THE GRAND SUPERHERO OPERA

PIRATES OF CAPRI (1949)

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*

CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *sociological*

Most film-fans know director Edgar G' Ulmer for his famous Universal horror-film THE BLACK CAT or for his handful of 1950s SF-films, such as THE MAN FROM PLANET X. But he did dip his directorial oar into swashbuckling waters occasionally, and PIRATES OF CAPRI was, oddly enough, his second outing with a masked swashbuckler, following 1946's THE WIFE OF MONTE CRISTO.

CAPRI's credits are complicated by the fact that the film wasn't the usual Hollywood product, but was shot in Italy with an uncredited Italian co-director. That collaboration aside, Ulmer does seem to attempting a more painterly approach to an adventure-story. Possibly this was because the CAPRI project was shot in black-and-white, at a time when the majority of swashbucklers, even the cheap ones, were filmed in color. At times some of the shots are quite reminiscent of the delirious black-and-white contrasts from BLACK CAT.

On the other hand, the film is an extremely derivative take on the Zorro mythos, but with less effectiveness. In 1798, the ships of Naples-- where rules a queen, Maria Carolina (Binnie Barnes)-- are continually raided by a masked pirate, Captain Sirocco (Louis Hayward). In the raid that begins the story-- actually the only pirate-action in the movie-- Sirocco encounters a lovely young noblewoman, Mercedes (Mariella Lotti), who's on the way to Naples to meet one Count Amalfi for an arranged marriage. The masked pirate disparages Amalfi to Mercedes, but it turns out to be Sirocco's private joke, for the foppish fellow Mercedes later encounters at court is none other than the captain's secret identity.

In the original Zorro, the hero plays a languid aristocrat so that no one in Old California will suspect his double identity and so threaten himself and his family. Amalfi's motive is a little more confused. He's not literally a count, but assumed the title after his brother, the real royalty, was slain in Naples for abetting revolutionaries. Thus he would seem to be diametrically opposed to the example of the Scarlet Pimpernel, who was all about saving royals from rebels. Yet strangely, though Amalfi has good reason to hate the aristocracy, he doesn't despise Maria Carolina. He deems her an innocent, and the real tyrants are her ministers and her law enforcer Baron Holstein. At any rate, Amalfi uses his dandy-persona to spy on the court in order to gather info for more raids.

However, most of the film involves nasty Holstein trying various strategies to destroy Sirocco's network of operatives. Despite some decent dialogue the film as a whole is stodgy and stuffy, and Hayward's borderline-effeminate imitation of Leslie Howard's Scarlet Pimpernel is overdone by half. It's modestly interesting that Amalfi uses his masked persona as an alter ego to romance Mercedes, but by 1949 this was par for the course. Hayward does a good job with a climactic swordfight against his main enemy, enlivened a bit by being set on a theatrical stage.

SORCERESS (1982)

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

The above lobby card is probably more amusing than the movie itself. There is a winged lion in the movie-- albeit one that looks like a demented Muppet-- but there's no black guy with an axe, and there's no single heroine, as the title loosely suggests, but rather twin heroes, mediocre as they may be.

SORCERESS was one of the first films that sough to coast on the success of CONAN THE BARBARIAN. Unfortunately, it was also one of the many Roger Corman-produced flicks in which Corman decided to cheap out big-time. Veteran exploitation director Jack Hill, who claimed to have co-written the movie with Jim Wynorski, hoped that he might spark his flagging career with this film, but instead it became his final directorial credit.

I tend to believe Hill co-wrote the film, even though its plot is a garbled mess. There are glimpses of anarchic humor here that recall Hill's inspired work on films like THE BIG DOLL HOUSE. But even though I'm sure Corman was responsible for a lot of the flaws of SORCERESS by cheaping out on the budget, the plot is flimsy in the extreme and suggests that Hill was just winging it-- which is never a good way to make a comeback.

The villain's bid for power defines the course of the plot. Evil sorcerer Traigon (Roberto Ballesteros) plans to sacrifice his own firstborn to his evil goddess Caligara (a reference to Doctor Caligari, perhaps?) His unnamed wife, having just given birth, flees with her progeny, but Traigon and his thugs overtake her. Though the mother is wounded unto death, she has a surprise for her nasty husband: she gave birth to twins, and she refuses to tell Traigon which one is the eldest. In addition, the wife-- possibly a priestess of some sort?-- summons an ancient mystic warrior, Krona, who fights off Traigon's warriors while the wife herself kills Traigon. However, Traigon will be able to return from death in 20 years-- just enough time for his two offspring to grow to maturity-- and so the dying wife enjoins Krona to have the twins raised in hiding. Krona does so, swearing to endow the twins with special fighting-powers, even though they're twin girls. This setup has some decent melodramatic potential, but Hill blows it with a careless attitude toward establishing characters.

Twenty years later, twins Mara and Mira (twins Leigh and Lynette Harris) have been raised on a small farm by adoptive parents. The parents tell the twins none of their backstory, nor do they actually inform them that they are not boys. The girls apparently are too dumb to have made any conclusions themselves from looking at their adoptive parents, much less from the behavior of the farm's animals. They're first seen skinny dipping and being watched by a satyr named Pando (who seems intelligent even though he never utters anything but goatlike bleats). The girls catch Pando perving on them and beat him up.

Being off the beaten track is absolutely no help to the girls, for as soon as Traigon is reborn, he easily tracks his daughters down and slaughters everyone on the farm except the twins. The bereaved ladies make it into the nearest town, where they gain allies: a blustery Viking named Valtar, a roguish prince named Erlick, and Pando, who somehow gets involved for no good reason. After some more gratuitous fight-scenes, Traigon manages to lure the girls away from their protectors, and soon dispenses with the whole "who's the firstborn" plot-thread with some magical contrivance. The supporting heroes try to rescue the girls, but Traigon manages to keep hold of Mara, the elder sister, so the rest of the film is all about rescuing her before her mean father can sacrifice her.

Reputedly the shoot was a jinxed one, so that may explain why even Hill's specialty, that of extravagant violence, didn't come off. The Harris twins come off as blank slates even when they're undergoing orgasmic titillation in tandem (did I forget that they're "Corsican twins" who can experience one another's impressions?) Mara and Mira are the stars of the show, but almost everything in the script places more emphasis on the supporting characters. It's not the worst sword-and-sorcery film ever made, but SORCERESS will leave even the most undemanding viewers un-enchanted.

TRANCERS (1984)

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

I'm kind of surprised that the above poster pictures the hero with a helmet. I don't believe the main guy Jack Deth (Tim Thomerson) wears such gear in the original film or in any of the five sequels, and neither did Harrison Ford when he played the template for Deth: Rick Deckard in BLADE RUNNER.

One of the first scenes is a pretty fair riff on the "android interview" from BLADE RUNNER. Deth, a retired cop in the 23rd century, attempts to suss out which occupant of a run-down diner (that looks like it belongs in the 1950s) is actually a "Trancer." Deth guesses wrong and gets attacked by the titular creature, a human who instantly mutates into a bloodthirty savage.

After Deth makes short work of the creature, we get the exposition as to how Trancers have been unleashed on the future-world by evil psychic Martin Whistler. It's not clear as to how Whistler was going to gain world dominion by infecting random people with the Trancer condition-- which is limited in that it only works on weak-willed people-- and so the villain is forced to flee the forces of law and order. He does so by using a special chemical that hurls his consciousness back in time, so that he can occupy the body of an ancestor. Deth, who for some reason has a real mad on against Whistler, uses the same technology to zoom back to an ancestor's body in 1984.

Most of the remaining film consists of copious "duck out of water" scenes as Deth tries to accommodate himself to the 1980s. By chance his ancestor happens to have got lucky with a young woman named Leena (Helen Hunt, a few years from mega-stardom), and after the usual misunderstandings, Leena becomes fully enmeshed in Jack Deth's quest. I think something was said about what Whistler meant to do in his new body, but it escapes me at the moment. Clearly the writers, Danny Bilson and Paul De Meo (best known by me for the 1990 FLASH teleseries), knew that the main appeal of the film was letting Tim Thomerson run around beating up people and spouting tough-guy lines, so that's pretty much all there is to TRANCERS. I like Thomerson, but based on the first film I wouldn't have thought it would have spawned a six-flick series.

THE SWORD AND THE SORCERER (1982)

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

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By chance I happened to re-watch two disparate films from the oeuvre of director Albert Pyun, without any plans to set up a mini “Pyun-fest.”

I had mildly enjoyed SORCERER back in its original release, despite its status as an eighties version of a “mockbuster,” being a shallow knockoff of a big-budget release, the 1982 CONAN THE BARBARIAN. Prior to the re-watch, I had remembered SORCERER as fast-paced dumb fun. However, upon viewing the Rifftrax version, I realized how much Pyun filled the flick with dull-as-dirt talking-head scenes. This gave the comedians had ample chances to insert comments whenever the characters were droning on about rebelling against the evil Lord Cromwell. (This particular modern-sounding name shows how much the writer cared about keeping faithful to the fantasy’s archaic character.)

The aforementioned Cromwell (Richard Lynch) makes a deal with evil sorcerer Xusia (Richard Moll) to seize control of all the fair-minded kingdoms of this S&S world. Then Cromwell gets worried about sharing power with Xusia, so he has the sorcerer killed—apparently. While Xusia hides and licks his wounds, Cromwell makes war on the last free kingdom, killing the king thereof. Prince Talon (Lee Horsley) sees the king his father perish, but after he makes an attempt on Cromwell’s life, Talon goes off somewhere and becomes a Conan-like sword-for-hire. It’s not memories of paternal loyalty that finally bring the prince-barbarian back into the fray against Cromwell, but the blandishments of a Resistance spy, cute Princess Alana (Kathleen Beller).

There are various attacks and reverses, but eventually Cromwell captures Talon. Having seen the advance publicity for CONAN THE BARBARIAN, the tyrant decides to put Talon on display at his festival by crucifying this lesser barbarian, because—well, because that happened in Conan. The rebels come to Talon’s rescue, but not before his character commits the film’s most notorious faux pas: simply pulling his hands free from the nails holding him to the cross, and then immediately wielding a sword against his enemies. More excursions follow, bringing Talon into conflict with alive-again Xusia before he has a final death-duel with Cromwell. Oh, and the hero gets the girl.

Though Horsley won’t be anyone’s favorite barbarian, at least he plays the role as straight as possible, and Beller’s willingness to sell her body to a handsome barbarian, however un-PC even back in ’82, adds a little zest to the ho-hum revenge plot. There’s also some nice T&A that you won’t get in a SCORPION KING movie.

SUBSPECIES (1991)

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

SUBSPECIES is the first of four vampire films with the same cast of characters, as well as one "spin-off" film that takes place in the same "universe." All were written (or co-written) by director Ted Nicolaou, and all were filmed in Romania, which proves to be the best aspect of the series, since Nicolaou takes full advantage of the settings and even the physical attire of the characters to give his films vraisemblance.

I haven't finished re-watching all five films yet, but my memories of previous screenings suggest that these are just lively, atmospheric time-killers. The first sets up the basic characters and their concerns, and then the sequels just repeat the same basic formula; vampires running around fanging people while pursuing an arcane artifact, the Bloodstone. The "subspecies" tag originally refers to little red manikins that the king-vampire Radu creates from his own blood, but they have only minimal impact on the storylines and may have been no more than concessions to one of the film's production companies, Full Moon, which made malevolent manikins one of their signature tropes, a la PUPPET MASTER and DEMONIC TOYS.

Nicolaou's take on vampire mythology, while derivative, is at least somewhat more engrossing than the average low-rent fang-tale. In this world, apparently vampires can breed normally, for SUPSPECIES concerns two half-brothers, begat from a vampire lord from two women, one a vampiric sorceress and the other a mortal. The film starts out with the full vampire Radu (Anders Hove) slaying his father in order to obtain the Bloodstone, a relic able to shed the blood of a saint, and thus empowering any vampire who owns it. (That said, even when he has the Bloodstone in his hands, Radu doesn't seem to hold off on drinking blood from innocent mortals-- though he and his kindred must not have doing much blood-taking, since in modern times, only the older Romanians believe in vampires.) Radu's half-brother Stephan doesn't want the relic, nor does he want anything to do with feeding off people, though it's established that he does have roughly the same vampiric powers as Radu.

Enter two American college students, Lillian and Michelle, who come to a small town in Romania, rooming with Mara, a Romanian college girl whom they met in America. All three are students of Romanian folklore, and when they go nosing around Romanian ruins, they encounter Stephan. Stephan and Michelle fancy each other, and Radu, observing this, decides to use the girls against his hated half-brother. Radu vampirizes first the two "Lucys," Mara and Lillian, and eventually does the same to Michelle, the "Mina" of the story. Stephan attempts to prevent Michelle from being enthralled to his brother by re-biting her and binding her to him. The fraternal conflict comes to a head: Radu and Stephan engage in a long swordfight, after which Stephan beheads Radu, while Michelle overcomes one of her vampirized friends with a canny trick. The swordfight, while not very well choreographed, is the only element that makes SUBSPECIES a combative film, though it's my memory that none of the other related movies qualify for the combative mode.

There's not much psychological depth in this battle for two brothers over one woman, and the film's ending is just a setup for the sequel, which picks up immediately after the events of SUBSPECIES. Aside from the location advantages, the series' main asset is the makeup devised for Radu. With his pale skin, long stringy hair and long clawlike fingers, the evil undead's image certainly owes something to that of silent-film vampire Orlock from 1922's NOSFERATU, and actor Anders Hove gives a spirited performance as the nasty bloodsucker. Had there never been any sequels, I might have found it hard to decide if the narrative centered more upon Radu or upon Stephan and Michelle-- though, since the latter two are fairly bland, I might well have settled on the undead villain, since it's his quest for power that makes the story go. In terms of the series, though, Radu is unquestionably the star, since Stephan is quickly knocked off in the first sequel, Michelle becomes more drawn into Radu's world in all three sequels, and another heroine, Rebecca, is introduced in Part Two to become "the new Mina," so to speak.

MANDRAKE (1979)

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

I'd seen the TV-movie MANDRAKE only once, on its original broadcast, and really didn't remember much about it. Thus, when I had the chance to re-screen the flick on Youtube, I wasn't expecting anything more than the two deadly-dull CAPTAIN AMERICA films from around the same period.

To my surprise, even though neither writer Rick Husky nor director Harry Falk (apparently no relation to MANDRAKE-creator Lee Falk) had nothing on their resumes but tons of TV-work, the 1979 pilot is a pleasant little adventure. It has all the budget limitations of any other telefilm of the period, and I don't necessarily think the concept would have made for an outstanding series. But as a one-off take on the classic comic-strip magician, television has done much, much worse.

Naturally, some elements of the original strip had to be changed. The hero's partner Lothar was originally an African prince dressed in lionskins and speaking in pidgin English, so that had to go. The new Lothar (Ju-Ti Cumbuka) speaks coherent English, wears suit-clothes, and claims to be descended from an African royal who competed in the Olympics. That said, he doesn't get into as many skull-busting fights as did the original character, and for the most part his role in the telefilm is unnecessary-- not least because the main hero can do hand-to-hand combat as well as his sidekick.

The early version of Mandrake seemed to be a genuine worker of wonders, but after a few years, Lee Falk provided a new rationalization, that all of the seeming miracles were produced by hypnotic persuasion. The version in the telefilm straddles these two. As a child Mandrake is taken in by a Tibetan magician when his plane crashes in the mountains, and even though Mandrake still produces hypnotic illusions, the plot of MANDRAKE insists that psychic phenomena are real, not just contrivances.

The central plot concerns a missing psychic scientist whose daughter seeks out Mandrake's help. While the comic strip hero and his sidekick simply traveled from place to place helping people, the film's heroes have loose ties to some American intelligence agency, though happily the spy-jinks aspect isn't overdone. Mandrake and Lothar go looking for the missing man, and they encounter people who have been turned into mad bombers by some unidentified villain. Indeed, the best thing about the plot is that, unlike the majority of superhero-pilots, the script doesn't immediately reveal who it is (though for a time, a fellow with the dramatic name of "Arkadian," played by Robert Reed, is a suspect). And when the villain is revealed, it's not your "least likely suspect," though it is a person known to the magician-protagonist.

The pace is decent and reasonably engaging, and Anthony Herrera projects decent heroic charisma. It's far from a definitive adaptation of the character, but it puts across the appeal of Mandrake far better than, say, the serial version MANDRAKE THE MAGICIAN.