THE HIDDEN (1987)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *cosmological*

THE HIDDEN neither loses nor gains from the standpoint of expired years. An efficient thriller with lots of gunplay and car-chases, its main innovation is that the featured team of buddy-cops are a human (Thomas Beck, played by Michael Nouri) and an alien masquerading as an FBI agent (Gallagher, played by Kyle MacLachlan). 

Alien Gallagher has taken over the body of a dead agent in order to seek a body-hopping E.T. of another species who has to come to Earth to usurp citizens and take them on criminal joy-rides. Naturally, for some time Beck has no way of realizing that the various breakout of random criminal acts stem from one source. But the longer he spends in the company of the quixotic Gallagher, the more he sees that "the truth is in there"-- that is, a gross ALIEN-imitator who slurches his way into the gullets of human beings prior to making them his pawns. Gallagher can destroy the creature, but only in a crucial period when the unnamed malefactor is outside a human body.

Because in his  own world Gallagher is a policeman who lost his partner, he has a rough bonding-experience with Beck. There's no great depth to their exchange, though, even on the level of DIRTY HARRY. The most interesting symbolic motif in the film is that while the evil alien is all gooey putrescence, the good alien, when he shows off his own ability to body-switch, manifests as an angelic ray of light.

MEGASHARK VS. CROCOSAURUS (2010), MEGASHARK VS. MECHA SHARK (2014)

 

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

MEGASHARK VS. CROCOSAURUS picks up where the previous MEGASHARK VS. GIANT OCTOPUS left off, but leaves behind the eight-armed monster and substitutes a big croc. None of the characters from the first film show up, but this is no loss, since the first ones were forgettable. In contrast, the script for CROCOSAURUS comes up with three viewpoint characters-- a Navy scientist, a U.S. government agent, and an English hunter of rare animals-- who play off one another a little better than the human characters found in most big-beast flicks.

Although Megashark is the focus of this four-flick series, if only in line with the scores of killer-shark films out there, both the Giant Octopus and the Crocosaurus are more visually interesting, and I consider both of them co-stars alongside the big megalodon. The script works in a relatively well-thought-out conflict for the shark and the croc, before the interfering humans manage to wipe them out.

Though there's not much to say about CROCOSAURUS, it's an improvement over the second sequel, MEGASHARK VS. MECHA SHARK is a dull slog indeed. I'm not sure why the honchos at the Asylum didn't just keep churning big prehistoric survivals, unless they had some delusion of being able to come up with a robot as appealing as Toho's Mechagodzilla. The "Mecha Shark" of the title is a shark-shaped submarine invented by a boring lady scientist, and although she wants to use her invention against a new Megashark (the first one have been finished off in the first sequel), the Mecha Shark has a tendency to go berserk at times, as if it was a real sea-beast.

MECHA SHARK's only accomplishment is to make the third sequel, MEGASHARK VS. KOLOSSUS, look at least adequate by comparison. However, I don't think either Mecha Shark or Kolossus have enough personality to share the spotlight with the monster shark, since they're just tools of those pesky humans.

THE SON OF TARZAN (1920)

 

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

Serials in the sound era weren’t known for fidelity to their sources, but a few silent chapterplays hit closer to the mark. SON OF TARZAN may have been following the lead of the 1918 TARZAN OF THE APES, a feature-length film which faithfully adapts the first half of the first Tarzan novel. Further, whenever SON departs from the 1915 Burroughs novel, it’s generally an improvement.

I wrote that the novel that gave us “Korak Son of Tarzan” didn’t manage to create a hero equal to his famed sire, and the serial is also little more than a variation on the jungle-man theme. But though some silent serials ate just assemblages of perilous situations, sometimes lacking the celebrated “cliffhangers,” the various vicissitudes of SON OF TARZAN are more artfully crafted. Like the perils of the novel, all the conflicts serve to give hero Korak and heroine Meriem their “baptism of fire” until the happy ending.

One huge improvement on the novel is the serial’s main villain. In the book Paulvitch, the fiend who is indirectly responsible for sending the son of Tarzan to the jungle, is killed right away. But in the film, he survives his first encounter with the young hero and pursues the youth to Africa as a means of seeking vengeance on Tarzan. Since the novel’s villains are weak and narrowly conceived, Paulvitch, played by Eugene Burr, provides a more obsessed and hiss-worthy enemy.

As in the book, Korak and Meriem starts as children, mature during their very chaste time together in the jungle, and then are played by different actors in their teen years. Rather surprisingly, the serial even preserves the novel’s idea that Meriem initially thinks of Korak only as a “big brother,” but slowly gains an awareness than she doesn’t want a brother’s affection from him. As a displacement for those burgeoning sexual feelings, the serial adds a detail absent in the novel: a scene in which Meriem goes bathing in a river and has to be rescued from a beast by Korak. Whether or not the makers of the 1932 TARZAN THE APE MAN were aware of this earlier adventure in jungle-nudity is anyone’s guess.

As in the novel, Tarzan and Jane play supporting roles, kept in the background as they tirelessly search for their lost offspring. However, someone in production must have decided that the audience wanted some real ape-man action, for the serial introduces a subplot in which thugs attack Tarzan and get their asses handed to them by jungle savagery.

THE RETURN OF THE VAMPIRE (1943)

 

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

It’s been alleged that Columbia’s RETURN OF THE VAMPIRE may have started out as an attempt to make a sequel to Universal’s DRACULA, presumably without actually drawing on that movie but rather on the public domain novel. But Universal’s legal department blocked that idea, so Columbia came up with a “Dracula-under-another-name.” This character, Armand Tesla, inevitably reproduced the physical image of Universal’s Dracula since he was played by Bela Lugosi.

The legal complications might not have had any real impact on the script for RETURN, since its authors would have been drawing from Bram Stoker’s novel from the first anyway. That said, the writers also brought in elements foreign to Stoker, some of which may have been borrowed from contemporaneous horror films. Yet there are aspects of the Columbia vampire saga that are more faithful to Stoker than one sees in Tod Browning’s 1931 adaptation. For instance, though the script doesn’t exactly give Armand Tesla an origin as such, there’s the implication that he was once a scholar back in 1700 who became so infatuated with the subject of vampirism that he somehow transformed himself into one of the undead. This fragment of a backstory bears some resemblance to one of the origins Stoker gives to Count Dracula, who’s said at one point to have been a student at a college called the Scholomance, which somehow led to his vampiric descent.

To be sure, some structural elements just make good sense for the whole subgenre. The vampire needs to have a base from which to carry out his depredations, and he’s generally impatient enough to fixate on a victim or victims within easy access. Armand Tesla is first seen fanging an innocent woman in the London of World War One, and he likes the taste enough to follow her to a medical clinic. His activities, however, trigger two persons affiliated with the clinic, Doctor Saunders and Lady Jane Ainsley, to thwart the vampire’s initial attack. Angered by the resistance, Tesla tells his lupine slave Andreas (Matt Willis) that he plans to punish Saunders by making his small granddaughter into a bloodsucker. But the vampire hunters strike first, driving a metal spike through Tesla’s heart, and he dies, albeit temporarily. With the expiration of his master, Andreas reverts to human status and lives for the next twenty-something years with no werewolf-style transformations, working for Lady Jane at the clinic.

Andreas, of course, is RETURN’s version of Renfield, who in both Stoker and in Browning is a madman influenced by Dracula’s power, though in very different ways. The script implies that somehow Tesla has transformed Andreas, a normal human, into a hairy monster, though this ploy might seem counter-intuitive since Andreas does not seem able to transform back to human even at his master’s behest. (Late in the film Andreas is stopped by two cops, and though the wolf-man fights off the constables, having a lupine appearance probably didn’t help him avoid trouble.) Though the script does not reference Stoker’s claim that vampires can command wolves to do their bidding, this is apparently at the root of the writers’ decision to make Andreas a wolf-man, so that he would obey Tesla in all things. Yet it’s also possible that they were riffing on the general idea of supernatural contagion by having a vampire capable of creating not only vampire-slaves, but a werewolf-slave as well. The scripters may also have taken some influence from 1941’s THE WOLF MAN, where a werewolf (played by the then-ubiquitous Lugosi) passes on his curse to Larry Talbot (Lon Chaney Jr, to whom Matt Willis bears a nodding resemblance).

Some twenty years later, Saunders has passed on of natural causes but his granddaughter Nikki (Nina Foch) has become a young woman in her twenties. She’s engaged to John (Roland Varro), the son of Lady Jane—making their relationship a trifle odd for a horror-film of the time, since John and Nikki are the movie’s romantic couple, yet are a good twenty years apart in age. (Almost surprisingly, Foch and Varro were both accurately cast with respect to their real ages.) A local constable heralds trouble, though, for he confronts Lady Jane with a recording by Saunders, detailing how he and Lady Jane killed a vampire. In a bit possibly derived from the 1935 DRACULA’S DAUGHTER, the policeman explains that the law takes a dim view of driving spikes through people, accused vampires or not.

However, fate, and the Second World War, intervene to make possible the vampire’s return from death. A bombing-raid by German planes unearths the spiked corpse of Tesla. Two groundsmen come across the impaled body, assume that the spike was put there by the bomb-blast, and they pull out the metal intruder. In due time Tesla returns to his unholy unlife, which includes asserting his mastery of Andreas once more and assuming a new identity, the better to get close to Saunders’ granddaughter and turn her into one of his own kind.

After this original twist on the idea of resuscitating an undead, the movie largely falls into a routine pastiche of the customary vampire tropes: the evildoer’s stalking of his victim, her wasting illness, the slow realization of the vamp’s true identity. The only novelty of the film’s middle part is that for the first time the main vampire hunter is a woman of mature years, Lady Jane (Frieda Inescourt). It’s also of interest that, whereas Tod Browning’s adaptation uses crosses and other holy paraphernalia in an offhand manner, the script for RETURN strongly emphasizes through Lady Jane’s dialogue the sanctity of Christian icons and their ability to repel Satanic evil. This emphasis also appears at the climax, in which Andreas uses a Christian cross to defy his master, propelling him to his doom in the sunlight. The script doesn’t provide any explanation as to why vampires dissolve in daytime but remain whole when they’re spiked/staked. In Stoker’s book, either staking or sunlight can slay a vamp, but vamps only decompose if they have cheated time long enough that they fall apart once their unnaturally prolonged lives are terminated.

The script is strong in terms of keeping things busy with lots of incidents, though RETURN never escapes a feeling of being a bit too derivative. The movie’s primary distinction is that it seems to be the first film to articulate the image of a vampire controlling a werewolf, even though Andreas makes a very atypical lycanthrope. This trope, though it only appears occasionally, has the distinction of having shown up in such diverse places as Jack Kirby’s JIMMY OLSEN comic and Whitley Streiber’s novel WOLFEN. Lugosi is satisfactory in the role of Tesla but the role doesn’t really give the actor any standout lines, whereas Inescourt manages to dominate every scene she’s in. The ending, in which the dopey constable breaks the fourth wall for the sake of a lame joke, has been rightly castigated by almost everyone.

THE MURDER MANSION (1973)

 

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

SPOILERS immediately: MURDER MANSION is a supernatural hoax flick, putting it firmly in the domain of the phantasmal figuration. To my knowledge the film is only readily available in a dubbed English version, so it’s hard to judge whether or not that release left out any material that would have made the original Spanish-Italian narrative seem less derivative and haphazard. I tend to doubt it, though.

The two most oft-used tropes of the “old dark house” template are either that (1) a bunch of people come to stay at a mansion for some common purpose, such as the reading of a will, or that (2) a group of people, either close associates or strangers with unrelated backgrounds, end up taking shelter in said mansion to escape bad weather or similar problems. In this case, MANSION hews to the latter model. Because the titular dwelling-place seems perpetually enshrouded by heavy fog (the Spanish title was “the Mansion in the Fog”), several people, one individual and three separate couples, end up taking refuge in the mansion of a vaguely aristocratic couple, the Clintons. Martha Clinton (played by top-billed “Evelyn Stewart”) goes out of her way to tell all of the travelers the spooky story of her aunt, who was rumored to be some sort of vampiric witch before she and her chauffeur died in a car-crash. Then, for the rest of the travelers’ stay at the mansion, they’re besieged by the spectral figures of aunt and chauffeur. There are some decent minor scares before it’s revealed that the Clintons are pulling off the ghostly imposture, hired to do so by one of the husbands, who’s apparently trying to drive his rich wife crazy.

Generally, this sort of Gothic spook-show only sounds workable when there’s an isolated target to gaslight, one person who will sound daffy when he or she rants about vampires and ghosts. Such a plot doesn’t seem at all tenable when a bunch of people are seeing specters in one place, even if most of these witnesses are supposed to get killed. In essence, the writer wanted to merge a gaslight-plot with giallo-style incidents in which a bunch of people get knocked off in succession. (To be sure, though European cuts are often spicier than their English dubs, I don’t see a lot of room for any artiful Argento-style executions.) With one exception, all the putative victims aren’t any more engaging than stick-figures, though the cast-list includes a number of familiar faces of Euro-genre films. When this is the case, I tend to view the person or persons perpetuating the hoax to be the real stars of the show—unless the hoaxers actually create a fantasy-persona that’s more resonant than they are, as I’ve seen in such films as MARK OF THE VAMPIRE and APRIL FOOL’S DAY, to say nothing of the Washington Irving classic “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”

Of the ensemble of targeted victims, only one character stands out, and with a different approach it wouldn’t have been hard for the film to make her the star. Elsa (Anelia Gade) is the rich wife, married to a wastrel named Ernest, the fellow who hired the Clintons to do his dirty work. But Elsa’s real problem with Ernest—and the thing that keeps him out of her bed—is that her real name ought to be Electra. In a fevered flashback scene, Elsa is seen as a teenager at a party, scolding her old man—whose good looks she remarks upon—for dating a “child.” In truth, the so-called “child” is one of Elsa’s own classmates, and thus a young woman her own age. It’s clear that Elsa wanted more from her father than paternal attention, and that she married Ernest in part because her father didn’t like him—though her act of keeping Ernest at a distance revealed Elsa’s true sentiments. But teen-Elsa’s father dies of a heart attack while getting it on with the classmate—the film’s one good psychological fantasy, merging sex and death. Thus, modern-day Elsa remains terminally messed up—so much so that by making her crazier, Ernest unleashes a demon on himself. At the climax, when Ernest thinks he’s going to get away with everything, Elsa shoots him to death. She doesn’t see her actual husband, but rather the image of her dead father, whom she’s executing for having had sex with someone who wasn’t her. This hyper-Freudian fantasia is the only element that lifts MURDER MANSION out of the level of the routine scary movie it was designed to be.

UP, UP AND AWAY (2000)

 

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

This Disney Channel telefilm appeared in the same year as the first live-action X-Men movie, but the concept of UP UP AND AWAY could have appeared as easily in the 1960s. If one can imagine some producers attempting to do THE MUNSTERS as a family comedy about superheroes instead of using movie-monsters, you would get something very like this movie, with lots of slapstick jokes counterpointed by lackluster homilies about the relationship of parents and kids. In this case, the homily would probably read something like, “Parents have to learn not to project unrealistic expectations on their kids.”

The Marshalls make up a family of superheroes in a world where, like THE INCREDIBLES, a lot of superheroes are seen bouncing around though no supervillains seem to be extant. They are also an all-black family of do-gooders, though the script thankfully downplays any sociopolitical content beyond giving the superhero father (Robert Townsend) the name “Bronze Eagle.” The Eagle is married to heroine Warrior Woman (Alex Datcher), who somehow maintains the look of a smoking-hot model while fixing breakfasts for her three children: oldest child Adam, youngest child Molly, and middle child Scott. Adam and Molly have both manifested super-powers that in no way resemble those of their parents But Scott, about to turn 14, has not yet gained any special abilities. One of the basic rules of the universe is that if one’s powers don’t show up by age 14, they never will, and so Scott has deep fears of being the odd man out. (Even his grandparents have super-abilities, with Scott’s grandfather—a horribly miscast Sherman Helmsley—representing the old guard of superheroes.) Scott decides to fake his ascension to superhero status, but this merely results in his exposure as a “power-less wonder” earlier than intended.

The best thing about this bland concoction (aside from how good Ms. Datcher looks in a skintight superhero outfit) is that Scott doesn’t obtain any eleventh-hour abilities, so that he and his family must cope with this admittedly mild conflict. But, in order to underscore the idea that mere mortals can also make a difference, a poor excuse for a supervillain at last shows up, and Scott manages to foil the mastermind and free his family from the villain’s machinations. However, the climactic scenes are extremely low-energy and desultory, and Scott doesn’t even get into a basic hand-to-hand fight during his triumph. (Didn’t his heroic daddy train his middle son to fight with his fists, even if he did get super-powers?) This lack of a climactic fight-scene gives UP UP AND AWAY its only distinction. Since I deem all of Scott’s heroic relations to be no more than support-characters—AWAY is Scott’s story, not theirs—this is a superhero film that doesn’t feature even an ordinary human with combative skills, making the movie even less relevant to the superhero idiom than HBO’s THE BOYS.

THE SISTERHOOD (1988)

 

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

Just as one man’s trash may be another man’s treasure, not all makers of trash-films can find treasures in their own junky entertainments.

Filipino writer-director Cirio H. Santiago, for example, gained a measure of fame with action-film addicts throughout the seventies and eighties, in that he could turn out a film full of blood, breasts and bullets with the best of them. It’s also of passing interest that Santiago put out a fair number of “femme formidable” flicks, in which sexy women demonstrated a separate but equal ability to kick ass. He not only directed the kung-fu tournament film TNT JACKSON, but also both of its remakes, 1981’s FIRECRACKER (the best of the three IMO) and1993’s ANGELFIST.

So one might have thought he might do well directing a cheaply-made film about Amazons in a post-apocalyptic world. Unfortunately, Santiago just didn’t have the right mojo for even this simple form of science-fantasy, and what one gets is even less interesting than his other films in the genre, such as EQUALIZER 2000 and FUTURE HUNTERS.

SISTERHOOD starts out with a little promise. Following the usual barely described apocalypse, viewers are told that most of the surviving human tribes have regressed to a barbaric patriarchy, in which women are kept in bondage by the stronger males. However, there’s one rebellious all-female tribe, the Sisterhood, which lives apart from the other tribes. The male tribal leaders fear these women warriors because some if not all of them manifest mutant abilities, even though they tend to be very minor in nature (and thus not requiring much expense in the FX department). The viewer first encounters two of the sisters: Alee, who can do a little telekinesis, and Vera, who can heal others’ wounds instantly. The duo then encounters Marya, a young woman from another tribe, exiled for her witchy ability to commune with a pet hawk. When a gang of hostile raiders attack the threesome and abduct Vera, Marya joins Alee in the attempt to rescue Vera.

I didn’t expect any deep disquisitions on gender inequity from THE SISTERHOOD, just some basic entertainment in which women got to kick a little butt. But though actresses Rebecca Holden and Barbara Hooper go through the motions of fighting with swords, they’re never convincing as warrior-women. Lynn-Holly Johnson projects more personality in the character of Marya, but despite her real-world skill at gymnastics she doesn’t fare much better in the fight-scenes. Further, Santiago opts for an easy victory by having Alee and Marya uncover a cache of 20^th-century weapons, enabling them to take down a whole tribe of male malcontents with barely a mussed hair. So SISTERHOOD lines up with Santiago’s other science-fantasy flops, not lively enough to be kinetically involving and not goofy enough to engage the irony response.

MEGASHARK VS. KOLOSSUS (2015)

 

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

In one of my reviews of a Syfy Channel flick, I observed that the channel’s spate of giant-monster films suggested that the film-writers were sick of being told that everything in the ecosystem was deeply precious and vital to human existence. These “creature on the loose” films usually culminate in some heroic individual managing to stick it to some colossal representative of the natural world.

However, since the Asylum’s “Mega Shark” franchise necessitates finding a way to bring back its jawful antagonist again and again, at some point the writers began drawing on abstruse ecological theories, not unlike the Gaea hypothesis, to explain the big beastie’s resuscitation. In the original film, MEGA SHARK VS. GIANT OCTOPUS, a prehistoric megalodon got flash-frozen into an iceberg, as did the other creature of the title. The big shark dies in the first sequel, but a second Mega Shark emerges from another iceberg in the second sequel. In the third and thus far last sequel, humans have very sensibly gone hunting down all the frozen megalodons and destroying them. Yet one Doctor Kelly advances the theory that the ecosystem keeps finding ways to generate new Mega Sharks every time human beings kill one. The one that perished in Part Three, therefore, gave parthenogenetic birth to a new spawn, which shows up in Part Four to contend with the spawn of human ingenuity, Kolossus.

The script is too jejune and erratic to play up the idea of Mega Shark as an avatar of the ecosystem, but it’s probably no coincidence that his opponent is spawned by a human seeking not to balance the natural world but to end it. Kolossus is a colossal robot, loosely compared to the giant bronze warrior Talos from JASON AND THE ARGONAUTS, and he’s also a doomsday weapon, designed to annihilate sinning humanity. Somehow the human protagonists—the aforementioned doctor, another scientist, and a tough lady operative-- must find a way to eradicate both a menace arising from the natural order and a peril spawned by the hubris of homo sapiens. Just to keep the pot boiling, there’s also an ecology-oriented supervillain who attempts to control both the big shark and the robot to his own dastardly ends.

Even for this subgenre, KOLOSSUS is badly padded with lots of scenes of Navy ships doing uninteresting things. Worse, when the film finally gets around to a match between the two colossi, it’s less like “When Titans Clash” and more like “When Titans Splash.” It's also possibly the least bloody of all giant shark films, so despite the coda’s promise of another Mega Shark flick, it might be time to let this franchise die a natural death.

MERLIN (1998)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*

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

Most works that have appeared under the imprimatur of Hallmark Entertainment have struck me as thoroughly mediocre. However, the 1998 two-part telefilm MERLIN proves a decent addition to the annals of modern-day Arthuriana.

Any creators working with Arthurian story materials is inevitably faced with something in the nature of an all-you-can-eat buffet table. Creators have a huge selection of stories, some of which contradict one another, in order to produce a new work for modern audiences. MERLIN therefore can’t be faulted for lack of fidelity to a prescribed model, since nearly every creator picks and chooses from the buffet of both archaic tales and modern variations.

One prominent variation is the idea of medieval witches and warlocks fighting a “rear guard” action for paganism against encroaching Christianity in Great Britain. Mab, Queen of the Faeries (Miranda Richardson), sees the “Old Ways” dying, so she gets the idea to bring forth a great mortal magician to aid her in her quest to reverse the tide. Merlin, instead of being fathered on a mortal woman by a demon as in some old tales, is brought into being with no father at all, on top of which his mortal mother dies in childbirth. A former pagan woman, Ambrosia, becomes the child Merlin’s surrogate parent, since Mab, arguably his “bad mother,” doesn’t want to mess with child-raising. Merlin speedily grows to manhood, at which point he’s played from then on by Sam Neill, and he shows a talent for magical manipulation even before Mab takes him under her wing. However, Merlin is less interested in defending paganism than in building a normal life for himself, and after he meets a comely young noblewoman named Nimue (Isabella Rosselini), he attempts to avoid magical in general and the schemes of Mab specifically.

Though there are no Christian supernatural entities in MERLIN, Mab becomes something very like Satan, constantly tempting and manipulating others, particularly her disobedient “son.” Once Merlin inevitably returns to the practice of magic, he foresees the necessity of bringing forth a great king named Arthur, even if this means allowing his father to spawn him on the body of a woman married to another lord. Arthur’s teen years are speedily bypassed, and his drawing of Excalibur and ascension to the throne are given adequate but somewhat rushed treatment. Then Mab comes up with her coup de grace, suborning the ambitious mortal girl Morgan LeFay (Helena Bonham Carter), leading to her unholy union with her half-brother Arthur and thus the birth of Modred, whose iniquity will doom Camelot.

There are a number of good psychological touches in MERLIN. Though Richardson’s Mab becomes somewhat trying (she always speaks in an intense stage-whisper), her disinterest in human love alters late in the game, when she forms a maternal bond with Modred, even though he’s less her true son than is Merlin. Neill, who was in his early fifties at the time of filming, was probably not anyone’s ideal Merlin, whether as a young or old character, but he treats the role with respect and handles all the thaumaturgic pronouncements handily, particularly in his climactic magical duel with Mab. Arthur is played by a lanky actor who never seems very kinglike, though it’s a good touch that he at least resembles the actor playing Modred. There are some good tragic moments with the misguided sorceress Morgan, and on the whole the film probably equals THE MISTS OF AVALON in terms of providing plum roles for female characters, but without falling into AVALON’s soap-opera bathos.

At the same time, though the script does work in a lot of the metaphysical and sociological myths attendant on the founding of Camelot, the story never quite manages to bring all of the separate tropes together into an impressive whole. The Grail myth is touched on so briefly that the writers probably ought to have left it out, which might have given them more space to build up the Arthur-Guinevere-Lancelot relationship. On the whole, it’s a respectable Arthurian tale, focused less on the king than on the kingmaker. But its apparent main theme—Merlin’s mother issues—is never rendered well enough to bring forth any narrative “magic.”