PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous* MYTHICITY: *poor* FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure* CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, sociological* I'd never heard of the popular nineties video game "Wing Commander" before hearing about this feature-film adaptation in 1999. I never caught the movie in any venue before streaming, and only completism justified seeing this box-office bomb at all.
Headliner Freddie Prinz Jr, playing COMMANDER's main hero Chris Blair, went on record as stating that when he signed on to the project, he really liked the script he was given-- but that the actual shooting script was "shit." There's surely more truth than poetry in that assertion. Even if I had not had Wikipedia at my disposal, I feel sure I would have noticed how the script for the theatrical release tosses out plot-threads and then summarily drops them like hot coals. One of the most obvious occurs in the first half hour. New pilots Blair and Marshall (Matthew Lillard), fresh from their training-school, show up at their space-station barracks to introduce themselves to their new crewmates. Immediately before this scene, Blair makes the mistake of sitting in a plane designated for another pilot, thus getting on the bad side of one of his superior officers, Commander Devereaux (Saffron Burrows). Then. when Blair and Marshall mention the incident to the other pilots, one of them, Forbes (Ginny Holder), claims that the designated pilot no longer exists and should not be spoken of. It's a nice scene of its kind-- and the existing script never follows up on the subject.
The main plotline is no better. We see nothing of this era's futuristic Earth-culture except the spacefaring military, and the entire film concerns the space-militia's attempt to beat back the hostile forces of the Kilrathi (catlike aliens only seen a couple of times in the movie). However, we hear a little bit about a group of early Earth explorers called "Pilgrims," but only because Blair is half-Pilgrim on his mother's side. The current human culture has some sort of bias against Pilgrims, for what reasons the viewer never knows, but a lot of people in Blair's new crew are prejudiced against him for his heritage-- though the script handles even this basic melodrama clumsily. The main purpose for the script to mention the heritage at all is because being half-Pilgrim has imbued Blair with mad piloting skills, enabling him to navigate through black holes and stuff like that.
There was also apparently a subplot about someone in the Earth-forces being a secret ally to the Kilrathi, but all of it was edited out. A lot of this crappy plotting might be bearable if at least the space-combat scenes were exciting, but director/co-writer may hold the record for Worst Space-Fights Ever. The only slight recompense for watching this turd was that the four principal actors did pretty well polishing it. Prinze, Burrows and Holder are as good as is possible, but Lillard makes the most of his second-banana character. Since he's probably going to forever known for playing and/or voicing Shaggy Rogers in the SCOOBY DOO franchise, it's refreshing to see him playing a largely straight role for once.
PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*, MYTHICITY: *fair* FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure* CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological* In my review of SAKURA KILLERS, I could only guess as to the connection of that film and this same year ninja-movie, and if asked could not have even proved which film came first. Happily, IMDB provided a link to the apparently archived site NINJAS ALL THE WAY DOWN, where site-runner CJ Lines not only reviewed the film here, he also tracked down and interviewed PHANTOM's writer-director Dusty Nelson, and recorded the interview for posterity here, on the site DEN OF GEEK. Nelson specifies that while he lived in Pittsburgh, he made contact with a company that had access to raw Taiwanese footage about ninjas and gangsters, and that he Nelson was asked to edit the footage and add in enough new scenes to cobble together a movie for VHS release. Once that task was accomplished, the same company rustled up enough capital for Nelson to write and direct WHITE PHANTOM. Nelson states that it was the idea of someone in the production company to link PHANTOM with SAKURA by using the same villains and one supporting character. Incidentally, Lines misremembers an IMDB detail: the site attributes the Taiwanese footage to a fellow named "Wang Yu," but does not claim that this is the same as international one-armed wonder "Jimmy Wang Yu."
So Nelson and his people went to Taiwan with three American actors-- star Jay Roberts Jr, leading lady Page Leong, and "name actor/supporting player" Bo Svenson-- and made PHANTOM. Svenson's character is some sort of Interpol-like commander who's supposed to be the same as SAKURA's Chuck Connors. The previous character was just named "The Colonel," while PHANTOM gives him the full name of "Colonel Slater." Slater's trying to get a lead on what the Sakura ninja-clan did with a stash of stolen plutonium. Though the Sakura clan is led by a mysterious man whose face is never seen, Slater tries to get intel from the clan leader's heir apparent Hanzo. The colonel blackmails an exotic dancer named Mei Lin (Leong) to get close to Hanzo and pump him for information, if she can manage to avoid getting pumped full of lead or anything else undesirable.
A wild card then deals himself in. Known only as "Willi" (Roberts), this duster-clad American seems content to bop around Taiwan (or whatever place in Asia Taiwan is pretending to be), playing basketball and boffing prostitutes. However, he keeps turning up and messing with Sakura gangsters when they shake down average citizens for protection money. When not confounding gangbangers with his laid-back martial talents-- sort of like a "drunk-fu" practitioner-- he pays court to Mei Lin. This infuriates Hanzo and aggravates both Slater and Mei Lin, though in time the dancer is won over by Willi's raffish charms. One scene suggests that Slater recognizes Willi from some previous contact, but the script is not consistent on this point. Hanzo complains to his dad about the "white ninja" interfering with Sakura's protection racket-- a term used long before Willi actually dons white ninja-gear-- and Masked Dad thinks Willi represents some extinct clan, implicitly one with which Sakura had issues. As I recall, everyone pretty much forgets about finding the plutonium stash.
Like most ninja-movies, the action is episodic until the narrative reaches the (pretty decent) end-fight between Willi and Hanzo. But Nelson works in a fair number of character-moments, mostly between Willi and Mei Lin-- so that there's some mild sadness when Mei Lin gets sacrificed by this war of ninja-clans. Roberts does credible kung-fu stunts-- a particular standout is the way he flummoxes a bouncer by pretending to "accidentally" block him or hit him-- and I liked that he's a bit of a rogue, not just a flat goodguy. I'm guessing that Roberts, who retired from filmmaking years ago, remembered his first big role fondly. In my review of one of his last movies, 1990's AFTERSHOCK, I noticed that Roberts' central character was named "Willi" like the hero in PHANTOM, and that a support-character is named "Colonel Slater." It seems likely to me that Roberts chatted up the scriptwriter and simply asked him to interpolate the names of two PHANTOM characters for AFTERSHOCK characters that originally had no connection. Since Roberts plays the two characters substantially the same, one could imagine that AFTERSHOCK tells the story of Willi and Slater after they survive a sci-fi apocalypse.
PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*, MYTHICITY: *poor* FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure* CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological* On IMDB I saw a number of reviews asserting that they found this Taiwanese ninja-flick "so bad it was good." All I can say is that SAKURA KILLERS didn't tickle my funnybone. Yes, it's an incompetent, low-budget movie with two charisma-free leads, and you see a lot of low-level ninja-tricks, one of which had a black-clad "Sakura killer" writhing on the ground like an earthworm. But the only slight asset of this pedestrian effort is that the fighting, while not noteworthy, is at least reasonably constant.
The Plot: black-clad ninjas, working for a Japanese crime ring named "Sakura," steal a videotape with a scientific secret on it. To protect freedom and democracy, a guy called the Colonel (Chuck Connors) calls upon two of his--agents? Allies? Guys he met in a bar? Whatever the standing of Sonny (Mike Kelly) and Dennis (George Nichols), in no time they're off to Japan (for which Taiwan is a stand-in) to find the criminal ninjas. But even though both guys have some martial training, they're also encouraged to find a master and train as ninjas, since it takes a ninja to beat a ninja. I don't know why, though. The very first time the guys ask a waitress about the Sakura organization, she sets a bunch of ninjas on their tails, and Sonny and Dennis beat the masked men handily.
Nevertheless, with equal ease the two goofs stumble across a ninja master and his cute daughter, and he puts them through some mild rigors. The result is that not only do Sonny and Dennis master all the ninja devices, they can quick-change into ninja costumes in the blink of an eye, with demon-masks covering their faces. Moreover, both the old man and his daughter help the guys fight their enemies, so they've really got it easy. KILLERS is barely an adequate time-killer, but it boasts two curiosities. One is that according to IMDB, American director Dusty Nelson recycled elements of this movie into the same-year WHITE PHANTOM, though none of those elements included Sonny or Dennis. The other slight distinction is that although Chuck Connors' scenes in the film only add up to about ten minutes, he gets the only decent scene when he blows away a couple of ninjas with a shotgun-- though of course a repeating rifle would have been more appropriate.
PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous* MYTHICITY: *poor* FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure* CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, sociological* AFTERSHOCK-- whose title seems like a reference to nothing at all-- may be rare among apocaflicks in also being a "first contact" story. And it's got kung fu also, so it's a first-contact chop-apocaflick! Also, it's got almost ten familiar faces spread throughout the movie, though some of the performers are in the story for only a handful of scenes, like Richard Lynch and Christopher (son of Robert) Mitchum.
Writer Michael Standing (who also has a small acting role in AFTERSHOCK) comes up with a basic concept that almost has satirical possibilities. What if all the societies of Earth fall into apocalyptic chaos thanks to a repressive military regime, and then a beneficent ET pays Earth a visit, having heard from our outer-space satellites that we're a happening kind of world? A writer with a head for satire might have come up with all sorts of little jabs at human mediocrity while the hero of the story tried to help the aggrieved alien phone home. But Standing had no such head. His idea of satire was to say that the repressive military faction, represented by enforcers John Saxon and Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, likes to control subjects by somehow affixing "bar codes" to their persons. Stop me, I'm laughing.
At first AFTERSHOCK looks like it's going to be a "soldiers vs rebels" story. Saxon and his goons arrest two young guys, one of whom is a member of the rebel movement (Chuck Jeffreys) while the other, Willie (Jay Roberts Jr.), is a sort of rebel against the rebels. When the two guys break out of their confinement-- both of them doing so much kung-fu that it seems like they're going to be a salt-and-pepper team-- they also break out a young blonde woman named Sabina (Elizabeth Kaitan). Sabina is an alien visitor who, as I said, came with the idea of contacting a rational civilization, but she can't speak except by imitating the words of others. Naturally, there's no point in having an alien visitor who can't talk, so in jig time she assimilates enough Earth-lingo to communicate. In order to return to her own planet, Sabina desperately needs to return to the point where she first teleported to Earth. The nasty soldiers want to take Sabina into custody in order to profit from her advanced alien knowledge, so the good rebels largely put aside their own concerns to help out this sister from another planet.
With this setup out of the way, the last hour of the film is just one fight after another, and since Jeffreys' character disappears, most of the heroic action is performed by super-rebel Willie, who's just a bleeding altruist at heart. Roberts is nowhere near the best at either acting or fighting, but he's adequate for this sort of routine future-chopsocky. Kaitan provides okay humor support: her jokes aren't especially funny, but she sells the innocent-ET thing well enough. Most of the name performers just say their lines and collect their paychecks. However, the best acting comes from Chris de Rose, whom I at least had never heard of. He plays an "apprehender," a bounty hunter who goes looking for Willie and his alien charge at the behest of Bad John Saxon. But for reasons never very clear, he begins to feel like he wants to wash his hands of the military dictatorship. He turns on Saxon and makes possible Willie's triumph and Sabina's escape from Earth. A concluding curiosity: the name of the hero and that of the Chris Mitchum character, "Colonel Slater," both appeared for other characters in Roberts' first movie, the 1987 ninja-flick WHITE PHANTOM, though that film and AFTERSHOCK shared no personnel except Roberts.
PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous* MYTHICITY: *fair* FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure* CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical, sociological* It's now over a year since I screened the first, over-two-hours part of Joe May's INDIAN TOMB. I rendered no firm opinion, since I hadn't seen the second part. Now that I have done so, and can consider the two parts together, I can say that although May's epic doesn't stand as one of the great silent films, it deserves to be regarded as a strong experiment with what I earlier called the "painterly" approach to cinema.
When last we left European innocents architect Herbert Rowland and his fiancee Irene, they were stuck in the palace of the Maharaja Ayan (Conrad Veidt). Rowland came to India in the belief that he had been hired to design a tomb for Ayan's dead wife Savitri, and Irene, worried that Rowland was in over his head, followed. After many long, brooding scenes on the massive edifices of Ayan's India, the Europeans learn that because of Savirti's adultery with an Englishman, Ayan plans to kill his wife and then entomb her. Rowland is torn between trying to flee with Irene and seeking to talk Ayan out of such an uncivilized enormity. However, though the innocents don't know it, Ayan has already undertaken murderous actions against the Englishman (Paul Richter). Part One ends on a cliffhanger as to whether he will survive the attacks of Ayan's soldiers. He does, but he's also captured and fed to some tigers. Rather a depressing outcome for a cliffhanger.
Rowland and Irene don't see this, but they're kept in the loop by Savitri's maid, and they consider making a run for it. Ayan, who has forbidden his people to talk with the Westerners, orders the maid to do a little dance for him at a celebration, and she's killed by a poisonous snake. This decides the two guests on taking their leave, and they take Savitri with them, I guess out of sheer decency, though that gesture guarantees that Ayan will pursue with all his resources.
In theory, one might think this is where the adventure gets going. However, whatever may have happened in Thea Von Harbou's original novel, or in Fritz Lang's scenario for the movie, Joe May flenses all of the excitement from the conflict with medium and long shots designed to place maximum emphasis upon the imposing buildings in the background. Rowland has a couple of lackluster fistfights with Indian guards, and then he, Irene, and Savitri depart in a boat. Maybe there was a scene left out somewhere, because when Ayan and his men show up on the quay, all the boats are floating out of reach. Did Rowland cut all the moorings? One minion dies by crocodile attack while trying to fetch a boat for his rajah. But it's only a minor delay. The three fugitives try to escape via a high mountain pass, but Ayan and his horde are right on their tail. Somehow Irene falls behind and Ayan captures her, demanding the return of Savitri for Irene's life. But Savitri has one last gambit to stay out of the hands of her husband-- one that causes Ayan far more pain than any physical assault could have.
Though the mystic yogi Ramigami barely appears in Part 2, I consider that the second section keeps the same phenomenality as the first, where the ascetic is shown performing literal miracles. But though director May acts as if the massive Indian sets are his movie's only attraction, Conrad Veidt sells his brooding, Byronic sinner with a set of larger-than-life gestures, and effectively steals the movie from the other performers. I don't make the Byron comparison lightly. I've no idea what Von Harbou's novel was like, but May turns its narrative into the movie-equivalent of one of those wordy verse-dramas from Romantic authors like Byron and Shelley, May's characters often seem like humanized ants, doomed to be forever dwarfed by the heaven-challenging edifices they have created. Only Ayan, "sympathetic villain" though he is, seems equal to the monumentalism, for his love for Savitri is so heartfelt that he's willing to kill for it. In marked contrast to many similar melodramas, Savitri never offers an excuse for her adulterous actions, like being betrayed or treated cruelly by her husband. One doesn't even know if she ever felt anything for Ayan, only that within the scope of the movie, another man holds her love. And Ayan can only seek to make her betrayal into a monument to his lost love-- which is what Rowland ends up completing for the rajah, before he and Irene go back to the safety of a very un-exotic Europe.
PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous* MYTHICITY: *fair* FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure* CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical, sociological* There had been a small handful of Justice League stories from Filmation Studios in the 1960s, followed by and the very compromised versions of the "Super Friends" franchise. But this 2001 series, following up on the respective continuities of the Batman and Superman TV shows of the 1990s, still feels like the first animated iteration of DC's Justice League. Unlike those nineties programs, LEAGUE had nearly no participation from writer-producer Paul Dini, so that this DC adaptation is dominantly the product of producer Bruce Timm. The first season is characterized by larger-than-life stories meant to spotlight not only the derring-do of the seven rotating members-- Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, J'onn J'onzz, Hawkgirl, and the John Stewart Green Lantern-- but also the complex backdrop of the DC Universe. Though characterization improved in the second LEAGUE season and the subsequent three seasons of JUSTICE LEAGUE UNLIMITED, it might be fairly argued that the "larger than life" approach was later translated to most if not all of the LEAGUE movies made for the DC Animated Franchise, resulting in a certain level of mediocrity there. In my ratings of individual episodes, "G" means "good mythicity," "F" means "fair," and "P" means "poor."
SECRET ORIGINS (F)-- To be sure, "larger than life" is the only way to go when assembling a team of seven unrelated heroes, and in truth the menace of alien invasion was the pretext for the Justice League's formation in the original 1960s comic. This time the ETs are a race of parasitic shapeshifters, given three-legged vehicles that are clear shout-outs to the tripods of H.G. Wells' Martians. But in this universe DC's Martians are the first people to be annihilated by the newcomers. The survival of last Martian J'onn J'onzz gives "Origins" a fair degree of emotional depth, while the backstories of other characters-- notably Hawkgirl, who'll get no real backstory this season-- are more circumscribed. Both seasons of LEAGUE will show a marked tendency to give Batman all the good lines while Superman goes begging for even one decent scene.
IN BLACKEST NIGHT (F)-- This story attempts, with only partial success, to squeeze an expansive JUSTICE LEAGUE story into two 20-minute episodes. In the comic the Hal Jordan Green Lantern is accused of having destroyed a world with his ring-power, while here it's John Stewart. The basic plot remains strong as the League seeks to clear the Lantern's name, but the villains, the android Manhunters, fail to prove as impressive as they were in the comics story.
THE ENEMY BELOW (P)-- Here the writers sought to incorporate a "meaner, leaner" version of Aquaman, more or less in line with what had happened to the Sea King in the comics. What the writers produced was largely a warmed-over version of a variety of Sub-Mariner stories, wherein some Atlantean schemer seeks to force Atlantis into a war with the surface world. In this case the schemer is Aquaman's brother (or half-brother?) Orm, and this may be the first time any story made him into an Atlantean, rather than a human seeking control over the realm of his hated sibling. There's a buildup to the Sea King losing a hand, which was also a big thing in the comics, and this version of his queen Mera has no powers, presumably because it would been extra trouble to explain.
INJUSTICE FOR ALL (F)-- This is an acceptable origin for the Injustice Gang, melded with a comics-story about Luthor getting poisoned by his use of kryptonite against his foe Superman. Still, the story throws a lot of villains at the audience without any rationale, and they don't have that much personal interactions with the heroes, just purely physical brawling. And there's a little too much of Batman outwitting everyone.
PARADISE LOST (P)-- This Wonder Woman-centric episode has the primary menace evolve on her home of Themiscyra, a home she deserted to serve humankind as a hero. The immediate menace is sorcerer Felix Faust, who has made a pact with the Greek God of Death to secure his release from Tartarus, which has to take place on the Amazon isle. I didn't care for portraying Hades as a garden-variety demon trying to escape his prison, and I think this basic idea may have stemmed from some comics-stories in which some myth-entity dwells beneath the island, but if so the writers botched the idea. Further, they loosely imply that Hades may have been the lover of Diana's mother Hippolyta, which implication needlessly complicates an already overwritten script.
WAR WORLD (P)-- Why does an episode that has all the makings to be "Superman-centric" capture so little of the hero's character? Superman and J'onn get captured by the minions of evil Mongul and are forced to fight in War World's gladiatorial games. Their rescuers Hawkgirl and Green Lantern get better character moments than either the Kryptonian or the Martian.
THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD (F)-- In the only first-season episode to which Paul Dini contributed, that grotty Gorilla Grodd, originally a foe of the comic-book Flash, debuts here as a menace to the whole Justice League. In this series the Flash is more an amiable goofus than the straight-arrow crusader of the comics, but at least Flash gets the finishing move to "his" old enemy. Grodd's world-conquest plan is unimpressive, but at least the concept of Gorilla City comes across intact.
FURY (F)-- Rogue Amazon Aresia wants to eliminate all men from Planet Earth, and she enlists the Injustice Gang to help her. Some good superhero brawls don't distract from the weaker aspects of the script, which sidelines the male Leaguers so that Wonder Woman and Hawkgirl get all the glory. Points for having Aresia beat up Batman.
LEGENDS (P)-- Does it really make sense for even a reinvented Justice League to make fun of the sort of uncomplicated, simon-pure heroes of the Golden Age, given that the Justice League of the early 1960s wasn't any less goody-good than their 1940s forbears? Anyway, some Leaguers get stuck in an alternate dimension which exists so that a fanatical fanboy can imagine his favorite heroes having wacky adventures. The New League, which got all its gravitas thanks to the influence of Stan Lee's Marvel, provides the cold water to wake the world up from its fannish dreams.
A KNIGHT OF SHADOWS (F)-- Alarums and excursions abound as the medieval menace of Morgaine Le Fay imperils the modern world and its costumed knights. Le Fay is pursued by Jason Blood, who in this iteration started as a mortal who betrayed King Arthur for Morgaine's sake. As punishment, Merlin bound the traitor to the body of a demon, or, as DC billed this Jack Kirby creation, "The Demon." In Kirby, the Demon was a hell-creature who assumed mortality at Merlin's behest, so the script here inverts that scenario. It's a decent episode but the subplot in which Morgaine almost subverts J'onn to her cause seems forced.
METAMORPHOSIS (G)-- The only high-mythicity episode of Season One profits from its model, the origin-story of Metamorpho from the comics. In my review of that origin, I argued that writer Bob Haney reworked the essential elements of Shakespeare's THE TEMPEST, where the hero contends with a magician and his brutish servant for the hand of the magician's daughter. In the comics, the brute Java channels the father's arguable inappropriate feelings for his grown daughter. Here, Simon Stagg not only wants to get rid of his daughter Sapphire's age-appropriate boyfriend Rex, he also finds a way to exploit Rex in good capitalistic fashion. In the comics Simon Stagg is just a pompous fool, but here he's the epitome of the nasty rich man, determined to have everything in his greedy grasp.
THE SAVAGE TIME (F)-- The League finds its way into an alternate Earth where the Allies have almost lost WWII thanks to the intervention of immortal villain Vandal Savage. Refighting WWII is always a popular superhero trope, and this one is decent though not outstanding. This version of Wonder Woman, who's never existed in any time but the 21st century, gets a meet-cute encounter with doughty Steve Trevor, so that in a sense he's still her "first." The comics-fan authors also find guest-spots for the best-known land soldiers in the DC (Sergeant Rock and Easy Company) and for those daredevil aerialists The Blackhawks, though technically these aviation aces made their bones fighting Nazis for Quality Comics, and were only acquired by DC after that company folded. The Leaguers succeed in defeating Savage's rewriting of history with no big surprises. For whatever reason, Easy Company doesn't fit into the JUSTICE LEAGUE world, but the Blackhawks worked just fine.
PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*, MYTHICITY: *fair* FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure* CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological* I know next to nothing about Rocambole, an adventurer who first saw life in French newspaper serials of the mid 19th-century. He's sometimes been cited as "the first superhero," but I don't find that he had either a costume or special powers, beyond maybe some stage-magic. I don't think the Mexican filmmakers behind this film, the second of two directed and co-written by one Emilio Muriel in 1967, knew anything about the original character either. I think it's pretty likely that they just seized upon a public-domain character who had a little cachet in Europe and molded him into a longjohn-wearing hero to profit off the popularity of '66 BATMAN. Unfortunately, ROCAMBOLE VS. THE SCORPION SECT-- which had a subtitled copy on YouTube-- is mostly so dull that it makes the '68 Mexican BATWOMAN look good. The opening isn't bad. Rocambole (Julio Aleman) is seen in his stage-identity of performing magician "The Hindu," but as soon as the act is done, he confers with his female assistant and changes into cape and cowl. Rocambole invades a private residence looking for evidence on an embezzler. However, a new villain anticipates the hero's move and ambushes him. The villain's thugs (including German Robles of NOSTRADAMUS fame) take the hero to a theater and sit him down as their master, The Scorpion, seeks to persuade Rocambole to join the sect. Seems the Scorpion-- who talks remotely through a dummy of himself-- has been knocking off various political figures to sow chaos. Rocambole nobly refuses the offer and leaps up to do battle-- fortunately, because the seat he was occupying suddenly surges with fatal electricity. The thugs and their master escape and then-- about an hour of dull talking-head scenes ensues. Rocambole confers with his lady-love henchgirl and a short male aide, the comedy relief of the movie. Rocambole tries to persuade two or three political figures of their peril, but they get killed anyway, one by a poisonous scorpion. Rocambole gets helped out of danger by a police confidante once, but it's a really dull scene. Only toward the end does the sluggish action pick up a bit. Rocambole in his secret ID has to be hospitalized for an injury, and the Scorpion sends a karate-chopping female nurse to assassinate the hero. Surprisingly, the battle lasts a good three minutes before Rocambole wins. But after that, there's just a few more routine confrontations before the Scorpion and his agents are defeated. SCORPION's got zero sting, except for completists of the period's superhero films.
