SUPERMAN IV: THE QUEST FOR PEACE (1987)

 

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

As entertainment, SUPERMAN IV almost makes SUPERMAN III look good, and not only because the latter has better production values. 

To be sure, the most frequent complaint against the 1987 film-- which I'll hereafter abbreviate as QUEST-- is that when the franchise was transferred from the Salkinds to the Cannon Group, the latter producers pinched so many pennies that they had copper on their fingers. One of the major selling points of the franchise-- that the FX would make audiences "believe a man can fly"-- thus went down the tubes, and audiences accordingly stayed away, thus ending the Superman movie franchise for the next 19 years. But I might have lived with chintzy production values if the writing-team of Lawrence Konnor and Mark Rosenthal had been able to do anything impressive with actor Christopher Reeve's threadbare idea of "Superman tosses the world's nuclear weapons into the sun."

I presume that Reeve's idea arose from a problem that many readers have had with Superman: if he can do anything, why doesn't he change the world radically, rather than just stamping out occasional evils like a super-patrolman? Even the original comics have had only mixed success in trying to elaborate an answer to this question, which usually boils down to "humans must forge their own destiny" or the like. This isn't a bad answer, but it's almost always expressed in a pedestrian manner, so as to avoid transgressing against the status quo of the series. Indeed, this is pretty much what Reeve's Superman ends up stating at the end of QUEST, after he's learned that "no nukes" can have dire consequences-- both for him and for Earth.

Whereas the David and Leslie Newman script for SUPERMAN III was IMO ponderous, that of Rosenthal and Konnor has a herky-jerky quality, as if the writers didn't know what part of the Superman mythology they ought to focus on. An early scene has Clark Kent (Reeve) back on the Kent farm, communicating with the hologram of his late mother as she gives him some info on a Kryptonian deus ex machina that will come in handy later. Then Kent returns to Metropolis, once more meeting with series regulars Lois Lane (Margot Kidder), Jimmy Olsen (Marc McClure) and Perry White (Jackie Coogan). All of the Planet staff soon learn that the Daily Planet has been bought by an exploitative high-rolling businessman who promptly assigns management of the newspaper to his daughter Lacy Warfield (Mariel Hemingway). Though there's clearly some intent to rag on money-mad investors like Rupert Murdoch, any satirical point gets lost by a fatuous romance subplot, in which Lacy becomes attracted to Clark Kent even as Lois continues to be dotty over the Man of Steel. This is one of the few things SUPERMAN III-- which promoted a similar attraction between Clark and Lana Lang-- did better than QUEST. Rosenthal and Konnor's only notion of what to do with this "eternal quadrangle" was to roll out some tired comic business about Superman trying to keep dates with both Lois and Lacy in both of his identities.

Gene Hackman's Lex Luthor is certainly an improvement over Ross Webster of #3, but this time out he's saddled with an even worse sidekick than the bungling Otis: Lex's insipid nephew Lenny (Jon Cryer, who would turn out to make a pretty good Luthor much later on the SUPERGIRL TV show). After Superman gathers up Earth's missiles for sun-disposal, Luthor reflects that the sun itself is a nuclear bomb of sorts, and that it may be able to spawn an "imperfect duplicate" of Superman. The villain gets hold of a single hair from Superman's head, attaches it to a new missile, and when the hero hurls the offending weapon into the sun, it spawns another super-powered being, the largely inarticulate Nuclear Man (Mark Pillow). 

As poor as the script is, I can see some potential in the basic imagery here, which is the only reason I gave QUEST a "fair" mythicity rating. Superman attempts to get rid of Earth's nuclear weapons by tossing them into the sun. In rude poetic terms, the weapons "get even" by spawning their own champion who journeys to Earth and almost kills the hero. The script also blows the dramatic potential of Superman being sick from radiation poisoning, given that the audience knows from the get-go that he can invoke the Kryptonian Whatsis to make himself better. Nuclear Man, though, is not capable of sustaining the poetic association. Rosenthal and Konnor apparently wanted him to be inarticulate like the Universal Frankenstein Monster, at most rebelling weakly against the control of Lex Luthor and falling in love with Lacy Warfield (whose charms I found non-existent). The latter trope makes it likely that the scripters were channeling the basic idea of the Superman-foe Bizarro. Rosenthal and Konnor probably would have screwed up that Superman character as well, but at least they would have been working from a character with some pathos in his makeup.

There are entertaining bits and pieces in QUEST. Reeve makes the most of his last performance as the Man of Steel, exuding homespun sincerity even in tiresome situations. The other regulars are okay, and I rather liked a fight-scene between hero and nuclear monster on the moon. I think this sequence is still the only live-action film to attempt duplicating the old comic-book visual schtick where one character literally pounds another into the ground like a tent-peg. 

THE DESERT HORSEMAN (1946)

 

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

Though some army officers on horses are killed by bandits in the desert, I've watched this trifle twice and can't think what "horseman" is being referenced by the title. In all likelihood, it was just a tag that someone flung onto this B-western in haste.

Over the course of 65 oaters churned out starring the masked Durango Kid, the writers never sought to establish a consistent alter ego for the hero. This time he's a traveling cowpoke, Steve Godfrey, who gets accused of the army payroll robbery. When Steve finds the body of a slain man, he brings it to the closest town, where he meets an old buddy, Smiley Burnette (played by the actor of the same name). Steve makes it his business to solve the payroll crime, in the person of the Durango Kid. Somehow the big boss behind it all is also trying to force a pretty young thing to sell her property, which was perhaps the most popular plot in B-westerns.

Though there's some decent photography of the outdoor scenes, it's a pretty pitiful horse opera when the most memorable action-scene takes place when the comic sidekick tosses pepper in the eyes of several owlhoots.

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. 

THE HOBBIT: BATTLE OF THE FIVE ARMIES (2014)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*

MYTHICITY: *fair*

FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*

CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical*

Given that I've let seven years pass since I reviewed the middle part of Peter Jackson's HOBBIT film trilogy, it should be evident that the film didn't inspire in me any great passion to review it, either to bash or to praise. And I tend to believe that by this time in the filming-sequence, Jackson too just wanted to tie everything up and be done with the project.

As with the other reviews of the trilogy, I'm not going to dwell on differences between the Tolkien book and its adaptations, except for three points. Naturally, this film finishes up the slaying of the dragon Smaug, who was a principal antagonist of the second movie. Next, as mentioned in the previous review, Jackson concludes a romance-subplot that never existed in the book: a doomed but still not very interesting dalliance between a female elf (Evangeline Lilly) and a male dwarf (Aidan Turner). And the other point is that most of the climactic battle in the book takes place after viewpoint character Bilbo has been rendered unconscious, so that the reader only gets the main action summarized.

For any readers who might have wanted to behold that battle, Jackson and his entourage spare no expense in mounting copious battle scenes. Some of these take place between the fractious armies of the dwarves and of the elves-- both of whom are, in essence, "good guys" who are divided by their lust for treasure and for the self-esteem that comes from holding it. But to banish the potential for tragedy from the story, an army of Orcs, led by a super-Orc named Azog, intrudes on the conflict, providing a mutual enemy for all to fight with. Bilbo even participates in this conflict a little bit before he does indeed get hit on the head and knocked out until all the fighting has been finished.

To be sure, Jackson does keep an element of tragedy from Tolkien's book. Thorinn, king of the dwarves, succeeds in regaining the long-lost mountain-home of his people, and the treasure therein-- but even without his having any contact with the One Ring, the monarch becomes fanatically obsessed with keeping all the treasure, even from those who earned their share. Bilbo, a simple hobbit guided by common sense, eventually shows Thorinn the error of his ways, though the dwarf loses his life despite regaining (perhaps too easily) his sanity.

But Jackson's film is all about the action, not the drama. Many of the big scenes between contending armies are just average, but Jackson managed a standout duel between Thorinn and Azog on the surface of a frozen lake-- though arguably it goes on a little too long. I can't give the whole trilogy a "good" rating as I did for the first film in the series, but it could have been far, far worse.

BATMAN UNLIMITED: MONSTER MAYHEM (2015)

 

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

The first DTV in the "Batman Unlimited" series was so bad that there was no place the series could go but up-- though I wouldn't have been surprised had the sequel remained at the same level of mediocrity-- especially since both first and second efforts come from the same writer and the same director.

For whatever reason, the decision to give MAYHEM a Halloween theme provides more interesting moments than the "animal theme" of the first opus. True, of the five villains in the story, only one is a true "monster," the hulking Solomon Grundy. But the other four-- Joker, Clayface, Scarecrow and Silver Banshee-- all have some macabre aspects of one sort or another. Heath Corson's script probably derives from other Joker-stories in which the Monarch of Mirth held all Gotham City hostage in some way or other. But it's moderately original that this time the villain hijacks all the digitally-operated tech in the city via a "laughing virus," which makes a fair extrapolation from his more famous "Joker venom." This emphasis on technology allows Corson to incorporate guest-star Cyborg into the story in a logical manner. 

In fact, Joker's tech-plot and the often bumptious activities of his four allies overshadow most of the Bat-teammates in this series. Green Arrow, Nightwing, and Red Robin are almost interchangeable in the story, except for a sequence in which Nightwing has to overcome his artificially induced fears of the Scarecrow. Although all of the toy-related modifications of the heroes' costumes are ugly, Batman comes off a little better than the others. To be sure, the mythic joust between Batman and Joker can sustain many mediocre Bat-tales, and the DTV's best moment takes place in a digital universe where Bats and Joker take each other with MATRIX-stratagems. 

Of all the voicework, Troy Baker's Joker proves the most enjoyable, even with the caveat that he's closely following in the large footprints of Mark Hamill's work in BATMAN: THE ANIMATED SERIES. 

SPIES STRIKE SILENTLY (1966)

 

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

Before watching this 1966 Italian-Spanish Eurospy thriller-- whose literal name in Spanish is more like "spies kill silently"-- I noticed that it was directed and co-written by Mario Caiano, who performed the same duties on one of my favorite giallos, 1972's THE EYE IN THE LABYRINTH.  I don't think this knowledge prejudiced me to give SPIES special favor. Yet some might think it significant that it's the first Eurospy whose mythicity I've rated above the level of "fair."

I was rather impressed by the way SPIES begins; not with the spy-hero getting his latest assignment or villains ripping off some complex. Instead, following a colorful theme-opening (replete with checkerboard-patterns seen in other parts of the narrative proper), we see a peaceful conversation in Beirut between two pretty girls and an older man with the name of Doctor Rashid (a peculiar name, since the rle is played by Andrea Bosic, who doesn't look the least bit like a Middle Easterner). They chitchat for a while. mentioning that Rashid is a scientist-- and then we get the introduction of the main hero, Mike Drum (Lang Jeffries). Some mysterious murders have been committed, and one of the victims was the daughter of a vital scientist. So Drum investigates-- and almost immediately, someone starts shooting at him.

Aside from the chitchat, most Eurospies proceed similarly, as if the spy-hero was a military commando who was empowered to seek out and destroy the enemies of his country. While SPIES does have that element as well, it really does feel more like a thriller emphasizing the uncertainty of the spy business. Drum's intelligence contacts in Beirut aren't thrilled to be working with an American agent; they think he's going to believe himself to be James Bond. In due time Drum proves that he's got the stuff, and although he does eventually cross paths with both of the sexy women from the opening sequence, Drum doesn't really seduce them in the approved Sean Connery style. Moreover, as in more realistic espionage tales, there's at least some concern that one's allies may turn into enemies at the drop of a hat.

Like both the book and movie DOCTOR NO, SPIES starts out looking like a mundane adventure-tale, only to ratchet up into wild metaphenomenal fantasy in the second half. Probably no one will be surprised that the urbane Doctor Rashid is a scientific mastermind seeking to use a special device to control people's minds. But some may be surprised when the villain actually does succeed in taking control of the hero's mind and sending him on a mission of murder, which mission is only foiled by the hero's dumb luck. While under this hypnosis Drum is seen marching along with dark glasses on his eyes, making him seem more like an automaton. Rashid gets a florid villain's speech in which he reveals a Nietzchean ambition to control all the little people:  "I look upon mankind from a superior level." Rashid isn't given any real background, but he shares Doctor No's Napoleon-complex, eventually comparing himself to "Prometheus Unbound." In the big climax, he shows off a ray-device that can not only overrule human wills but also has a double function as a disintegrator-- which pretty much telegraphs the script's intention to have someone get disintegrated.

Caiano's control of colorful backgrounds is quite impressive given what must have been a humble budget. The film's only flaw is that none of the action-sequences are first-rate, though the final struggle between Drum and Rashid evokes a few memories of the battle between Bond and Goldfinger in the Fleming book.

WAR OF THE PLANETS (1966)

 

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

WAR OF THE PLANETS was the second of Italian director Antonio Margheriti's "Gamma One" tetralogy. I happened to see the first flick in the series first, THE WILD WILD PLANET (which justified that title), and next to that brain-damaged bit of space opera, WAR seemed rather routine and chintzy.

On re-viewing WAR, though, I find it holds some appeal different from that of the first film. The story concerns how the crew of the futuristic space station Alpha Two is menaced by energy-aliens known as "diaphanoids." (An alternate title for the film is THE DEADLY DIAPHANOIDS.) The aliens are easily the most underwhelming aspect of the film, for they're always represented by nothing more than green swirls of smoke. 

However, Margheriti's depiction of life on the space station is much more lively and appealing than that of a lot of SF-films of the time. The main characters are Commander Mike Halstead (Tony Russel) and his girlfriend, communications officer Connie (Lisa Gastoni), but their respective ranks get in the way. In their first scene together, she objects to him expecting her to tamp down her feelings despite the military hierarchy to which both belong. I wouldn't go so far as to say Margheriti or his writers were attempting to make a philosophical point as such, but the script does keep coming back to the conflict between individuality and authority-- seen at its most tyrannical in the menace of the insubstantial Diaphanoids. By chance, the filmmakers touched on a conflict which would appear throughout Gene Roddenberry's seminal STAR TREK series, which debuted on American TV the same year.

The evil cloud-aliens start possessing human beings, which makes it much easier for them to communicate through their pawns. One of these characters, Captain Dubois, actually seems to struggle against the possession, communicating more than a little sense of what it means to have one's will subsumed. Thus, when Halstead eventually finds a means to expel the possessors, there's a little more emotional context to the victory than one sees in, say, THE GREEN SLIME.

Similarly, though the relationship between Halstead and Connie is fairly sexist, at least it doesn't feel SLIME-y by having the main hero get rid of his romantic competition to win the girl, as SLIME did. So WAR OF THE PLANETS is at least a modestly pleasing thriller, but nothing more.

GODZILLA FINAL WARS (2004)

 

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

Whatever its flaws, GODZILLA FINAL WARS does a better job summing up the "Millennium" cycle of Godzilla films that GODZILLA VS. DESTROYAH did for the "Heisei" series. At least in the former flick, the Big G goes out on top.

Ryuhei Kitamura directs his only Godzilla film with a fast-paced style reminiscent of such music-video-and-commercial directors as the American McG. The script for FINAL is generally better than your average music video, but the pace is so rushed and heedless that the potential for even basic characterization of the human characters get kicked to the curb. To his credit, Kitamura provides lots of kaiju eye-candy to take the place of drama, which one may justify on the grounds that most of the time the "human bits" in Godzilla films mostly serve to provide a sense of contrast to the battling behemoths.

Kitamura also makes clear from the outset that these "wars" are a tribute to all the "monster mash" elements of the Showa era. The opening asserts that in this world all the countries of the world have reached some sort of accord as the result of their constant battles with giant monsters (some of which appear only in old film-clips). This slightly futuristic setting is more or less a riff on DESTROY ALL MONSTERS, as is Kitamura's opening gambit: to have various countries other than Japan-- the U.S., Australia, France and China. The one monster who's out of the picture is Godzilla, who was entombed in ice by Captain Gordon (mixed wrestling champion Don Frye), who used a super-submarine to consign the Big G to his frozen prison. The submarine, "the Gotengo," is a shout-out to the one in ATRAGON, while the monsters on the loose include such sixties favorites as Rodan, Manda, Ebirah, Kumonga, the Kamacuras, Minilla, Anguirus, and (eventually) a version of King Ghidorah. Kitamura also works in the less celebrated critters of later eras, such as King Caesar, Hedorah, Zilla (a renamed version of America's 1998 GODZILLA), and Gigan. Further, Gordon belongs to a standard "Earth Defense Force"-- also a standard element of kaiju films-- but FINAL's defenders include a bunch of black-clad "mutants "(all Japanese) who don't demonstrate powers so much MATRIX-style martial arts, and these mutants seem like a cross between the X-Men and one of the many *sentai* teleserials that channeled elements of Japanese kaiju films.

Gigan gets an upgrade from his jejune beginnings in GODZILLA ON MONSTER ISLAND. In that film, he was just a big kaiju stooge to his alien masters. Here, he was sent to Earth 12,000 years before the film's present by an alien group, the Xielens, to conquer Earth, but the monster was defeated by a prehistoric incarnation of Mothra. Gigan's body remained submerged in the sea until discovered by the Earth Defense Force, and a cute lady biologist determines that there is a special genetic marker, "M-base," in the body of the dead monster. This genetic marker also appears in the bodies of the Matrixy-mutants, including the only one we get to know, Shinichi Ozaki. But does this strange discovery have anything to do with the sudden upsurge in monster activity?

Then the Xielens show up on Earth, but they present themselves as having come to be of service to mankind (as opposed to serving man, heh heh). The aliens somehow banish the monsters, and sign an accord with the humans to help them against a yet greater threat, an asteroid that may hit the Earth (and nostalgically named after the offending celestial body in GORATH). However, Ozaki, the lady biologist and a few others are given some inside info by the Faerie-Handlers of Mothra, who tell Ozaki that he's bonded to the evil of Gigan but that he still possesses the freedom of choice. They even give Ozaki a talisman to help him, though this item disappears from the story until needed at the climax.

The name of the Xielens is indebted to the alien villains of Planet X from MONSTER ZERO, and the FINAL script underscores by giving us a main villain who quixotically dubs himself "X." X takes less time than his predecessors to reveal his real plot: like the Planet X'ers, he and his people have engineered the upsurge in the monsters. The monsters are controlled through the M-base-- which X also plans to use to control mutant defenders, including Ozaki-- and the impending approach of Gorath is part of a really overcomplicated plan to bring a new version of Gigan and a new version of King Ghidorah to Earth as well. (The latter is apparently dubbed "Keizer Ghidorah" to distinguish him from the original, though the script had no problems rebooting Gigan's origin-- possibly because few people care any more than I as to the original.)

Once the Xielens have control of both the monsters and many of the mutants, the remaining good guys have only one resort: to revive Godzilla, who for some hard-to-believe reason cannot be controlled through the M-base. Once Gordon releases the Big G, he stomps off to Japan and begins the first of his "final wars" with various monsters, most of which are more like tussles. (I did like the one where Godzilla swings Kumonga around on his own webbing.) Godzilla does defeat one version of Gigan with ridiculous ease, but when Gorath arrives, the asteroid births both a second, tougher version of Gigan and the aforementioned Ghidorah. Godzilla gets a rough time from these two, and even some last-ditch help from Mothra doesn't make much difference. Ozaki, who is briefly suborned by X, manages to make his "choice" and send Godzilla enough power to revive the big lizard. Meanwhile, Ozaki has a big Matrix-fight with X and kicks his ass-- though the fight never sustains any emotional interest because Ozaki is so thinly drawn. (He doesn't even get a romantic arc with the lady biologist, though their opening scenes imply that they like each other.)

The FX are strong and produced with traditional "suitmation" techniques to the best of my knowledge, and Godzilla gets to be the consummate badass. He even menaces the good-guy humans at the end, but they're saved by the compassionate Minilla. And while this ending almost sounds like a "puppies and rainbows" conclusion, the script undermines that tendency by giving Ozaki the last word, as he states that this is just "the beginning of a new war." I wish that the whole script had followed something like this insight; that the release of the chaos of Godzilla isn't going to make everything safe, and that at some point in the future, monsters and humans are going to battle again, and that there will be no "final war."

HERCULES THE AVENGER (1965)

 

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

Most cut-and-paste films-- that is, flicks that employ large quantities of footage from earlier movies-- are just examples of studios saving money by churning out used goods. I'm sure that saving money was the first consideration of the Italian producers of HERCULES THE AVENGER, which pads its running time with copious scenes from two 1961 Herc-flicks, HERCULES IN THE HAUNTED WORLD and HERCULES AND THE CAPTIVE WOMEN. Since bodybuilder Reg Park played the indomitable Greek hero in both of these earlier films, the filmmakers only had to provide a handful of new scenes with Park and with other actors to flesh out the new narrative, which borrows heavily from HAUNTED WORLD and lightly from CAPTIVE WOMEN. 

All that said, AVENGER provides an interesting take on the storyline of HAUNTED WORLD. One plot-line is completely new: Leda, Queen of Syracuse, has lost her king-husband Cadmus, and a group of rival monarchs insist that she should marry one of them now. Leda, like Penelope before her, desires no such alliance, and she journeys to Thebes to succor help from the famed strongman.

Hercules, though, has his own problems. Not long after mentioning to his wife Deianira that he lives under the curse of the earth-goddess Gaia because the hero slew her child the Hydra, the couple's stripling son Xanthus is attacked by a lion, implicitly by the will of Gaia. Xanthus is brought back to the palace in Thebes, but though he has survived the wounds of the lion's claws, the young man has gone insane because Gaia has drawn his soul into the underworld. Hercules is informed that even his heavenly father cannot overrule the curse of the earth-goddess, and so he must journey into the death-realm to free his son's soul. This is in many ways a more affecting situation than the original from HAUNTED WORLD, in which Hercules seeks a token from the death-domain to save the memory of Deianira, who's not his wife or even his intended. 

HAUNTED WORLD also boasted a take on the Greek "exchange of prisoners" trope, in that Persephone, daughter of the death-god, returns to the world of the living with Hercules and his buddies, but must eventually return to the underworld. AVENGER's take on this trope is to introduce Anteaus, son of Gaia. While Hercules descends into Gaia's domain to save Xanthus, the goddess sends her son-- who's strong, but not as strong as Hercules-- up to the mortal world to assume Hercules' name. One might think a proper vengeance would have Gaia send Antaeus after the helpless Deianira. However, for some reason Anteaus ends up lending his support to Leda, tossing out all of her would-be bridegrooms. However, Antaeus quickly becomes the cure that's worse than the disease, and he brings great suffering upon Syracuse. 

As a result of Hercules' labors in the death-realm, he liberates the spirit of Xanthus, who regains his sanity. But when Hercules returns to the mortal world, he learns that Antaeus has usurped his good name. An oracle helpfully informs the hero that all the good people have deserted Syracuse, which is now a "nest of vipers"-- and so ripe for a Sodom-and-Gomorrah fate (even though Queen Leda is essentially innocent of wrongdoing). With Zeus's help Syracuse perishes in flames, while Hercules gets a final duke-it-out scene with his evil impostor. This battle echoes the encounter of the two characters in antiquity, where Hercules triumphs when he's able to keep the earth-mother's son from touching ground. 

All in all, this is a good little action-melodrama, as well as being a good deal more inventive than most of the duller all-original efforts.

JUNGLE DRUMS OF AFRICA (1953)

 

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

I first saw this 12-part serial in a condensed TV-form, where it was given the awkward title of "U-238 and the Witch Doctor." But though it's not a very euphonious sounding title, it's more accurate than the original, since "jungle drums" play no real role in the story. 

DRUMS was one of the last Republic serials, and though a number of other serials from the studio cobbled together earlier footage to save money, this one uses only a handful of brief scenes from other films. The conflict is predicated on the good-hearted mission of two Americans from a uranium processing company who want an African tribe's permission to dig for the radioactive mineral. The quest for uranium barely influences the plot as such; instead, it's simply the bone over which two sets of dogs fight. On the good guy side, there's American agents Alan King (Clayton Moore) and Bert Hadley (Johnny Spencer), as well as a white female doctor who ministers to the tribe, Carol Bryant (Phyllis Coates, who would play a jungle-heroine two years later in the same studio's PANTHER GIRL OF THE KONGO, one of the very serials which did employ a lot of old footage). One other good guy has a minor influence on the plot, the tribe's chief Dounga, who favors the Americans because he himself was educated at an American college-- but despite this promising touch, Douanga does very little). On the side of the bad guys are a handful of unmemorable white traders who want to harvest the uranium for a foreign power, and the witch doctor of the alternate title. The latter, Naganto by name, is pissed off because all of his tribesmen give their business to the white doctor, so that Naganto can't sell his phony magical cures. (He's played skillfully by Roy Glenn, immortalized as the Black Dad in GUESS WHO'S COMING TO DINNER.) 

Most of the serial consists of the bad guys trying to get rid of the American agents, either in running gun-battles or with involved traps. The diabolical devices include a spear-launcher set to fire when a rope is pulled and a "hypnotic drug" that causes a hulking warrior to attack the two Americans without cause. More interesting is the serial's replay (with almost no old footage) of the wind-tunnel menace from 1942's PERILS OF NYOKA. The seesaw battles finally come to a head and the villains are defeated, so that beneficent American technology can continue bringing light to the Dark Continent, or something like that. 

Though DRUMS is pedestrian in concept, the charm of the three good guys and the wily Naganto make this chapterplay an adequate time-killer. In contrast to some other jungle-serials, the heroine here is pretty gutsy, often seeming less like a lady doctor than like a sharp-shooting jungle guide.

HERCULES AND THE CAPTIVE WOMEN (1961)

 

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

This film, whose Italian title was "Hercules and the Conquest of Atlantis," was cut for American release, and I imagine that this was the version I saw on the DVD pack WARRIORS. What I've heard about the cuts don't sound like they made a lot of difference to the narrative, which is a slow and often incoherent follow-up to the first two raucous Steve Reeves films.

Italian director Vittorio Cattafavi, who's listed as one of the writers of CAPTIVE, opted for a very slow buildup to the latest adventure of the son of Zeus. In contrast to the previous two films and almost all other films with "Hercules" in the title, this time the hero has settled down somewhat, being married to Princess Deianeira, probably the best-known of the Greek champion's lady loves. This Hercules also has a teenaged son named Hylas. This proves an odd choice of names, since in the Hercules canon the name is only used for a young companion of the hero in the ARGONAUTICA. In the Greek epic, Hylas, who may or may not be the hero's lover, suffers death, and Hercules is so broken up by the youth's fate that he deserts the Argo's voyage. In CAPTIVE, Hylas is just a young guy yearning for adventure, trying to persuade his old man to desert the family hearth and go looking for trouble.

Some vague presentiments of danger cause King Androcles of Thebes to mount an investigative expedition. The king wants Hercules, Hercules doesn't want to go, so Androcles, with the help of Hylas, drugs the hero and takes him onto the voyage. Strangely, the demigod just takes his abduction in stride, reminding one of the somewhat lazy Steve Reeves characterization in HERCULES UNCHAINED.

The ship gets wrecked at sea, and Hercules is separated from the crew, including Hylas and Androcles. He finds his way to a remote island, and beholds a woman who seems to be merged with a big rock on the beach. (This young women, name of Ismene, is the only "captive woman" in the film.) When Hercules seeks to free the woman, he's attacked by a shapechanging magican named Proteus. It's a pretty good battle, as Proteus attacks the hero in forms like a lion, a hawk and a man-sized bipedal dinosaur, and even some budgetary problems (when Hercules hurls the lion away, it turns into a lion rug) don't ruin the scene. When Proteus is slain, Ismene is released from the rock-- and unfortunately, the film enters tedium.

Hercules takes Ismene to her home on the island, which is apparently either Atlantis or a colony thereof. The city is ruled by Antinea (Fay Spain), who takes her name from the imperious queen of the 1919 novel ATLANTIDA. Antinea welcomes the return of her daughter Ismene, but it eventually comes out that Antinea and her counselors sent the young woman to Proteus as a sacrifice. They believe that their city is doomed to be destroyed if Ismene is not sacrificed-- but this will be difficult now that Hercules is hanging around. 

Hercules mooches around, somehow convinced that he ought to be able to find Androcles and Hylas on the island-- and in fact, Antinea does have Androcles squirreled away for some reason. Hylas is wandering around free, though, and at some point in the film-- I no longer remember details-- he crosses paths with Ismene and they starts cooing love songs. Since this Hercules was married, that may be why the hero doesn't get to romance the younger woman, though he is ceaselessly pursued by her mother. 

The aforementioned "vague presentiments of danger" bear fruit when it's revealed that Antinea possessed a magical stone, "the Blood of Uranus," which is vaguely connected to the Father of the Titans, one of whom was the father of Zeus and many other Olympians. Antinea is currently experimenting on her own people with the stone's magic, and though some citizens get turn into semi-deformed wretches, others become super-strong warriors. (They're mostly seen in helmets, but in one scene they take off their headgear and are revealed to look just like Antinea's main counselor-- which might have made more sense in the Italian original.) Antinea plans to use these super-soldiers to conquer the entire world, and of course Hercules, Hylas, Androcles and Ismene unite to stop her. Given the prophecy of Atlantis's destruction, any viewer can probably guess how Antinea's scheme works out.

Despite a few decent action scenes, CAPTIVE is weakly plotted and the characters are flat. giving the actors little to work with. I've seen a few sources claim that the plot draws upon Pierre Benoit's prose novel ATLANTIDA.  I have not read the book myself, but I've read summaries and seen one film adaptation, and the name of the queen is pretty much the only similarity. CAPTIVE's plot seems more indebted to the Cassopeia-Andromeda storyline from the Perseus cycle of stories, in which a queen mother, intentionally or otherwise, sets up her nubile daughter to be sacrificed. This could have yielded some good psychological drama even in a sword-and-sandal picture, but Cottafavi blows any such potential, and what's left is just a middling peplum adventure with a few good scenes. 

THE TRIAL OF THE INCREDIBLE HULK (1989)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *psychological. sociological*

The second HULK telefilm proves far better thought-out than the previous entry. In this as in the next and last in the short-lived series, Bill Bixby directed from a script by TV-writer Gerald Di Pego, who never worked on the HULK TV show but did script a lot of better-than-average telemovies, starting with 1972's THE ASTRONAUT.

Following up on developments in INCREDIBLE HULK RETURNS, a morose David Banner has hit the road again, and like his TV-predecessor Richard Kimble he often gets a hard-knocks education in the ways of blue-collar life. He makes his way to a big city that seemed to be New York (though the actual filming was in Vancouver), if only because of the role the city's subway system plays in the story. Using the name David Belson, Banner checks into a dingy flophouse, unaware that the metropolis is a battleground for two opposed forces. The first is crime-boss Wilson Fisk (John Rhys-Davies), who maintains a stranglehold upon most of the criminal activity in the city, and his name is derived from a somewhat similar mastermind, the Kingpin, in various Marvel comics. The second is black-clad adventurer Daredevil (Rex Smith), who continually opposes Fisk's schemes.

This time "Belson" doesn't even have the chance to get some menial job before getting caught up in someone else's troubles. While Banner rides the subway one night, a couple of thugs assault Ellie, a young female passenger. Banner can't stand idly by, and after he gets clobbered, he once more transforms into the Hulk, as usual with no one witnessing the change. Even on a budget, the Green Goliath's scenes of tearing free of the subway car are fun, as are his flight down the tunnel. However, the Hulk barely has time to relax and re-transform before the subway cops find this nearly naked guy and arrest him on general suspicion.

The cops can't question Ellie, who's fallen into a coma from her injuries, but they do question the thugs, who trump up a story about Banner being the one who attacked Ellie, so that the former scientist ends up in the jug. Enter blind attorney Matt Murdock, who offers to defend "Belson" because Murdock suspects that the thugs work for Fisk. Banner doesn't initially want representation, and hopes that prison may finally keep his alter ego from hurting anyone.

This proves a rather short-sighted notion on Banner's part, and during his incarceration he dreams of being put on trial (thus justifying the title) and of causing chaos when he Hulks out. The nightmare results in a real-life transformation, the Hulk busts out of prison, and soon Banner is on the loose again. The mysterious hero Daredevil finds the fugitive doctor (heh), but Banner has no reason to trust the vigilante-- until the latter doffs his mask and reveals that he's met Banner before, as blind attorney Murdock.

Though Daredevil's origin is only related in conversation, it's surprisingly true to the original. Further complications include Fisk suborning Ellie, who initially supports the thugs' version of events until Fisk tries to have her killed. After Daredevil prevents the murder, the murderous mastermind lures the hero into a trap, and Daredevil's life is only saved because Banner tagged along with him. The Hulk rescues the hero, who then figures out the secret of Banner's double identity. Banner helps the vigilante recover from his injuries so that he's ultimately able to foil Fisk's schemes, even though the oily villain escapes to fight another day.

In contrast to the backdoor pilot for a "Thor series," Di Pago's ideas for a "Daredevil series" could have been at least decent. I'm doubly surprised that Di Pago captured much of the appeal of Daredevil and the Kingpin despite changing various details, for the writer had never previously worked on any project resembling superheroes, unless one counts a 1978 TV-remake of the adventure-classic THE FOUR FEATHERS. To be sure, Stan Lee-- doing his first live-action cameo in any Marvel adaptation-- advanced a telling critique of the Daredevil costume, noting that unlike the one in the comics, the all-black outfit with solid cloth over the eyes seems to broadcast that the hero is blind-- which is not something that the general public is supposed to know. That said, it's still a cool costume, and Rex Smith, previously known for his role as STREET HAWK, acquits himself ably. Bixby's direction shines in both the interpersonal scenes between Banner and Murdock and in some of the grungier parts of this faux New York City.

THE INCREDIBLE HULK RETURNS (1988)

 

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

Six years following the demise of the INCREDIBLE HULK teleseries, Bill Bixby and Lou Ferrigno re-united once more to play respectively the tormented scientist David Banner and his viridian alter ego. The first of the three TV-movies is said to have received strong ratings, which certainly led to the other two, both of which were directed by Bixby.

Allegedly Bixby himself invited Nicholas Corea to write and direct the Hulk's comeback, based on Corea's work during the teleseries. From what I can tell, most of Corea's work, confined entirely to TV episodes and telemovies, seems pretty mediocre, and RETURNS is equally pedestrian in both the scripting and direction departments. 

Instead of six years, only two years have passed since David Banner's last exploit. Working under an assumed name at a research center, Banner has managed to use his genius to midwife a device, the Gamma Transponder, ostensibly for the company's use but actually meant to let the scientist escape the greener side of his psyche. His greater calm may have something to do with having kindled a romance with a lady doctor at the institute. The Hulk-banishing project will soon be sabotaged by criminals seeking to employ the Transponder for unspecified evil purposes, but before the gang of crooks even gets into the act, Banner meets an old familiar face: former student Donald Blake.

Comics-mavens know Blake as a doctor who went traveling in Norway, found an archaic war-hammer and used it to transform into Thor, the mighty thunder-god of ancient legend. Much later, the THOR comic revealed that Blake never truly existed; that he was always Thor, transformed into a mere mortal by his godly father Odin as a punishment for arrogance. Corea seems to have worked with this trope somewhat to produce a concept suited for a possible Thor-series. Blake tells Banner than on an archaeological trip to Norway, he found the hammer as did the comic-book version. However, the hammer summoned into the twentieth century an ancient Nordic warrior named Thor, who is not explicitly said to have been a "real god." Nevertheless, Thor's father, who is still Odin but also maybe not a god, somehow bound Thor to the hammer as a punishment for arrogance. The skeptical Banner then gets proof of Blake's assertion when the latter summons Thor into being in Banner's laboratory. Thor, a big raucous brute, ends up wrecking some of the equipment, and Banner can't help Going Green.

The inevitable fight between the TV versions of Thor and the Hulk is passable, and only because of the limitations of the budget, though I was more entertained by Thor labeling the mute green goliath an "ugly troll." Belatedly Blake calls upon the hammer to send Thor back into limbo, and this act sets the pattern for the remainder of the movie, and for what would have been the pattern had Thor become a live-action series. Said pattern might be said to a combination of the Aladdin-and-genie tropes (owner of a magical device can summon a powerful being and also send him away) and the "troublemaking roommate" trope often employed on Bill Bixby's earlier TV-success, MY FAVORITE MARTIAN. 

The crooks intrude, attempting to steal the Transponder and kidnap its inventor Banner (they have an inside man who informs them of the device's real creator). The Hulk and Thor end up fighting the crooks, which proves a bore since neither superhero is invulnerable to gunfire, meaning they have to vanquish the gunmen by shoving big objects at them. Banner of course loses his chance to cast out his brutish side and he hits the road again, while Blake and Thor contemplate crimefighting in order that Thor may win free of Odin's exile.

I don't think that a Thor series based on Corea's script would have been very good. Blake is a zero, meant to operate as the superego telling the Id-like Thor not to do inappropriate things, and the actor playing Blake is stuck with a very unrewarding role. Eric Allan Kramer, though, really tries to put a lot of macho chutzpah into the role of Thor, and it's not his fault that Corea's unimaginative script puts a lot of cornball sentiments in his mouth. For the final time actor Jack Colvin plays Hulk-hunting reporter Jack McGee, but the character never crosses paths with either Thor or the Hulk, and so his contribution to the narrative is nugatory at best.

THE THREE AVENGERS (1964)

 

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

Considering that this film starts looking like an anticipation of the silly "Trinity" films-- which are almost nothing but endless slapstick fighting-- THREE AVENGERS proves to have a much more solid and inventive plotline than do most peplum-flicks.

The three characters of the title are the strongman Ursus (Alan Steel) and two comical acrobats, Pico and Manino, the latter of whom is apparently a mute. Though the film opens with the three of them fighting various opponents in the vaguely Middle Eastern city of Attra, Pico and Manino really aren't that important to the overall plot, so I consider them no more than subordinate allies, not central heroes in their own right. They do supply all of the comedy, though, and even Ursus gets a little more humor than a main hero usually does, complaining about how he's somehow become saddled with these ne'er-do-wells. A couple of lines-- probably inserted for the English dub-- make it sound as if this Ursus might be the son of Zeus himself, though at no time does the hero display Herculean levels of strength. 

The plot begins to thicken up as we learn that Attra's aged king Igos has married a much younger woman, Alina (Lisa Gastoni), much to the disgust of Igos' sole heir Dario (Vassili Karis). By sheer coincidence, Attra also plays host to a "False Ursus" (Mimmo Palmira), who's in command of Igos' army, and who once had a fling with Alina. There's no explicit explanation for the impostor, though I suppose it would have made sense to say that Ursus #2 was just some muscle-boy who decided to capitalize on the fame of the real thing. 

Though Real Ursus does hear the story of Fake Ursus, the two don't cross paths. Dario comes across Real Ursus and his companions, but even though they've been fighting with the city guards, Dario lets them escape the city. This proves fortunate later, when Dario has to go scouting for the camp of a local enemy, the Tenussi. Dario meets a haughty beauty, one Demora (Rosalba Neri), and sparks fly all over the place. But Demora's brother wants vengeance for past grievances against Attra, and only the lucky intervention of Ursus saves Dario's life.

Ursus returns to Attra, intending to have it out with his impostor, who has slain Igos and who intends to marry a captive Demora. Fake Ursus consults a local magician, who counsels the fake to slip a blinding-potion into the real hero's helmet when the two musclemen fight it out. The ploy succeeds, and the true Ursus is both blinded and imprisoned. Dario, the two acrobats, and Alina-- now sympathetic to Dario's cause, due to her former lover's apostasy-- contrive to set Ursus and return his eyesight, so that he can defeat the forces of the Fake.

The final combat between the "Ursi" is over rather quickly, but one doesn't feel the loss, since there's a much more thrilling sequence in the prison, as a guard fights it out with the still-blind hero and comes damn close to defeating the good guy. Neri and Gastoni are both scrumptious, and there's a mystery blonde girl who hangs around Ursus a couple times but disappears from the story. Director Gianfranco Parolina also scripted AVENGERS with two other credited writers, and the strong melodrama here may be said to presage Parolina's writing and directing on the first three SABATA spaghetti westerns. 

THE PURPLE MASK (1955)

 

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

While PURPLE MASK is still a B-level swashbuckler, made when Tony Curtis had yet to become a major star, it's certainly not a cheapjack affair like the recently reviewed FLAME OF CALCUTTA. The players, whether celebrated at the time or not, included such figures as Angela Lansbury, Dan O'Herlihy, and Gene Barry, and the staging of the swordfights is handled with as much panache as one of the A-level films of the thirties.

The story is based on a 1913 French play, itself probably indebted to the "Scarlet Pimpernel" books and movies of the previous decade. Where the Pimpernel concerned himself with saving royal figures from the merciless guillotine during the Terror, the Purple Mask devotes himself to saving royal figures victimized during the later era of Napoleon (who is one of the key villains, played here by Robert Cornthwaite). There's never any stated reason as to why he happens to wear a face-mask of this particular color, though it may be of interest that purple is said to be the color of royalty. The Mask's main focus is not just rescuing victims; he irks those in power by kidnapping significant potentates of the new regime and forcing their allies to pay out hefty ransoms (all to be used for some far-off royalist program). 

However, the Mask seems to be off-camera for most of the film. Some of his allies, who don't know who he is, decide to hoax Napoleon by luring a young man, Rene (Curtis), into posing as the crusader to take the heat off the real hero-- even if that means letting the young fellow go to the gallows. However, Rene eludes execution, and to no audience member's surprise, he turns out to be the real mystery-man, who didn't approve of his allies' plans and decided to "become his own substitute." This plotline, which concentrates more on evasion than on violence, probably played well on stage, but said plot proves a slow one for a colorful swashbuckler movie. There's also a romantic subplot, when a young woman falls for Rene and tries to prevent his sacrifice.

This timekiller is largely significant for its place in Curtis's early career. On a side-note, there was a 1916 serial with the identical title, directed by the elder brother of John Ford, but the serial has nothing to do with the play and seems to contain no similar content.

FLAME OF CALCUTTA (1953)

 

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

FLAME OF CALCUTTA is one of many "masked swashbuckler" B-films that appeared throughout the late forties and early fifties. In contrast to the swashbucklers of the thirties and early forties, these flicks had no problem showing women in these Zorro-like roles. That said, FLAME is a little ambivalent on that score.

As the title suggests, the setting is Calcutta, specifically that of the 1850s, at a time when the British had established a trade hegemony in India, though they were not at that time in total control. India is still dominated by numerous warring princes, and one of these is Prince Jehan, who deposes another Muslim monarch, name of Amir. But in so doing Jehan creates his own nemesis, for Jehan murders a French diplomatic representative, apparently for being friendly with Amir. The diplomat's daughter Suzanne Roget (Denise Darcel) then seeks revenge on Jehan by organizing the remnants of Amir-loyalists against Jehan. It's not clear whether or not her allies know she's female, but she's definitely shielding her identity from Jehan's people, for Suzanne wears a red mask and flowing red robes that lead to her being dubbed "the Flame." She leads her forces into battle, showing herself to be as good with a sword as this catchpenny production can make evident.

Prior to becoming a freedom fighter, though, Suzanne was engaged to a young British officer, Lambert (Patrick Knowles). Lambert wants Suzanne to quit being a martial symbol and to marry him, but she refuses to leave her father unavenged. Lambert has no jurisdiction over Jehan's new rule, but he can deploy troops if British trade interests are threatened. Jehan decides to force the Brits' hand, hiring an impostor to masquerade as the Flame and to attack British caravans. Because Lambert knows that the real Flame is innocent, he talks her into surrendering to British forces so that she will receive an exculpatory trial. 

Thanks to various info-peddlers, Jehan manages to abduct Suzanne, though his long-range purpose is to implicate her in British raids once more. Lambert foresees the stratagem and outwits Jehan. The final battle is arranged a bit like the one in PRC's SWORD OF MONTE CRISTO,   wherein the male lead swordfights with the main villain while his female partner has to settle for the villain's counselor. 

Much of the narrative is organized around Lambert's machinations as he tries to break British neutrality. However, another similarity to SWORD is that all of the male character's activities are something of a response to the female lead's charismatic personality, so here as in SWORD, I deem the Flame to be the centric figure here, even if she only gets a few half-decent action-scenes. Darcel, with her thick French accent, doesn't make the most appealing of heroines. But then, all of the actors in this routine thriller give no more than the mechanical script gives them. Director Seymour Friedman and one of the two writers have nothing but journeyman work to their names, but the second writer, Sol Shor, contributed to four classic serials in the 1940s: DRUMS OF FU MANCHU, THE CRIMSON GHOST, ADVENTURES OF CAPTAIN MARVEL, and KING OF THE ROCKET MEN. 

2-HEADED SHARK ATTACK (2012), 3-HEADED SHARK ATTACK (2015)

 

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

The one "sociological" element of these "giant critter films" that I didn't cover in this post is the way many of the modern iterations seek to balance "girl power" with "girls gone wild." In the first of the Asylum's "hydra-headed sharks," former Baywatch beauty Carmen Electra plays a resourceful, can-do lady scientist who's never at a loss even when faced with mutant monsters. At the same time, the film never neglects the chance to remind interested viewers that Carmen still looks good in cut-offs.

As expected the film spends no time positing an origin for the two-headed freakazoid, though as always there are assorted sea-life factoids scattered throughout the narrative. There's a little more tension here than in the 2015 sequel, simply because (a) the victims of the double-header are a bunch of students somewhat unwillingly following their college professor on a sea-exploration trek, and (b) the expedition ends up taking refuge on an unsteady atoll, which gives every indication of sinking and leaving them to Old Two-Head's tender mercies. The latter element was used to much better effect in the fourth entry (the one, oddly, with a six-headed beastie), where it took on a very slight satirical edge.

In the first sequel, the new Three-Header also goes unexplained, and there are plenty of bikini-clad young women around, even though attractive female lead Karruechie Tran keeps her clothes on. Because all of the teens and their perceptors are oceanologists (or whatever they might be called), there's not as much tension between the factions. Though the same director essayed this entry, it's a lot duller, and the only interesting aspect of it is this poster, which cleverly parallels the three heads of the shark with the three "headliners" of the movie.

No points offered for anyone who guesses which of the headliners proves most expendable. After DEEP BLUE SEA, every ought to see it coming. 

PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN (2003)

 

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

 

 

The failure of 1995’s CUTTHROAT ISLAND seemed to provide the last hurrah for the piracy-swashbuckler. The genre flourished in the days of the studio system, when the major filmmakers could maintain lavish sets, including the simulacra of mighty sailing-ships—sets which could also be rented by smaller studios for humbler productions. But one offshoot of the largely naturalistic genre—what might best be called “the supernatural swashbuckler”—arose in the 2000s to keep the icon of the pirate alive and kicking.

 

The setup of PIRATES appears, like many previous works in the genre, to place its emphasis upon the star-crossed fate of two young lovers. Heroine Elizabeth Swann is still in her girlhood when she and her father are sailing toward Jamaica, where the elder Swann serves as governor. The ship discovers a young boy afloat on the waves in a boat, and though he’s still alive when they take him aboard, he has no memory of his past. He’s newly christened with the name Will Turner and apprenticed to a Jamaican blacksmith, but unbeknownst to the governor, Elizabeth becomes fascinated with the young boy. Eight years later, and played respectively by Keira Knightley and Orlando Bloom, the two youths share a secret love, but commoner Will has no chance with a daughter of the English aristocracy. Governor Swann wishes Elizabeth to marry landed gentry like himself and pushes her to an alliance with a naval officer, Norrington.

 

 Into this struggle between rigidly stratified classes saunters the story’s real star: a gangling, loony-talking seaman who turns out to be none other than the notorious Captain Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp). Sparrow clashes with the constabulary, who want to hang him, but he ends up rescuing Elizabeth from a planned marriage, so that he fulfills one of Will’s desires even while placing the young woman in danger. There’s a lot of rigamarole about why Sparrow went missing for years and how he lost his pirate ship and his crew to his rival Captain Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush), and some of the rigamarole has to do with a supernatural curse that was apparently was not part of the original script. Nevertheless, even though the magical elements seem haphazard at best, they’re almost certainly the things that sold the PIRATES project to an audience for whom swashbucklers are more defined by light sabers than by cutlasses.

 

In contrast to the original film’s first two bloated sequels, though, the first PIRATES entry displays the core of a good psychological opposition to match the sociological struggle between stultifying respectability and raucous lawbreaking (though no one is seen doing anything really piratical). It eventually comes out that Will’s long-deceased father was one of Sparrow’s crewmen, and Will, as a descendant of the original crew, possesses a possible cure for Barbossa and his cursed pirates. Sparrow allows Will access to the lawbreaking world of his father, and it wouldn’t have been hard to rewrite PIRATES along Oedipal lines, with an actual father from death returning to lay claim to the son’s true lover. But then, Johnny Depp conveys no paternal associations; he’s more like the “weird uncle.” Sparrow makes various lascivious remarks to Elizabeth in the course of the movie, but there’s never any real sense that he’s a genuine romantic rival for Elizabeth’s hand, and so she too profits from Sparrow taking her for a walk on the wild side.  

 

Director Gore Verbinski and his crew steer a steady course, ably paying homage to the naturalistic thrills of Classic Hollywood pirate-flicks, and the score, emphasizing the rhythm of pounding waves, makes the film a delight to listen to as well as to see. 

DREAMSCAPE (1984)

 

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

I was surprised to learn that DREAMSCAPE was based, however thinly, upon Roger Zelazny's own treatment for his 1966 THE DREAM MASTER. Though I haven't read the novel for many years, and though it wasn't a favorite of mine, I did think of the book while re-watching DREAMSCAPE. I would guess that the movie's three writers, one of whom was director Joseph Rubin, took nothing from the prose work but the basic idea of a person being able to project his consciousness into another person's dreams via technology.

Alex Gardner (Dennis Quaid) uses his talents as a psychic to gamble and to bed women. He's out for himself after the negative experience of being a lab rat at a psychic research facility, run by a man named Novotny (Max Von Sydow). Novotny then reaches out to Alex, asking the young fellow to provide aid on a new project devoted to psychological healing of trauma cases. With the use of a sophisticated mental technique, Novotny's psychics can project their minds into the minds of dreaming subjects, the better to find out the source of their disturbances. Alex, although suspicious, allows himself to be beguiled into assisting his sort-of mentor, at least partly because one of the old man's assistants is a hot young scientist, name of Jane (Kate Capshaw).

Novotny has a deeper concern than his patients' welfare, for the whole project has been underwritten by a "dark ops" government unit. Novotny suspects that the contact man, a highly placed agent named Blair (Christopher Plummer), wants to use the project for espionage, and the scientist's fears are aggravated by the news that the President himself (Eddie Albert) is about to enter the clinic for dream-treatment. Alex, who soon masters the ability to project himself into others' dreamworlds without the technique, eventually learns that Blair wants to use the procedure to perpetrate assasinations.

DREAMSCAPE is an efficient but by-the-numbers thriller. The audience isn't asked to look too deeply into the nature of dreams or of their dreamers. There's not much motive behind Alex putting aside his selfishness in order to save the President, except insofar as he falls in love with Jane and "becomes a better man" because of it. Nor is Blair's desire to depose the Prez explained by anything more than a vague hawkishness. The FX are passable for the eighties but prove rather disappointing in these CGI days. 

THE MONSTER SQUAD (1976-77)

 

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

From time to time I contemplated the purchase of a DVD collection of this hoary seventies kids' show, if only to see where it fit in the spectrum of the superhero idiom. But the vague memories of MONSTER SQUAD I had suggested that it would be money badly spent. But some generous soul happily downloaded all thirteen episodes onto Youtube, and so I was able to delve into all that seventies silliness without expense.

Most of the episodes of this program-- in which three classic monsters decide to fight the super-villains that constantly menace their city-- were written by former BATMAN '66 scribe Stanley Ralph Ross. The fact that the series is so outrageously dumb indicates that Ross had no appreciation of the camp aesthetic that made BATMAN so successful with both adult and juvenile audiences. Of course, since MONSTER SQUAD aired on Saturday mornings, there's no question that it was conceived as a kid's program. I was rather amused by an online Ross interview, in which he claimed that he was writing for "teenagers." I have no idea why he would deflect from the fact that he was writing corny jokes, with an almost total lack of sex, for an audience of grade-schoolers.

The concept by itself is engagingly stupid. Would-be crime-stopper Walter, a caretaker for a wax museum, builds a "crime computer" whose vibrations somehow bring to life three statues representing classic creatures Dracula, the Frankenstein Monster and the Werewolf (the latter two called "Frank N. Stein" and "Bruce W. Wolf.") The reborn monsters somehow have the memories of their original selves, and they decide to take up crimefighting to atone for past sins. All three actors-- Henry Polic II, Buck Kartalian, and Mike Lane-- are charged with reading all of the silly superhero-schtick with as much gusto as possible-- and in that respect, they're certainly more successful than most actors trying to emulate campy acting.

Each of the thirteen episodes offers a new villain, only a few of whom have encountered the Monster Squad before. Only two of the actors playing the villains appeared on the BATMAN teleseries: the obvious one being Julie "Catwoman" Newmar, while midget Billy Curtis had a supporting role as a henchman to False Face. Surprisingly, even though Ross wrote all of the Catwoman episodes for the 1966 show, Newmar doesn't score all that well as villain "Ultra Witch" on MONSTER SQUAD. Perhaps that's because Ross gave this project so little thought that he decided to recycle a gimmick from the Bat-episode "Entrancing Dr. Cassandra," whose big thing was a ray gun that could turn heroes into flat paper shapes. (Terrible pun alert: Ultra Witch calls her weapon "Ronald Raygun.") Surprisingly, the actors who get the best out of their silly roles are Alice Ghostley (as "Queen Bee") and Geoffrey Lewis (as "The Skull.")

Presumably Ross had nothing to do with the decor of the show, but SQUAD does successfully emulate the day-glo look of BATMAN '66. However, the fight-scenes are kept as tame as possible, as the monster-heroes fight the villains and their henchmen with things like pillows and streamers. But there's just enough minor violence-- Frankenstein making two thugs bonk heads, for instance-- that I can still deem MONSTER SQUAD a combative comedy, even though it's one of the weakest of its breed.