THE X-FILES: FIGHT THE FUTURE (1998)

 

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

One reviewer complained that the feature-film debut of the popular X-FILES telseries needed "Cliff's Notes." In contrast, I tend to complain that the story scripted by the series' creator/producer Chris Carter was, in effect, a Cliff's Notes version of the show. Like the famed summarization franchise, FIGHT THE FUTURE (a subtitle I'll use to avoid confusion with the TV show) boils down the essence of the ongoing series for ease of consumption.

I was never a huge X-FILES fan. I found some episodes superior, but I was never greatly invested in what the creators called the show's "mythology" or in the "will they won't they" dynamic between male FBI agent Mulder (David Duchovny) and female agent Scully (Gillian Anderson). The dominant arc of the show was that Agent Mulder, who at age 12 witnessed ETs kidnapping his sister, would attempt to unravel the mysteries of aliens on Earth and their covert interactions with human governments. The FBI assigned the rationalistic Scully to team with loose-cannon Mulder in investigating "X-Files," stories with possible paranormal associations. Though the viewer of the show is never in serious doubt as to the truth of Mulder's conspiracy theories, the duo are never able to gather conclusive evidence either of aliens or any other phenomena they investigate, be it Yetis, vampires, or metamorphic mutants.

The FUTURE being fought here is a scheme by unidentified aliens-- who may or may not be tied to the ones Mulder usually pursues-- to unleash a virus upon Earth. Indeed, the virus is implanted on Earth in primitive times, and first infects a prehistoric human. The bug remains dormant for centuries, until certain 20th-century officials form a contract with the aliens. The plan is to engender a plague that will possibly turn all of humanity into receptacles for alien habitation.

Carter's workmanlike script covers all of the usual beats of the series: the revelation of the weird phenomenon, the agents' pursuit of the strange thing amid temptations to make their relationship more than business, and then the government's cover-up, implicitly by officials who were not part of the conspiracy but who find it expedient to conceal the truth from the public. Carter's script strains to find ways to lend cinematic grandeur to a rather simple alien-plague narrative, but I don't think it would have worked even if he'd been teamed with a director with any sense of visual style. Rob (ELEKTRA) Bowman did most of his work in TV, and his idea of grandeur is having the camera pull back for a lot of capacious long-shots. 

Still, Duchovny and Anderson's chemistry is good, and may be the main thing that earned decent box office for FUTURE, which probably made possible  a second and final X-sequel ten years later.

THE SHADOW OF THE BAT (1968)

 

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

One might think that rewriting "The Phantom of the Opera" for lucha-wrestlers could only succeed as a "so bad it's good" notion. But no, it's actually a fine little pulp thriller with a delirious sense of pulp-poetry about it. As with many similar films, the poetry would seem to have no real "auteur" behind it. Of the two writers, the appositely named Jesus "Murcielago" Velasquez also contributed to the above-average WORLD OF THE VAMPIRES, while Luis Vergara, also a producer on several Santo and Blue Demon films, is somewhat infamous for his participation in a quartet of cheapjack Boris Karloff films of the late 1960s. Director Federico Curiel directed various other luchadore films, and I've not seen all of them, though so far THE CHAMPIONS OF JUSTICE has been his best outing.

This was the third feature film devoted to the exploits of the masked wrestler Blue Demon, still today the second-best known luchador next to El Santo. If the hero had any ongoing mythology, one wouldn't know it from this film; he's practically a placeholder next to the much richer portrait of his opponent The Bat.

Like the Phantom of the Opera, The Bat (Fernando Oses) is hideously deformed beneath the mask he usually wears, though the Bat's facial scars resulted from a wrestling-accident. Despite the fact that lucha-wrestlers might theoretically practice their professions all their lives while masked, the Bat (which was also his wrestling-cognomen) is hugely traumatized, and the wrestling-world thinks that he went mad in some foreign country. Instead, he's deep beneath some Mexican catacombs near a major city, where he lives with a handful of servants who serve his will. From time to time the mad masked man sends his servants-- particularly the hulking Gerardo (Gerardo Zepeda of PANTHER WOMEN fame)-- out to find other men whom the Bat can wrestle with in his private underground ring. After the villain wins each match, as he always does, he instructs Gerardo to free the victims in the city, though for his own reasons Gerardo always kills the innocents. Oddly, the one time the Bat learns of one such homicide, he punishes Gerardo. "Wrestling is not murder," he opines, finding that the sport itself must be holy since it's mentioned in the Biblical narrative of Jacob and the angel.

So the Bat is not devoted to music as the Phantom is, though he does play a piano to anneal his lonely seclusion. Then he chances to hear the musical stylings of a singer named Marta (Marta Romero), and he sends his men to kidnap her, which immediately rings in a strong likeness to the Phantom. Late in the movie we find out that the Bat keeps a cell-full of female prisoners whom he kidnapped to be his love-objects, and who implicitly are in prison because they wouldn't be his bat-bride. Before that revelation, though, as soon as the villain has Marta in his clutches, he importunes her as if her consent is the only thing that can save his tortured soul. However, at no point does propinquity make the terrified girl more sympathetic to El Murcielago. 

For that matter, the Bat is not above trying to persuade his desired bride through occult means. Two separate scenes descant on a mysterious root called "Androma" in the subtitles, though from the folklore surrounding the herb, the plant referenced is the mandrake, which did have "love potion" associations. The Bat talks about using it to brainwash Marta, though he never does so, though he seems obsessed with the plant's root, which is shown to look like a woman's body. During Blue Demon's quest for the missing singer, he finds a fragment of mandrake, and seeks to discover where it came from. This detective thread leads to a very weird scene in which the hero seeks out a weird old witch-woman (Enriqueta Reza). However, though the witch shows Blue Demon some visions in her cauldron, she refuses to reveal where mandrake grows, and the luchador has to find the villain by other means.

SHADOW never stints on the action scenes, and the climactic battle of the Bat and the Demon earns high marks. But the film's highlight is the villain's bizarre fixation on both his physical appearance and on the sport of wrestling-- the one used for seducing women, the other for conquering male opponents. As with SANTO IN THE WAX MUSEUM, the weird psychology of the villain is the main thing that makes this a high-mythicity movie, though the strange allusions to mandrake-mythology provide a pleasing side-effect.

BLUE THUNDER (1983)

 

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

Not until 2014's CAPTAIN AMERICA THE WINTER SOLDIER would the world see a movie that tried so hard to mitigate use a Liberal political stance to justify throwing the spotlight on the destructive power of a huge piece of law enforcement ordnance.

Frank Murphy (Roy Scheider) piloted helicopter rescue missions in Vietnam and now flies a police chopper in Los Angeles. The taciturn Murphy, who doesn't appear to play well with others, is partnered with a chatty fellow named Lymangood, apparently just to draw him out of his shell. The two witness a murder in the streets of LA but are unable to convince their superior of the murder's importance. (They also spy on a sexy girl doing yoga poses, just to make them both relatable.) The murder never really becomes a major plotline in THUNDER, but it helps establish that there's a lot of civilian criticism of police overreach, though all of the cops are good guys.

The bad guys are agents of the federal government, who are developing the technology of the super-helicopter "Blue Thunder" for use against civil disobedience and political undesirables. Murphy is tapped to fly Blue Thunder as part of a test of the ordnance in use for purposes of crowd control, though the association with the LAPD is merely the spooks' cover for their activities. The agents belatedly learn from their other pilot Cochrane (Malcolm McDowell) that Murphy may be more trouble than he's worth.

Given that Cochrane warns the agents, you would think they'd take ample precautions to conceal their agenda. But what we get is Hardy Boys 101, as Murphy and Lymangood ferret out the covert plans for Blue Thunder with ridiculous ease. Murphy then makes it his mission to expose the dirty dealings to the press. To that end he uses Blue Thunder to wage a one-man war against conventional cops before he ends up in an aerial dogfight with his old enemy Cochrane.

THUNDER is okay eighties action-fodder but often proves a little on the slow side for modern tastes, and it's certainly one of the lesser accomplishments of co-writer Dan O'Bannon. Rude though it may be, I think the movie's best legacy is having inspired the TV show AIRWOLF, whose super-helicopter was way cooler.

SUPERMAN RETURNS (2006)

 

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

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

Not having seen SUPERMAN RETURNS since its theatrical premiere, I wanted to like it. By chance its 2006 appearance was sandwiched between the two best fantasy-films in Singer's directorial repertoire, 2003's X2 and 2013's JACK THE GIANT SLAYER. Singer passed on directing the third X-film in order to do RETURNS, and ended up helming SLAYER when a sequel to the under-performing RETURNS did not materialize. 

I recognized on my first viewing what many other viewers did; that the movie was too intent on duplicating the appeal of Richard Donner's two SUPERMAN films. The most noticeable element was certainly the master plan of Lex Luthor (Kevin Spacey), who again showed aspirations to being a "land baron," which was a lame scheme to begin with and was no better the second time around. 

I did not know on that first viewing, though, that some elements of RETURNS were almost certainly set up to buttress that sequel that never arrived. At the end of RETURNS Superman flings Luthor's artificial island into space. In the hypothetical second film, this would have attracted the attention of a being who is at least believed to be a Kryptonian. Had this contingency been realized, Singer's two Super-films would have displayed two levels of consciously planned symmetry. On the first level, the second film would have allowed the hero to meet a possible Kryptonian (who was actually going to be Brainiac), one of the people Superman went searching for prior to the action of RETURNS. On the other level, Singer's two films would have emulated the template of Donner's two films, where the first is focused upon Superman's effect on humanity and the second on his renunciation of the cruel nature of three surviving Kryptonians.

All that background explains some of Singer's creative choices. But of course we only have one Super-film by Singer, and it has to be judged on its own terms.

Since Singer had chosen to position RETURNS as his sequel to the two Donner films, the only way Singer could duplicate the effect of Superman's advent on Earth was essentially to have the hero go away and come back. So prior to the film, Superman (Brandon Routh) decided five years ago to investigate astronomers' reckoning of Krypton's former location, and he simply left Earth without telling anyone except his widowed mother Martha Kent (Eva Marie Saint) about his mission. In particular, he didn't broach the subject of his leavetaking with Lois Lane, who is presumably not discontinuous with the Lois he made love to in SUPERMAN II. (Presumably she does not remember the lovemaking because of the memory-wiping kiss at the end of SUPERMAN II, though this creates more problems than it solves.) 

In the comics it was a familiar trope for Superman to hunger after knowledge of the world he'd lost, but that hunger is not much more than a pang in the Donner films. As early as possible in the film, Singer and his writers needed to make the hero's passion for his past seem real, important enough to put aside his desire to protect his adopted world. But when Superman returns to the Kent farmland, he crashes a crystalline ship (implicitly built for him by the Fortress of Solitude computers) and receives succor from Martha. (A deleted scene showed the hero on the barren surface of long-dead Krypton.) The conversation between Martha and her son is crucial to convince the viewer that Superman had good reason for his junket-- and the scripters utterly blow the moment. (Singer even portentously delays the conversation with an irrelevant flashback to Clark Kent's youth, when he was first testing his powers-- one of the more tedious Donner quotations.) The Clark-Martha conversation includes a line in which Martha suggests that the mission's failure doesn't absolutely prove that her son is the last Kryptonian, which looks more and more like setup for the hypothetical next film.

Luthor, meanwhile, has been freed from prison after the same five years of Superman's absence, which freedom is blamed on Superman's unavailability to testify. (So there wasn't enough evidence of the two missiles and their point of origin, to keep the arch-fiend locked away?) Apparently drawing on memories of his earlier trip to the Fortress (his hench-girl Kitty remarks that he seems to have been there before), Luthor  and his entourage find their way to the Arctic fortress. He learns everything he wants to know from the incredibly cooperative Fortress A.I. (voiced by the late Marlon Brando). His first experiment with these new powers causes chaos throughout Metropolis, and almost causes the crash of two aircraft, one of which is carrying-- Lois Lane (Kate Bosworth).

I'll hop over the hero's rescue of the planes (Singer, trying to top the helicopter rescue-scene from the 1978 Donner film) to the big change in the Lois-Clark-Superman triangle. Clark is no longer part of the picture-- indeed, Lois barely acknowledges their former friendship when Clark returns to the Daily Planet. Further, Lois had two new males in her life, her son Jason (Tristan Lake) and a long-term boyfriend, Richard White (James Marsden). Jason calls Richard "daddy," although Lois and Richard are not married, so of course Clark jumps to the obvious conclusion. 

By the movie's end Lois finally has reason to believe that Jason may actually be the by-blow of her night with Superman, though up to that point she may think Jason might be Richard's offspring. But for that to be credible, then Superman must have left Earth shortly after the events of SUPERMAN II, and Lois must have been seduced by Richard before she was "showing." The script is also inconsistent on how much Lois remembers of her romance with Superman, though one must take for granted that the "memory-wiping kiss" took away her recollections of the hero's double identity. 

And this brings me to the movie's second big problem. If viewers don't get a clear sense of what Lois remembers about Superman, how can they gauge what Lois feels about his long absence and his sudden return? Bosworth plays Lois's feelings as ambiguously as possible; clearly she has some feeling for the hero but she's managed to paper it over. I guess since she doesn't remember sleeping with Superman, and since initially she has no evidence that her somewhat sickly kid has super-powers, one must assume that she never really questions her kid's paternity by Richard. But it's still kind of an emotional mess, and Superman's sole rationale for not broaching his mission to Lois-- that saying goodbye was "too difficult"-- seems like nothing but a scripter's contrivance.

Oddly, the one thing Singer gets right about Lois is her bulldog tenacity. She actually advances the plot more than the hero does, stubbornly investigating the puzzle of the power failure, until she and Jason cross paths with Luthor and his gang. If it weren't for Lois's snooping, Superman presumably would have been too busy pulling cats out of trees to monitor Luthor's activities.

As Singer himself later admitted, RETURNS is short on bracing action-scenes, which may have contributed to its box office under-performance. Even before detaining Lois and Jason, Luthor anticipates Kryptonian interference and uses a stash of a certain green rock to render the hero helpless. This leads to an overlong scene of Luthor and his hoods beating on the Man of Steel and consigning him to the ocean. Here too, Lois literally comes to the hero's rescue, and her intervention makes it possible for him to save Earth from the villain's crystal-created artificial island.

Though some critics thought that Singer was following some of the Christ-parallels of the Donner films, most of these are very generic. After Lois tells the hero that the world doesn't need a savior, he responds that "every day I hear people crying for one." This sentiment is not borne out by the script, except at the ending when Superman exhausts himself expelling the island and almost perishes, thus bringing forth world-wide grief and near-mourning. RETURNS doesn't really engage with Superman as a soteriological figure, being too concerned with melodramatic moments-- most of which don't work because the character's relationships are badly defined. Luthor doesn't do any better with his myth-reference, comparing himself to Prometheus in stealing "fire from the gods," when of course he's closer to Zeus, using that fire to tyrannize mortals.

Routh and Bosworth are good despite their underwritten roles. Spacey delivers a decent Luthor who succeeds at being less comic than the Donner version, though the script fails to capture the villain's conceit and self-justifications. Parker Posey, whose Kitty riffs on the Eve Teschmacher character from Donner, is actually a little more fleshed out than the original model. Posey certainly scores a few more decent acting-moments than either Frank Langella or Sam Huntington, whose Perry White and Jimmy Olsen are just there to fill spaces. Noel Neill and Jack Larson from THE ADVENTURES OF SUPERMAN are given adequate cameo roles.

Though Singer got a good number of things wrong with the X-MEN franchise, in his first two X-movies he showed a much better capacity for producing snappy, amusing moments of action and melodrama. In contrast, SUPERMAN RETURNS is a grab-bag of ideas that mostly misfire. The film's perceived box-office shortfall, particularly coming on the heels of the more successful BATMAN BEGINS of the previous year, provides one of many examples of the Cowled Crusader's tendency to exceed his caped predecessor in the pop culture wars.

ADDENDUM: Some additional meditations in response to an online post:

here's a possible save that I don't think the RETURNS writers considered. So at some point before Lois starts having symptoms of pregnancy, Superman gets a bug up his rear about finding out if Krypton is really quite sincerely dead. So he leaves, unable to broach the matter to Lois, since he does remember what she meant to him. THEN-- as she begins realizing that she has someone's bun in her oven, the hypnotic conditioning breaks down-- just enough that she knows she did the deed with Superman, but nothing else. If THAT was the case, she wouldn't have to meet Richard during those nine months and to be deluded that he might be the real father. She might go through tons of doubts about what kind of super-spawn she'd conceive. Then she gives birth to a kid who seems human in every way, and by five years' age, he actually seems a rather sickly kid. 

So maybe she thinks, "Okay, Kryptonian super-gene was recessive, so I've got a normal kid." However, her having partial memory would put a new spin on her line to Jason in Jason's first scene, that he wants to "grow up strong like his daddy." That could have a double meaning for Lois but not for Jason. The boy seems to regard Richard as his dad, and even though Richard and Lois aren't married that may not register on his kid-mind, as long as they're living together like a regular mom and dad. I honestly could not tell if they were or not, by the one scene where the three of them are having dinner at someone's apartment with Jimmy. That's the scene where Lois sneaks to the rooftop, has an extended dialogue with Superman, goes back to the apartment and is quizzed by Richard about whether she snuck off for a cigarette break. My initial impression was that Lois and Richard did live together but I need to look at the scene again. (Correction: the eating-scene is at the Planet, so it proves nothing about the co-habitation arrangements of Lois and Richard. However, it was pointed out to me that in the infamous "X-ray vision" scene, Superman scans Lois's house, and not only is Richard there, his plane is docked nearby, so clearly Jason regards Richard as his dad because he lives with Jason and Lois.)

I still think Bosworth's Lois doesn't act like a woman who got left by a "deadbeat dad," or even a "love em and leave em Kryptonian," but that's possibly not the actor's fault. 

JACK THE GIANT SLAYER (2013)

 

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

A minor point: kudos to the unknown Warner Brothers executive who decided not to call this film JACK THE GIANT KILLER, thus creating needless confusion with the 1960s movie of that title. Additionally, the elision of references to the British "Giant Killer" folktales is appropriate because SLAYER is a heroic reworking of the more familiar "Jack and the Beanstalk" fable.

The only previous time I watched this Bryan Singer film, I thought of it as just another big-budget action-epic. But on re-examination I see several interesting complexities in the script, originally submitted by Darren Lemke and reportedly finessed by Christopher McQuarrie, a writer who had collaborated with Singer three previous times before SLAYER. In contrast to many scripts based on fairy tales, the Lemke-McQuarrie narrative takes loose folktale motifs and builds on them with an almost Tolkienian methodology.

A prologue establishes that the famous "beans" of the beanstalk-tale weren't just some throwaway magical dingus with no history. Instead, ancient mystics in the kingdom of Cloister (not the best name) wanted to bring forth titanic beanstalks in order to ascend to Heaven. But between Heaven and Earth was the cloudy domain of Gantua (yeah, another bad name), which is inhabited by nothing but ugly male giants. When the monk-created beanstalks reach Gantua, the giants use the stalks to descend to Earth and to begin a reign of terror, eating people and stealing their treasure (though the latter crime never becomes a big element in the film). King Eirik orders his magicians to create a mystic crown that can bind the giants and force them to return to Gantua, and once the beanstalks are cut down, the giants can no longer "fee fi foh fum" over the blood of Englishmen. However, over strange aeons the crown is lost to humans.

But certain beans survive, even several generations later, when Eirik's descendant King Brahmwell (Ian MacShane) rules Cloister. Brahwell plans to marry his restless daughter Isabelle (Eleanor Tomlinson) off to a local lord, Roderick (Stanley Tucci). By chance farm-boy Jack (Nicholas Hoult) has a meet-cute with Isabelle, but in the end Jack has to trudge back to his farmhouse, though he's gained some magical beans in a trade. Jack's only relative, a cranky uncle, tosses them away, though this time the legumes end up under the floorboards of the farmhouse.

Restless Isabelle ends up at Jack's house, just wanting to talk to another young guy before she's off the market. A rainstorm activates the beans, and a mammoth beanstalk erupts from the earth, carrying the whole house (without Jack in it) up to the kingdom of Gantua. Isabelle is duly captured by the giants, though she wanders away from the site of the beanstalk, so that the titans don't know precisely where it links up with their realm. When the king finds out about his daughter's fate, he sends a group of knights up the stalk, led by Elmont (Ewan McGregor) and Lord Roderick. Jack is allowed to go along. But Brahmwell knows that he can't leave the beanstalk in place very long, lest the giants repeat their earlier invasion.

Thus Jack's trip to the giant's world is never about plundering treasure-troves, but about the joint task of rescuing the king's daughter and then severing the connection between giant and human domains. Despite his humble nature Jack proves himself a hero, though I'd call him the "deathblow" type because. being dwarfed by the colossi, he can't fight the giants directly and instead must find vulnerable points to strike at. His single-handed slaying of a giant cook, who's preparing to make Elmont into a hors d'oeuvres, is a strong heroic scene, though not the only one. The mission is complicated by the fact that Roderick, the dastard who plans to marry fair Isabelle, has possession of the lost mystic crown. For a time Roderick takes control of the giants, planning to descend with them and to take control of the entire world, no matter how many people get eaten. Roderick isn't a great villain, but he does supply secondary hero Elmont someone to kill, though.

Despite all human efforts, a horde of giants are able to invade Earth and to attack the castle of Brahmwell. In contrast with the majority of FX-blockbusters, the script for SLAYER is scrupulous about what the villains can do, so that the colossi don't simply pull useful powers out of nowhere. The attack on the castle is pleasingly bloody and Jack's final encounter with the giants' general ends up giving him the means to defeat the horde and to secure his relationship with Isabelle.

A lot of folktales depict valiant commoners getting the chance to marry royal princesses, but the script for SLAYER gives the fantasy a bit more groundedness, thanks to a development by which Jack does become a sort of "ruler." There's not much McGregor and Tucci can do with their simple "hero" and "villain" roles respectively.But there's a nice chemistry not just between Hoult and Tomlinson, but between each of them and Eleanor's father. The giants, produced in part through motion-capture, are consistently grotesque and are at their best whenever they're expressing their fervent desires to chow down on human beings. Bill Nighy voices the dominant cranium of the two-headed titan Fallon, and on the whole I'd have to say that I've never seen another fantasy-film translate the fear-appeal of giants as well as SLAYER does. Unfortunately, the film experienced bad box office, and Bryan Singer's spirited contribution to the genre of archaic fantasy-films has been largely overlooked.

POTC: DEAD MEN TELL NO TALES (2017)

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

When I reviewed the 2011 installment in the adventures of Jack Sparrow, I hoped it would mark the end of the series. Now that I've seen the 2017 film, I admit that it makes a better finish to the series than ON STRANGER TIDES. But I'd still like this to be the last one for, say, the next decade.

The main idea behind TALES is essentially the game of "pair up the offspring of different families," which may seem a little dicey even the families have no blood relation between them. One offspring's participation is logical enough given the status of familiar support-character Will Turner (Orlando Bloom) at the end of the second sequel. He's been stuck piloting the Flying Dutchman for the last twenty-two years, but at last his son Henry (Brenton Thwaites) has figured out a way to free Will from durance vile. All Henry needs to do is to find Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp), whose erratic but extensive knowledge of maritime metaphysics can guide Henry to the fabled Trident of Poseidon, which can dispel all curses. 

Jack, as usual, is about to be hanged for piracy, and eventually he has some company in the form of Carina Smith (Kaya Scodelario). Carina is an earnest young woman far ahead of her time, in that she's become a master astronomer, though the ignorant people of the era all think she's a witch. Carina is an orphan brought up with only fragmentary memories of a father, and she thinks she can find her unknown progenitor if she follows certain clues in her father's diary-- clues that can also take her, Henry and Jack to the location of the mystic Trident. 

Prior to Jack and his prisoners/allies escaping the hangman's noose, Jack makes his usual bone-headed cock-up: he gives away a magical doodad, the "compass." This releases a horde of malignant ghosts whom Jack imprisoned in the Devil's Triangle, and their leader Salazar begins his jeremiad to catch and kill Jack Sparrow. On his way, Salazar and his zombies overtake Jack's friendly enemy Captain Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush) and they enlist Barbossa in their cause.

Jack is loosely motivated both to look for treasure and to save his hide, but emotionally he plays second fiddle to the young lovers. It's an okay romance, nothing more, though I appreciate that Carina isn't one of the many superficial tough-girls seen in action-films, since this would contrast with her intellectual nature. As for what "family" she belongs to, there are only two potential candidates in the movie to be the missing daddy, and evil Salazar is not the right choice. The revelation of Barbossa's past indiscretions isn't handled very well and there's not a satisfactory pay-off at the climax.

Depp does his usual hijinks, and some of them are kind of fun, especially a bit with his uncle, played by Paul McCartney. There are some OK FX-scenes, but no memorable sword-battles this time. I give away no surprises by stating that Will Turner is released from his curse, and even has a brief reunion with a non-speaking Keira Knightley. It's just a so-so movie but it will rise in my estimation if it's the conclusion of the series.

BLACK ADAM (2022)

 

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

Close to the end of BLACK ADAM, the actors playing superhero Hawkman (Aldis Hodge) and archaeologist Adrianna Tomaz (Sarah Shahi) get to utter two of the stupidest lines ever written for a superhero film.

HAWKMAN: "The kind of justice you [Black Adam] dish out can darken your soul."

ADRIANNA: "It's his darkness that lets him do what heroes like you cannot."

Now, some exchange like this might make sense if the preceding movie had incarnated the "rough justice" of,say, Marvel's Punisher, whose 1989 movie sports the tagline "If society won't punish the guilty, he will." But BLACK ADAM constantly vacillates between championing rough justice and advocating the more nuanced crime-fighting approach of the "heroes" Adrianna criticizes, the Justice Society, or at least the four members of the Society seen in this movie. Director Jaume Collet-Serra and his three writers want to have it both ways. They want audiences to cheer when Adam and the JSA join forces against a common enemy that endangers the whole Earth, as would be the case in a normative superhero film. But they also want to "virtue signal" by implying that the script has made some incisive sociopolitical critique of superheroes. I might not think the 2018 BLACK PANTHER is a good film, but at least the whole film is utterly straightforward in its devotion to crafting a sociopolitical message.

Some background: in the comics Black Adam first appeared in one Golden Age comic, MARVEL FAMILY #1 (1945). He started as an Egyptian named Teth-Adam, and the wizard Shazam endowed him with the power to fight evil. Teth-Adam promptly made himself Pharaoh, at which point Shazam renamed him "Black Adam" to denote his evil nature, and then banished him from Earth. After battling the Marvel Family in that story, he was not revived until DC Comics acquired the characters of their former comics-rival Fawcett and began re-publishing the original Captain Marvel and other Fawcett properties. In the 1980s all the Fawcett characters joined the DC mainstream and Black Adam was revised. He was no longer a scion of ancient Egypt, but of a fictional Middle Eastern country, Kandahq, and in due time he becomes a more ambivalent figure, with aspects of both heroism and villainy. The film takes elements from a 2004 comics-continuity, BLACK REIGN, in which Adam, who briefly served in the Justice Society, decided to overthrow the native rulers of Kandahq with a handful of allies-- one of whom is the hero "Atom Smasher." This provokes other members of the Society to attack Adam and his allies to keep them from invading neighboring countries. The story ends with Adam and the JSA forging a peace agreement based on the understanding that Adam will not venture beyond Kandahq's borders.

The movie ADAM essentially blends elements of the character's origin with the main plot of REIGN. Teth-Adam is still born in ancient Kandahq. At the time the reigning tyrant Ahk-Ton seeks to make his power insuperable by forging a magical talisman, the Crown of Sabbac. Ahk-Ton's reign is destroyed and the Crown of Sabbac is lost. Modern-day archaeologist Adrianna has only a sketchy idea of a powerful hero who defeated Ahk-ton, but her primary goal is locate the Crown. She hopes to use its power to oust a foreign occupying force from control of Kandahq, but the foreign tyrants, known only as "Intergang," also want the Crown, and they suborn one of her assistants, Ishmael, into betraying Adrianna's quest. Cornered by Intergang soldiers, Adrianna reads an ancient incantation and releases from 5,000 years of slumber Teth-Adam (Dwayne Johnson). Because the reborn Adam displays the same powers as modern-day Shazam-- super-strength, invulnerability, and magical lightning-- Adrianna and her superhero-happy son Amon assume that Teth-Adam is the ancient hero who fought Ahk-ton. Adrianna also gets hold of the Crown of Sabbac, but her primary purpose is not to use it, but to keep it out of the hands of Intergang and the traitor Ishmael.

Before proceeding to the second act, I have to note that there's no intrinsic reason for the evil current rulers of Kandahq to be outsiders. In BLACK REIGN Adam and his allies overthrow an evil local ruler, but I suspect the writers of ADAM wanted to make some loose critique of colonialism. But the script does not provide even a rough history of how these invaders-- given the name of a criminal organization in various DC comics-- insinuated themselves into power. This should be an important plot-point, because in various speeches Adrianna slams the Justice Society for not having ousted Intergang's corrupt regime. Yet if they're only a criminal gang as in the comics, there's no reason the Society would not have done so. The only way that U.S.-based heroes would have withheld their powers from intervention would be if Intergang had an alliance with some hypothetical Second-World or Third-World power. But the writers clearly hoped that audiences would ignore sociopolitical realities and simply cheer mindlessly when the reborn Adam started killing off Intergang soldiers.

The film then diverges into two plotlines. Amon, who is a fan of American superheroes and wants Kandahq to have its own champion, tries to convince Adam to be that hero. Since the ancient Kandahqian seems to be utterly remorseless and bereft of affect, Amon has only minimal success. However, four members of the Justice Society are sent into the country to overpower Adam, who for vague reasons is perceived as a cosmic threat to humanity. Said heroes are Hawkman, Doctor Fate (Pierce Brosnan), Atom Smasher (Noah Centineo), and Cyclone (Quintessa Swindell). As noted above, Atom Smasher was in BLACK REIGN as one of Black Adam's allies. I believe Cyclone is an original creation of the movie, though since she sports the surname "Hunkel," she's implicitly related to "Ma Hunkel," the Original Red Tornado from the comics, a spoofy costumed character who crossed paths with the JSA once or twice.

I can't complain that the movie doesn't have a lot of wild fight-scenes, though since the movie flopped at the box office, it would appear that this attraction wasn't enough to make viewers pony up, any more than they cared about seeing Johnson step outside his usual role as "the musclebound teddy bear." But everything in between the fights is pedestrian. Adrianna and the JSA have their respective agendas and they remain tied to them, while Adam is something of a bone over which they contend, even while playing a parallel game of "crown, crown, who's got the crown." Eventually Ishmael is able to acquire the Crown and call upon the power of Sabbac, transforming himself into a red-devil monster and almost defeating all the heroes (as well as killing one of them in a blatantly telegraphed plot-point). The movie does end roughly in the same manner as the graphic novel, with Adam remaining confined to the borders of Kandahq (though not as the country's ruler) and the fate of the Intergang soldiers left up in the air (unless the movie meant to suggest that Adam killed them all).

Johnson was attached to the role of Black Adam as far back as 2014, though possibly the original concept was to have him fight the Original Captain Marvel. This plodding concoction doesn't really justify whatever suspense it created, though admittedly Johnson, Hodge and Brosnan all look pretty good incarnating their respective roles. The plot's "big reveal" is the truth of Adam's relatedness to Kandahq's ancient hero, but the script fails to give this development any emotional tonality. Adrianna, Amon and Adrianna's comedy-relief brother Karim are all just functions of the plot with no charm of their own, and the eleventh-hour revelation that Ishmael is the descendant of Ahk-Ton is a pathetic excuse for a "secondary reveal." I assume the majority of Justice League characters were put off limits by other projects, though I guess Superman gets a cameo since he didn't have any irons in the fire. A couple of SUICIDE SQUAD characters are needlessly interpolated and serve only to make the JSA look compromised by nebulous political influences.

PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE (1959)

 

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

I meditated on the best way to open a review of PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE without falling into the usual cliches, and came up with this quote from one of my other reviews:

Modern-day Earthman Francis Melchior (note the Biblically inspired name) runs an antiques shop and spends all his free time star-gazing. He holds an enduring fascination with two seemingly contradictory spectacles: those that are "steeped in the mortuary shadows of dead ages," and those that suggest "the transcendent glories of other aeons." Smith incisively notes that these desires are both rooted in Melchior's distaste for "all that is present or near at hand," which might be seen as a comment on the tastes of horror-and-fantasy readers in general.

To be sure, what is profound coming from a creator like Clark Ashton Smith is just endearingly goofy coming from one like Edward D. Wood Jr. Nevertheless, Wood was definitely attempting to meld the appeal of Gothic horror with that of space-age menace. Wood had grown up enjoying Classic Hollywood's era of Gothic horror, which genre had for the most part been supplanted by aliens and colossal beasts. Wood wasn't the only fifties filmmaker to merge the two forms of terror. But Wood's helter-skelter approach, that of jamming together moldy corpse-people with aliens in shiny acrylic, adds an inevitable level of humor to his genre-bending.

So what is PLAN 9 about, aside from trying to appeal to audiences with those two forms of terror? 

The original title of Wood's film was GRAVE ROBBERS FROM OUTER SPACE, and since the aliens don't use any particular cultural name for their species, one might as well call them "the Grave Robbers" as anything else. In both their interpersonal conversations and in exchanges with Earth-people, the Robbers claim to have been trying to contact Earth's governments in order to warn humans about the dangers of their triggering a universe-destroying cataclysm when and if they uncover the principle of the "solaronite bomb." Wood's script does not represent the responses of any Earth-government except that of the United States, but this was a common trope in fifties SF-films, where aliens frequently interacted only with the country where the films originated. 

Wood almost certainly derived the essentials of his story from 1951's THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL. But because he had a minimal budget, Wood avoided any scenes that might show humanity as a whole reacting to the advent of aliens. Instead, Wood presents the idea that the U.S. government steadfastly refuses to admit the Robbers' existence, or even to privately engage with them to find out what the ETs want. Given that the high-echelon officers of the army (we never see any actual governmental figures) know that the saucers are real-- one even remarks that the ETs destroyed some unnamed "small town"-- this level of mule-headed refusal to face facts makes no sense.

But of course, Wood wasn't worried about internal consistency, assuming he understood the concept at all. Wood, a notorious glad-hander, was all about spectacle, about making people see what he wanted them to see. Not for nothing does narrator Criswell pontificate, "There comes a time in every man's life when he can't believe his own eyes!"

And so unwinds the flimsy story of PLAN 9, in which Wood hopes that fans will overlook wobbling gravestones and the fact that the one "name star" in the film was being impersonated by a stand-in who bore no real resemblance to the late Bela Lugosi. 

Wood also apparently never met a malapropism he didn't like. In one scene, two cops investigating the case of the risen dead remark on the stubbornness of Paula Trent.

Cop 1: "Modern women!"

Cop 2: "Yeah, they've been that way all through the ages."

One might think that someone who had the gift of gab would also be able to discern the dissonance in that exchange, that "modern women" cannot possibly have existed "all through the ages." But maybe Wood's gift simply lay in telling people what they already wanted to hear, which didn't necessarily depend on good diction.

And yet some odd details were important to him. When he shows mourners exiting the crypt where Lugosi's old man (aka the "Ghoul Man") has been buried, one person remarks that it's curious that the old fellow was buried in the crypt while his recently deceased wife was buried in a grave. It's as if Wood felt he should clarify a point that would have occurred to no one. Yet he couldn't see bigger issues-- like, why is the Old Man's recently deceased wife a hot, wasp-waisted young chick (Vampira), and why does she walk around holding her hands like lobster-claws? And if the Grave Robbers really want to overthrow the Earth, why don't they revive more than just these two corpses (with their not coincidental resemblance to the roles played by Lugosi and Carroll Borland in MARK OF THE VAMPIRE) and that of the also-recently-dead policeman Inspector Clay (Tor Johnson). As the hilarious "electro gun malfunction" scene shows, the space-soldiers Eros (Dudley Manlove) and Tanna (Joanna Lee) can barely even keep Big Dan Clay under control. Imagine a horde of Plan-9 dead people invading Washington, while Eros and Tanna have to keep pointing their little space-guns at all those zombies to keep them on the right path.

In contrast to the many things that don't work in PLAN 9-- and I'm trying to avoid those that have been ridiculed to death-- the one thing that works well is the "nerd vs. jock" opposition of Dudley Manlove's Eros and Greg Walcott's Jeff Trent. The latter is a pilot and one of the first persons to see the Robbers' saucers, and he gets involved with the investigation of the UFOs. Eros is the polar opposite of Michael Rennie's cool, collected alien from DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL, for Eros is filled with prissy conceit about his people's superiority to the "stupid minds" of Earthlings. Yet when Trent comments that the U.S, would only be "stronger" if they do invent the solaronite bomb, not even the most gung-ho warhawk in a movie theater would have thought Trent was supposed to be taken seriously-- though other fifties SF-movies have a number of warhawk characters who ARE fully justified. Eros and Tanna (Eros and Thanatos?) get away briefly, but their saucer malfunctions, and upon crashing they change into skeletons instantly, just like their zombie pawns did. Unlike the Rennie movie, which implies that Earth will be prevented from spreading its bad influence throughout the galaxies, the failure of the Grave Robbers from Outer Space leaves open the possibility that Stupid Earthlings may indeed bring doom to the entire universe. 

DAUGHTER OF THE JUNGLE (1949)

 

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

I saw DAUGHTER OF THE JUNGLE so long ago I remembered nothing about it. From the few online reviews, I assumed it was just a one-off "jungle queen" story that would go through the motions of the usual jungle-adventure story. Yet strangely, the character of Ticoora (Lois Hall) has more in common with the jungle-melodramas of Dorothy Lamour than with the adventure-stories of Bomba and Jungle Jim. 

Ticoora was a small girl when she, her rich father and the pilot of their plane all crashed in some obscure part of Africa. The three white people were unable to make the difficult trek out of the wilderness-- I think because there are hostile tribes all around-- so for something like the next ten years Ticoora grows up with only vague recollections of civilization. 

Ticoora is sort of an anti-Sheena. In the origin of Sheena, the heroine's father dies and the young girl is raised by a native tribe, and thus she becomes a savage fighter. But though Ticoora doesn't receive training from natives, much less from animal adoptive parents, she's often seen swinging around on vines like it's second nature. She and her father eke out their living by treating natives with superior white medicine, but this earns them enmity from the local witch doctor (Frank Lackteen).

Then another plane crashes, and Ticoora meets her first new white men in ten years: Two are cops who have custody of the other two plane-passengers, both of whom are criminals being transported to prison. The four men want to get back to civilization, and I think they're willing to risk the dangerous trek because they have handguns. Ticoora goes with them-- but the meaner of the two crooks, Dalton (Sheldon Leonard), has plans to make sure he also escapes imprisonment.

There's very little action in DAUGHTER, and I rate it a subcombative adventure because there aren't any significant fights involved as the heroes try to escape both hostile natives and fierce animals. Ticoora wears an outfit that allegedly was recycled from the 1941 serial JUNGLE GIRL, presumably so that the filmmakers could re-use scenes from that chapterplay. But the heroine of JUNGLE GIRL could fight a little bit, while the only real action DAUGHTER swipes from the serial is a hard-to-see scene with Ticoora slaying a crocodile in a river. Overall she shows no true toughness, screaming when accosted by a gorilla and failing to hit back when Dalton slaps her, requiring one of the cop-characters to come to Ticoora's defense. The only significant metaphenomenality in the flick follows the trope "exotic lands and customs," if only because the witch doctor keeps ranting about using "voodoo" on the outsiders.

DAUGHTER was listed in the Medved Brothers' FIFTY WORST FILMS OF ALL TIME, but it's too dull to deserve that distinction. Its only assets are the good looks of Hall and the gangster-schtick of Leonard. George Blair also directed the oddball fantasy-flick SABU AND THE MAGIC RING and some ADVENTURES OF SUPERMAN episodes, but the main distinction of his career was helming the 1960 horror-film THE HYPNOTIC EYE, which I remember fondly though I've yet found the chance to review it.

PREY OF THE JAGUAR (1996)

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

I'm mildly surprised that I found the first thirty minutes of this low-budget superhero flick adequate. Though prolific director David DeCouteau made a handful of combative films, such as this one with the very long title, to date he's showed almost zero interest to films in the superhero idiom.

Nevertheless, the first half-hour of JAGUAR reminded me of a cheaper version of a standard DTV action movie from some producer like NuImage. Good tension is maintained as we watch insidious drug-lord Bandera (Trevor Goddard of MORTAL KOMBAT repute) sprung from a prison transport by his kung-fu thugs, Bandera and his henchmen are seen to be hissably evil in their killing of police officers, so the viewer knows that when they go after their next target, the body count will be high.

DeCouteau also gives some fair emotional attention to those targets. Derek Leigh (Maxwell Caulfield), his wife and his son have gone into a witness protection plan after Derek put Bandera away. Derek gets the bad news (from none other than his old boss, played by Stacy Keach) about the breakout. Yet before that takes place, Derek indulges his young son's ideas for a new comic-book hero, The Jaguar, who has no super-powers but defeats criminals with his superior fighting-skills and with sleep-darts.

Bandera colludes with agency insiders and, after killing Derek's wife and son off-camera, the villain ambushes Derek. After raging about how Bandera's father died because of his son's incarceration, Bandera shoots Derek dead.

Of course the hero gets better, and he decides to become the hero designed by his late son. DeCouteau works in a nice moment when he seeks out his old agency trainer (John Fujioka) for further martial arts tutelage, and reveals the news of his family's death.

However, after all the setup is done, DeCouteau just falls back into rote-movie mode. Derek's Jaguar costume is largely unimpressive, being beat out even by TV's Nightman design-wise, and the remaining action scenes are poorly executed. Aside from Fujioka, the other supporting actors-- Keach, Linda Blair, and Paul Bartel-- just turn in equally rote performances.

PRAY FOR DEATH (1985)

 

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

Despite a cool title, PRAY FOR DEATH is at best a middling follow-up to the thrills of REVENGE OF THE NINJA, as well as an inverted anticipation of 1988's COMING TO AMERICA.

Akira Sato (Sho Kosugi) is a modern-day ninja, but he's retired from whatever duties he once had to become a settled family man with wife Aiko (Donna Kei Benz) and sons Takeshi and Tomoya (Kosugi's sons Kane and Shane). However, unlike Akira, Aiko is an American citizen, and she talks Akira into moving to Los Angeles and starting a Japanese restaurant there. 

The first half-hour successfully puts across the family's desire to enjoy "the American dream." Naturally, one expects by the nature of the genre that this dream will turn into a nightmare, as the immigrants encounter the scourge of L.A. criminality.

In contrast to many similar eighties action-films, though, the Sato family is only victimized by bad luck. Because the site of the restaurant has been closed for some time, a gang of thieves decided to hide a priceless stolen necklace in the building's storeroom, presumably until they're ready to fence the item. However, one of the crooks returns and rips off the necklace. Gang-boss Newman (Michael Constantine) and his enforcer Willie (James Booth) convince themselves that the new residents ripped off their loot, and so the rest of the film concerns the crooks' attempts to terrorize the utterly bewildered family. Eventually Not So Slick Willie kills a member of Akira's family, and at last the aggrieved Asian dons his ninja gear and decimates Newman's whole gang, using only smoke bombs and archaic weaponry-- easily the movie's best scene.

The film's biggest deficit is that even though Evil Willie is Sato's most dogged assailant, and the guy whom Sato will cause to "pray for death," James Booth is just not that impressive in this role. I suspect he got the role as part of a package deal for having wrote the script. Director Gordon Hessler produces an adequate thriller but here he's a long way from horror films like CRY OF THE BANSEE and MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE.

MONDO KEYHOLE (1966)

 

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

Though I've always thought the majority of director Jack Hill's films were good basic sexploitation fare, I never suspected he could make a film able to mythologize an aspect of sex, such as, in this case, the act of rape-- even though he may have written the famous BIG DOLL HOUSE line, "You get it up or I'll cut it off!" Possibly Hill's directorial collaboration with John (MERMAIDS OF TIBURON) Lamb provided some creative cross-pollination, though nothing in Lamb's oeuvre comes close to this mini-masterpiece.

Howard Thorne (Nick Moriarty) has no proximate reason to be a serial rapist, for at home waits his hot wife Vicki (Adele Rein, although the voice was that of Luana Anders), who's always more than willing. However, what Howard desires is the thrill of "man and woman locked together in violent combat," as he himself explains in a voice-over. In fact, he displays a somewhat muddled knowledge of Freud when he calls such combat "the classic scene, the primal conflict," which was probably Hill having fun with the hackneyed (even in 1966) Freudian phrase "primal scene." Howard turns an indifferent shoulder to his willing wife, even when she wears a Bardot wig. In a related scene, a secretary at his workplace who went out with him (possibly while he was still married) calls her boss a "cold fish."

Does Howard's propensity have anything to do with his work? After all, he does run a small company devoted to selling all sorts of sexy paraphernalia through the mail, such as dirty magazines and recordings of "torture sounds." Howard apparently also finances the filming of some cut-rate sexploitation movies (like the one Hill and Lamb are making, no less). But Howard doesn't get off when his pet director stages a scene in which a trio of performers (one male, two female) take turns flagellating one another. Howard particularly doesn't like being told that the guy being whipped deserves it because he's a rapist, because it suggests to Howard that this will be his fate. Howard *could* hypothetically also deal in paraphernalia that might reinforce his fantasies of the "natural" conflict between men and women, which he thinks of as a false mask created by "civilization." But Hill and Lamb don't show us any confirmation of male power-fantasies at Howard's workplace. Rather, even though Howard has successfully violated several women, all implicitly too embarrassed to go to the police, Howard is more or less aware that he's forged his own doom.

At one point Howard has a premonitory dream. He's sitting near a swimming pool in what he thinks of as "Okinawa," though he has no special associations with that Japanese island. Sexy Vicki is there in her bathing suit, and all the other people around the pool are also sexy girls in swimwear. Slowly Howard realizes that all the unnamed girls are his former victims, and they swarm upon him and try to drown him in the pool. Vicki alone comes to his defense, but the girls fend her off, so all that saves Howard is that he wakes up, though he still doesn't know why he dreamed of Okinawa.

The viewer finds out a little way down the line, after the serial criminal makes the first of two big mistakes. Instead of hewing to his successful practice of randomly stalking women on the street, he responds to a personals ad in a newspaper, suggesting that the person behind the ad may want rough sex. Haughty blonde Carol (Carol Baughman) meets him, and almost immediately rejects him. Howard not only rapes her, he whips a few times as well. But unlike Howard's other victims, Carol has her own resources for revenge. She calls upon an acquaintance, a female karate student billed as "The Crow" (Cathy Crowfoot), to gain vengeance. BTW, we see that the dojo of the Crow is labeled "Okinawate," meaning "Okinawan karate."

Howard's second mistake is that he tries to shit where he eats. Vicky plans to go to a big costume party for sexy models, implying that maybe she used to be one such, and she invites to their house a friend named Charlene. The moment Howard sees Charlene, he wants to rape her too, so he dons a Halloween mask and crashes the party. But at the costume bash, Vicky dons Charlene's wig, and because of her mask Howard doesn't recognize her when he enacts his little hobby. Suffice to say that Howard loses the support of the only woman who really loved him, and that puts him in the hands of his tormentors.

Apparently Carol and the Crow trail Howard, for when he exits the party, Howard, having learned nothing from his cock-up, sees the sexy Crow girl and stalks her as well. Crow beats him down with her karate and the two women drag him to a torture-den, much like the one in the movie-set, and the movie ends on the strong likelihood that they will inflict on him a hell of punishment for the remainder of his life.

In a side-plot, miserable Vicki actually gets deliverance at the hand of a "devil," a partygoer dressed as Dracula. In a comic Bela Lugosi accent, the guy conducts Vicki through the "five circles of hell" comprised by the wild sex-games of the costume party. Yet none of the partygoers are committing criminal acts, and indeed "Dracula" gives Vicki closure by offering to make real love to her. The party-people, like the film-director, have control of their sex-fantasies and don't go around committing assaults to get their jollies. 

According to a DVD review Jack Hill's commentary track called MONDO his "softcore art film." Whatever his motives in making the flick, Hill came closer to the aims of art in terms of associative freedom. The film satisfies my criteria for symbolic concrescence in assorted ways. The best such scene appears at the end, when we see the S&M figure of The Crow allowing her whip-stock to sway from side to side, in rhythm with the pendulum on a nearby grandfather clock, but a clock without hands. Hill and Lamb set up this conceit in the commentary of the egotistical smut-film director, whose project also contained a clock with no hands. According to the director, the clock is there to remind the victim of the torture that no time will truly pass while he is punished, just an endless ticking of a meaningless clock. 

Not symbolic, but a funny malapropism in subtitling: the learned Dracula-guest makes reference to a "Bridge of Sighs," by which he almost surely meant the Venetian Ponte del Sospiri. The subtitling has the fellow allude to a "bridge of size."

CAPTAIN SINDBAD (1963)

 

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

I saw CAPTAIN SINDBAD in the sixties, probably in some second-run theater, and remember being pleased with it, though far from enchanted, as I had been with the better fantasy-films of the period. SINDBAD was one of several films in the "magical-fantasy" genre that had been somewhat jump-started by Ray Harryhausen's SEVENTH VOYAGE OF SINBAD in 1958. Sad to say, though, SINDBAD hasn't improved with age. Some low-budget films manage to use wit or characterization to get around their other limitations. But even though the producers had scored with the British monster-film GORGO the previous year, and the director had helmed the 1953 WAR OF THE WORLDS, SINDBAD is never more than the sum of its inexpensive parts.

As in the Harryhausen film, there are a number of magical wonders in the film. Princess Jana of Baristan (Heidi Bruhl) is transformed into a bird by her court magician, to warn her lover Captain Sindbad (Guy Williams) of the machinations of the usurper El Kerim (Pedro Armendariz). El Kerim succeeds in destroying Sindbad's ship before the hero can reach Baristan, but that doesn't stop the stalwart swordsman from arriving to challenge the villain. Sindbad must face an invisible monster in an arena, and later he runs a gauntlet in a tower with such menaces as a hydra, killer plants and a gigantic mailed fist that tries to crush him. A dotty old wizard supplies some other marvels as well, such as elongating his arm to steal El Kerim's magic ring. Yet something about the presentation of all these wonders still seems pedestrian at best, possibly because the players were restricted to the grounds of a film studio in Germany. 

None of the actors are bad in their roles. Williams, who had finished Disney's ZORRO four years previous, swashes his buckles nicely enough, and Armendariz gloats and glowers impressively. But when the script doesn't include any fun elements, the actors have nothing to work with.

Only one scene in SINDBAD still sticks with me. The hero beards the evildoer in his lair, and stabs him through the heart-- only to find out that El Kerim can't die that way, because he separated his heart from his body. Eventually Sindbad finds El Kerim's Achilles heel and destroys his enemy. I'd later learn that the idea of sorcerers becoming invulnerable by removing some vital organ was a common folklore trope. But for this movie, that was the one enchanting element that did work, probably because the writer allowed it to "spring" upon the audience, rather than explaining things too much.

GHOSTBUSTERS II (1989)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *metaphysical*

I've never understood the antipathy for the GHOSTBUSTERS sequel. Like the first film, Number Two was written by stars Dan Ayrkoyd and Harold Ramis (reprising their roles as Ray Stanz and Egon Spengler) but for the sequel the writers relied a lot less on coincidence and produced a much tighter plot. Whereas the menace of the first film is just a mean demon who wants to bring about the end-times for no particular reason, here we have a ruthless revenant who hopes to embody his spirit in the form of an innocent infant. And although once again the romantic arc of Peter Venkman (Bill Murray) and Dana Barrett (Sigourney Weaver) gets the lion's share of attention, the characters have a more involved history, one that includes Dana having had a baby by her absent ex-husband. This development obliged both actors to deliver stronger performances.

As if anticipating the reception of the sequel, the plucky parapsychologists-- Stanz, Spengler, Venkman and Ernie Hudson's Zeddemore-- have lost favor in the eyes of ever-cynical New Yorkers due to the damages they caused in 1984. (One wonders if Akroyd and Ramis remembered the opening of SON OF KONG and the woes of Carl Denham). Even little kids scorn these real-life heroes in favor of He-Man. Aykroyd and Ramis find evidence of a strange river of ectoplasmic slime beneath the city, but pin-headed officials won't listen to them. The slime's source is none other than the spirit of medieval Count Vigo (Wilhelm von Homberg, though his voice was that of Max Von Sydow). This unruly spirit resides in a huge painting owned by a New York museum where Venkman's ex-girlfriend Dana works. Presumably at some point Vigo gets a look at Dana's infant son and decides that the child will be his new place of residence. The river of slime absorbs the negative emotions of New Yorkers and thus supplies Vigo with enough raw power that his spirit can escape the painting and incarnate in a human form. He also suborns museum-official Janosz (Peter MacNichol, sporting a very funny accent), and makes the man his pawn, in return for Janosz getting to wed Dana. 

I don't know if Aykroyd and Ramis were thinking of any particular social developments circa 1989 that informed their idea about New York's negativity (though I should note that the script went through numerous changes over the years). But the idea that New Yorkers might pay some karmic price for their own near-legendary contentiousness is a fine setup for the concluding conflict, in which the heroes must find a way to make New Yorkers project "good vibes."

And this brings us to the colossus in the room. I'm convinced that a lot of fans and reviewers got turned off when they saw Number Two display yet another Godzilla-sized monster stomping through the streets of the Big Apple. In my opinion, the mild humor of the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man is entirely different in purpose from the Ghostbusters' animation of Lady Liberty in order to boost the citizens' positive emotions. But if there's one thing that cheeses off some viewers more than a sequel that doesn't give them the exact same thing they got the first time, it's a sequel that seems overly similar. Darned if you do, and so on.

Number Two's indictment of short-sighted officials is much more clever than anything from the first film, with a stand-out scene involving an arrogant judge (Harris Yulin) getting "haunted" by the ghosts of men he sentenced to death. As mentioned, Murray has a few more vulnerable moments as he seeks to reconcile with Dana and to cope with her little bundle of joy. Yet Murray still delivers more than his fair share of snark, particularly when he plays at being a fashion photographer taking snapshots of the Vigo painting and lobbing putdowns at the count's surly image.

Even the minor developments, like Louis Tully seeking to become a Ghostbuster, are handled adequately. An eleventh-hour situation in which Vigo briefly possesses Stanz feels clumsy, specifically because Stanz is the most ebullient of the Ghostbusters and the one who primarily comes up with the idea of neutralizing the city's negative vibes. Maybe Aykroyd just wanted a little extra screen time. Weaver's character, who exists in the first film largely to be romanced by Venkman, has a better arc than before, as she makes clear some of the downsides of a relationship with a perpetual snark-machine.

The film made a profit but may have been hurt by a plethora of franchise-movies that same summer, such as the first Batman, the second Lethal Weapon and the third Karate Kid.

LEGO DC SHAZAM!: MAGIC AND MONSTERS (2020)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *metaphysical*

Like AQUAMAN: RAGE OF ATLANTIS, this Lego concoction is essentially a Justice League adventure that emphasizes one particular hero, though the hero retroactively known as "Shazam" is, unlike Aquaman, not yet a member. In fact, one of the main conflicts of the DTV flick is that Shazam doesn't want to admit his double identity as middle-schooler Billy Batson because he thinks the older heroes won't allow him to play in their superhero sandbox.

This concern plays into the A-plot of MAGIC: why are the fearsome fiends of the Monster Society of Evil running around stealing tons of food for their boss? Said kingpin is, as insiders should know, the not so fearsome Mister Mind, a tiny worm wearing glasses and a speaker-box to amplify his voice, while his criminal associates are made up of three characters who were in the authentic Golden Age society (Sivana, Jeepers and Crocodile-Man) and two others (Oom the Mighty and the Dummy) who were "retconned" into the group by a later author in the 1980s or thereabouts. 

Aside from the obvious question-- how come the tiny worm doesn't become a really fat tiny worm?-- the Justice Leaguers no sooner lock horns with the Society than Mister Mind subjects them all to the horrors of a second childhood, de-aging the heroes to make them easier to control. Batman, being the coolest hero (just as Shazam is seen to be the most polite), escape the nasty worm's influence, and they have to more or less bond, even though Batman's not the most trusting soul. Then the two of them must pursue assorted strategies to trap and free the kid-Leaguers from Mind's control, though it takes longer to re-age them.

There's a muddled subplot about how Billy was selected to be Shazam by the old man who used to be named Shazam, but who is now addressed only as "The Wizard." Eventually we find out Mister Mind's reason for consuming mass quantities-- to make himself into a bigger, badder worm-thing-- but he's not even the main menace, who has been pulling Mind's strings in order to arrange his release from the Wizard's custody. 

The most clever subplot in MAGIC is one that sounds like a throwaway line, when Shazam expresses some confusion about the "power of Zeus" that's one of his six aspects. But this turns out to be the script's way of referencing an ability that rarely appeared in the comics but got plenty of exposure in the 2019 SHAZAM movie: the hero's ability to transfer his powers to others. Of course the story is self-consciously silly, and over-impressed with its own cleverness, but occasionally there are a few bursts of real wit.

The DVD I saw includes some cartoon episodes as extras, and I only watched one, a fifth-season episode of TEEN TITANS GO in which the goofy crusaders meet both Shazam and Mister Mind. This short cartoon is on the same level of self-conscious silliness with occasional moments of wit.

GHOSTBUSTERS (1984)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *metaphysical*

The original GHOSTBUSTERS is a fine idea executed just adequately, generating a lot of smiles from me but not nearly as many laughs as I expect from the best comedies. The obvious durability of the concept seems to depend less on execution than on originality. There had been spoofs of supernatural sleuths and monster hunters before-- notably Roman Polanski's 1967 FEARLESS VAMPIRE KILLERS. But the script by GHOSTBUSTERS co-stars Dan Ackroyd and Harold Ramis showed audiences how to bring monster-catchers into a high-tech era, using zap-guns and containment canisters to restrain paranormal bogeys, rather than old-fashioned circles of salt.

The characters played by Ramis and Aykroyd, Egon Spengler and Ray Stanz, are the source of all the tech the Ghostbusters use to bring spirits to heel. However, Peter Venkman (Bill Murray) is largely responsible for forcing the cloistered academics to get out of their comfort zone and become heroes. It's not clear how Venkman, who often projects the aura of a skeptical con-man, became associated with the two paranormal experts during their adumbrated academic career, or why he even thinks there are enough malignant spirits in New York City to make ghost-busting a profitable enterprise. Maybe Venkman only does so because he got an early look at the movie script, which shows a spike in hauntings in the Big Apple for reasons no one initially figures out. Not until very late in the movie does Egon figure out that a particular New York high-rise was constructed to be a gateway for Sumerian demons. But such is the comic chemistry between Murray, Aykroyd and Ramis, with additional reinforcement from belated addition Winston (Ernie Hudson) and wacky secretary Janine (Annie Potts) that most moviegoers didn't care about script consistency.

The script does introduce the haunted building by way of two of its occupants: musician Dana (Sigourney Weaver) and her nebbishy neighbor Louis (Rick Moranis). Dana calls upon the Ghostbusters to solve the mystery of her haunted icebox, but when Venkman fails to deliver anything but his attempts to hit on her, she shuts the door on further ghostbusting. However, the plucky parapsychologists find no shortage of bizarre apparitions to trap. One of the ectoplasmic entities was later dubbed "Slimer" and became a regular cartoon character. In any case the Ghostbusters become heroes of the city for their successful spirit-catching.

Since the demon-gateway isn't revealed for some time, the writers spend a lot of time showing how its heroes get hemmed in by small-minded bureaucrats, one of whom irresponsibly releases all of the Ghostbuster's imprisoned revenants. Since said bureaucrat represents the EPA, his role may speak to the idea that the organization's real-world reps were something less than conscientious in their agenda. But all the ghosts are just window-dressing for the Big Bad, the Sumerian demon Gozer, who will bring about the end times for humanity.

Though Venkman is destined to get in good with hot leading lady Dana, the script also indulges in a nerd's sex-fantasy. Both Dana and Louis get possessed by low-ranking demons and implicitly have sex with each other in order to open the gateway for Gozer. Just try to get away with that sort of thing in a modern "comedy."

The original GHOSTBUSTERS has a number of decent, often quotable jokes (though I may be the only viewer not amused by the appearance of the "Stay Puft Marshmallow Man") and provides Murray with one of his best "sympathetic cynic" roles. The original movie, though not a classic of comedy, is nevertheless one of the more significant franchise-starters of 1980s cinema.