THE GRAND SUPERHERO OPERA

MIGHTY MORPHIN POWER RANGERS (1995)

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

Like many films built around continuing teleserials, the two POWER RANGERS movies always seem hard-pressed to put across why audiences should care about the characters or their situations. The elements that usually seem to vanish from movie adaptations include (1) the ability to work well with an ensemble of characters (see also most of the STAR TREK feature-films), and (b) a strong central conflict. In a serial television show, it's a given that every episode, whether directly linked or not, gives the viewer a cumulative sense of the characters' world. Thus it doesn't matter so much to many viewers if a given episode sports a weak villain or central conflict; the teleseries' charm is its "continuing adventures."

The 1993-96 POWER RANGERS teleseries, which was the main influence on these two movies, had two things that lifted it above the ranks of the usual juvenile live-action cheese. One element was contributed by the makers of SUPER SENTAI, the original Japanese series from which RANGERS was derived, for the design-work for the series' bizarre / goofy villains was far superior to similar work in American live-action juvenile TV entertainment. The other element was what the American producers brought to the table. As most fans know, the American producers of POWER RANGERS edited out everything in SUPER SENTAI that denoted Japanese culture or the Japanese identities of the heroes and shot new scenes of the heroes' secret identities as potrayed by English-speaking actors. I don't know to what extent SENTAI included scenes of the heroes' alter egos holding martial-arts battles with various villains' henchmen, but in any case the American version did a bang-up job in terms of choreographing the new fight-scenes, making them imaginative yet keeping the violence fairly "clean" and antiseptic (though the series was roundly criticized by parental-watch groups anyway).

The first film, whose full title is MIGHTY MORPHIN POWER RANGERS: THE MOVIE, proves a lackluster take on the teleseries. The Rangers barely get a chance to have a lackluster battle before their new nemesis "Ivan Ooze" deprives them of their powers and almost destroys their co-ordinator/mentor Zordon. Zordon survives and sends the heroes on a quest to another planet to find new empowering weapons. They find them, fight a few more demonic henchmen in an even more forgettable battle, return to Earth and kick Ooze's butt. The end.

Director Bryan Spicer can't do much with this lackluster script, produced by two guys with no previous association with the teleseries. As the villain Paul Freeman is given numerous attempts to camp things up, possibly because the producers were just so thrilled to get the guy who played Indiana Jones' best villain. Like the villains in the teleseries Ooze is meant to be slightly comic at times, but in contrast to the frustrated villains of the regular series, he lacks any particular charm or vocal peculiarity. Said regulars, Rita Repulsa and Lord Zedd, make a glorified cameo in the story, and outclass Ooze in terms of costumes alone.

THE MARSHAL'S DAUGHTER (1953)

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*

MYTHICITY: *fair*

FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*

CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *sociological*

THE MARSHAL'S DAUGHTER is one of the many extremely cheap western features that came out in the early fifties, a little before television began to edge the cheaper flicks out of the arena. Purportedly the movie's star Laurie Anders was the protege of producer Ken Murray, and he was attempting to see if he could launch a series of movies with Anders as a double-identity crimefighter. As "El Coyote," Anders' character Laurie Dawson dons a face mask and heavy garb that disguises her femininity, much as Linda Stirling had in the serial ZORRO'S BLACK WHIP about a decade earlier. However, it would appear that DAUGHTER did not rate even one sequel, and Anders did not make more than a few more acting appearances.

I've seen comments to the effect that DAUGHTER wasn't as good as the average grade-C oater, but as I'm no fan of that subcategory, I think this was a modest success in terms of showing how a female hero might take up crimefighting during the Old West. Laurie is the only child of Marshal Dawson (silent film-cowboy Hoot Gibson), but though she appears to be a woman of her time, she's been raised to be "the son her father never had," being adept with both riding and shooting. She also has an advanced knowledge of jui-jitsu and even demonstrates it on her hapless boyfriend. Possibly this element was meant to suggest that the action took place in the 20th century, but if so I don't remember seeing any other prominent indicators of modernity.

Though there are no actual Mexican characters in the story, Laurie apparently tries to pass herself off as a Mexican man-- addressing her opponents only in Spanish, for example-- because it's assumed that many such males are on the short side. (One bandit, prior to getting clocked by Laurie's judo, calls El Coyote a "runt.") In a couple of scenes, Laurie more or less signals her use of Mexican motifs by doing a ventriloquist act with a puppet speaking in Mexican dialect. This of course is as far as the film is willing to go in suggesting the perils of a double identity.

Action and dialogue are fair, but the film's main significance is its attempt to promote a female action-hero-- oddly, about a year before a TV show succeeded with the 1954-57 ANNIE OAKLEY series.

ALITA BATTLE ANGEL (2019)

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

Since ALITA BATTLE ANGEL is one of the most faithful adaptations of a comics-property in history, I may as well lay out the manga's backstory by re-using an earlier writeup I did for a particular ALITA arc, IRON MAIDEN:

Yukito Kishiro’s world is dominated by an aerial city named Tiphares (named for the central sephiroth of the Kaballah’s “Tree of Life”), a city linked to the Earth’s surface by a long shaft and assorted cables. Yet for the first two arcs the reader does not see how life is lived by the citizens of the clouds. Rather, Kishiro focuses on the lives of the ground-bound humans whose domain, “the Scrapyard,” coalesces around the aerial shaft. The reader’s first image of this environment is that of a mammoth junkyard, reinforcing the idea that the people, too, are castoffs from legitimate society. Earthbound commerce centers around Tiphares as well. The only businesses Kishiro shows are METROPOLIS-style factories, whose main function is to process food and other commodities and send the goods up to the sky-city via the central shaft. The inhabitants of the Scrapyard, however, live a hand-to-mouth existence, and many of their bodies have become modified through grafting or through the addition of cyborg parts—which seems to debase rather than enhance most of them.

Much of the story of ALITA derives from the first origin-arc, IRON MAIDEN and the subsequent arc KILLING ANGEL. Future arcs dealt with the young cyborg's eventual journey to the forbidden cloud-city Tiphares, but ALITA can only suggest this potential. As scripted by James Cameron and Laeta Kalogridis, Alita's early years in the Scrapyard serve to infuse her with two major motivations: to discover the original nature of her metal body's programming, and to avenge the death of her first love Hugo, and the script succeeds in making the familiar bildungsroman seem fresh, even if the film must by its nature end with its saga incomplete.

Though Robert Rodriguez does yeoman work bringing Kishiro's cyberpunk world to life, the pleasures of the Scrapyard and its piecemeal inhabitants takes second place to the characterization of Alita-- which is all the more remarkable, since the heroine's on-screen presence is that of a visual effect. Still, facial capture technology has come a long way since THE POLAR EXPRESS, with the result that real-life actress Rosa Salazar is able to convey a wealth of emotions through her CGI persona.

I can quibble at a few of Rodriguez's elisions. In contrast to the original manga, Alita's first love Hugo (Keean Johnson) never quite "comes alive," and some of the finer points of Kishiro's characterization are lost in translation. In contrast, Christoph Waltz provides able support as Alita's mentor Doctor Ido, who not only installs her brain in an unpredictable new body but also introduces her to the perils of the Scrapyard.

But ALITA is not primarily a drama, but an eye-popping adventure-tale, and Rodriguez does not disappoint here either. In fact, I prefer Rodriguez's combination of adventure and drama far over that of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, where much of the emotionality seems superficial and manipulative.

Rodriguez had a previous outing in adapating comics-properties, with the two SIN CITY films, and as I note in my review, the second film didn't turn out nearly as well as the first. However, those works were derived from an anthology concept. Thus Rodriguez, having a strong model to draw from in the manga-series, would seem to have a fool-proof series in the making.

SON OF SAMSON (1960)

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

Maciste gets one of his chronologically earliest outings when he shows up (according to the dubbed voiceover) in Egypt in the eleventh century B.C., which is more or less the time-period during which the Biblical Samson lived. As in many such films, Maciste (Mark Forest) doesn’t actually know who he is or where he came from. But because he’s been adopted by a tribe of impoverished Egyptians, who are apparently conversant with the Hebrew story of Samson, he’s dubbed “the son of Samson.” I would imagine that the original Italian script did not involve the Samson reference at all, given that the simple plot makes no reference to Hebrews of any time period. The opposition between “good tribe” and “bad tribe,” so indispensable in most peplum-films, consists of native Egyptians being oppressed by Persian invaders and their Egyptian servitors.

The Persians’ chief representative is Queen Smedes (Chelo Alonso), the wife of the rightful Pharaoh. A voiceover asserts that her loyalty to the Persians is supposed to be a secret, but it’s hard to see how she could conceal her loyalty to the occupying forces, particularly after she has the old Pharaoh assassinated. She has a potential opponent in the Pharaoh’s handsome young son Kenamon, who hobnobs with the lower classes and even has a love connection with a poor girl. So Smedes uses drugs and an amulet-- possibly magical, or maybe a hypnotic aid--to brainwash Kenamon so that he marries his father’s former wife, ensuring that Smedes remains on the Egyptian throne.

Maciste naturally comes to the defense to the tormented lower classes, not least because Maciste like Kenamon has a girlfriend among their ranks. He plans to arrange a rebellion against the evil queen, but he catches Smedes’s eye when performing in the local arena (suggesting that the 11^th-century Egyptians had their own version of the Roman “bread and circuses.”) Smedes brings Maciste into her palace, and from their G-rated lovemaking, it becomes increasingly ambivalent as to whether she’s subverting his will with drugs and if he’s just playing her to suss out the easiest way to overthrow her reign. Smedes is too smart for Maciste, slipping the hero a knockout drink him and having him flung to the crocodiles. However, Maciste is too tough for the crocs and ends up leading the good Egyptians against the bad collaborators and the Persian occupation—which is naturally all wrapped up in one big climactic battle.

This is a fairly ordinary muscleman-flick, without any outstanding stunts or fight-scenes. Chelo Alonso provides the strongest element in the film, particularly when she does a sexy dance to captivate the hero. Maciste and Kenamon are loose mirror-images, given that regal “bad girl” Smedes threatens both of their relationships with noble but poor “good girls,” even though the evil queen is interested only in Maciste and never makes any moves on her stepson/husband. Yet it’s Kenamon who gets his girl in the end, while out of the blue Maciste suddenly decides that he’s got to desert his lady love in order to go questing to help more people in trouble. Given that none of the Maciste films connect with one another, there should be no objection to the hero settling down with a wife in one era, given that he’s destined to pop up in some other timeframe. But maybe the scripter just thought the audience would like to see their immortal hero toss off the chains of matrimony in favor of having yet more never-ending adventures.

ZETA ONE (1969)

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

I suppose it might seem anile to speak of a dopey sexploitation film like ZETA ONE-- also known under such names as ALIEN WOMEN and THE LOVE FACTOR-- in terms of any sociological ramifications. And in truth, ZETA doesn't have any of the oddball charms I found in, say, a similar breast-obsessed flick like INVASION OF THE STAR CREATURES. ZETA's main sources of interest are twofold: (1) it represents a specific type of sexploitation typical of Great Britain in the "swinging sixties," and (2) it's a rare example of a sex-comedy where the women are at once empowered and disempowered.

It's hard to tell if ZETA expresses any personal fetishes on the part of its one-shot director-- who reportedly gave Tigon Studios an incomprehensible potpourri of footage-- or the unbilled raconteurs who stepped in to film additional scenes that made the flick slightly more coherent. The inspiration for the film stemmed from a British sex-picture magazine in which models posed naked or semi-naked in sci-fi outfits. The magazine may have been a response to the influence of the Barbarella comic book, but it's awfully hard to picture writer-director Michael Cort having opened any kind of a book.

Though there are some piddling references to the James Bond spy-craze-- mostly in a frame-sequence involving an agent named "James Word" (Robin Hawdon) -- the film's strongest trope is that of "aliens abduct humans for sexual purposes," seen in British movies as far back as 1954's DEVIL GIRL FROM MARS. Usually, the aliens are deficient in one gender and are making up the deficit with Earthpeople of said gender. Here, the alien "Angvians" (a jumble for "vaginas") are, for reasons not well explained. abducting Earth-women to take back to a planet full of other women. Earth-agencies seem only dimly aware of this incursion, and play no role in contending with the "alien women." Instead, the extraterrestrial enchantresses get opposition from an evil group of Earthmen, led by a mastermind named Bourdon (James Robertson Justice). Bourdon, having somehow learned of the Angvians' existence, wants to reverse the abduction-project and start capturing alien girls for exploitation on Earth.

Predictably, the movie has no intent to do anything with this "battle of the sexes" except to put a lot of semi-nude women on display, and if ZETA does nothing else, it does assemble an admirable list of British starlets, including Yutte Stensgaard, Anna Gael, Brigitte Skay, and Valerie Leon-- three of whom, for no appreciable reason, sport the names of the Greek Moirae: Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos. Equally nonsensical is the name of the Angvians' leader, Zeta, played by a covered-up Dawn Addams, who easily turns in the most mechanical performance. Addams doesn't have many scenes, but she plays them all the same, with a forced cheery air that probably reflected her relief at not having to parade around half-naked like the younger actresses.

The plot is merely a farrago of scenes in which the agent of one side gets captured by the other side, interspersed with dull explanatory scenes-- one of which even makes a game of strip-poker tedious. The film's only memorable sequence transpires at the conclusion. Bourdon, having captured one of the Angvians, assembles his men to hunt her like an animal in the forest. A troop of warrior-women, all in pasties and bikini-bottoms, descends to fight Bourdon's men (the villain himself inexplicably disappears from the story, probably due to actor Justice walking off the set). Though the Angvians have been seen performing some very mediocre martial arts back on their own world, the warrior-women defeat the evil exploiters of womankind by pointing their fingers and zapping them into unconsciousness with invisible beams. Then, with the villains defeated, the Angvians belatedly decide that it might be nice to have a stud around the house, so they invite James Word to join them on Angvia for endless hetero romps. This, far more than showing the hot actresses semi-nude, is a more disempowering message. At least when agents like Derek Flint and Matt Helm end their adventures getting oodles of quim, it's because they-- unlike the worthless Word-- have actually DONE something to merit the hero's reward.

SOS COAST GUARD (1937)

SOS COAST GUARD, while nothing special in the scripting department, benefits greatly from the presence of a more pleasingly diabolical villain-- Bela Lugosi playing "Boroff," foreign spymaster-- and from the much livelier direction of Alan James and William Witney. Given that James' directorial efforts without Witney are just adequate, I suspect Witney's eye for spectacle informed the better sequences of this serial.

SOS starts with a bravura sequence: Boroff, who has invented a "disintegration gas" which he plans to sell to hostile powers, infiltrates America to find the physical elements he needs to produce more of the gas. When the Coast Guard tries to stop Boroff, he shoots down one of the men. The victim's older brother Lt. Terry Kent (Ralph Byrd), also of the Coast Guard, dedicates himself to tracking down Boroff and his gang. Like a lot of "federal men" types of the time, he's almost never seen reporting to a superior or justifying his actions.

Boroff is a simple, straightforward fiend of the type Lugosi did well. In addition the script invokes a few touches at the actor's horror image, such as having him smuggled in on a ship called the "Carfax" (as in DRACULA's "Carfax Abbey." Boroff also has a master-slave relationship with a huge muscular servant named Thorg (Richard Alexander), who at the climax turns on his master in approved monster-movie tradition.

Thanks to Witney's directorial skills and Lugosi's sinister presence, SOS is well worth catching, while MANDRAKE is really only for hardcore serial followers.