FANTASTIC FOUR (1994-96)

 

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

Since I grew up with the 1960s Hanna-Barbera FANTASTIC FOUR cartoon, that one will always be my go-to adaptation of this pivotal Marvel comic book. That said, I realize that the limited animation of the company, while it could capture the quirky humor of Lee and Kirby's Early Period, it couldn't quite manage the visual grandeur of the Middle Period. That was the period in which many of the key concepts of the Marvel Universe-- Galactus and the Silver Surfer, the alien Kree, and the Inhumans-- were formulated. Hanna-Barbera did adapt the Galactus Trilogy, but with mixed results at best.

The 1994-96 series makes a concerted effort to adapt the best of Classic Lee-Kirby FF, but also with mixed results. The biggest problem is that the first season suffers from poor animation and character design, as well as very lame humor. Ben "the Thing" Grimm is given the bulk of the supposedly comical dialogue, though there's a new character, the FF's female landlord, who's even worse in the comedy department. The series begins with Reed "Mister Fantastic" Richards and Sue "Invisible Woman" Richards already married, which eliminates a lot of the early tension between the romantic couple (and messes up the chemistry in the show's one Sub-Mariner adaptation). Johnny "Human Torch" Storm has no impressive story-arcs in the first season, but then, he didn't have many in the Early Period of the original comic, either. The scripts often play mix-and-match with different stories, but this isn't always a problem, since even a few of the early FF stories were rather dodgy (particularly FF #2, the introduction of the Skrulls).

Had there only been one season, I would have rated the show as poor. However, the quality of the animation and character design is improved in the second season, possibly thanks to a bigger budget. (Given the awfulness of the first season's theme song, the lyric-less music for the second season is a titanic improvement.) The scripts stick closer than before to their original models, and while this doesn't always lead to greater mythicity, at least one episode, "Prey of the Black Panther" is particularly strong in this department. The Torch gets a lot more attention this time, as the season includes his blazing passion for the Inhuman Crystal, which arc actually receives a modest payoff at the end of the second and last season. Almost all adaptations are from Lee and Kirby, though one episode faithfully adapts John Byrne's arc with Frankie "She-Torch" Raye, while another, "Worlds Within Worlds," melds Lee & Kirby introduction of Psycho-Man with a problematic Byrne story about Sue Richards' metamorphosis into the violent villainess Malice.

On the whole, the 1994 cartoon is watchable, but even the best-animated episodes leave something to be desired.

ASTRO ZOMBIE MARATHON (1968, 2004, 2010, 2012)

 

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

In marked contrast to Ed Wood, who filled the slow scenes in his movies with loopy dialogue, Ted V. Mikels is sort of the anti-Wood, in that all of his achingly slow scenes force the performers to utter the most blandly functional lines. Even the occasional gem of bad dialogue gets lost in all the dullness.

Mikels' direction is the same as his writing. In most if not all of his films, he burns up time with lots of talking-head scenes, broken up by occasional outbursts of violence, usually with only the weakest forms of gore. But he was canny about casting name actors alongside all the non-professional performers in his flicks, and it seems likely that the name of John Carradine is the only thing that kept one of Mikel's best known crapfests, THE ASTRO ZOMBIES, in television syndication back in the day.

Carradine plays mad scientist, Doctor DeMarco, who gets tossed out of some U.S. astronautics program. His response is to go full Frankenstein, getting his ugly mute servant to collect the dead body of a criminal, which he DeMarco transforms into an "Astro Man." (The film's title is thus a cheat: there's only one "Astro Zombie.") The creature goes on a rampage, and despite DeMarco getting it under control, some enemy spies have taken notice of the scientist's efforts. A spy chief named Satana, played by Tura Satana of FASTER PUSSYCAT! KILL! KILL!, kills time lurking around with a single henchman for most of the film, eventually getting around to simply invading DeMarco's laboratory to take over his operation. Satana kills DeMarco, and the Zombie goes wild, killing the spies while a couple of useless American operatives hang around on the periphery.

Empty though ASTRO ZOMBIES is, the growth of the cult-film subculture gave its name some cachet over time. Almost forty years after the original, Mikels somehow managed to get someone to pony up enough money to make MARK OF THE ASTRO ZOMBIES. I suspect that over the years Mikels often heard the complaints about the first film's false title, for now there are a small horde of brain-dead zombies on the loose, randomly chopping people with machetes. (Pretty much the same appliance effect is used for every machete-killing.) This time, aliens called "Reptilians" are responsible, though they've adapted the DeMarco process for their own ends-- which I think must be world conquest, though I don't remember anyone saying so. Though both DeMarco and Satana were apparently killed in ZOMBIES, the lady spy, now usually called "Malvina," is still alive, and again played by a considerably older Tura Satana, though again she just has one lousy henchman she occasionally slaps around. DeMarco is conditionally alive in that Malvina has kept alive his decapitated head (played by a mock-up of the late Carradine's face), apparently just so that she can taunt the old scientist. What either of them has to do with the aliens I never figured out. While waiting for the eventual hurry-up-and-finish climax, Mikels again wastes time with copious talking head scenes, most of which are with a crusading reporter (Brinke Stevens). She's reasonably good during all of this hoohah, unlike Satana and everyone else. Some good aliens show up at the conclusion to destroy the Reptilians.

Though Satana seems to get killed at the end of MARK, she's still around for 2010's ASTRO ZOMBIES: MS-- CLONED, though this time the actress only provides a voice-over for an animated effect based on Satana in her youth, presumably an image taken from ASTRO ZOMBIES. In Malvina's one or two scenes, she still has access to the living head of DeMarco, but neither of them has any consequence to the story. The real villains are warmongering weapons-makers of Area 51, who have used cloning to make new Astro Zombies from the remains of those created by the dead aliens.

This time, the director himself plays both one of the Area 51 honchos and his hippie brother. However, the scientist who's most involved in the creation of new Zombies is Stephanie DeMarco, granddaughter of the original scientist. Curiously, one of her bosses tells her that they kept her from knowing about her grandpa's experiments, which means that Stephanie simply recreates her relative's research without any idea of her indebtedness. This time, when the Zombies get out of control, Mikels resorts to a crossover, resuscitating the long dormant franchise of The Doll Squad from the seventies movie of the same name (in which Satana had a minor role).  Most of the current Squad-members are of course played by young women, but as a nostalgic comeback, Francine York reprises her role as the team's leader Sabrina, and looks pretty good for a seventy-plus actress.

The final fight between the all-female Squad and the Astro Zombies comes too late to boost any interest in this lumbering monstrosity, though it makes this flick the only combative one in the series. M3's only distinction, beyond its crossover status, is being the final film-credit of Tura Satana. As it happened, Francine York would have her last credit in another Mikels mess-terpiece, 2017's TEN VIOLENT WOMEN, PART 2.

Four years later, Mikels went to the Zombie well one last time. I'm guessing he didn't have much of a budget this time, since, aside from a few members of the sort-of Mikels repertory company, the only "name" in the cast was Beverly Washburn from the STAR TREK episode "The Deadly Years." I also recognized none of the character-names from ASTRO ZOMBIES: M4-- INVADERS FROM CYBERSPACE, so I guess Mikels finally decided to let Malvina and every version of Doctor DeMarco fade into nothingness.

This time Mikels decides to rewrite his whole scenario. Instead of the Astro Zombies being Earth-corpses brought back to life by Frankensteinian science, or clones of such corpses, there's a whole race of alien Astro Zombies out there that's just itching to invade Earth again. They find a brand new method of invasion: invading through cyberspace, which principally means that they can pop out of the screens of Earth-people's laptops. Also, this time the Zombies don't just run around chopping up people with machetes. For the Internet Age, they can now shoot beams from their foreheads, blasting people into bloody stains and blowing up Big Ben.

The Earth is so helpless before these invaders. some of the interchangeable talking heads began seeking answers from experts in the occult, for no particular reason, including a palm-reader named Madame Bovary (!) But none of the supernatural stuff ends up being of consequence, because one of the talking heads figures out that all they need to do is to hold up mirrors to repel the aliens' rays. I think that after the Zombies are thwarted, Mikels still left the door open for a sequel, but I doubt if even the most dedicated lover of dreck would have cared.

One thing the series does for me: I once debated whether or not the Zombie or his creator was the focal presence of the original film. Now it seems that the Zombies would seem to be the main focus of all four flicks, for whatever that may be worth in the world of genre analysis.

WAR CAT (1987)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *naturalistic*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*

This 1987 film was given the bland title ANGEL OF VENGEANCE in DVD releases, but I still prefer the title from its VHS incarnation, WAR CAT. The heroine of the story isn't especially cat-like, but she does show an ability to turn savage, in contrast to having zero angelic qualities. In terms of phenomenality this flick is largely relevant for being a naturalistic take on the "most dangerous game" trope of human-hunting. 

Heroine Tina Davenport (Jannina Poynter), daughter of a deceased armed forces officer, decides to take up temporary residence in a small American town in order to write a book about her late dad (a motif possibly borrowed from 1979's I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE). Because Tina's hot and runs around the town for daily exercise, she's noticed by a neighboring survivalist group. This group is made of its leader Major Hargrove and about half a dozen hangers-on. Hargrove honestly thinks that the country's about to be consumed by chaos at any minute, while most of his followers just seem to be in the group because it gives them the chance for antisocial activities.

Tina uses an elbow-strike to repel an assault by the most lustful member of the survivalists, and gets him charged by the local cops. Apparently he gets bailed out by his cohorts, but after one shot of a cop-car there's no sense of any local law enforcement on the scene. Hargrove's survivalists take down an equally scuzzy biker-gang and take their women prisoner. The desire for more feminine company leads the faux-soldiers to kidnap Tina as well, after which at least one of them rapes her.

Hargrove, dedicated to his martial mission, does not rape her, but he decides to execute her. Tina requests a fighting chance: to run ahead and let her oppressors hunt her down. The guys all think she's going to be a sitting duck, but Tina's father trained her in guerilla tactics. One by one, she takes out each of her armed enemies, with an admirable variety-- miniature spears jabbed in one guy's eyes, a noose-trap and a grenade for another one, a throat-slitting for her rapist, and a "fighting chance" fate for Hargrove. 

While the killings are the best part, they're all in the last twenty minutes of this short flick, and most of the rest of the film displays director Ted Mikels' legendary talent for wasting time. One review commented that no one in the film could act, and it's true that almost everyone is a bad amateur, particularly the guy playing Hargrove, who looks like he ought to be a manager at a Wendy's. But if it's true that Poynter came to the film after having been a cocktail waitress, she actually acquits herself fairly well for a non-professional. It's still a blah film, of course, but Mikels had done, and would continue to do, many movies of far worse quality.

BATMAN: UNDER THE RED HOOD (2010)

 

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

In my review of the original comic-book continuity of UNDER THE RED HOOD-- the storyline that returned Second Robin Jason Todd to the ranks of the living-- I observed that writer Judd Winick produced a rambling script with a lot of extraneous characters. But I credit Winick with producing a much more stripped-down version of his own story for the 2010 animated adaptation.

The script keeps the original famous/infamous scenario in which Jason is beaten to death by the Joker's crowbar. Gone, perhaps inevitably, is the idea that Jason was revived by some obscure cosmic phenomenon called "Hypertime," only to be discovered afterward by Batman's foes Ra's Al Ghul and his daughter Talia. This time, Winick devises a new situation in which Ra's has some scheme he doesn't want Batman messing with, so the mastermind hires Joker to run interference. After Second Robin's brutal slaughter, Ra's secretly steals the body of Jason and uses one of the Lazarus Pits to revive the dead adolescent. Jason does come back to life, but goes mad and runs off, eluding even the great resources of The Demon. 

When Jason comes back, he dons a variant of an identity once sported by the Joker before his clown-ification, as part of a long-con strategy to lure the Clown Prince of Crime into his grasp. But Red Hood's greater strategy is to become a player on the Gotham crime scene as a way of rejecting everything Batman taught him in his role as Robin. He doesn't care about being a crime-lord; he just wants to kill criminals while flouting Batman's ethos. Winick also comes up with a novel way to dovetail Red Hood's war on Gotham's major crime-lord Black Mask with his plans to gain revenge on Joker. 

Despite assorted changes to the overall plot, Winick does a fine job of translating the psychological conflict between Red Hood and his mentor in the big climax, ending in Red Hood's escape-- but as yet, no more major animated incarnations. The DTV film's best moment is not from the segment with Jason as Red Hood though, but in an original-to-the-video scene in which we see Batman and Second Robin fighting the Riddler. It catches much of the appeal of the Golden Age Batman and Robin shenanigans, but with a slight undercurrent of dark irony. 

GRAND MASTER OF SHAOLIN KUNG FU (1978)

 

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

GRAND MASTER OF SHAOLIN KUNG FU has received only two online reviews that I could find, and even these aren't certain as to whether or not schlockmeister Godfrey Ho might've co-directed this item. If so it must've been around the same time as his helming of THE DYNAMITE SHAOLIN HEROES, and like that film, MASTER is at least marginally comprehensible within the standardized tropes of the kung fu flick. Both seem to star a handful of Chinese actors amid a Korean support-cast.

Before even meeting the hero, the viewer sees a talisman that will change his life: a mystic pearl that passes from one pair of hands to another. The pearl has the power to get the owner into a special Buddhist (and Shaolin?) temple, and it's shown shining an intense ray that opens the way for the seeker, though I'm not sure the pearl is literally magical. However, one of the people who steals the pearl falls afoul of heroic Chun (Philip Cheng), who kills the man in defending an innocent. Chun innocently displays the pearl in front of a tavern of reprobates, and suddenly everyone in the tavern tries to kill him and take the pearl.

Though at first Chun seems to be aimless, he actually burns with passion to be avenged on a criminal gang that killed his parents. (Hey, just as DYNAMITE SHAOLIN HEROES had a few Superman tropes, MASTER seems to be grooving on Batman.) Chun makes his way to the temple and, after proving himself in a fight with a Shaolin monk, the young man is accepted as a student. Perhaps to get past a long sequence of training montages, the old monk gives Chun a "medicine" that will beef up his kung fu abilities. Additionally, he tells Chun that what everyone wants from the temple is a special kung-fu training manual, written by "Dalma" (possibly a corruption of "Bodhidharma," a legendary teacher credited with inventing kung fu). The mentor puts Chun in charge of guarding the manual while the teacher goes off for some reason.

The gang, bossed by a fellow named Ma, starts attacking Chun in various ways whenever they can. Oddly, these crooks also find time to hassle a ferryman because they don't want to pay him for his services. At first the ferryman fights off the thugs, but he's blinded when one criminal pulls a bird out of his robe (?) and the bird flies up and lays an egg (??) in the ferryman's face. But the thugs are then routed by a new arrival, a woman named Ah Kim (Pearl Lin)-- and since she's engaged to marry Chun, clearly the main reason that the ferryman's in the story at all was to provide an introductory scene for Ah Kim.

Ah Kim joins Chun at the temple, even as Ma's crooks make new attempts to get the manual. One assassin masquerades as a monk and almost kills Chun with a cup that shoots lethal darts. But the winning gambit comes from Ma himself, when he laces Chun's drink with an aphrodisiac. Inflamed by the potion, Chun has sex with Ah Kim, and suddenly the bad guys are able to conquer Chun. (Having sex doesn't seem to impair Ah Kim's fighting, but she gets overwhelmed and killed anyway.)

Chun does get his mojo back, and confronts Ma in the temple.  Briefly the hero has to fight a bunch of gold-painted guys-- not sure there were eighteen of them, like 1976's 18 BRONZE MEN-- and then he takes on Ma in a fight to the finish. 

One review claimed that the falcon with the egg was meant to be a robot, and indeed, when the bird comes back to its owner, he just sticks it back in his robe like a non-living thing. So it's one of those inexplicable weapons, like the rotary saw in BANDITS, PROSTITUTES AND SILVER, that can't be easily categorized as magical or scientific. But diabolical devices to one side, the martial battles between Cheng, Lin and their foes make this an okay opus.

TERROR TRAIN (1980)

 

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

Like PROM NIGHT, which Jamie Lee Curtis filmed the same year, TERROR TRAIN sought to "take a ride" on the fame of her breakout slasher-flick HALLOWEEN. But though TRAIN isn't any more complex psychologically than PROM NIGHT, it's a much better constructed thriller, in part because TRAIN was the directorial debut of Roger "TOMORROW NEVER DIES" Spottiswode.

Happily the script dispenses with the tedious red-herring plot of PROM NIGHT, placing all its energies toward depicting the vendetta of the resident psycho. Shy fraternity pledge Kenny is victimized by a humiliating prank and goes bonkers, being confined in an asylum thereafter. Three years later, all the members of the prank-cabal are still at the same college, though only one participant, Alana (Curtis), evinces any guilt about her past actions.

The fraternities and sororities involved in Kenny's pranking end up celebrating Christmas by holding a costume party aboard a train. Unbeknownst to the students, Kenny has escaped confinement and has found a way to assume another identity while on board. In addition, when he begins his killing spree, he often assumes the costume of his victim. Of all the costumes Kenny assumes, the one in the movie poster, a fiendish version of Groucho Marx, has given this particular slasher a minor iconic fame.

The killing-scenes are much better, in part because the script places more emphasis on how thoroughly most of the pranksters have forgotten the effects of their petty deed. And though the idea of "HALLOWEEN on a train" sounds like a banal movie-pitch, the constant rumbling motion of the train is often spookier than any number of creepy old house sounds. Late in the film, when the passengers have become aware of the serial killer's presence among them, the train stops in the middle of a snowy wilderness, and it's borne in to the panicky students that they have nowhere to go but back to the train with the mystery murderer.

Curtis once again makes an appealing viewpoint character, though it should be noted that in 1980 the trope of "the Final Girl" had not become so automatically expected. Thus it may be a shock to some when Evil Kenny is defeated not by Alana, but by the crusty old train conductor (Ben Johnson).

PROM NIGHT (1980)

 

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

PROM NIGHT is one of the iconic slashers of the eighties, so I wished it had been better overall, rather than having a great opening and a not-so-great rest-of-the-movie. Along with TERROR TRAIN, it's the last of the slashers headliner Jamie Lee Curtis made in response to the phenomenal popularity of her role in HALLOWEEN. After those two, Curtis made other films that might have psycho-killers in them, but she stayed away from the specific slasher-subgenre except for participating in sequels to the film that bumped her up the fame ladder. 

It's a shame the rest of the movie doesn't match up to the opening. In an abandoned house, four pre-teens play a nasty version of hide-and-seek in which they pretend that they're going to kill someone. It's all pretend-violence, but there's a nice feeling that the kids' indulgence in their darker sides may get out of control. A fifth preteen, a girl named Robin, gets swept up in their game and she suffers a cruel accidental death. The kids conceal their knowledge of the death, but an unidentified witness has seen the whole thing. The witness also keeps quiet about the incident for the next six years, and this results in the police fingering a local outcast for the crime. In the film proper, this disfigured individual is frequently evoked as the possible killer, though the script also supplies a much more likely suspect even during the opening.

Six years later, the family of the deceased Robin still mourns her, but life goes on. Widower-father Mr. Hammond (Leslie Nielsen) and twin siblings Kim and Alex (Curtis, Michael Tough) are making ready for the prom at their high school, where Hammond is the principal. As the viewer follows Kim and Alex in their school routine, we see that the siblings' classmates include all four of the now adolescent kids who were implicated in Robin's death. The only male member of the guilty group, Nick, is now dating Kim, much to the chagrin of Wendy, one of the three females from that coterie. Wendy, who's evidently read Stephen King's CARRIE, plots to embarrass Kim at the prom celebration with the help of a local bad boy, Lou. While all this teenage soap opera is going on, some members of the guilt-group receive photos of themselves in which their images have been slashed up. This leads to real murders by a man clad in a black ski-mask, black shirt and black trousers-- who nevertheless does not have as much visual mojo as many of the more distinctive serial murderers in the subgenre.

Much of the film is achingly slow rather than suspenseful, and the killings are at best fair until one reaches the expected "prom night."  Even then, one does have to put up with lots of tacky disco dancing before the killer makes his move, forcing Kim, the "prom queen," to unleash her Final Girl persona. I like how the script follows through on the traditional faux-royalty trappings of the American prom, by having one crowned head take a tumble, but one has to slog through a lot of dully directed scenes to get to the good stuff.

DEADLY LESSONS (1983)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological*

I guess the title suggests that it's the rich-girl victims who are being taught "deadly lessons" by the slasher who invades their prestigious girls' school. Yet the script isn't interested in observations about class, even though it does give us a viewpoint character who's got into the school on a scholarship pass. But the primary concern seems to be delivering a quickie thriller that coasted on the (then-waning) appeal of the theatrical slasher-subgenre, while still keeping the sex-and-violence at a very low level. In fact, I think there were probably episodes of crime TV-shows of the time that were more violent than LESSONS.

Viewpoint character Stefanie (Diane Franklin of AMITYVILLE II) is a terminal "nice girl" who enlists in the school, and encounters all the expected tropes-- nice girls who want to be her friends, mean girls who want to walk all over her, a handsome young horse-trainer (and potential boyfriend), and a creepy janitor. It's all very standard until some of the girls begin dropping dead. The school's dean Miss Wade (top billed Donna Reed) is deeply concerned about the school's reputation, but she's never a serious suspect. Investigating officer Kemper (Larry Wilcox of CHIPS fame) does manage to come up with a decent suspect, but since he's rounded up before the movie's half over, the experienced viewer knows it's red herring time. The solution of the mystery, such as it is, does involve Miss Wade, and while I didn't exactly see it coming, the psychology of the killer wasn't especially interesting.

Like a lot of TV-movies this one is mostly interesting for the cast, which includes, in addition to Reed and Wilcox, Ally Sheedy and Nancy ("Bart Simpson") Cartwright. David Ackroyd plays John, a forty-something man who's the nearly constant companion of the sixty-something dean, but the script tiptoes around the matter of their having any sort of romantic liaison. Diane Franklin is the only actor who acquits herself well, bringing some intensity to her good-girl role. Before being revealed the killer is seen in brief shadowy scenes, so he doesn't have any special attributes beyond being a perilous psycho.

BRUCE LEE AGAINST SUPERMEN (1975)

 

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

One might think there would be some stupid fun to get out of a kung-fu mash-up of Superman, the Green Hornet and Kato, and Italy's long-lived franchise The Three Fantastic Supermen. But not so, unless one happens to be a devotee of films exploiting the legacy of action-hero Bruce Lee (i.e., "Brucesploitation").

The Bruce-imitator this time up is Bruce Li, who appears early in the film dressed as Kato for one scene, in which he's also called that name. Some reviews claim that Li then becomes a second character named "Carter." I think it's more likely that the producers of the film meant to have Li be their version of Kato for the whole film, but got nervous about inviting the wrath of foreign lawyers for their unsanctioned use of the Green Hornet franchise. So for the rest of the film, Li dresses in more or less regular clothes (though suggestive of Bruce Lee attire) and is called by the semi-sound-alike "Carter." Carter like Kato remains in contact with a costumed fellow named "Green Hornet," but he mostly hangs around in a car monitoring the situation, dressed in a domino mask and a red union suit with a hornet on the chest. 

Carter is called upon to fight a criminal gang that purposes to abduct a famous professor, Ting, who's supposedly invented a way to feed the world's millions at nearly no cost. (We hear about this miraculous process but don't see it, so I don't count it as relevant to the film's phenomenality.) After Carter fends off the gangsters a few times, the gang's leader Tiger seeks help from a mysterious kung-fu practitioner, Superman, who hangs around wearing a black leotard and a white cape, as well as teaching his kung-fu to two nameless, similarly attired students. These are the characters I believe to be functional stand-ins for The Three Fantastic Supermen, even though the Hornet and maybe one other minor character are the ones wearing something like the distinctive red leotards of the Italian heroes.

When the filmmakers aren't wasting time with extraneous car-chases and a bathroom catfight between two jealous women, a few of the kung-fu fights between Carter and Superman are watchable but unmemorable. No one has super-powers or special gimmicks, except that Superman has some spiked gauntlets on his wrists. There are some incoherent scenes of Carter fighting what look like costumed mimes, but there's no fun to be had in this dull potpourri. To say the least, the illicit use of franchise-names for characters bearing no resemblance to the originals does not constitute a crossover, only one of the dumbest attempts of a cheapjack film to coast on the success of both fictional and non-fictional icons.

MS. MARVEL (2022)

 

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

Half of the six-part MS. MARVEL streaming series is just a low-impact validation of Muslim-American culture. In contradistinction to the many invidious portraits of Muslims in American film and television, all of the Muslims in MARVEL-- mostly if not entirely of Pakistani extraction-- are absolutely virtuous in every way, so much so that they all register as fundamentally dull.

Validation of a marginalized culture doesn't have to be dull. In the early 1970s, one saw a small handful of movies dealing with African Americans living largely average lives with no pimps or gangsters in evidence. Two of these, SOUNDER (1972) and CLAUDINE (1974), are strong melodramas with appealing characters. However, MARVEL is able to manage no more than an unimaginative, standardized "hero's journey" in which Muslim-American Kamala Khan, upon getting super powers from a mysterious object, fights various vaguely conceived opponents while connecting with her Pakistani forbears. 

Online reviews of this adaptation of Marvel Comics' first well-known Muslim hero (no love for the Arabian Knight, I guess) have attacked the series on issues I find irrelevant. For one thing, in early issues Kamala displays powers comparable to the stretching powers of the Fantastic Four's Mister Fantastic-- though usually she only turns her hands into colossal fists. Attempting to translate this kind of comic-book power might not only be prohibitively expensive, it might not even look all that good in a live-action format. So it does not bother me that the producers behind the series gave Kamala energy-powers that often have the same basic "stretchy" effect. For a second thing, though I understand the business-related reasons as to why Kamala was designated an "Inhuman" in her early comic-book career, and why she's now being called a "mutant," neither designation makes any difference to my estimation of the streaming series.

I might have given MARVEL a passing grade regarding its mythicity just for its celebration of the normative world of Muslim-Americans. However, as usual Kevin Feige's MCU cannot pass up any opportunity to distort real-world politics. Thus, when Kamala begins to make contact with the Pakistani world of her deceased grandmother-- who is also the source of the aforesaid power-imbuing object-- the heroine experiences some of the violence of the 1940s period called "The Partition," during which Pakistan was established as a state separate from the parent country of India. But from this series one would barely know that the violence stemmed from conflicts between Indians and Pakistanis as the respective groups either departed from or headed toward the future state of Pakistan. 

At that point in history, the British were removing their forces from India, specifically because both Indians and future-Pakistanis wanted them out. Some historians believe that the former administrators of India should have stayed in India long enough to oversee the Partition, and that's a possible fault that the series might have explored. But the flashbacks to the Partition barely if ever mention the presence of Hindus, and includes a scene in which British soldiers are for some reason bombarding helpless Pakistanis. Why would the Brits be doing this? MARVEL does not care to give specifics; violence is just something Evil White People commit, even when they have nothing to gain from their Evil Acts. Feige's MCU cannot admit that two POC groups might have conflicts that result in the sort of destruction that can only be levied against the White Patriarchy.

And of course American authorities have continued the Evil Whiteness of the Brits. Though a few episodes have Kamala menaced by a POC terrorist group, her primary opponent is a government agency, Damage Control, which is out to capture Kamala because she's unpredictable. (I'm surprised that the Registration Act of CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR is not evoked, but that political briar patch seems not to have any effect on the streaming serials.) For once, the leader of the nasty agency is a female-type woman, but she's painted as an unregenerate racist in that she claims she wants to keep powers away from "the wrong type of people." She immediately clarifies that she means anile teenagers, not Muslims, but the writers know how their audience will read the remark. The most I can say of MS. MARVEL is that its woke politics aren't nearly as lazy and predictable as those of FALCON AND THE WINTER SOLDIER, and that star Iman Vellani gives her limited role a lot of gusto.

GUILTY CROWN (2011)

 

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

If I hadn't known while watching this two-season anime show was an original TV production, I might have assumed that a lot of the narrative lacunae stemmed from the writers dropping out segments from a slower-moving manga or prose series. Instead, I think the flaws of pacing and character development came about from the writers trying to cram too much into the show's 22 episodes. That said, the writers did manage to bring the entire concept to a mostly satisfying close, in marked contrast to such "left-up-in-the-air" adaptations as NISEKOI and HEAVEN'S LOST PROPERTY. 

The story commences with a seemingly ordinary Japanese high school student, Shu Ouma, who lives in a Japan subjected to a humiliating fate. Ten years previous, an outbreak known as the Apocalypse Virus originates in Japan, and other Earth-nations place the nation under their control in order to manage the virus. The other nations are not specified, though one broad characterization looks American, and it seems likely that the scripters had in mind some parallels with the Commodore Perry intrusion upon Japan's sovereignty. An organization named the GHQ uses its medically based, UN-derived authority to usurp control of Japan, and its agents and their mecha-- respectively "Anti Bodies" and "Endlaves"-- are none too gentle about enforcing their will. An anti-GHQ organization, Funeral Parlor, appears to oppose this rule by outsiders.

Shu accidentally gets mixed up with Funeral Parlor when he meets Inori, a pop-singer who's one of the Parlor's agents. She entrusts him with a genome-weapon stolen from GHQ, but Shu triggers the weapon so as to infect himself. He develops the unique power to draw "Voids" out of other human beings, which are energy-manifestations that look like physical objects-- a sword, shears, even healing bandages. Shu then can then wield these objects against the enemies of Japan, so Funeral Parlor pressures the high-schooler to join. Shu gets involved partly because of his attraction to Inori, but he really wants to live an ordinary life. Funeral Parlor's leader is the demanding Gai, with whom Shu butts heads, but he's drawn into friend-like relationships with such ensemble-characters as courageous paraplegic Ayase and freaky hacker Tsugumi. Some of Shu's high-school acquaintances also become part of the ensemble, though they become more significant in the show's second season.

The most mythic aspect of CROWN is its concept of Voids, which are generated from the soulfulness of whatever human they're taken from. For many years I've noted that anime and manga make substantial use of a trope in which human beings get turned into weapons, conspicuous in the 2003 manga BECAUSE I'M THE GODDESS.  In CROWN, since the weapons are expressions of people's heart-deep feelings, Shu becomes the conduit through which young Japanese people assert themselves against the foreign powers, which embrace their rule of Japan with too much gusto. 

At the same time, Shu's head is uneasy now that he wears "the crown" of responsibility for his people's fate. One episode of the second season, in which Shu and his friends (including the Funeral Parlor agents, masquerading as students) hole up at school when GHQ turns up the heat. Briefly Shu almost does a Paul Atreides, becoming a petty tyrant because of the death of a woman who loves him (but whose love he didn't return). The writers get him out of that funk rather quickly, but I give them credit for giving the "nice ordinary guy" some potential for corruption.

On the matter of the protagonist's ordinary nature, the first season drops hints that he isn't really so quotidian, particularly since his adoptive mother works in genome studies. The end of the first season reveals that Inori is actually an android who is supposed to be the receptacle for the first victim of the Apocalypse Virus, and that said victim is none other than-- Shu's older sister Mana, whom Shu conveniently forgets for most of the first season. The second season burrows even deeper into the strange triangle between Shu, Gai and Inori/Mana, but overall I enjoyed the hyper-dramatics, since they were grounded within a concrescent application of psychology and sociology. 

THE POLICE ARE BLUNDERING IN THE DARK (1975)

 

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

Though filmed in 1972, when many of the great giallos were produced, this movie didn't make it to Italian theaters until 1975. In addition, POLICE's writer-director Helia Columbo never made another movie. Of the cast-members, actress Halina Zalewska probably has the greatest number of genre movies, but two or three main actors have, like Columbo, no other credits but POLICE.

Just today I also viewed and reviewed another long-delayed giallo movie from the seventies, CRAZY DESIRES OF A MURDERER. I criticized it for "dull characters" with "pointless eccentricities," but at least I could follow what was going on. POLICE has both dull characters and an erratic narrative that I could not follow in the least. At least with DESIRES, there were a few standard Gothic devices to hold my interest.

I suppose that if I were trying to nail down which of the boring characters was the main one, I suppose it would be the "scissors killer," who provides the only motive force of the narrative as he goes around killing beautiful women. Columbo doesn't know how to leave clues, even the erratic ones expected in a giallo, so the killer's motives are never suggested, merely summarized in a quick wrapup.

The gore murders are extremely derivative, and Columbo even manages to make a long sequence with a completely nude woman boring. I suppose there's some curiosity value in the fact that a professor character invents a device that can record people's thoughts, which the murderer tries to destroy. The film started with a different title, and IMDB claims that the official one may have been conceived to appeal to fans of police drama, even though there are no police characters to be found. FWIW, the subbed version of the film does insert the words "the police are blundering in the dark," which may or may not be present in the Italian original.

CRAZY DESIRES OF A MURDERER (1977)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological*

The bloom was pretty much off the gialli rose when CRAZY DESIRES was filmed in 1975, and perhaps its total lack of marketable foreign stars indicates that its producers had little hope for anything but some quickie profit.

A wheelchair-bound old man refuses to allow his young niece Ileana (Isabella Marshal) to invite her hip friends to a party at the uncle's Gothic castle, but she does so anyway. The party-goers are all a bunch of wealthy eccentrics, and two or three of them are involved in drug-smuggling. However, the castle boasts more secrets, such as Ileana's demented half-brother, who's watched over by a maid who controls him with sex. Not long after the unwanted visitors show up, a mad killer begins murdering people, starting with a sexy blonde, by cutting out their eyeballs. When the cops are called in to question the castle's occupants, can the clever inspector manage to figure out the identity of the Eyeball Killer?

Though production values are relatively good and the female stars are sexy, the narrative's  rambling plot builds nearly no suspense. Director Fillipo Ratti, whose credits in that department are underwhelming, is at least partly responsible for the languid pace. However, the dull characters, all defined by their pointless eccentricities, are surely the responsibility of writer Ambroglio Molteni, who had racked up some minor but enjoyable Laura Gemser erotica and a couple of above-average sword-and-sandal (VULCAN SON OF JUPITER, GIANT OF METROPOLIS).

Aside from a closeup on an eyeball's removal, there's not much gore, and it's a long slog between the nude scenes. It takes little detective ability to guess that the perilous psycho in the film is not the real architect of the killings, though he's at least a possible source of danger at times. The original Italian title, "Morbid Habits of the Governess," has more to do with the actual story than does the English title, but it also kind of gives the game away.

WHAT THE PEEPER SAW (1972)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological*

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

First, I've yet to find any data on the genesis of this international project, whose primary creative personnel included one Italian writer (Andrea Bianchi), one German writer (Erich Krohnke), and a British director (James Kelley), while the principal stars were British, Swedish, and German. 

Second, I've seen more than a few online reviews comparing this "evil child" film with the 1956 BAD SEED. But while the kid-psycho there is as ruthless as Marcus Bezant (Mark Lester), the twelve-year old killer of  PEEPER is motivated by extreme intellectual distance, which makes it possible for him to covertly arrange the murder of his mother, apparently just to see if he can bring it off. (At one point, his stepmother-turned-adversary sees him reading, and asks him if the book is by DeSade.) In many ways Marcus is closer to the intellectual killers of Hitchcock's ROPE, who murder just to see if they can get away with traducing moral laws.

The film begins two years after Marcus has made his mother Sarah's death look like a bathing accident. The viewer never knows how Marcus's forty-something father Paul (Hardy Kruger) meets his twenty-something second wife Elise (Britt Ekland), but in the course of the narrative it's suggested a couple of times that she resembles the late Sarah, both in looks and demeanor. Were this a more metaphysical film, it would be possible to assert that she's the reincarnation of the dead mother, come back to render vengeance.

For some reason, Paul is tied up elsewhere when Elise journeys alone to her new husband's Spanish mansion to meet Marcus. The twenty-something stepmother, while not unintelligent, seems most characterized as a "free spirit" with a loopy sense of humor. (In one of her first exchanges with Marcus before she realizes what a monster he is, she locks gazes with him, her own eyes protected by sunglasses, and says, "I can see your eyes but you can't see mine.") In contrast, Marcus comes back his intellectual hauteur honestly, since Paul displays a similar attitude of smugness about his knowledge of abstruse subjects, and he's somewhat less than sympathetic when Elise becomes disturbed her stepson's peculiarities. But whereas Marcus has a Sadean assurance about his priorities, Paul chooses not to acknowledge his son's abnormality. Some time before Paul married Elise, Marcus was expelled from a boarding school, being accused of voyeurism and animal cruelty, but Paul seems aloof to this testimony, doing nothing but to have Marcus examined by a psychiatrist (Lilli Palmer in a very small role). But Smarty-Pants Marcus plays the psychiatrist like a violin, and later uses her to put Elise in her place.

Marcus's first declaration of hostilities is minor, but Elise's warning bells go off. She learns that Marcus has used peep-holes (hence, "the Peeper") to spy on Elise and Paul having sex. But every time Elise tries to make her new husband aware of Marcus's strange habits, Marcus covers things up, and Elise looks stupid. Paul takes Elise to a party at the house formerly owned by himself and his wife, and though Elise thinks of the party-goers as "zombies" (including an old geezer who hits on her), the new owner of the house, a former friend of Sarah, informs Elise of some irregularities about Sarah's death (which is the only "bizarre crime" in the movie, BTW). From then on, it's war between good stepmother and evil stepson, as Elise learns of the boarding school incidents and tries to get Paul to step up his parenting game.

At almost every turn, though, Marcus out-thinks Elise. Though the preteen never displays overt lust, Elise gets sucked into his mind-games and commits a faux pas that Marcus later uses against her, getting the dimwitted psychiatrist to have Elise spend time in some sort of mental hospital. During that time, Elise has intense fantasies about killing Marcus-- smothering him, drowning him-- but also some erotic fantasies, arguing that she's been drawn into Marcus's transgressive mentality to some extent. But just when it seems that she's been defeated, Elise figures out how to strike back, finding a way to make her opponent's juvenile nature his Achilles Heel.

Online reviews of a PEEPER are generally positive about Lester's performance, and not so much about Ekland's. I found Ekland quite as good as Lester if one understands the type of character she's playing, given that she's a bit of a child-bride herself, being closer in age to her stepson than to her husband (as Marcus naturally points out). I will admit that Ekland's repetoire is dominated by "sex kitten" types, but PEEPER is a cut above, right alongside her underrated perf in THE NIGHT THEY RAIDED MINSKY'S. 

ATTACK OF THE 50-FOOT CHEERLEADER (2012)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological*

This Roger Corman production echoes the title of a nineties flick for the same producer's New Horizons label, ATTACK OF THE 60-FOOT CENTERFOLDS. However, while both films are sold on Corman's dependable attractions of T & A, my memory is that CENTERFOLDS had nothing else, while the Michael MacLean script for CHEERLEADER injects some intelligent humor into an undoubtedly silly concept.

Possibly the silliest concept with which CHEERLEADER begins is that main character Cassie (played by beauty queen Jena Sims) is supposed to be an unatttractive science nerd because she dresses badly and wears glasses. College-student Cassie pursues science in the university's laboratory alongside her colleague Kyle (Ryan Merriman), but Cassie's mother (Sean Young) constantly tries to live through her daughter. Because the mother was a cheerleading phenom, she insists that Cassie should do the same. But when Cassie makes an attempt to join both the college's cheer squad and an influential sorority, she's shot down by a mean girl with the rather predictable name of Brittany (Olivia Alexander).

For some reason Cassie and Kyle's project leads to beauty-enhancement in a test animal, so the distraught woman has a Doctor Jekyll moment and uses the beauty-serum on herself. Instantly she's a gorgeous creature to whom every male is attracted, and she likes being the center of attention, particularly when it includes shafting Brittany and joining the squad. But the serum also enlarges its recipients, and soon Cassie is getting literally too big for her britches.

A lot of episodic comedy-bits follow to prop up the latter half of the movie, all pleasing but none memorable (including some contributions from Treat Williams, Mary Woronow and Ted Raimi). Meanwhile Brittany seeks to utilize the beauty-enhancing drug without knowing about the side-effects, and she too gets injected. This leads to a scene in which the two tit-titans clash in the college stadium, for a much livelier catfight than we got in Corman's early big-girl flick.

All ends happily for Cassie and unhappily for Brittany, and Kyle and the other guys just exist to goggle at them, in contrast to the male/female conflicts played out in the original ATTACK OF THE FIFTY-FOOT WOMAN.

DEVIL GODDESS (1955)

 

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

DEVIL GODDESS is the last of the films spawned by the JUNGLE JIM franchise. I say "spawned" because as the JUNGLE JIM series was winding down, producer Sam Katzman's license to use the comic-strip character expired. Rather than renewing the license for the last of these cheapjack jungle-flicks, Katzman simply had actor Johnny Weissmuller play action-hero Johnny Weissmuller, who was in every other way identical to Katzman's Jungle Jim. 

I don't for a moment imagine that anyone making these toss-off cheapies had any sentiment about what they were doing, but GODDESS does have, if only by accident, a couple of "send-off" moments. The first is that its director and writer, Spencer G. Bennett and George Plympton, were two of the best raconteurs of adventure-serials, a form of cinematic entertainment which was doomed, like all of the B-films featuring continuing characters, by the spread of television. The second is that the plot involves characters searching for lost treasures of King Solomon, which is a fortuitous callback to the prose book that essentially jump started the African jungle-adventure, Rider Haggard's KING SOLOMON'S MINES.

All that said, everything in GODDESS is routine at best. Jungle Johnny meets a pretty young woman (Angela Stevens) who ropes him into helping her explorer-father looking for yet another explorer, one Dixon, who is the one seeking the treasures of Solomon. The seekers believe that Dixon has gone missing in the forbidden territory of the Korundi tribe, who sacrifice maidens to their volcano, which doubles as a "fire goddess" (and also the title's "devil goddess," I guess). However, some forgettable White treasure hunters intrude on the Korundis to get at the treasure. This ends up putting Jungle Johnny in between the tribesmen and the hunters, which leads to the film's only half decent fight-scene, when Jungle Johnny slides down the side of a mountain while fighting two tribesmen.

When Jungle Johnny makes it into the volcano where Dixon makes his home, the hero learns that Dixon now thinks that he is some sort of godly immortal, even though he has to use flash-powder tossed on a fire to "disappear." Despite being addled, he's also saved at least two sacrificial maidens from death because he's a Nice White Guy at heart. It takes almost no time for Dixon to remember who he really is, though, just in time for the bad treasure-hunters to be defeated and for all the good people to escape the exploding volcano. Oh, and the last shot of the Jungle Johnny-cum-Jim series is that of Kimba the Comedy Relief Chimp wearing the jewels of the long dead Solomon. Great art it's certainly not, but at least they didn't finish up the series with another of the ape's stupid back-flips.

MISSILE TO THE MOON (1958)

 

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

Before getting into the review proper of this film-- the only one of Richard E. Cunha's SF-cheapies that I hadn't yet analyzed-- I'll note that I watched the 2007 colorized version. The color added a little extra zest to a film that had even less of a budget than the flick it was remaking, 1953's CAT WOMEN OF THE MOON. 

Though I've suffered through a lot of senseless remakes, at least writers H.E Barrie and Vincent Fotre found a way to inject a different angle on the story. The original CAT WOMEN already had various narrative problems, and MISSILE TO THE MOON doesn't appreciably improve on any of these, nor does it tap into the "War Between Men and Women" theme of the first film. In its place, the writers inject a somewhat awkward "good women vs. bad women" motif, in which the male characters are carried along like flotsam.

CAT WOMEN dealt with an all-female civilization of lunarites sending their thought-waves to an Earthwoman in order to get her added to the crew of a moon-rocket. In MISSILE, the all-female society apparently sends its last male, name of Dirk, to Earth to find out if they should emigrate to that planet before their artificial atmosphere runs out. The dialogue suggests that the present crisis on the moon has only been going on for twenty years, solely because the new plot makes it necessary that Dirk's arranged fiancee Alpha (Laurie Mitchell) has to grow from childhood to womanhood while he's gone. 

If your society is worried about survival, it doesn't make much sense to send the last male away, but the script avoids dealing with the specifics of what Dirk did and why he did it. Masquerading as an Earthman for all those years, Dirk manages to partner with another inventor, name of Steve, in order to make their own moon-rocket. However, the government steps in to confiscate the project. Dirk is in a dither to get back, so he hijacks two escaped convicts, Gary and Lon, to help him pilot the ship back to the moon. Partner Steve and his fiancee June accidentally get swept on board the ship, so that as in CAT WOMEN, five space-travelers end up moonbound.

However, one big change is that Dirk perishes on the way, and he calls out to someone called "the Lido" as he dies. With Steve's guidance the survivors manage to land the ship and debark in space-suits. Despite a run-in with some palpably phony "rock-men," they make their way into a cavern that in turn leads to them to the all-female society of the moon.

The aforementioned Lido (K.T. Stevens) is the queen of the moon-people, and because she's blind she seems to initially mistake Steve for her agent Dirk. (Later she tells her servitors that she knew the Earthman's identity all the time and was just sussing him out.) Dirk's fiancee Alpha-- whose name was originally given to the leader of the evil Cat Women-- takes a fancy to Steve while thinking he's Dirk, and doesn't get discouraged even when June jealously breaks the news of Steve's true identity. (June and Alpha even have something the Cat Women never did: a true "cat-fight.") Meanwhile, the arcs of Gary (hardened, greedy crook) and Lon (relatively innocent kid who made a mistake) roughly follow the arcs of Walt and Doug from the earlier film, with Lon even falling for a young innocent named Lambda.

The Lido doesn't have any plans to conquer Earth-- in fact, she's already made plans to evacuate her people to some other unspecified world-- but she like the villain of CAT WOMEN still wants to take over the Earth-ship. As shaky as the CAT WOMEN plot was, this wrinkle makes even less sense, since the Earth-rocket can't accomodate more than five people. However, the Lido doesn't wish harm to the Earth-people, so she and Alpha butt heads when the latter wants to eliminate June and marry Steve. For that matter, the Earthpeople get in trouble when they try to escape the city, and run afoul of the same spider-marionette seen in CAT WOMEN. (FWIW, Cunha does film the spider a little better, so that it might at least scare a five-year-old.) The spider doesn't get the humans but poor Lambda-- who apparently doesn't have any of the mental powers other moon-girls demonstrate-- becomes arachnid-chow.

Alpha can't challenge the Lido's powers, but she manage to shank the queen when her guard is down. In addition to cowing the lesser women, Alpha shows that she, unlike the Cat Women, can easily use her abilities to hypnotize Steve, after which she sentences June to Death By Spider. At this point the script, having dumped Lambda, quickly builds up a secondary nice-girl character, Zeema, who then challenges Alpha. (Wonder if one of the scripters meant to write "Zeta?") Zeema makes possible the Earth-people's escape, though at the cost of her entire civilization when she destroys the atmosphere machine. (Virtue is definitely Zeema's only reward.) Foolish Gary dies in the heat of the moon's surface because he won't give up a cache of diamonds he's found. His death is one of MISSILE'S best scenes, since Gary is easily the film's most annoying characters, though I for one didn't really care when the thoroughly boring survivors made it back to Planet Earth.

CAT WOMEN OF THE MOON (1953)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, psychological, sociological*

This movie rates as a cine-mythic "one-off," in that none of the primary creative contributors ever again came up with anything quite as memorable as this collaboration, the risibly titled CAT WOMEN OF THE MOON. The raconteurs involved in the direction, production, and writing racked up a lot of credits, but most of those credits are remembered only by hardcore period enthusiasts (though one of the writer-producers also had a producer-credit on KRONOS). Said writer-producer Jack Rabin had a long career in the special effects department, which is somewhat ironic given that the extremely paltry FX of CAT WOMEN often cause the film to be ridiculed and thus dismissed.

I'm not overlooking a lot of CAT WOMEN's real failings. Though it's got a fairly detailed script dealing with 1950s sexual politics, the writers frequently throw in "jolts" just to keep things from slowing down too much-- two separate meteor bombardments, a couple of lame looking giant spiders, and a scene where the titular "CatWomen" attack the astronaut-protagonists, even though the assault ought to sabotage their long-range plans. But these sort of narrative glitches don't detract from the main story, yet another take on the War Between Men and Women.

It takes quite a while for the titular femmes fatales to show up on-screen, though the viewer eventually learns that they've got their claws into Earth's lunar expedition from the outset. Of the five astronauts that venture into space, four--  Laird, Kip, Doug, and Walt-- are men who seem to be in some branch of the military, while the lone female, Helen, appears to be a civilian navigator, though she like the others wears regulation khaki garments. Though initially the viewer may be impressed that a woman has made it as an astronaut in a 1950s film, it's later revealed that the Cat Women have manipulated Helen from their hidden refuge on the moon for some years. The moon-girls want Earth's rocket, and the only way they can get it is to have one female aboard as a "sleeper agent." All through the voyage to the moon, Helen evinces strange foreknowledge of the expedition's destination. Eventually she guides the bemused males right into an underground moon-cavern, complete with a breathable atmosphere and hot-and-cold-running Cat Women (so called by Kip, for no explicit reason, unless it's because all seven of the lunarites are sleek and slinky).

The writers devoted a fair amount of attention to the background of the cat-suited aliens. At some point the moon had both an atmosphere and a civilization. But the moon, not unlike the Mars of Edgar Rice Burroughs, began to lose its air. Some survivors were able to seek refuge in a domain with an artificially created atmosphere, but only by eliminating most of the population through genocide. This left the moon inhabited by just seven females-- four without names, while the others decided to use the names of Greek letters, Lambda, Beta and Alpha (Alpha being the leader, of course). Lambda is the youngest, unable to remember what the males of her species looked like-- though there's no knowing how old any of them are in total years, since they all boast phenomenal mind-powers. One may be tempted to wonder if they're immortal, since they didn't seem to worry much about having any males for reproductive purposes. 

Immortal or not, all the Cat Women want to emigrate to Earth and take over the planet by telepathically controlling Earth-females, since for some reason they can't control the minds of men. (Maybe this is another reason for the Cat Women having got rid of the moon-males, as well as the reason Alpha speaks of breeding only "girl children.")  Having used Helen as their "catspaw" (heh) to get the males into their web of sin, the slinky succubi try to wring the secrets of operating the rocket out of them. (They never really explain the reason for their abortive physical attack on the guys, but Kip in particular never trusts the moon-maidens.) Walt proves the weakest link, in that Beta gets the info she needs from greedy, gold-mad Walt and then kills him. Doug and Lambda fall in love, but they're not fated to settle down and raise moon-kittens, for Lambda is slain as a traitor to the Space-Amazon cause. In the none too exciting climax, Kip manages to shoot Alpha and Beta before they can board the ship with their thrall Helen, and the surviving astronauts return to Earth, implicitly leaving the four unnamed Cat Women to their doleful fate.

In order to explicate the mythicity of the Cat Women, I leaped over the three audience-identification characters who are also comprise one of Hollywood's favorite tropes, the romance-triangle. In one respect, the narrative comes close to being an older man/younger man/younger woman trope, in that Helen at first seems to be interested in the experienced expedition leader Lord (I mean Laird) but was actually manipulated to pursue him by those mean Cat Women. Her true interest is the more dynamic Kip, and all this does sound like the Oedipal struggle-- except that the actor playing Kip, Victor Jory, was actually older than the Laird-player, Sonny Tufts. For that matter, Marie Windsor, who played Helen, was no spring chicken either, being in her middle thirties. 

Still, though neither Laird nor Kip is particularly appealing as a romantic icon, Kip is the quintessential manly male. At one point he becomes so frustrated by Helen's divided loyalties that he seizes her roughly-- which is just enough male-on-female contact to briefly dispel the mental thralldom of the Cat Women. However, Kip like the other males is too dim to realize what's going on, and Helen becomes a catspaw again, manipulating Laird and Kip against one another and (as noted above) almost helping the main two moon-cats to abscond with the rocket. Still, even if Kip and Helen aren't the ideal romantic couple, there's more sexual tension than in the average male-female pairing in 1950s science fiction films, and so CAT WOMEN provides a nice variation on the "men vs. women" theme.

AENIGMA (1988)

 

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

Director/co-writer Lucio Fulci was refreshingly honest about stating publicly that he'd derived AENIGMA from the template of Stephen King's CARRIE (albeit channeled through Brian De Palma). Ironically, had he devoted more attention to fleshing out the characters in one way or another, AENIGMA might have given DePalma a run for his money.

To date the only Fulci I've reviewed here was the 1971 LIZARD IN A WOMAN'S SKIN, which I downgraded as a bad imitation of Dario Argento's giallos. But the plot of AENIGMA is considerably tighter and the various death-scenarios are at least on a par with the best of Argento.

AENIGMA opens after the fashion of many contemporaneous stalkers, by showing the event that makes the film's monster. Kathy Wise, an ugly duckling at a Boston girls' school, gets mousetrapped when her macho gym teacher invites her to neck with him in a parked car. The gym-rat has arranged with a bunch of mean girls and their boyfriends to let them listen in on Kathy's passionate mewlings, until the mean girls lower the boom and reveal their presence. Kathy runs, gets hit by a car, and ends up in a hospital, stuck in a coma.

Only Kathy's mind is still able to range forth from her hospital-bed, and she somehow possesses a young student, Eva Gordon, who then enrolls in the same Boston school. Almost immediately the mean girls take a dislike to Eva as well, but it's Kathy who's in control, and Kathy begins knocking off each of her earlier tormentors one at a time, designing bizarre quasi-magical deaths for each of them. The scenario in which one girl is smothered in snails is the one I used above. However, my favorite has a girl get stuck in a museum, where she's terrorized by statues that slowly start coming alive. (Given that the film was shot in Sarajevo by an Italian director, it's interesting to see a victim essentially killed off by incarnations of history.) All this goes on while the only person who seems to suspect some weirdness is Kathy's mother, a custodian at the school.

Fulci supplies a weak "detective" of sorts in Robert Anderson (token American actor Jared Martin), a doctor at Kathy's hospital. Anderson notices that Kathy has some odd reactions that he eventually correlates with Eva's activities on campus-- I forget exactly how he pieces things together-- but in any case he ends up checking out the school. He meets Eva and they begin dating, but Anderson gets rather turned off when he dreams of Eva turning into a demoness who tries to savage him with her teeth. He then deserts Eva and takes up with Jenny, the only one of the mean girls who regrets her past actions. For the first time Eva-- who has up to this point been a passive pawn of Kathy's-- becomes jealous, and though she's sent home for having freaked out, she returns to school, mad for vengeance against both Jenny and Anderson. But at the last moment, Kathy's mother takes action and ends her daughter's rampage.

One big change from the CARRIE template is that both Kathy and Eva seem to have a thing for older men. In the King novel and the DePalma adaptation, Carrie grows up without her father in the picture-- he deserts at some point, and I'm not sure she ever lays eyes on him-- but Carrie is entirely uninterested in any males not in her own age-range. Fulci stresses Kathy's Electra-style situation in such a way that strains credulity-- why would an adult gym teacher conspire with a bunch of students for a prank?-- but the director keeps the motif going by having both Eva and Jenny date Anderson, putting both of them in Electra-territory as well. I don't think Fulci elaborates this motif to any significant discourse, but it added a little spice to the grue, so to speak.