 could actually create such vehicular weapons, but since the script believes that, I'll treat the little cars as uncanny devices.

BATTLE OF THE AMAZONS (1973)

  

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

The standard legends about Amazons assert that the warrior-women lived apart from males, except when they raided neighboring villages and kidnapped men for temporary stud service. Alfonso Brescia's Italian trash-peplum gets that part right, but adds the idea that the Amazons ruled by Queen Eraglia (Lucretia Love) keeps some males as slaves.

BATTLE has a rushed look even for an exploitation flick, possibly because the Italians wanted to "mockbust" Terence Young's more expensive production, THE AMAZONS. That's probably why the three credited writers (one of whom was Bruno Corbucci) took the obvious tack of ripping off THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN. After the women warriors kill the headman of one village, his daughter Valeria (Paola Tedesco) decides to oppose Amazon tyranny. She hires handsome bandit Zeno (Lincoln Park) and his fellow rogues to train her people to fight.

It's not an irredeemable sin to be unoriginal, but it is to be lazy. Though Valeria is not much of a heroine, most of the Glam-azons are good looking enough to provide the sort of spectacle the movie needs. But the battles, even when not performed by stuntmen in drag, are unexceptional. And since the script has no interest in examining Amazon society from any sort of feminist angle-- which, admittedly, would be very atypical for any Italian film of the sixties or seventies -- BATTLE becomes something of a slog, rather than a fun if mindless peplum.

In addition to the "weird societies" trope, BATTLE also employs "outre outfits" in that the Amazons sometimes fight wearing outsized masks, whose real purpose was to conceal the masculine nature of the ladies' stunt-doubles. Over twenty years later, the show XENA WARRIOR PRINCESS also made frequent use of masked Amazons, though I don't know if the producers did so for a similar reason, or if someone on staff saw BATTLE and thought that the mask-thing was cool-looking. 

PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: AT WORLD'S END (2007)

 

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

Given my poor rating for DEAD MAN'S CHEST-- which film was shot back-to-back with AT WORLD'S END-- I wasn't expecting to rate END highly. In fact, I remember watching the film in a theater in 2007 and being exasperated by its meandering plot, its over-indulgence in trump cards and double crosses, and its make-work mythology. However, watching END back-to-back with CHEST, I accrued a greater appreciation for some of the consistent myth-motifs in the 2007 production, even if they were surrounded by a lot of chaos. CHEST now appears to be a padded middle act that introduces a lot of connective tissue necessary for a stronger third act-- which, to be sure, does have a lot of messy stuff as well. 

END, after all, is noteworthy for providing a pleasing if poignant ending to the story-arc of Will Turner and Elizabeth Swann (Orlando Bloom, Keira Knightley), who share the spotlight with capricious captain Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp). The 2017 DEAD MEN TELL NO TALES added a coda to the Will-Elizabeth arc, but the conclusion of END still works as one of two major myth-motifs: that of "lovers tragically separated over long intervals," like "The Cowherd and the Weaver Girl." This motif was probably derived from one of the ancillary versions of the Flying Dutchman, where the cursed captain was able to visit the human world from time to time, seeking true romance. The other major myth-motif-- that of a curse that is passed on from one victim to another-- may be extraneous to the major expressions of the Dutchman story, but END uses the motif to provide a reason why Will is forced to loosely duplicate his father's career as an absentee husband and father.

CHEST's strongest moment appeared toward the movie's conclusion, when the good-hearted Elizabeth unleashes her "inner pirate" and so betrays Jack Sparrow, so that he's consigned to the afterlife ruled by the predacious Davy Jones (Bill Nighy). CHEST also concluded with the mercenary Beckett, representative of the East India trading company, gaining the heart of Davy Jones. With this talisman, Beckett forces Jones and his Dutchman crew to serve as his enforcers in a campaign to eradicate all piracy. Here the script builds upon the first film's suggestion that piracy can be a counter-agent to the compromises of respectable society, and so END opens with a series of grotesque executions of everyone even suspected of associating with pirates. This one sequence might be the best scene ever directed by Gore Verbinski.

Will and Elizabeth, along with former enemy Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush), plan to rescue Jack from perdition, in part to overthrow Beckett's tyranny. To accomplish this, the trio engage the help of a pirate brotherhood. These "pirate lords" add a fair amount of narrative confusion, but they seem necessary to expound on just how former human Davy Jones was transformed into a soul-collector by the goddess Calypso. The brotherhood also somehow forced the goddess to become human, though they don't know which human, and indeed one of the lords thinks Elizabeth is Calypso's reincarnation. Indeed, Calypso and Jones were lovers in antiquity, making them the precursors of the pattern that will consume Will and Elizabeth.         

                

Actually, because the script concentrates so much on the Will-Elizabeth arc-- and some minor ones involving Will's father and Elizabeth's former fiancee Norrington-- Jack Sparrow doesn't have that much to do. Indeed, one of the best scenes toward the big finish has Captain Barbossa marry Will and Elizabeth while all three of them are engaged in mortal combat. Davy Jones too gets closure to his arc, while END shows Jack and Barbossa still engaged in their perfidious but harmless pirate games-- as they still will be in the fourth installment. END has no end of flaws. But as far as putting across the message that we all need to embrace our inner pirates, this is the best of the Caribbean franchise.     

HONOR ROLL #307

 KEIRA wraps up the Caribbean saga in a KNIGHTLEY fashion.

  Amazing are the Amazons of LUCRETIA LOVE. 

And bald is the dome of KARL MAKA.

RAMON DE LA PORTA is just a portal to tedium.

CHRIS REDFIELD: another good resident of EVIL.

And we finish up the adventures of the Smashing Agents with SHE-HULK and SKAAR.