THE GRAND SUPERHERO OPERA

ADVENTURES OF CAPTAIN MARVEL (1941)

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

The “Classic Era” of film serials is often said to begin with 1936’s FLASH GORDON, which in terms of expense and overall quality marked a new level of ambition. Even the better serials of the early thirties are not that distinct from the silent chapterplays of the twenties. Film studios began investing more heavily in adapting properties from assorted media, such as pulps, radio and comic strips. Republic attempted to adapt SUPERMAN at the height of the character’s popularity. But when negotiations with DC Comics broke down, the studio successfully got the rights to Superman’s greatest competitor Captain Marvel, who had the honor of being the first comic-book character adapted to film.

The original Captain Marvel was, in many ways, an attempt to one-up the Man of Steel. The first adventures of Superman give him assorted limitations: he could leap but not fly, and his skin could in theory be damaged by an exploding shell. Over time Superman would take on a host of new powers and become invulnerable to everything but kryptonite. Yet Captain Marvel had no real weaknesses in his superheroic form; he only risked injury when he assumed the mortal form of Billy Batson. The serial’s writers and directorial team (the stalwarts William Witney and John English) may have anticipated that a totally invulnerable hero would prove difficult to place in peril, and so, while they did put his mortal identity in peril at times, this Captain Marvel, as essayed by the athletic Tom Tyler, proved somewhat vulnerable to dangers like molten lava and electrical discharge—though naturally the filmmakers did not eliminate one of his primary appeals: the resistance to gunfire.

Possibly the filmmakers did not anticipate visiting the Captain Marvel well twice. The comic-book character has an open-ended origin, as Batson is given his “magic word” by the wizard Shazam with the expectation that Captain Marvel will continue fighting crime indefinitely. ADVENTURES opens with young Billy Batson (Frank Coughlan) accompanying an archaeological expedition to a series of Siamese tombs, hard by a smoldering volcano. When the group deciphers a warning not to violate a certain tomb, Batson belatedly decides not to trespass on this sanctum of the ancients (though one would think he should’ve expected something of the sort from the word “go.”) Just as the archaeologists locate an insidious looking metal statue, representing a scorpion with glass lenses held in its claws, Batson encounters the wizard Shazam, who is the guardian of the temple. Shazam gives Batson the magic word only for the purpose of preventing chaos when the Scorpion-statue falls into evil hands—said hands belonging to a masked marauder who emulates his prize by calling himself the Scorpion.

The archaeologists wrangle about who gets custody of the fantastic find. It’s then agreed that they divvy up the lenses so that everyone will have a piece of the artifact, though for the scripters this makes it more complicated for the villain to lay hands on the entire artifact. For all twelve chapters, the Scorpion sends his henchmen to collect the entire statue, which when assembled can radiate rays of immense power. It’s not clear how the villain plans to use this power for conquest, though in the final chapter he and everyone else return to Siam, where he attempts to convince local tribesmen that he’s the incarnation of the Scorpion-God—who is also loosely linked with the eruptions of the volcano. In addition, Batson and his alter ego become convinced that the Scorpion is one of the scientists, and as in many serials the partitioning of suspicion is a source of narrative tension.

Though Witney and English follow the well-traveled plot-threads of the average serial, they and their writers conceive of better-than-average cliffhangers, one of the best being a trap involving automated rifles. The Scorpion’s henchmen themselves are more deadly than many such thugs, and because they are killers, the serial version of Captain Marvel is on occasion less than decorous about taking prisoners, throwing one of the thugs off a high roof to his death. This scene, and an earlier one in which the hero machine-guns some Siamese tribesmen who have also made murder-attempts, suggest that Witney and English were having a little fun with the G-rated violence of the comic-book character. That said, they probably knew they could only get away with such outbursts a few times, since throughout most of the serial Captain Marvel simply knocks out crooks with his fists.

The staging of the fights and of the hero’s flight-scenes are overall excellent, but Tom Tyler’s unfailingly earnest portrait of the superhero sells all the FX-work. The other performers do well enough with what they’re given, but the script doesn’t really fill in any blanks for Batson, the scientists, mysterious Eastern guide Tal Chotali (John Davidson) or for secretary Betty (Louise Currie). The serial’s conclusion also ends Billy Batson’s career as Captain Marvel, though presumably the hero might have returned if Captain Marvel had broken box office records. Given the exigencies of making such a super-powered character credible, perhaps it was just as well that this was the only cinematic outing for the hero in the serial venue.

NEXT AVENGERS: HEROES OF TOMORROW (2008)

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

Most attempts to forge “legacy versions” of popular established comics-characters fall flat because the authors are trying to recapitulate the elements of the earlier characters in contrived ways, often to make them appeal to a new generation of readers, to political factions, or to various other considerations having nothing to do with the dynamics of storytelling. Not surprisingly, the third original-to-DVD iteration of the Avengers from this particular animation house is poorly named, for the young descendants of the original Avengers are more “heroes of yesterday” than “tomorrow.”

I won’t bother detailing the particular conglomerations of these “Young Avengers,” since at no time do the writers of the story come up with anything inventive. One of the teens is the daughter of Thor, another is the son of Black Panther, another the son of Ant-Man and Wasp, and the last is the son of Captain America and the Black Widow. The writers’ only concern is to make sure the Cap-kid gets the shield, the Ant-Man kid does the requisite shrinking, and so on.

The basic setup is equally routine. Thirteen years previous, the monstrous mechanoid Ultron slew most of the Avengers. Iron Man fled with the children of his fellow heroes and raised them in seclusion, training them for an eventual reckoning. Ultron finds their hiding-place and sends forth robotic versions of the dead Avengers to slay them and their mentor. The kids learn that one other Avenger, the Hulk, still survives in seclusion, so they go looking for him, aided by yet a fifth Avenger-spawn, the son of Hawkeye.

The Hulk—now sporting the grey hair of an old monster—is the movie’s only saving grace, for he’s allowed to have a rip-snorting battle with Ultron. But all of the rest is just time-killing trivia.

DANCE IN THE VAMPIRE BUND (2010)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *cosmological, metaphysical, psychological, sociological*

DANCE IN THE VAMPIRE BUND, also a one-season wonder with just twelve episodes, had a much greater capacity for spectacular failure. The manga-series DANCE has ranged over several years and several volumes and still has not reached a stopping-point. Nozomi Tamaki’s manga is as layered as any of the best prose adventure-novels, with two strong leads and a wealth of impressive supporting characters. DANCE takes place in a world where vampires and werewolves have existed since antiquity, but only in modern times has Mina Tepes, the Queen of the Vampires, established a self-sufficient kingdom for the vampire people. But Mina has countless enemies, and her strongest ally in preserving the Vampire Bund is her werewolf bodyguard Akira. The two of them, who possess both a nascent romantic bond and a figurative “daimyo-samurai” relationship, embody the heart and the soul of this extraordinary serial, to which I’ve devoted two essays, here and here.

Happily, the DANCE teleseries does not make the error of attempting to condense this sprawling saga into a single season, as did (for instance) the second season of ROSARIO + VAMPIRE. Although DANCE elides a lot of plotlines and supporting characters, and changes one support-character from male to female, the twelve episodes faithfully adapt the essence of the first two or three major arcs. The show references Mina’s three main enemies from the early continuity and concludes by causing the trio to be stymied though not precisely defeated. In addition, the final episode alludes to yet another major evildoer, but anyone who wants to learn more about that character would be forced to seek out the manga-stories.

It’s almost standard for anime serials to faithfully emulate the artistic look of the manga-art, and DANCE effectively mirrors Tamaki’s lush designs of characters, locales and attire. Tamaki’s series was more vulnerable to being censored in one respect: that the character of Mina, seeking to protect herself from being forcefully married to some vampire-lord, has transformed herself into a pre-teen girl. For this reason, the potential romance between Mina and Akira remains merely a wish-dream, even though one episode makes it clear that under the right circumstances Mina can transform into a mature form, albeit temporarily. I’ve argued that Tamaki was not playing to the “lolicon” undercurrents in Japanese manga and anime but that he was in fact deconstructing that cultural meme by showing that Mina’s immature body was not on display for the purpose of erotic stimulation, and might in theory even discourage anyone so inclined. Even in Japan, though, this meme could have been censored for television consumption. DANCE not only keeps the meme but is true to Tamaki’s handling of it. Since this accuracy might not have lasted over the long haul, the brevity of this particular anime series might be a blessing in disguise.

JACK THE GIANT KILLER (1962)

In contrast, JACK THE GIANT KILLER uses many of the same elements seen in VOYAGE but succeeds in giving them at best only a trifling degree of mythic resonance.

Whereas Harryhausen, Juran and Kolb managed to find common ground between the original Sinbad-tales, the Odyssey, and the basic "princess-in-peril" story, Juran and Hampton seem to have chosen the "Jack the Giant Killer" stories simply because it suggested a way to work in a lot of titanic creatures. The special effects team-- of whom the best known members were Jim Danforth and Wah Chang-- follows the pattern Harryhausen set in a mechanical fashion. If Harryhausen began VOYAGE with a giant, satyr-legged creature menacing normal-sized humans, then JACK does the same. If VOYAGE had actors Kerwin Matthews and Torin Thatcher locked in combat as respective hero and villain, so must JACK-- though Thatcher plays a different type of character, if not a particularly successful one. If VOYAGE has a genie in a bottle, JACK has a leprechaun in a bottle. If one of VOYAGE's climactic scenes pits its cyclops against a green dragon, JACK must have a two-headed giant battle a giant green sea serpent. The last conflict contains an element of probably unintentional humor, when the tentacled sea serpent "bitch-slaps" the giant across both of its ugly faces.

The most interesting alteration in JACK is that though Jack, just like Sinbad, spends most of the film attempting to free a princess from an evil sorcerer, Elaine lacks the elegant simplicity of Parisa, and registers as nothing more than a cypher. She becomes more visually interesting when the sorcerer Pendragon uses his Satanic magic to morph Elaine into a witchy beauty, but she isn't evil in any interesting way, and doesn't really do anything that evil before Sinbad manages to transform her back to normal.

Whereas Harryhausen and Kolb apparently had an instinct for combining different strains of myth and folklore, Hampton's script simply imposes a superficial conception of "evil witches" over the template of Jack's giant-killing adventures. Only once does Pendragon do something authentically "witchy," when he conjures in the name of Isis while kissing a skeleton's hand, but the script merely throws this bit of magical detail out with no context.

Though VOYAGE's Sokurah is no more complex than Pendragon, his motives for gaining the supreme power over the lamp has a strong elemental appeal. In contrast, there seems to be no particular reason as to why Pendragon wants control over the kingdom of Cornwall. Too often Pendragon's demons, when not being rendered in stop-motion, appear as nothing but actors in monster-suits, and many of the stop-motion creatures have plastic-ky eyes, detracting from any sense that they might be alive.

JACK is not a terrible film, but it has no imaginative center. VOYAGE is using myth and folklore for entertainment aimed at juveniles, but it comes much closer to the tone and feeling of the originals.

THE WRECKING CREW (1968)

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

This was the last and IMO the least of the four 1960s "Matt Helm" films starring Dean Martin as superspy Helm.

In my reviews of the other three I've found that the series' most interesting sociological motif has been its teeter-totter attitude toward women. In my recent review of the first two films, I found that the first one, directed by Phil Karlson, treated its heroine rather badly, while the second, helmed by Henry Levin, made its heroine-- again, an "amateur sidekick" to the main hero-- considerably more formidable. The third film, also Levin-directed, which I reviewed some time back, eschewed the use of an amateur, placing Helm between the affections of a good spy-girl and a bad spy-girl, both of whom proved quite competent.

With WRECKING CREW Phil Karlson comes back to the director's chair. Since the end-credits announce that the producers intended to make yet another sequel entitled "The Ravagers," the filmmakers probably didn't think of this entry as wrapping up the franchise.  The only effect of Karlson's return is that once more we have the Return of the Klutzky Sidekick seen in THE SILENCERS, although the type has been crossbred with the efficient good girl-spy of AMBUSHERS.

Of all four this storyline seems the least interested in the villain's diabolical plan and its consequences for the free world. Count Contini (Nigel Green) is little more than a roadshow Goldfinger, who heists a billion-dollar gold shipment from the U.S., thus threatening the economy (which is nowhere near as much fun as the death-dealing "helio beams" and flying saucers of earlier films). Contini is aided by various Asian agents, including a female agent with the corniest name yet seen in the series, "Wen Yu-Rang." But he himself is a dull villain, who misses several opportunities to knock Helm off, with the usual I-have-to-learn-what-you-know-before-I-kill-you rationale.

Helm, however, has only one aide: a British agent named Freya (for the Norse goddess?) Freya, perhaps because of her youth and inexperiences, shows herself a continual screwup, prompting Helm to utter the same sort of acidulous putdowns seen in SILENCERS, though at least Helm doesn't treat Freja with the same level of sadism.

Because Contini has Asian agents, some of them engage Helm in martial-arts battles, all of which are atrocious. Dean Martin looked like he tried to fake-fight a little bit in MURDERERS' ROW, but here he's just doing transparent setups with various stuntmen. But there is one good fight-scene-- possibly choreographed by Bruce Lee-- that transpires near the end between Sharon Tate's Freya and Nancy Kwan's Yu-Rang.  Neither actress would be likely to outclass Eliza Dushku or Michelle Yeoh in the art of movie martial arts, but they put more into their effort than the lethargic Martin.

The last image of the film is a strange choice. After the villain's been defeated aboard a speeding train-- with Freya taking out one of the henchmen rather nicely-- the hero settles down for connubial bliss in the DOCTOR NO tradition.  As they're getting it on Freya's foot accidentally hits a brake, sending both of them catapulting toward the front of the train, toward certain injury and/or death. The action freezes there, and a helpful caption informs us that not only does Matt Helm survive, he "got where he was going," wink wink nudge nudge. It's rather appropriate that a near-farcical adventure-series should end with an image of a farcical death.

FROM DUSK TILL DAWN (1996)

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

The original FROM DUSK TILL DAWN is famous for the involvement of director-editor Robert Rodriguez and screenplay-scribe Quentin Tarantino. However, despite their unquestionable input, at base the original story by makeup/effects guy Robert Kurtzman is most concerned with producing as many crazy-ass prosthetic effects as a horror-fantasy can hold.

In 1996, watching DUSK on the big screen was a hoot. Almost twenty years later, the film doesn't hold up as anything but a series of cheap thrills, though the central idea remains appealing. A couple of tough crooks-on-the-run, holding a small family hostage, blunder into a Mexican titty-bar. The bar is run by vampires who prey upon truckers and bikers whose disappearances will presumably never be missed. The first half-hour plays like a mundane suspense-tale: will the innocent nuclear family-- lapsed preacher Jacob Fuller (Harvey Keitel), his daughter Kate (Juliette Lewis) and adopted son Scott (Ernest Liu) win free from the merciless gunmen Seth and Richie Gecko (George Clooney and Quentin Tarantino)? But the gangsters' success at fleeing the U.S. law into Mexico takes a PSYCHO-like turn as they find themselves immersed in a titty-bar version of the Bates Motel, where customers who check in-- well, you know. There follows a series of fight-and-chase scenes, interrupted with a few dramatic moments, ending with a slightly ironic coda for the survivors of the firefight.

The first section shows the greatest attention to detail. The Gecko Brothers have a dysfunctional relationship: though Richie is responsible for breaking Seth out of jail, Seth is the more rational of the two, regarding himself an experienced holdup-artist who doesn't kill without necessity. Richie, however, is a dangerous psychotic given to imagining that his hostages are out to kill him or have sex with him-- and both scenarios lead Richie to commit gratuitous murders. Seth knows that his brother is crazy but remains loyal to him, hoping that they can retire to Mexico with their ill-gotten gains. In contrast, the Fullers are reasonably cohesive, even though Jacob's kids bust his chops a little about having given up his religious status. The script doesn't really explore the characters of Scott and Kate, though. The focus is almost entirely on Jacob's loss of faith due to the loss of his beloved wife, but in the Rodriguez-Tarantino universe, loss of faith can best be countered by becoming a kickass Warrior of God.

One of the main pleasures of DUSK the first time out was its gestures to earlier icons of adventure-cinema. John Saxon and Michael Parks don't get much to do, but Fred Williamson, who had not made a high-profile film in years, is fetishized for his status as a major adventure-icon. In the history of metaphenomenal films, Tom Savini's fame depends far more upon his skill with special effects than at acting. Still, though he had acted in other films prior to DUSK, in this film his semi-comic turn as tough biker "Sex Machine" raised Savini to the level of a minor character-icon in his own right. In fact, Savini's acting is better than Williamson's. The latter's image of extreme toughness descends into silliness when he rips a vampire's heart right out of its body.

Tarantino is reasonably good as the alternately whiney/hyperviolent Richie, but he only works because Clooney gives a more nuanced performance than usual. Jacob Fuller is the only character given a level of development approximate to that of Seth Gecko, but as noted above the Robert Rodriguez answer to "the silence of God" is really no more than a lot of noise.

The weakest link in DUSK, though, is the vampires. Because they're thrown into the plot in such a haphazard way-- as I argue above, as little more than an excuse for lots of FX-stunts-- there's no coherent vision of what these vamps can or can't do. The script gets some humorous mileage out of the fact that the humans defending their lives are desperately trying to figure out the nature of supernatural killers for the first time ever. But that said, there's no reason why some vampires keep semi-human forms, while others seem to be auditioning for ripoffs of NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET. The central villain, Santanico Pandemonium (Salma Hayek), has a cool opening performance, but she's killed early on, after which the vampires are just a motley crew of monsters.

HONOR ROLL #51, SEPTEMBER 4

A funny thing happened after three months of posting here: I finally realized how odd an entry looks on any other blog when the header says THE GRAND SUPERHERO OPERA but the last movie cited has a name like DESTROY ALL MONSTERS or JASON X. Not that I can't justify their presence on the list through all my various theories, but... I'm going to switch positions six and one, so that the last mentioned post each time will be a "Costumed Crusader."

__________

QUENTIN TARANTINO may never be a great actor, but for a raunchy project like "From Dusk til Dawn," he was far better suited than vanilla co-star George Clooney.

Speaking of Tarantino, only in fantasy could he let SHARON TATE live. FWIW, she was the best thing in the last of the Matt Helm flicks.

TORIN THATCHER, already vanquished by Kerwin Matthews in "Seventh Voyage of Sinbad," just couldn't resist taking on Matthews again in "Jack the Giant Killer."