TRUMP VS. THE ILLUMINATI (2020)

  

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

I've reviewed a couple of the low-budget, made-for-streaming cartoon movies made by writer/director BC Fourteen, and both were pretty dull. I have to assume that Fourteen, whose career is dominantly in CGI animation, keeps getting work because streaming services are willing to buy kilotons of animated flicks. This would make sense if all of Fourteen's movies were designed to keep the kiddies entertained. Instead, the guy has a whole science-fiction series which uses foul language, meaning that someone thinks there are consumers, adolescent or older, who might be beguiled by such films. I doubt that most streaming-consumers are even aware of Fourteen's efforts, and the only reason I decided to explore them further is because I'm deeply into both (a) crossovers and (b) monster-mashes.

TRUMP VS. THE ILLUMINATI seems to be the first of Fourteen's SF-series, also involving such featured characters as Bigfoot, Xterminator, and Jack Van Helsing, a clone of the descendant of the DRACULA slayer, appearing here three years before he gets his own film. In the time of the historical Donald Trump, Earth is wiped by aliens called "Illuminati," who look like the popular image of alien abductors, "The Greys." However, the Chinese clone Trump, and Clone-Trump escapes Earth before it's destroyed. He lands on Mars and lives there, with another lost astronaut, for a thousand years.

At the end of that millennium, the Illuminati face opposition from another band of aliens, called the Allies, who somehow form the idea that only Clone-Trump can destroy the Illuminati, and their devilish master Lucifer. To that end, the Allies' queen Varuna (named for a male Hindu god and claiming to be an "Atlantean") journeys to Mars. Clone-Trump refuses her invitation to battle her enemies, but then Illuminati foot-soldiers, aware of a prediction that the reborn 45th President can destroy them, also show up on Clone-Trump's doorstep. Surprisingly he beats them up, and when reinforcements arrive, Varuna teleports the clone into her ship, where he reluctantly agrees to join them.

Varuna's subordinate Princess Kali may be the one who gathered at least two other clones of Earth-entities: Doctor Jekyll and Bigfoot. Fourteen devotes no time to explaining either one, though he would later use Bigfoot in half a dozen other similar productions. Van Helsing, though, is the only clone with whom Kali is sleeping. Kali may not be a Grey, since she and Van Helsing, like Clone-Trump, are never seen outside of a heavy spacesuit-- which suggests that the director knew his CGI couldn't make credible human beings. Yet another historical figure is apparently reincarnated as a Grey: the 20th-century occultist Aleister Crowley, who communes with the Egyptian god Anubis but serves the unseen Illuminati lord Lucifer.

All of this folderol does align BC Fourteen with other bad-movie makers, such as Ed Wood and Jerry Warren with respect to erratically raiding history and pop culture to buttress their grab-bag universes. Fourteen's version of Donald Trump is as stupidly executed as all his other borrowings, with all the usual Liberal triggers included, so it seems a given that he only used Trump's name as a means of getting attention. From what I can tell, this was Clone-Trump's only appearance in the Fourteen-verse, and most of the installments that followed would focus upon his not-much-less-stupid iteration of Bigfoot. FWIW, I judge Clone-Trump to fit the persona of "monster," since in his confrontation with Lucifer, he's more of an unleashed force of nature than a hero.

BIGFOOT VS. THE ILLUMINATI (2020)

 

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

Given that this film shares the same date as TRUMP VS THE ILLUMINATI, the creator probably never meant to follow up his lame "satire" directly. Thus BIGFOOT VS THE ILLUMINATI stands as a soft reboot of the other film, with no references to the Trump-Clone or his climactic confrontation with Lucifer. All of the other regular characters are in place: Van Helsing (now said to be the clone of a Jack Van Helsing, who as far as I know never appeared anywhere), his suit-clad paramour Kali, the Allies, the Illuminati (whose foot soldiers are now called "Archons"), and the occultist Aleister Crowley, who's been incarnated in the body of a Bad Grey alien. Bigfoot appeared briefly in TRUMP but did almost nothing, so that may have been the director monetizing the animation-work he did in advance of this flick. BVTI may also be the first appearance of "Xterminator," who gets his own feature in 2023, and his appearance in the same film as Bigfoot makes the movie a very minor monster mashup.

This time, Van Helsing goes looking for Bigfoot to help out against the Illuminati, going on the memory that the real VH was acquainted with the hairy monster as a buddy. Their meeting is complicated by the fact that VH is a clone, but Bigfoot eventually gets over his reluctance and joins the space-war effort. Fourteen's sloppy script more or less implies that Bigfoot is a thousands-years-old survivor of the devastated Earth, but how he came to live in the galactic empire is never related. Bigfoot talks tough and uses lots of foul language, but he does very little and most of the combative action here is just spaceships, fighting with the most minor CGI-FX.

Once again, it's a lot of plotless jibber-jabber with a few esoteric references to Crowley's occultism thrown in for no good reason. Oh, and there's also no explanation as to whether Kali's ship-physician "Doctor Jekyll" has anything to do with the original Victorian experimenter. As I work my way through this sludge, I think an explanation is unlikely to appear, so if anyone's a crossover-icon here. Jekyll's probably not one.  

  

SWAMP THING (1991)

  

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

By 1991, both Alan Moore and Rick Veitch (and artist collaborators) had turned the SWAMP THING into an opus dedicated to metaphysical and psychological speculations. But as far as other media were concerned, there'd never been any Swamp Thing but the two live-action movies, loosely based upon the original 1970s comic series. 

The 1990 live-action teleseries, budget-restricted though it was, at least stayed in tune with the dramatic feel of the first movie. This cartoon series-- consisting of just five "tryout" episodes-- sometimes resembles the overtly comedic RETURN OF SWAMP THING, but without enough jokes for the cartoon to register as a comedy. So I have to deem the 1991 show an "adventure" series, since the emphasis is on turning plant-mutated scientist Alec Holland into a swamp-dwelling crusader, complete with a bunch of crime-fighting gadgets (some of which certainly must have made it into the SWAMP THING toy line).

This swamp-hero also has a small coterie of friends: a couple of kids, a young woman named Abigail (with no romantic angle attached), and two diverse but still bland adult action-guys, Tomahawk (Native American) and Bayou Jack (Black). I think the animators could have switched the dialogue-tracks for the two guys and no one would have noticed any difference. Since the two movies featured mad scientist Arcane as the Thing's only opponent, he appears in all five episodes as Swampy's regular enemy, complete with a gang of mutated henchmen, one of whom is named "Weedkiller." The voice-actor for Arcane gets the short serial's one good line: observing the fall of a radioactive satellite into the swamp, Arcane says, "I love radiation-- it's so INTENSE."

          

MONSTER SEAFOOD WARS (2020)

  

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

Japan turns out so many hyperactive comedies than it's almost a surprise when one of them-- namely, MONSTER SEAFOOD WARS-- takes the opposite approach. Here the premise is loony but all of the performers treat the proceedings in a restrained, deadpan manner.

Amateur scientist Takuma, who works for his parents' seafood restaurant, invents a chemical that can enlarge small animals into giants. I think he does so with the idea of being able to create big creatures to supply the restaurant, but he's not responsible for unleashing his "food of the gods" upon urban Japan. A rival, Hikomi, steals the chemical and dumps it in the sea, where it creates three gigantic kaiju: a squid (Irkalla), a crab (Kanilla), and an octopus (Tokalla). There are a few scenes where the big beasts display ancillary powers, and of course there's no explanation for these.

The main joke is that when Japan's defense forces can't stop the goony giants, the government creates a special department SMAT, Seafood Monster Attack Team. (Nice of them to use English for their acronym even though the film is subtitled.) For some reason Hikomi is part of this team despite his having created the crisis, and so is Nana, Takuma's childhood sweetheart. Takuma joins the team too, and they strive to find ways to thwart the monsters, with weapons like vinegar-blasters and a giant chef robot who, at the climax, turns the creatures into sashimi.

The movie's best joke is that while the defense forces battle the kaiju, small parts of the sea-monsters' bodies get sliced off, and somehow these get marketed so as to become great dining delicacies. So the movie is not just "The Monsters That Ate Tokyo," but "The Monsters Tokyo Ate." Though Takuma and his romance with Nana is mild fun, the monsters are the stars as they provide the narrative vector. 

SPACE MONSTER WANGMAGWI (1967)

 

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

I term the dominant function of WANGMAGWI "sociological" simply because the main plot involves aliens sending a giant monster down to 1960s Earth to kill all the humans and leave Earth free for colonization. While such a plot was a perfectly serviceable excuse for a giant-monster rampage, the writers seem confused about how to properly go about defenestrating the populace of a planet.

At the outset of the film, the unnamed aliens seem utterly confident that the Earth-people can do nothing to save themselves from the solitary, skyscraper-high creature-- presumably named "Wangmagwi," though I never heard the name used. The creature proceeds to rampage through Seoul, though its model-streets have been largely been cleared of people. So it's not clear how the aliens expect Wangwagwi to extinguish humanity. Keep stomping through cities and crushing people until, decades later, all the humans are dead?

Jets assault Wangmagwi's scaly hide with no effect, so the monster does have a Godzilla-like level of invulnerability. Yet when we hear Korean military men discussing the situation, they're reluctant to employ a nuclear bomb against the monster due to collateral damage. But if the monster succeeded in killing all the people in Seoul, then the Koreans could bomb him, right? Not until the climax does the subtitling for the aliens *seem* to indicate that Wangmagwi actually CANNOT survive a nuclear attack. Indeed, when the giant finally wanders out into the Korean countryside, the military makes one last jet-attack while planning a nuclear strike. At that point, the aliens just throw in the towel and remotely cause Wangmagwi to self-destruct. What? Was this the aliens' first defenestration? If not, clearly they suck at it. 

There's just enough combative action to keep the film in that domain, though the Koreans weren't able to make Wangmagwi's rampage as effective as even the lesser Japanese efforts. The humans are pretty forgettable-- a couple of clowns who bounce routines off one another while fleeing the chaos, and a young couple whose wedding is interrupted by the big critter. In fact, Wangmagwi channels his inner Kong by kidnapping the bride-- though technically the aliens are controlling the monster remotely, so her kidnapping makes even less sense than if the giant did it of his own will. The only human who has a good arc is an urchin who somehow clambers onto the giant's body, manages to work his way into the creature's ear and wound he inner ear with a knife. He also detaches the device with which the ETs control the monster, though this doesn't have much effect on the outcome. A heroic pilot rescues the boy and the bride before Wangmagwi destructs.

This kaiju flick was lost for a long time. In terms of film history, I'm glad a copy was found, but it's pretty small beer.

        

LUPIN III: MISSED BY A DOLLAR (2000)

 

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

MISSED BY A DOLLAR was the last Lupin TV special to be animated in the traditional fashion. More importantly, though, DOLLAR is much less dominated by the tropes of wild fantasy found in many Lupin stories of the period. Here the master thief and his gang oppose an evil financial cabal that seeks to manipulate world events, and the only metaphenomenal elements of DOLLAR are the rather low-level tricks Lupin uses to bamboozle Zenigata.

As usual the Lupin gang only oppose greater evils as a means of maintaining their freedom to commit generally harmless crimes. In fact, in the opening sequence the master thief begins the adventure in an apparently legal venue: participating in a New York auction (albeit in disguise) for a rare ring. However, another party outbids Lupin by a mere dollar, and on top of that, Zenigata arrives with a squad of New York cops to seize the master criminal. Never daunted, Lupin simply evades the cops and steals the ring, However, an enforcer working for the mystery bidder steals back the ring and tries to kill Lupin in the bargain. Of course all Lupin viewers know that this means war.

Lupin briefs his comrades in crime on his plans: the ring can guide one to a fabulous brooch, which in turn confers incredible luck upon its possessor. It's not entirely clear why Lupin wants the brooch. He natters a bit about a Lupin Empire, but somehow he convinces Jigen and Goemon that the brooch will lead to a big payoff. Fujiko isn't interested because she's become fascinated with the world of high finance, though she changes her tune when reversals decimate her wealth. Fujiko's attempt to transition from crook to high financier proves the reverse of Lupin's new enemy: Cynthia Craymov, already the head of a banking empire. Her father was the deposed tyrant of a small country, so Cynthia wants to rule an empire founded in high finance. She believes implicitly in the brooch's power to convey luck, though said power is never unilaterally proven. Her main enforcer is an ex-KGB killer with a penchant for knife-fighting, but Cynthia's cool resolve makes her the main opponent.

There's a subplot in which Lupin appears to fall to his death, in such a way that both his friends and Zenigata are convinced he's finished. The sequence is good for a laugh as Zenigata mourns his foe (or at least the impossibility of ever accomplishing his monomaniacal goal). There are some decent but workmanlike action-sequences, with Fujiko getting just one femme-formidable scene in which she shoots a guy menacing Goemon. In the end Cynthia's crimes are exposed and the brooch ends up in good hands, though for a change all four of the super-crooks end up temporarily broke. There are some acidulous comments on the financial mentality, but anyone wanting a critique of capitalism would need to look elsewhere.  

SCANNERS III: THE TAKEDOWN (1992)

  

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

Despite having the same director and writer as SCANNERS: THE NEW ORDER, the second sequel to SCANNERS doesn't rise to the level of competent genre-material. It does give viewers many scenes of Scanners tossing people around with telekinesis, but it screws up the psychological motifs that could have made for a better film than the original.

It's still roughly 10 years from the time of the original film, and though I don't remember much about NEW ORDER, it seemed odd to me that the general public now knows what Scanners are and what they can do. Some time back Elton Monet, a scientist who's been researching the Scanner phenomenon, adopted and raised to maturity two European kids, Alex (Steve Parrish) and Helena (Liliana Komorowska). Both have the requisite psychic powers, but for some reason the script doesn't venture to explain, Alex suffers none of the usual side-effects of his in utero mutation. In fact, at a party whose attendees all know what Alex is, the partygoers ask Alex to perform a trick with his powers. The trick results in a friend's accidental death, so Alex goes off to a Thailand monastery to learn how to control his powers. A better script might have made more of Alex's search for spiritual clarity, but the Thai-trek is just a plot-point.

To be sure, Alex gets secondary status because Helena is the star of the show. The young woman-- who incidentally remains friends with Valerie, Alex's ex-girlfriend-- suffers migraines whether she uses her powers or not. Her adoptive father reveals a new project: chemical patches that may be capable, after adequate testing, of eradicating the Scanner side-effects. However, Helena steals the patches to anneal her suffering. In nearly no time, the untested tech unleashes Helena's "Miss Hyde." She kills her adoptive father and enlists a small army of institutionalized Scanners to become her agents, and one of the first things she does is to send her pawns to Thailand to kill Alex.

Perhaps the dumbest subplot involves Helena to get revenge upon a scientist at Elton's institute who tortured her when she was a young girl-- wait, what? What was Elton doing at the time, and how did the guy get away with such actions? I think the writer might have been evoking the old "good father's who's really a bad father" trope. But he lacked the guts to give Elton such a personality, so this nugatory scientist was used to provoke Helena to vengeful violence.

Naturally Alex and his girlfriend save the day from the bad sister. Since the FX scenes are only fair, the sole reason to watch TAKEOVER is to watch Komorowska pull out all stops as a psychic super-villain.

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.                   

            

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.

THE MASTER DEMON (1991)

  

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

"Measured choice" time again. MASTER DEMON is one of many undistinguished shot-on-video projects, starring a handful of familiar supporting-actors to give it marketability. But is it as bad as, say, SOUL OF THE AVENGER? And the answer is no, because SOUL burns up its run-time with dull sequences irrelevant to its hypothetical martial-arts content. DEMON's fights are almost all badly shot and arranged, but the movie doesn't make a pretense of being about anything BUT fights, which is a mild virtue.

So the demon of the title is an archaic Chinese being (Gerald Okamura) slain in some vague archaic time by a Chinese guy oddly named The White Warrior (Eric Lee). The actors, both of whom appeared in John Carpenter's BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA, then reappear in the 20th century. Lee becomes a martial-arts fighter named Tong Lee, who seems to know all about what transpired in antiquity and may be the White Warrior's reincarnation. Okamura's character Cheng though seems totally independent of the Master Demon, being a dealer of ancient artifacts. He accidentally summons a supernatural servant of the Master Demon, pumped prodigy Medusa (Kay Baxter Young), and she repays the dealer by killing him. Medusa goes looking for a mystic token in order to revive her Demon Master (whoops, got it backwards), and she finds the token in the possession of low-rent private eye Cameron (Steve Nave). She gets the token from Cameron and summons some kung-fu fighting servants to off the private dick, but Tong Lee shows up to thwart the assassins. But in jig time Medusa uses the token to revive the Master Demon in Cheng's dead body, and he summons a small army of bad kung-fu fighters from somewhere. Now the only people able to prevent the Demon from conquering the world are Tong, Cameron, Cameron's kung-fu secretary (Ava Cadell), and the secretary's cop boyfriend. And as stated, everything in the film is either a bad fight or a lead-in to a bad fight.

Writer/director Samuel Oldham doesn't ever come up with any worthy brain-fried dialogue for any of these goofballs, so don't expect DEMON to give competition to even the least of Ed Wood's offerings. DEMON does offer some of the worst makeup jobs ever seen in a cheapjack film, so that fills in some of the dull spots. Similarly, it's rare to see a martial arts movie with so many poorly choreographed fights. It looks like all the male performers had no idea how to deliver fake blows, so that all the punches and kicks look wildly misdirected. Oddly, only the two females look fairly authoritative when they're kicking ass, but Cadell only has three-four short fight-scenes, and Young doesn't get into fights per se, since she just slams opponents around with her massive muscles. Cadell and Nave are the only performers who seem moderately invested in their paper-thin characters, but this isn't much of a recommendation given that Lee, Okamura and the cop-actor get more scenes, and they're all bad ones.

If one isn't a fan of bad makeup jobs and bad fight-choreography, though, DEMON's sole virtue is that of being the only movie performance of Young, best known for promoting the popularity of women's bodybuilding contests. DEMON was her only movie role before being killed in a car crash, so at least this cinematic sludge preserves a decent sampling of scenes spotlighting Young's impressive physique.

MONSTER ISLAND (2017)

 

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

I almost want to create a neologism for movies that look a lot like the once-celebrated Pixar brand of animated features-- "Pixar-rips," maybe. The Mexican-financed CGI flick MONSTER ISLAND has at least the general look of a Pixar film, as well as a comfortable sort of "be yourself" moral. Not surprisingly, ISLAND lacks the wit and distinctive design-sense in the better Pixars. Still, I've seen much worse in the realm of original kid-vid movies.

For once, the title's accurate in that most of the story takes place on the island. For the first half hour, middle-schooler Lucas lives with his widower-father Nicholas, coping with school bullies and flirty girls. Nicholas constantly badgers Lucas to regularly dose himself with a special inhaler, to stave off some "attacks" to which their family is vulnerable. However, when Lucas attends a party of his schoolmates without using his inhaler first, he's somewhat torqued to learn that without that chemical, he turns into a huge, winged orange monster. He manages to reach his dad, and Nicholas reveals that though he sacrificed his ability to change into a monster somehow, the rest of their family-- including Lucas' late mother-- dwell on a special island called Calvera. 

I suspect that director/co-writer Leopoldo Aguilar was not too concerned about his universe, for it's never clear to what extent the human world knows about Calvera, or if there's any connection to the multifarious types of creatures there with regular humans. Lucas manages to reach Calvera to learn more about the family he never knew, which includes his big orange grandmother and an uncle named Norcutt, who seems to be a "recessive" type of creature since he looks like an ordinary human. Every entity on Calvera, no matter his or her bizarre shape, wears clothes and lives in a peaceful city, and thus aren't really "monsters" except in the sense of not looking like human beings. Their only problem is that some mysterious malefactor has been kidnapping Calvera's citizens. Hmm-- who could it be? Could it be the one resident who feels as isolated from his people as Lucas did from his middle-school peers? 

          

 If ISLAND offered nothing beyond Lucas's struggle with his monstrous identity, or Nicholas' desire to protect him, the film would have earned only poor mythicity from me. However, I rather liked Norcutt, who's motivated by "monster envy" to the extent that he's been draining off something-or-other from captive Calverans. His purpose is to transform himself to a powerful, malicious entity-- in other words, what most people think of when they hear the word "monster." Monster-Norcutt is the movie's only reasonably well-designed critter, and though ISLAND is supposed to be a comedy, its best scene is a big battle in which Lucas and Nicholas, both of whom are in monster-form, contend with Norcutt and his two bulky henchmen. Otherwise, there's not much here, though as I said ISLAND at least looks better than a lot of cartoon kid-vid and would probably be reasonably satisfying to munchkins.  ISLAND apparently made enough dough that three years later that Aguilar made another cartoon feature, which despite the name of MONSTER ZONE, seems to have nothing to do with ISLAND.

KONG: KING OF ATLANTIS (2005)

  

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

 

Though I liked GODZILLA VS. KONG, the movie was certainly replete with daffy notions. The weirdest by far was the idea that this version of Kong descended from a race of giant apes who weren’t just big animals, but some sort of semi-intelligent, tool-using creatures. The movie even built on the “king” part of the giant ape’s name by having him sit in a throne, bearing an ersatz version of a scepter. But goofy as the idea was, the 2021 film was not the first time Kong wore kingly raiment.

 

Prior to checking out this streaming animated video, I had seen the same production company launch the 2001 KONG THE ANIMATED SERIES on kidvid-TV. The show may have taken a page from the 1933 SON OF KONG, where the savage, man-eating colossus Kong somehow sired a kinder, gentler offspring. In the TV show, Original Kong is long dead, and there’s no mention of any of his human opponents. But a scientist took genetic material from the dead ape and produced a new giant anthropoid to rule over the monsters of “Kong Island.” For good measure, the scientist also used genetic material from an adventurous youth named Jason, with the result that Kong and Jason have a psychic connection, enabling the human guy to merge with Kong when the big ape thrashes giant-sized opponents. And for even more good measure, a copper-skinned jungle beauty, Lua, also hangs around Kong in order to tell him how to use his big muscles in the service of justice.

 

The series ended, but in order to profit from Peter Jackson’s KING KONG, the showrunners decided to turn out this DTV item. The basic concept is that of the “innocent duped into royal service.” It seems that after being off the grid for centuries, ancient Atlantis gets reborn, and the reigning quasi-human race, who are mostly human-serpent hybrids, decide they want Kong to be their king. Although Lua and Jason don’t always agree on how to counsel Kong—and there’s a very tedious sequence devoted to their disagreements—they both suspect the big guy is being sold a bill of goods. Not surprisingly, since the script recycles numerous old “palace intrigue” tropes, the serpent-tyrants are opposed by another bunch of hybrids seeking to overthrow the bad rulers. The evil snake-people, who sport names like “Reptilla” and “Sycopha,” have some ulterior motive in making Kong their king, but I’ve already forgotten that detail. Suffice to say, thanks to his human buddies Kong remains uncrowned—though, since the big ape can’t communicate, one never knows what he thinks of the whole royalty game.

 

I’ve seen a lot of worse animation than ATLANTIS, though the creators lose points for injecting a lot of awful doggerel-songs into the mix. There’s a little good action toward the end, when Kong fights two big lizard-dinos—and unlike GODZILLA/KONG, it’s the lizards who are swinging big weapons. The idea of Kong being a literal king of any sort is pretty stupid, but the stupidity certainly fits this oddball offering more than it gelled with the multimillion-dollar monster-mash.  

KONG: THE ANIMATED SERIES (2001/2005-06)

  

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

As a metaphenomenalist, I don't mind it when a show asks me to believe twelve impossible things, whether before breakfast or any other time. But even in a cartoon series aimed at kids, I could wish those impossible things added up to something more than ordinary.

It's curious that the writers even bothered to connect their KONG to the primal 1933 masterpiece, which related the complex but straightforward fable of an island where prehistoric life survived, and where a primitive Black tribe sacrificed women to the appetite of their gargantuan simian god. But that's the setup: after the 1933 Kong fell from the Empire State, a scientist, Lorna Jenkins, took a DNA sample from the big ape. She also did a lot of research on the renamed "Kong Island," where she found no primitive African tribe, but objects called "Primal Stones," which hailed from ancient Atlantis. (Kong Island is now located in the Bermuda Triangle, which I guess excuses the DNAPE's association not only with Atlantis but a host of other New Age concepts.)

Why Lorna does all this comes down to "just reasons," and this includes waiting about sixty years before she creates Clone-Kong-- possibly so that she could mingle the original ape-DNA with that of her grandson Jason. Young Jason grows up thinking of Clone-Kong as his "big brother"-- but only until Lorna's family is endangered by a villain who wants access to the magic of the Primal Stones. So Grandma takes her DNAPE and her research to the hard-of-access island, not reaching out to her grandson until he's of college age. Not content with re-creating a mammoth monkey. she's also invented devices called "cyber-links." A human who wears such a doohickey can magically merge his DNA with that of an animal, and conjure forth a gigantic humanoid creature. Why did Grandma want such a device? Reasons.

The real extrinsic reason was to provide heaps of Big Monster Action. The aforementioned villain gets hold of some of Lorna's links, and with them he can make himself, or one of his numerous henchmen, into huge beast-men in order to catch all the Primal Stones. Only Kong, who is "The Protector" of his mystic domain, can battle such titans-- and heroic Jason gets to tag along by merging his mind (but not his body) with that of Kong, sort of a primeval mecha-pilot.

While some kid-vids are clever enough that adults can appreciate them, KONG was designed to be dully repetitive, as evidenced by the fact that most of the episodes can be watched out of broadcast order. Villain and henchmen ferret out a Stone and use the links to become temporary monsters. Kong defeats them and they transform back and escape to do the same thing next episode.  

Jason BTW has two other partners in peril besides the big monkey: his comic relief college-buddy Tann, and what appears to be the only native of Kong Island. an acrobatic, copper-skinned shamaness named Lua. The three young people and Kong provide all the hero-action, with Lua using her shaman-powers to explicate whatever needs explication.

The only other point worth making is that if I watched this as a kid, I would rather have had the DNAPE dueling with traditional monsters. But there only a few of these-- a giant Yeti, a Wendigo--to allay the monotony.

XTERMINATOR AND THE AI APOCALYPSE (2023)

 

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

I know nothing about the origins of this low-budget CGI oddity. But just as a guess, it looks and sounds as if writer/director/voice-actor "BC Fourteen" started out trying to make a fan-film about the armored adversary from George Lucas' prequel STAR WARS series, General Grievous. Then he reworked his CGI model into a more skull-faced humanoid and dubbed hm "Xterminator," but kept the raspy, acerbic voice-characterization.

The setting is some futuristic sparse-opera-- my new term for a space-opera so sparse in details that it might as well be a western. Almost all we see of humanity are various armored soldiers, under the command of one Grace Sherwood, and her raison d'etre as a commander of Earth-forces is to play "Thunderbolt Ross" to the robotic villain Xterminator. He calls himself "X" for short, but he's an apocalyptic AI who despises humans as much as humans despise him. So who does Sherwood call upon when her creator obliges her to rip off "Escape from New York" and send someone to Mars to rescue a missing diplomat? That's riiiight...

While X is on his Mars mission, motivated by both carrot and stick, Sherwood decides to hedge her bets by unleashing an intelligent shark-monster. Megalodon, to ambush X. Why does Megalodon exist in this sparse-opera? Same reason Sherwood confers with an intelligent Bigfoot: a director's silly in-joke. because he worked on an early CGI junk-flick, BIGFOOT VS MEGALODON. For good measure, Sherwood also arranges a Martian jailbreak to add to X's headaches.

Though XATAA is never more than a junk-flick, I might have been slightly entertained if Fourteen had been able to deliver on all the promised action. But just as was the case with all the SYFY big-beast fests, action costs too much money for cheapie CGI movies. There's just barely enough violence for XATAA to qualify in my combative mode category. Yet while I can't recommend the film, it did make me a bit curious about Fourteen's half-dozen "Bigfoot" junk-flicks.   

    

CHAMBER OF HORRORS (1966)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny* 
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological*

"Jason Cravatte, a gentleman with a taste for the sewers..."

Before getting to the film proper, I'll spend some time remarking on the synchronicity of my reviewing, in the same month, two psycho-films I'd only seen once before, both of which could have been really good in their depiction of a common trope: "the Really Rich are Really Messed Up." The other one was A KNIFE FOR THE LADIES, and it shares with CHAMBER OF HORRORS the sense that the filmmakers of both weren't as devoted as they should've been to their psycho-subjects.

CHAMBER is credited to two writers, Stephen Kandel and Ray Russell, and a director, Hy Averback. Both Kandel and Averback were mostly journeymen laborers in the TV field, while Russell is best known for his short story "Mister Sardonicus," which gave rise to the William Castle film of the same name. My guess is that Russell, credited only with contributing to "story" rather than "screenplay," came up with the essence of the perilous psycho of CHAMBER-- which, even in its early origins, seems to have had some elements in common with Castle's other productions. Had Jason Cravatte been better elaborated, he could have been as good as Slade in THE LODGER.

We first see Cravatte (Patrick O'Neal) forcing a minister at gunpoint to marry him to a dead woman. Later, after the law has caught up with Cravatte, he escapes in such a way as to lose one hand. He then becomes a psycho-killer haunting the streets of 1880s Baltimore, but he's actually more interesting in the background provided by his aunt, Mrs. Perryman (Jeanette Nolan). The rich, fifty-something dowager informs the audience that despite the upper-class station of her nephew, he liked "the taste of the sewers" and apparently kept company with all manner of prostitutes (which is substantiated later when Cravatte's seen holed up in a whorehouse). If this was all there was to him, he'd just be a dime-a-dozen roue. But he also had some desire for a "madonna" as an antidote to the whores, because he courted blonde Melinda-- the dead woman seen at the opening-- in the belief that she was virginal. He killed her when he learned she was not pure, and yet he also had some notion that he "purified" her by killing her, for he seems to have every intention of taking his pleasure with her dead body. In addition, even after the madman's been condemned but escapes, he repeats this syndrome by paying a similar-looking prostitute to "play dead."

Unfortunately, the script doesn't follow the "madonna-whore" complex with any close attention. After Cravatte escapes the law and becomes "the Butcher of Baltimore"-- complete with various killing-devices he can fit into his empty wrist-socket-- he takes up a brand- new psycho-obsession. He starts killing off the men who sentenced him to the hangman, and out of nowhere there's some folderol about his forming a "composite corpse" of the body parts of his victims. This poorly conceived notion turns Cravatte into just another gimmick-oriented psycho-killer-- though Patrick O'Neal's rousing performance as Cravatte sustains the film through all its dull spots.

Now, although Cravatte is the Prime icon of CHAMBER OF HORRORS the film, he would not have been had CHAMBER succeeded in its original purpose, as a pilot for a TV-series, originally called "House of Wax" after the 1953 horror-film. If any of the networks had greenlighted "House" as a series, then the default stars of all the episodes would have been the characters Tony Draco (Cesare Danova) and Harold Blount (Wilfrid Hyde-White). These two amateur detectives-- whose backgrounds are spotty at best-- run a wax museum with the title "House of Wax," and unlike the one in the Vincent Price movie, all of their wax statues are devoted to murder and the macabre. Indeed, the script tends to suggest that Draco and Blount's fascination with the macabre-- presented as being benign, I guess like that of the pilot-makers-- is what makes them great detectives. Presumably they would have proved this again and again on a weekly basis. But though there was no series, CHAMBER still ends with the suggestion of another "episode" involving another bizarre murder.

Many reviewers have remarked on how little gore is present in a film about a psycho who frequently stabs people with his hand-utensils. Yet even without the gore, the concept was clearly too disturbing for the TV networks to accept. I speculate that the producers-- one of whom was director Averback-- were hoping to titillate TV audiences by frequently having Draco and Blount make speeches about all the horrible deeds performed by the subjects of their wax exhibits. This idea wouldn't have worked as a TV-show in a million years. But even with all the missteps in the pilot-movie-- enhanced with Castle-like gimmicks when CHAMBER went to theatres-- the Russell-Kandel provides some fun moments, albeit with a poky pace that made me appreciate William Castle's superior narrative drive. 

Next-to-lastly, while CHAMBER's script isn't interested in the opposition between "serene beauty and titillating shocks" established in Crane Wilbur's HOUSE OF WAX script, Averback et al did offer another form of enticement. Aside from the first female victim, only one feminine character is strictly necessary to the script: that of Marie (Laura Devon), a bargirl whom Cravatte makes into his partner, mostly so that she can seduce one of his victims, a horny old trial judge, and then lure the old duffer into a trap. But the script also works in technically unnecessary roles for glamorous actresses like Patrice Wynore and Suzy Parker, as well as several briefly-seen young working-women. (At times CHAMBER almost seems to anticipate how the Italian giallos developed in the early 1970s.) This strategy was doubtless meant to suggest that ladies- man Draco would have a girl to seduce every week had CHAMBER become a series. Indeed, the theatrical movie even gives some exposure to past-their-prime beauties like Nolan and Marie Windsor-- though Nolan steals the show, making clear that her side of the family is just as lubricious as that of Cravatte's paternal line.

Two other last things: first, thanks to a spectacular fight between Cravatte and Draco at the conclusion, CHAMBER, like HOUSE OF WAX, qualifies as a combative drama. Second, right around the time Hy Averback completed the pilot-movie, he became executive producer for the slapstick teleseries F TROOP, which certainly seems to have been much more up his alley.

   

                              

LUPIN III: LEGEND OF THE GOLD OF BABYLON (1985)

 

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

LEGEND, the third feature-film centered upon the LUPIN III franchise, is yet another treasure-hunt tale, and like many of the 1980s iterations, LEGEND follows the goony-cartoony approach of the Monkey Punch comics rather than the more streamlined adventures of later years. At the same time, there are odd mythopoeic elements here that don't often turn up in either the original manga or in the 1960s gangland stories helmed by one of LEGEND's two credited directors, Seijun Suzuki. Of the two writers, one worked on one Suzuki crime-film and several "pink" movies, while the other seems to have been more invested in television animation projects.

So there's a treasure being hunted by the Lupin Gang (included their on-off ally Fujiko) and by the Mafia, while in turn Inspector Zenigata is on Lupin's trail. There's nothing unusual about the treasure being some remnant of humankind's earliest generations, this time being a fabulous golden trove from ancient Babylon. But the script gives the treasure-trove a grounding in archaic myth: to wit, that in some bygone age, the supreme god of the Babylonians ordered his worshippers to gather together all of their gold into a great mountain, which the deity-- usually just called "God"-- then attempted to lift into heaven. But "God" dropped the tower of gold so that it fell into the uninhabited wilderness of the New World and was buried far beneath the earth of what would much later become New York City. Centuries later, both Lupin and the Mafia learn from ancient cuneiform tablets the possible location of the treasure, and they begin vying to seize the gold. In fact, the first time the viewer sees "Fujiko" seeking to find out what Mafia don Marciano knows about the bounty, the "mountains of Fuji" turn out to be an inflatable disguise worn by none other than Lupin. 

Now it's impossible to conjure with the image of a Babylonian mountain of gold and not think of the Old Testament's account of the so-called Tower of Babel. I don't remember what the LEGEND script says about the Biblical Tower, if anything, but I'm sure we never hear the canonical story in toto:

Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth.”

5 But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower the people were building. 6 The Lord said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. 7 Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.”

8 So the Lord scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. 9 That is why it was called Babel[c]—because there the Lord confused the language of the whole world. From there the Lord scattered them over the face of the whole earth. -- Genesis 11: 4-9.

Now, I'll concede that all the twaddle about the Babylonian God-- actually some sort of alien entity-- picking up the gold-mountain and dropping it was first and foremost a writer's means of getting the treasure from the Old World to the New. However, the basic idea of a deity taking some person or object into heaven follows the pattern of humans sacrificing goods to their deities. The original Tower of Babel story follows a parallel but opposing course: mortals are building a great tower that seems to reach to the heavens. God seems vaguely threatened by the project and confuses the languages of the builders so that the tower is never finished. (Some later retellings added the elaboration of the tower being cast down.)

However, the LEGEND script has an extra ET-fillip to add to its "was God an astronaut" concept. During Lupin's peregrinations he keeps encountering a wizened old woman, Rosetta, who makes weird claims about having lived for centuries while simultaneously offering her body to the flustered master thief. No viewer will be surprised to learn that Rosetta isn't just a crazed Earthwoman, and that she's really an ET who's been stranded on Earth since the age of Babylon. The script is never clear about how Rosetta got marooned-- though it would be logical if she was somehow compromised by the same difficulty that caused the gold-mountain to fall back to Earth. It's also never clear why the ET-ship left behind both Rosetta and the mountain and only visited the planet Earth at specific intervals; intervals that Lupin coordinates with the re-appearance of Halley's Comet. Maybe the basic idea was that the ET-ship was entirely automated. This might account for why it kept returning in mechanical fashion, and maybe for why Rosetta needs Lupin's help to gain access to the ship again. In the big climax, Rosetta transforms back into her natural form-- a space-babe, of course-- and she also tries to spirit away the golden treasure (with no mention as to why her people wanted the mineral). However, though Rosetta is able to return to her people (implicitly), she loses control of the treasure, which spills back down upon Earth. I think the script meant to imply that the gold was up for grabs to whoever could get it, so that this time, the Lupin Gang doesn't make an exceptional score.

The obsessed Zenigata furnishes some good laughs. After the inspector bungles catching Lupin in New York at the film's opening, his superior not only takes him off the Lupin case, he forces Zenigata to provide security for a New York beauty contest. Then, by a really weird conceit even for a cartoon movie, the superior gets in trouble for allegedly fixing the contest, so he placates the five runners-up by... talking them into becoming policewomen who help Zenigata track down Lupin again? The young women seem to get into their mission despite being saddled with the inept inspector, and a Chinese kung-fu beauty named Qing briefly tries to conquer Goemon, though she makes more impact on the samurai's heart than on his body. In fact, Lupin gets most of the good LEGEND scenes, with Fujiko and Jigen getting short shrift, while Goemon's most memorable scene has him dueling with a bolt of lightning. Clearly the writers were less beguiled with the regular Lupin gags than with their ambitious story of an astronaut/"god" who manages to leave behind a buried sacrificial treasure and its custodian, who looks like a "loathly lady" until she's reunited with her "dragon-hoard." But while LEGEND doesn't achieve the mythic concrescence of the better Lupin movies, unpredictable Lupin is always better than the predictable kind.                                      

           

LUPIN III: TACTICS OF ANGELS (2005)

 

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

I'm by no means a Lupin III expert, even where the animated films are concerned. But it's pretty evident to most of the feature films/TV specials usually involve three groups in conflict. The primary conflict is most often the Lupin Gang of superlative thieves with some other criminal gang, who are always more ignoble and destructive than the "honest thieves," and there's a secondary conflict in which Inspector Zenigata, accompanied by whatever law-enforcement agents he can draft, pursues the Lupin Gang but has to be satisfied with the defeated villains Lupin has left behind. It's a corollary tendency that if Fujiko Mine sees any advantage in betraying the gang to the villains, she usually will, but she always gets welcomed back to the fold when the evil guys seek to off her.

TACTICS starts out like a lot of Lupin adventures (though overall this TV special has better comedic elements than many of the others). Zenigata has received a challenge from Lupin to the effect that the master thief's going to raid the US installation Area 51. As Zenigata learns from head scientist Emily, the installation holds a bonafide alien artifact, a sphere called "The Original Metal," apparently because it's so hard nothing can cut it. Lupin and his associates succeed swimmingly. Jigen and Goemon are disgusted, however, when Lupin informs that he didn't steal the artifact in order to fence it and make a lot of cash. He plans to turn the metal of the sphere into a unique finger-ring for Fujiko, the better to steal her heart. Unfortunately for Lupin, not even Goemon's peerless samurai blade can cut the metal, and Goemon must leave to seek some way to repair his chipped sword. So then Lupin begins trying to figure out some way to penetrate the metal-- though even at the movie's end, it's not a sure thing that Lupin really intended just to make the Original Metal into a ring for Fujiko.

But other forces also want the Metal. The viewer meets "The Bloody Angels" before the Lupin Gang does, as this all-female fighting force practices for the coming conflict by killing four fighters dressed up like Lupin's people. The four Angels are Lady Jo (a kung fu expert who usually dresses up as a man), Poison Sophie (a poisons expert), Bomber Lily (an expert in both explosives and stage magic), and Kaoru (a samurai whose skills are a close match to Goemon's). The Bloody Angels (whose name always sounds like that of the "Lovely Angels" of the DIRTY PAIR franchise) seek to find out which of the gang has the metal sphere. But clever Lupin has made copies, so that not even devious Fujiko can be sure of stealing the right object when she tries to sell it to Lady Jo, who almost kills Fujiko.

The four main Angels, who are the forefront of an all-female army, provide the gang with good opposition, but the best comes from Kaoru, whose sword Goemon believed to be "cursed." It's not certain whether this is the case or not, but if so it would be a very rare instance of the supernatural existing in Lupin's sci-fi world. Because Goemon's sword was chipped by contact with Original Metal, he even has to flee Kaoru in the first encounter, though of course the second face-off turns out very differently. Lupin is faced with an intriguing puzzle: if no Earthly force can scrape off a shard of the sphere, what good is it to the Angels, or to any foreign government they might sell it to? As it happens, there is a good solution to this puzzle, which involves using the sphere in conjunction with something else to create a death-ray that no government should be trusted with.

Though the Angels are initially portrayed as terrorists, one of them, Sophie, claims to have an altruistic reason to want the sphere. Since she becomes somewhat simpatico with Lupin during their clashes, she reveals to Lupin that she carries a major grudge against the US due to having lost her brother, a member of the US military forces, due to incompetent commanders. It's rare for stories in the LUPIN canon to be very critical specifically of US practices, given that America is a big market for the franchise. At the same time, Sophie's grudge is loosely demonstrated to be sophistry in that she believes she can built a new, better country out of the ashes of devastation-- something Lupin opposes for purely practical reasons. Then Sophie is killed by one of her own, and the gang has no further sympathies for the other three angels or their small army of lady soldiers.

TACTICS is certainly one of the bloodiest productions in this franchise that I've seen, with lots of characters getting shot or sliced up. The animators don't linger upon the after-effects of the violence, but the carnage is a real factor in giving TACTICS a harder edge than many similar works-- though, oddly, it's also one of the funniest LUPINs in my experience. The viewer never learns anything about the ET science that formed the sphere, and no aliens make the scene. But there's a stronger sociological theme here than in most LUPINs. (Also, Fujiko does get a chance to be more of an action-girl than in many other productions.)

                    

LUPIN III: STEAL NAPOLEON'S DICTIONARY! (1991) n

 

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

For a LUPIN III TV special, DICTIONARY certainly has an interesting angle. It's one thing to begin with the premise that the family of Lupin has rumored to have hidden away some fabulous lost treasure. From this notion stems the inventive development that several world powers decide that they're going to hijack the treasure to solve their fiscal problems. (The dialogue doesn't mention that this is a reversal of the usual situation, where the Lupin gang is usually stealing from the powerful and the prosperous.) And the key to finding the rumored bounty is Napoleon's dictionary, which only became a part of history because the ruler supposedly said, "The word 'impossible' is not in my dictionary."

I don't remember how the world powers learn that the dictionary contains a treasure-clue, but even Lupin III doesn't know where it is, until a novelty car-race offers the item as a first prize. Since all the cars in the race have to be antique restorations, Lupin promptly rigs up an old flivver with special technology-- including the power of flight-- and takes part in the race, accompanied by a reluctant Jigen and later, a Goemon who unleashes his super-samurai skills in the name of "duty." (Duty as a thief?) The dogged Zenigata knows that Lupin will seek to win the race, so he too acquires an old car to participate, accompanied by Chieko Kido, a pretty young Japanese intelligence agent. Also joining the race is flirtatious Fujiko, though initially she seemed more concerned with seducing a handsome young millionaire racer-- at least until she decides she might make more dough by cutting in on Lupin's big score. Assorted agents of the world powers make the scene, though they don't join the race and seem to act erratically, sometimes trying to capture Lupin to pick his brain, sometimes trying to kill him. One such effort involves the Americans sending a tracker-missile to wipe out Lupin and Jigen, which the crooks only escape thanks to Lupin converting his car into a submarine and hiding from the missile in a lake.

The covetous agents are not particularly strong villains, but this allows the story to devote a lot more time to the comically obsessed Zenigata. He briefly captures his quarry, but disguise-master Lupin not only assumes the cop's likeness but makes up Zenigata to look like himself. This eventuates in one comic scene where the beleaguered cop has to pretend to be Lupin while in the company of Lupin's gang-members, and also an interlude in which "Zenigata" spends time in the company of Chieko. Unlike Zenigata, who's totally devoted to his quest for capturing super-thieves, Chieko has begun to have doubts about her dedication to serving a faceless intelligence agency. By the movie's end, Chieko does decide, with Lupin's help, to give up law enforcement, which decision stands in contrast to Goemon's dedication to peerless lawbreaking.

Goemon's big sword-feat here involves being attacked by several small tracker-missiles, which he carves up like sashimi. This LUPIN emphasizes comedy more than adventure, particularly in the revelation of the nature of the "treasure."