SNOW WHITE AND THE THREE STOOGES (1961)

 

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

It would be very interesting to know why someone at 20th-Century Fox had the idea that Gold Medalist ice skater Carol Heiss, who seems to have had no experience in formal acting, would sell a movie, even one pitched at juvenile audiences. And Heiss's Snow White is indubitably the central character of the film, the one to whom everyone in the film reacts, just like the animated Snow in the Disney classic. And despite the title, SNOW WHITE AND THE THREE STOOGES, the Stooges aren't co-equal stars in the flick, any more than the Seven Dwarfs are co-equals with the Disney heroine. Indeed, the script is constructed so that three or more dwarfs could have taken the Stooges' places with no damage to the story, since as many Stooges fans have noted, the performers don't have much comic business. (It's also the only film for the Three Movie-Stooges that isn't primarily a comedy.)

It may be that even though the Snow White narrative was in public domain, Fox was hoping to chisel in on Disney's kid-market without doing anything that would earn them a call from the Mouse's lawyers. Thus, in place of seven Dwarfs who become parental figures to the forlorn heroine, we have three mountebanks who become parent-like units to both the heroine and her destined beloved. Even those who barely remember the details of the Grimms' fairy story will be aware that the prince in both the original story and in Disney is something of a last-minute insert. But this time the prince has his own arc.

In fact, the Evil Queen (Patricia Medina) and her evil magician-counselor Oga (Guy Rolfe) are loosely responsible for the Stooges being in contact with the destined young lovers. Long before Snow is old enough to threaten the Queen with her beauty, the nasty ruler decides to knock off Prince Charming when he's still a young boy, newly affianced to Snow when both are children. She fails, though Charming loses his memory, and the kindly mountebanks raise the prince as their own kid, naming him "Quatro" (Edson Stoll). I guess it was better than "Zeppo." Only much later do Quatro and the Stooges occupy the house of the Seven Dwarfs (away on vacation), and this makes it possible for the traveling entertainers to encounter Snow when she runs into the forest to escape the Queen's wrath.

There's another big change to the Grimm template, also a possible ploy to distance STOOGES from Disney. The beautiful Queen does transform herself into an ugly hag as part of her plan to kill Snow at movie's end. But she doesn't make her own magic, but rather has Oga supply the transformation-potion. Further complications: the Queen actually gets real magic powers, being able to fly around on the archetypal broomstick, and later transforms herself into a second persona, a traveling gypsy, who actually persuades Snow to eat the fatal apple. Another twist: for some reason Oga carries around a magic sword that can grant its wielder three wishes-- but only if the wishes are used for good ends. (So Oga has no real reason to keep the sword with him, except so that it can fall into the hands of Snow's protectors.) All that said, Medina and Rolfe make a good evil couple, even though the script doesn't actually say they're lovers.

I suspect the three wishes concept was introduced by co-writer Noel Langley, best known for his contribution to the 1939 WIZARD OF OZ script. The wish-sword isn't strictly necessary for the plot, but there's a nice dramatic moment when the Stooges use the sword's last wish to eliminate the Evil Queen, and then have no wishes left to revive Snow White. One guess how she is restored.

If the Stooges don't get a lot of comic scenes, Snow and Prince Quatro get a lot of romantic scenes, whether sung (with forgettable doggerel lyrics) or skated (Heiss and a stand-in skater for Edson Stoll). The Technicolor photography looks good, if not outstanding, but I still don't know what kind of market there was in 1961 for romantic fairy tale musicals aimed at juveniles. Off the top of my head, the only similar movie that comes to mind is 1952's JACK AND THE BEANSTALK. and I think that film was only a minor success. 

THE THREE STOOGES IN ORBIT (1962)

 

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

I quite liked HAVE ROCKET WILL TRAVEL-- the initial feature-film for the Movie-Stooges-- Larry, Moe, and Curly Joe-- in that I thought it captured the inspired lunacy of some of the Classic shorts. But even though ORBIT was directed by Edward Byrnes, a veteran of several Stooge-shorts, the Norman Maurer script deep-sixes the concept's potential.

Despite an imaginative opening in which viewers see various grotesque images suggested for Martian forms, there aren't nearly enough Martians in the story to keep the story percolating, and when anything else takes the foreground, the movie just spins its wheels.

In this one, Larry, Moe and Curly Joe are TV actors who hope to sell themselves to a producer as hosts for a kid's show, in which they would introduce cartoons a la other kids' hosts of the time. Their struggles are complicated when they're tossed out of their apartment, so that they must find lodgings. This leads them to take a job at the estate of daffy inventor Professor Danforth (Emil Sitka).

Danforth is working on several inventions, but the main one is an all-purpose military vehicle combining aspects of tank, helicopter and submarine. He somehow knows that "men from Mars" are spying on him, though he doesn't know that his own butler is a Martian disguised as an Earthman. In their normal forms, the Martians wear capes and bodysuits and possess immense Frankensteinian skulls. Somehow the Martians learned of Danforth's invention and wanted to know if it could thwart their plans to conquer Earth.

Unfortunately, this promising farce-notion gets diluted by a subplot about the aforementioned kids's show. The Stooges need some new gimmick to impress the producer, and Danforth puts his plans for anti-Martian defense on hold while he concocts an animation dingus for the performers; a thingie that more or less works like rotoscoping, which had been around since the Fleischer Studios. Ostensibly this subplot was included so that Maurer could recycle footage he had used to pitch an unsold pilot, which was all about the Stooges hosting cartoons.

But even if this subordinate plot had been cut, the script doesn't know how to build comic suspense about the Martian threat. On the first night that the Stooges spend the night at Danforth's estate, the butler tries to kill the professor's assistants. Curly Joe trains a rifle on the Martian masquerader, but the butler disintegrates the weapon. Yet a few scenes later, the Stooges-- all of whom saw the rifle go "poof" -- act like Danforth is nuts for believing in Martians.

There are also some long, time-wasting scenes in which the Stooges create various kinds of chaos as they test the all-purpose vehicle to impress the army brass, and some shorter time-wasting scenes in which the professor's daughter is romanced by a young army soldier (Edson Stoll, playing a leading-man role like the one in the previous Stoogefilm SNOW WHITE AND THE THREE STOOGES). The two Franken-skulled Martians Ogg and Zogg infiltrate the estate and are given orders by their superiors to destroy Earth instead of paving the way for conquest. Here alone does the action pick up, as the Martian spies steal the all-purpose vehicle, planning to start destroying Earth's cultural centers first. (The film's best joke comes at this point.) However, the hapless goofs manage to get aboard the vehicle and manage to foil the invaders' plans. One might think they'd be feted by the whole planet for this deed, but the dopes are apparently content to succeed at their goal as kiddie-show hosts.

The Martian agents Ogg and Zogg steal every scene they're in, and it's a shame that the film wasn't built entirely around them.

THE THREE STOOGES GO AROUND THE WORLD IN A DAZE (1963)

 

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

I saw DAZE back in "The Day," though probably not at a first-run theater in 1963. Back then I only knew the Stooges from the movies, as I didn't see the theatrical shorts until the next decade, so I had no basis of comparison. But even if I had been exposed to the shorts, I probably still would have liked DAZE just because it moved quickly and had a fair amount of slapstick violence, however tame next to "Classic Stooges."

On viewing the film again, I still found it basically appealing in terms of offering a simple formula comedy-adventure built around an engaging premise. It just isn't really funny, and may be the least amusing of the six feature-films in which the final threesome-- Larry Fine, Moe Howard and Curly Joe DeRita-- appeared.

An opening placard apologizes to the late Jules Verne for swiping the premise of AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 DAYS, and then we meet the three dimwits in England, where they work as servants to Phileas Fogg III (Jay Sheffield). The accomplishments of Phileas's ancestor are so well known that a pair of thieves get the idea to trick the wealthy young man into duplicating his great-grandfather's feat, but with the added touch that Phileas must do so without using his fortune to buy his way. Phileas accepts roughly the same wager as his ancestor, to circumnavigate the world without using his money simply to buy a few plane trips. Naturally, his faithful servants volunteer to go along. During their trek across the globe the four guys pick up a romantic interest for Phileas (Joan Freeman) and are pursued by both police (who think Phileas robbed a British bank) and the two thieves (planning to knock off the young man so that they will never be suspected).

It's an okay romp, but it proves grating to see the rather limited Curly Joe attempting not one but two of the late Curly Howard's better routines from the shorts. The man probably did his best, but he just wasn't as charismatic or as inventive as Howard.

One of the routines from the shorts deals with Curly Joe being triggered into a manic rage whenever he hears the tune for "Pop Goes the Weasel," and this time the hairless dimwit even displays an uncanny level of strength, enough to break iron chains. In a peculiar commentary on the Asian reputation for sinister mind-control techniques, the Stooges are subjected to brainwashing by Chinese Communists. However, the three morons are so, well, moronic that they infect their three would-be brain-washers with the affliction of  "stooginess."

DAZE is probably still good G-rated entertainment for moppets, but not much more.

BARBARIAN QUEEN II: THE EMPRESS STRIKES BACK (1993)

 

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

Trust your power to the daughter of such

Who held it in another time, 

Trust to me what no man can touch

Without the blessing of womankind.

With the above bit of doggerel, was schlockmeister-writer Howard R. Cohen trying, even in a crude manner, to follow through on the quasi-feminist content of BARBARIAN QUEEN? To acknowledge this possibility is not to state that QUEEN II-- a sequel-in-name-only-- isn't one of the most dire sword-and-sorcery flicks to come down the pike. But one must give credit where it is due. (To be sure, this time Cohen is partnered with one Lance Smith on the script, though his credits are no better than Cohen's, while QUEEN II was the only directorial credit for film editor Joe Finley.)

It's possible Cohen subconsciously cadged from 1985's RED SONJA in coming up with a "power" accessible only to women, and which is fought over by a "good girl" and a "bad girl." In QUEEN II, the powerful talisman is a magical sceptre that's controlled by the royal family of Some Damn Kingdom or Other. The princess of that family, Athalia (Lana Clarkson), is evidently a bit of a tomboy, while her only relation, her king-father, has left the castle to lead a foray against an enemy. Athalia shows up at the throne room, and her father's counselor Ankaris reports that though the kingdom's (never seen) army has returned, the king has gone missing. Thus Ankaris and his cohorts decide to usurp the throne. They want Athalia to give them the secret of the magic sceptre that occupies some cynosure in the castle. When the princess refuses, they lock her up.

Enter the film's rather unusual "bad girl," pretending to be a good one: Tamis (Cecilia Tijerina), the 14-year-old daughter of Ankaris. Pretending to be Athalia's friend, Tamis frees the princess and takes her to the cynosure. After reciting the doggerel, Athalia is able to remove the magic sceptre, and have access to its unspecified power-- though she also claims that using it will cause her father's death, if he's still alive. I guess the writers threw this in so that she wouldn't be able to call on the power right away, thus ending the movie too soon. Tamis swipes the sceptre, and as Ankaris and his stooges waltz in, they all have a good laugh at the gullible princess. However, Athalia steals the sceptre back and puts it back in place, after which Ankaris and his guards can't touch the weapon. On top of that, Athalia escapes the palace and makes common cause with a band of forest-rebels-- though only after a mud-wrestling bout with one of the women warriors. (Yeah, even I'm not going to argue against that bit being gratuitous.)

While the villains lay their next plots, the Cohen-Smith script spotlights the bratty evil of Tamis, She seems convinced that her father's only good looking ally Sir Aurion (Greg Wrangler) is earmarked to marry her, though he looks less than enthusiastic at the prospect. Later the audience learns that Aurion proposed to Athalia several times, though she refused to marry him for reasons never disclosed. A few scenes later, though, the forest-rebels capture a band of royal knights, including Aurion, and we get to see that the fire of romance still burns between hunk-knight and hot princess. 

Athalia is captured when she and her rebels attack Ankaris' forces, and in a blatant callback to BARBARIAN QUEEN, the princess ends up on the rack as Amethea did-- although Athalia has to put up with nasty quasi-rival Tamis watching. Also, her torturer is evidently gay, baring the princess's breasts but calling them "disgusting."

Aurion tries to rescue Athalia, but she frees herself first and once more seeks out the magic sceptre. She experiences deep conflicts about using its power, though, since she doesn't know if it will cost her father's life. Ankaris captures her again, so apparently the only point of the escape was to underscore the heroine's reluctance to imperil her daddy's life, even though Ankaris tells her that the king is dead.

This time Athalia endures Tamis threatening to drop spiders on her. Aurion comes to her rescue, but so do members of the forest-rebels after they sneak into the castle. The rebels take Aurion and Athalia back to their camp. Meanwhile, Tamis belatedly reveals that she has a magic talisman given her by her mother, and uses some of Athalia's doggerel to activate it. Presto, change-o, Tamis becomes a full grown woman. 

Belatedly, a coterie of knights show up at the rebel camp with the body of Athalia's father, and now, despite her grief, Athalia knows she can use the magic sceptre against her foes. However, Grown Tamis infiltrates the camp at night, and after a weird attempt to get Aurion to make love to her, almost kills him. When the rebels attack the castle, they take Tamis along, hoping she'll be killed by her own forces-- and indeed, at the castle she's stabbed by her own daddy, because he doesn't know her. Meanwhile, Amethea kills the gay torturer and finds that Ankaris has killed himself over the body of his once more youthful daughter. After all the fuss about the magic spectre, it doesn't really do anything to resolve the main conflict, though Athalia says something about using it to cure a poisonous spider bite.

Unlike all the DEATHSTALKER movies on which Cohen worked, there's at least some erratic mythopoetic material here, which is the only reason I bothered to explicate it. But even if the movie had been given decent direction and fight choreography, the writers didn't know how to really make any of their mythic concepts resonate with viewers, and so QUEEN II-- which certainly wins no points for its cheesy subtitle-- earns only a ranking with the worst of the thud-and-blunder movies.

Odd addenda: at the start of the movie Athalia is seen wearing, very briefly, an outfit with a fur collar. About seven years later, Clarkson played a villain in one episode of the Corman-produced BLACK SCORPION teleseries, and the actress wore what I suspect was the exact same costume for that endeavor.

 

BARBARIAN QUEEN (1985)

 

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

Of the dozens of Roger Corman-produced films featuring gratuitous female nudity, BARBARIAN QUEEN may be the only one in which such concessions to the evil Male Gaze are entirely necessary to the plot and the main character's arc.

As the title suggests, QUEEN takes place in a standard barbaric cosmos, with lots of swords but no sorcery, except for the fact that the world itself is a made-up place with no connections to our reality. The plot takes the form of a straightforward rescue-mission, but one in which the female characters are indispensable to the defeat of the male villains.

Raiders of the evil lord Arrakur invade a peaceful village, where main character Amethea (Lana Clarkson) is about to be married to handsome hunk Argan (Frank Zagarino, long before his ascension to B-movie stardom). Argan and other villagers are captured and taken away by the raiders. But the women of the village are as hardy as their men, and Amethea and two others females escape. Their number grows to four when they track a smaller party of raiders who have taken Amethea's sister Taramis (Dawn Dunlap). After killing the raiders, Amethea and her allies continue their pursuit of Arrakur, though Tamaris has clearly been traumatized by gang-rape.

As the quartet nears Arrakur's walled city, they fortuitously encounter a small band of would-be rebels against the evil lord. The rebels help the four barbarian women enter the city covertly, and Amethea learns that the male villagers have been pressed into service as gladiators alongside other male captives, and this suggests a force that may be used against Arrakur's guards. However, Amethea and her warrior-allies are taken captive for questioning. Tamaris is separately spotted by Arrakur himself, who recognizes her from the raid. She saves herself from the torture-sessions given to Amethea by feigning craziness. In due time Amethea breaks free and paves the way for the gladiators to take on Arrakur and his men. Though Amethea battles Arrakur, Tamaris-- with whom the warlord also took his pleasures-- has the honor of killing the author of her despoilment. 

While the cinema boasts any number of gratuitous rape-scenes, the ones in QUEEN are not so easy to dismiss. It's a rude, crude, barbarian world, and when male soldiers take female prisoners, they rape them as a matter of course. Critics who have called the film problematic for showing that particular "fact of life" might as well call the entire history of human sexual dimorphism "problematic." Now, one might argue that QUEEN's most notorious scene, in which Amethea is spreadeagled on a rack by a torturer seeking info on the rebels, is not strictly necessary. However, without that setup, QUEEN would lack its most memorable scene, in which the torturer, in the process of trying to rape the warrior-woman, finds his member caught in a new version of a "man trap."

The director was Argentina-born Hector Olivera, who produced, wrote or directed some esteemed art-films alongside various trash-movies, while the script was entirely credited to American Howard R, Cohen, who to the best of my knowledge never wrote a non-exploitation script. Still, some of the actors' lines-- like Arrakur explaining the significance of pain to Amethea-- sound a little too sophisticated for Cohen, and I suspect they might have come either from Olivera or were adlibbed by the actors. (One of Amethea's warrior-girls is played by Katt Shea, who would go on to a number of writing and directing projects of her own.) The feminist message boils down to, "even if a man rapes a woman, she can still kill him," which is not without some appeal on the fantasy level.

Since Corman almost certainly did not spring for fight coordinators, no one looks all that great in the fight scenes, but there are a lot of them, and Lana Clarkson essays her most famous role with great gusto. Just for its unique place in the realm of sword-and-sorcery films, BARBARIAN QUEEN would probably make my top ten in that category.

WIZARDS (1977)

 

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

Ralph Bakshi asserted that he read Tolkien's THE LORD OF THE RINGS in the late fifties, roughly ten years before American paperbacks turned the Oxford don into a counterculture phenomenon. The future animation-king also read voluminously in other fantasy and SF books of the time, and claimed that he made many sketches of fantasy concepts over the years. But due to his interest in animation, it would be some time before Bakshi could indulge his science-fantasy bug, as there was no room for it in low-budget TV cartoons. The closest Bakshi could come to fantasy were his knockabout spoofs of familiar genres like superspies (JAMES HOUND) and superheroes (THE MIGHTY HEROES). 

Bakshi did however bring many comics and fantasy pros in to work under him at the Paramount animation unit, such as Wally Wood, Jim Steranko, and Lin Carter (who in 1969 would attempt to build on the popularity of Tolkien by launching Ballantine's Adult Fantasy line). RINGS had also sparked more interest in original paperback fantasy-novels and in the use of fantasy-imagery by rock musicians, which may have encouraged Bakshi to attempt selling CBS a series with a fantasy-concept in 1967. Ten years later, this idea was reworked into 1977's WIZARDS, which displays elements of the previous two phases of Bakshi's career-- knockabout comedy and gritty urban satire-- and of a third phase, culminating in his next-year adaptation of THE LORD OF THE RINGS.

Whereas the Tolkien epic took place in a medieval world dominated by a hierarchy of magical beings, Bakshi sets his adventure on a distant future-Earth that's been decimated by nuclear war. There had been many post-apocalyptic books and movies prior to WIZARDS, but I am not aware of any pre-1977 works in which nuclear annihilation brings about a rebirth of magical entities. But after two million years of nuclear pollution, Earth is inhabited by the remnants of humanity, who are largely mutants, and three magical races that have mysteriously resurfaced: fairies, elves, and dwarfs.

Then, as if to signal the end of three thousand years of peace between the various survivors, the queen of the fairies gives birth to two boys, born at the same time but in no way resembling one another. Avatar is a cherubic lad with a kind heart; Blackwolf is a cruel, twisted being who seeks to dominate others. A magical duel between the two brothers results in Blackwolf fleeing the fairy lands to mutant domains.

For several more centuries, Blackwolf can't stir the mutants into attacking the faery-folk-- until he comes across a cache of ancient Nazi propaganda films. Somehow the evil wizard finds a way to play the films for the mutants, and the rants of Adolf Hitler turn malingering mutants into determined storm troopers. 

Thus Bakshi sets up a basic "magic vs. technology" paradigm, with "technology" largely in a negative role, in contrast to a lot of prose science fiction. Avatar, now a very old wizard with very big feet (that some say he borrowed from the Cheech Wizard), tries to figure out some way to cope with the blitzkreig-like attacks of Blackwolf's mutant forces. In this he is aided by two younger faery-folk: elf warrior Weehawk and magically-potent fairy-princess Elinore. A third ally is made from an enemy, for when a robot sent by Blackwolf slays Elinore's father, Avatar reprograms the robot to help their cause, renaming the creature "Peace." (The four heroes are seen in the screenshot above.)

WIZARDS is very episodically plotted-- not surprising given that Bakshi wrote the script in two weeks-- so there's no point in dilating on specific plot movements. Whereas the Fellowship of the Ring has possession of a prize desired by their enemy, which they must destroy, Avatar and his friends must figure out how to undermine Blackwolf's progress while also seeking to forge alliances with various faery kingdoms-- not very successfully, at that. 

Given that Bakshi had made much more comedy than adventure, the most memorable moments of WIZARDS are not the standard tropes of epic fantasy, like Weehawk's duel with a huge monster. Rather, the comic scenes show Bakshi working to his strengths. In one scene, a trio of faerie priests (who look like Hasidic Jews) seek to stall enemy troops with various religious rigamaroles. In another, an irate Blackwolf trooper screams at the heavens over the killing of his fellow soldier, and when he yells about "those stinking lousy fairies," clearly a 1977 audience would hear his rants a little differently. In one scene Bakshi does try to make Avatar slightly two-dimensional by having him go a little crazy when he thinks Elinore dead, but it's the only such moment in the film. Voice-actor Bob Holt gives Avatar a sardonic "Peter Falk" tonality, and the character's jokey nature is on display when Avatar casts a spell that sounds like "Krenkel Morrow Frazetta," naming three of the foremost fantasy-illustrators of the seventies.

Still, the adventure-mood dominates the plot even though Bakshi's comic stylings are his strongest asset. Though the "magic vs. technology" opposition is overly simplistic, many post-apocalyptic works suggest that some new Eden will be born from the devastation of materialistic society, and so Bakshi's basic concept of having a magical fantasy subsume the old corrupt world of technology has an aesthetic appeal. Two coincidences: the same year WIZARDS appeared in limited theaters, Terry Brooks published SWORD OF SHANNARA. This fantasy-novel also dealt with a magical world arising after a nuclear conflagration, and that book became the first fantasy-novel to make the New York Times bestseller list, arguably cementing the presence of prose fantasy in pop culture. And there was also a 1977 movie of some significance. It didn't involve nuclear war, but it did have super-psychic priests in contention with a technological civilization. That obscure movie starred Mark Hamill, who by a third coincidence also has a small voice-role in Ralph Bakshi's WIZARDS.

THE CAT AND THE CANARY (1927)

 

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

Paul Leni's CAT AND THE CANARY was not the direct progenitor of the many "old dark house" films seen throughout the 1930s, for it came near the end of a spate of film adaptations of Broadway suspense-plays. But even without seeing all the other silent films, I doubt any of them go as far as Leni did, in trying to turn static theaterical scenarios into impact-filled "movie magic."

The plot in this case is pretty incidental. After a patriarch dies, embittered at the many greedy members of his family, his potential heirs gather at the patriarch's creepy old mansion to hear his will. As soon it's announced that his niece Annabelle (Laura LaPlante) is the main beneficiary, she becomes the target of familial enmity even as the old man was, a "canary" besieged by predacious cats. And as if to underline the feline metaphor, a guard from the local asylum shows up at the manor and warns everyone that there's an escaped madman on the loose. The fiend is called "the Cat" because of his habit of tearing his victims apart.

In contrast to many other ODH movies, nothing actually keeps the members of the gathering from getting in their cars and leaving, except perhaps the lateness of the hour. But then, while Annabelle is asleep in her bed, a clawed hand emerges from a panel in the wall and goes for her throat. Jump-scare! The claw-hand only takes her necklace, not her life, though she screams (in capital letters, yet).

Leni's playing around with the size of the inter-titles is just one of various Expressionist devices the director used to enhance a very gimmicky thriller. None of the characters are memorable, but Leni uses techniques like superimposed images and off-kilter set designs to enhance the emotions of the trapped characters. This is particularly true of Annabelle's cousin Paul (Creighton Hale), who gets most of the scenes in his role as the comedy-relief defender of the womenfolk. He sets the pattern for many similar viewpoint characters in ODH movies, not least the 1939 remake, with Bob Hope in the role. Interestingly, the later film makes more than the original of a possible romantic connection between Hope's character and that of Paulette Goddard, even though they too are figured as distant cousins.

I shouldn't need to expatiate on the nature of the Cat in a landscape where everyone knows what "the Scooby Doo Ending" means. Nevertheless, there's something almost archetypal about that key scene of the helpless female being menaced by a monstrous claw-hand-- a trope that would grow in strength over forty years later with the rise of the Italian giallos, followed by the American slashers.

DEATHSTALKER IV: MATCH OF TITANS (1991)

 

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

Howard R. Cohen, who wrote the first and third DEATHSTALKER films (but not the second funny one), got the chance to both write and direct the Stalker's last exploit. MATCH OF TITANS also offered actor Rick Hill, returning to the role he originated in the first film, as the brawny barbarian who can't be troubled with anything like a normal first name. 

Of course, almost any time producer Roger Corman made a sequel to anything, it became "old home week" regardless of the personnel, because Corman usually recycled footage from the original and other works. This time both the original DEATHSTALKER and the separate flick BARBARIAN QUEEN are worked into the new story, although MATCH arguably does so less than many other such productions.

In a plot-line loosely derived from the third movie, Deathstalker's looking for an old buddy, Aldilar. It seems that the hero at some point acquired a magical sword (not mentioned in the three previous films), but Aldilar accidentally took the magic sword with him and left behind some mundane blade. Deathstalker interrupts his search for his sword-swiping friend long enough to help out a maiden beseiged by nasty soldiers. He wanders a bit more and hooks up with a second swordsman, Vaniat (Brett Baxter Clark), and a little later they save hot blonde Dionara (Maria Ford) from some marauding pig-men. Dionara informs them that she's on the way to participate in a tournament at the castle of Queen Kana, so the two studs go along with her, Deathstalker still hoping to find his sword.

I may as well note at this point that Dionara has an ulterior motive for seeking out Kana, because Kana usurped the rule of Dionara's parents and forced Dionara into exile. I mention it here because though Dionara reveals this backstory to Deathstalker later, the heritage of this "warrior princess" has nearly no dramatic impact.

So the three wanderers enter the tournament and begin fighting people, which is the only good thing about MATCH. It might sport bad performances and a plot from hunger, but at least Cohen almost always has sweaty, scantily clad men and women on screen. Almost all of the female warriors wear leather halters and skirts, and the most avowedly lesbian one ends up in a death-match with Dionara.

The three heroes are all pretty dull, even when Sralker and Dionara take a few moments to swap spit. The best scenes go to the villainous Queen Kana (Michelle Moffett). The evil queen in Cohen's previous Stalker-opus talked a little bit about torturing the hero endlessly, but Kana sells the sadism better. She specializes in drugging male contestants, implicitly having dominant sex with them (not shown), and then turning them into stone-faced slaves. BTW, Stalker does eventually find both his magic sword and his lost buddy, the latter having been "petrified" by Kana.

While the sleaze factor registers high, no one in the cast can fake-fight his or her way out of a paper bag. But it's worth mentioning that even though Maria Ford is one of the worst in this respect, she got better. In 1994 she starred as a curvaceous kickboxing cop in ANGEL OF DESTRUCTION, an above-average American chopsocky, and she made effective appearances in about a half dozen junk-films.

SHANG CHI AND THE LEGEND OF THE TEN RINGS (2021)

 

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

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

The above movie poster for RINGS is amusing because, intentionally or not, it recapitulates visual elements from the first issue of the Marvel comic book that birthed Shang-Chi, where the young hero stands in the foreground, kicking some henchman's ass while overhead looms the imaginary figure of his father. But I should leave the majority of direct comparisons between the comic and the film for a separate article. As a CHFB poster asserted (and I'll credit him in the comments if anyone asks), RINGS is far less an adaptation of the MASTER OF KUNG FU franchise than a MCU imitation of CROUCHING TIGER HIDDEN DRAGON.

One of the key differences, though, is that TIGER was in part a modern filmmaker's take on the gender politics of traditional Chinese history, even though that film is set in the 1940s. Neither director/co-writer Destin Cretton nor the other two scripters are capable of critiquing any societies except Western ones, so all their "girl boss" tropes are ultimately as empty as those of BLACK PANTHER WAKANDA FOREVER-- though happily, RINGS does have fewer bossy babes.

I must include one item from the original conflict between Shang-Chi and his father because RINGS utilizes it briefly. In the comic, the evil father trains his son to be a "master of kung fu" so that Shang will perform assassinations in the name of his father. This detail is shoehorned into RINGS, but the movie has very little to do with dramatizing any conflict between father and son. Instead, RINGS is more about the role of women in both character's lives.

For a thousand years the power-obsessed warlord Wenwu (Tony Leung Chiu-wai) wields the power of a god with the ten rings he wears as armbands, and thus he amasses a covert kingdom of crime. Then in modern times he goes searching for power in the lost kingdom of K'un-Lun-- pardon me, I mean "Ta Lo." His attempt to learn Ta Lo's secrets are thwarted by a kung-fu guardian (Fala Chen, who may've been cast because she looks somewhat like Michelle Yeoh). Wenwu is so smitten by this girl boss that he woos and marries her, and they have two children, son Shang-Chi and daughter Xialing. In theory Wenwu gives up the conquering life to be a normal father, though it's a little suspicious that he still insists on Shang becoming a juvenile ass-kicker.

Sadly, Mrs. Wenwu, the woman in all three lives, meets her demise. In his grief at this loss, Wenwu spins a web of sin once more, but if anything he becomes an even less accessible father. At some point both Shang and Xialing flee his influence, though one ends up in the United States and the other in Macau, played in their respective adulthoods by Simu Liu and by Meng'er Zhang. 

There's a reason why Wenwu allows his children to remain outside his sphere of power, and it's tied to his gaining access once more to the forbidden kingdom of Shangri-La-- darn, I mean "Ta Lo!" But finally Wenwu comes after his offspring, or rather after certain artifacts they both possess-- although the artifacts don't serve that much purpose in the script beyond bringing about an alliance of Shang, Xialing, and Shang's comedy-relief girl-buddy Katy (the perpetually unfunny Awkwafina). The alliance takes place only after Xialing beats up her brother for no particular reason, by the way, because that's just the way girl bosses roll.

And why does Wenwu want to gain access to Ta Lo this time? Well, he claims that the people of Ta Lo forced his wife to leave their paradise-- a claim later disputed. But though he has one motive for wanting to invade and destroy Ta Lo, that wasn't quite enough for Cretton and company. So the same lack of feminine influence in the crime-lord's life is used against him, when he hears the voice of his late wife calling out to him, telling him he can be reunited with her in Ta Lo.

With unfunny Kate in tow, Shang and Xialing manage to enter Ta Lo before their bad dad does, and there they meet their good auntie Ying Nan (Michelle Yeoh, bringing to bear her usual charisma, even though Ying is a lot sketchier than her character from CROUCHING TIGER HIDDEN DRAGON). Ying and her fellow Ta-Losians explain that a demonic being has spoken to Wenwu in order to trick him into releasing said demon. I must admit that though this cosmic threat is not purely necessary just to make Wenwu invade Ta Lo, the various soul-sucking demons and flying dragons serve to provide a lot of the CGI that MCU-filmgoers probably expect. If RINGS had provided nothing but the wild choreography of the Jackie Chan Stunt Team, it might not have done so well in the American box office.

Though I've made fun of some of the film's rote tropes, RINGS does offer some very basic action-entertainment without lots of preaching, so it's ahead of a majority of other MCU films in that respect. The only tedious sequence in that respect is the scene in which Wenwu discourses on the character on whom he was based, Marvel Comics' "Mandarin." I understand that the writers had to throw in this rationale. A Fake Mandarin had been introduced in IRON MAN 3, and so, because the MCU was married to the idea of using the "ten rings" schtick for Wenwu, Wenwu had to explain why he both was, and was not, the Mandarin. Everything Wenwu said to the heroes about the phony Mandarin was credible, so far as it went. But then the writers felt they had to be cute, claiming that the word "Mandarin" referenced various culinary items. A moment or two on Wikipedia can make clear the word's real history, so why is it worth lying about, for the sake of a lame joke?

Though RINGS happily does not mess with most of the content of the Marvel "Shang-Chi" feature, there are a handful of cameos of MCU versions of Marvel characters, as well as quickie name-checks on such figures as "Master Khan" and "The Dweller in Darkness." And although F* M**c** is the hate that dare not speak its name in RINGS, oddly Tsai Chin, who played the daughter of F* M**c** in a series of five sixties movies, appears as Katy's grandmother. 

THE GREAT YOKAI WAR (2005)

 

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

I have not seen any of the earlier Japanese films on which THE GREAT YOKAI WAR is said to have been based (much less a novel that may have been an influence). I have seen other films by YOKAI's director and co-writer Takashi Miike, and since he's better known in the West for working on grim yakuza dramas, it's a little surprising to see him helming a cinematic salute to Japan's incredible array of yokai (a.k.a., "monsters," "goblins," what have you). But Miike came back and directed a sequel in 2021, so he must have found the experience reasonably congenial.

I dilate on the origins of the YOKAI story because I wonder whether one of the earlier versions was a little more organized. If I was going to grade the film purely on costume design, YOKAI would shoot up to my top fantasy-films of all time. As far as I can tell all the traditional monsters-- kappas, snow women, tengu and many more I don't know by name-- are played by human actors in extraordinarily detailed costumes, possibly with minimal CGI for things like women with stretchy-necks.

However, the main story, in theory, is about how a modern middle-school boy named Tadashi (Ryunosuke Kamiki) ends up being a hero, Kirin Rider, who unites dozens of ghoulies and ghosties to fend off a common threat. But after a few scenes establishing Tadashi's colorless home life (he's a child of divorce and bullied at school), he's pulled into the yokai world and even gets hooked up with a Japanese super-sword. The narrative drive pretty much reduces Tadashi's character arc to the minimum necessary.

Was there any way this could have been avoided? Well, Tadashi's main enemy, the demon Kato (Eysushi Toyokawa), nurses a bitter hatred toward humanity because they throw away things like old shoes. I *think,* going by the subtitled script, that the intent was to reference the Japanese belief that a sort of spiritual nature arises from the commonplace objects with which human beings interact. There might have been some way to work this belief into Tadashi's backstory, so that he had some way to relate to Kato's enmity. Instead, Tadashi remains a cipher who just follows the promptings of the helpful yokai. Similarly, Kato perversely embraces modern technology-- which would have been a major factor in eradicating traditional animistic faith-- by transforming various yokai into mechanical monsters, kikai.

There are some minor arcs of minor characters-- a yokai in love with Kato, a yokai beloved by a comedy-relief reporter-- but none of them gell particularly well. I liked the inclusion of some of the esoteric bits of Japanese lore-- though Tadashi doesn't grok ancient folklore, his grandpa sure knows beans about, well, beans in Nipponese legend-- but they do come at the non-Nipponese as out of nowhere. The fight-scenes are good but none of them stand out nearly as well as those fabulous fright-costumes.

The movie ends on a quasi-cliffhanger, which is apparently resolved in the 2021 sequel.

COWBOY BEBOP: THE MOVIE (2001)

 

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

After the original anime TV series COWBOY BEBOP ended in 1999, the show's four offbeat characters-- Spike, Jet, Faye and Edward-- got one more outing in this theatrical film, made by all or most of the same team that worked on the teleseries. 

Wiki describes the show as a "neo-noir space western." The most "noirish" thing about the TV show was its pacing, which eschewed the breakneck rush of the average space opera. The four heroes are quirky bounty hunters whose original motivation is almost always that of catching some wanted scumbag in order to grab a big payoff. More moralistic narratives might insist that bounty hunters should blow off their moneymaking trade in order to undertake some altruistic mission, but I don't think these bounty hunters ever do.

BEBOP-- which name in this essay I'll apply only to the movie-- mirrors the main disposition of the heroes. They usually start out their cases just lazing around their HQ, men and women of action who are intensely bored when they don't have something to do. (The exception is for daffy young Edward, a pre-teen girl with a boy's name and formidable computer hacking skills, for she's always annoyingly cheerful.) Spike is the handsome asskicker, Jet is the older, seasoned pro, and Faye is the hot but often unpredictable tough girl. They live in anticipation of some big score, but they never seem capable of monetizing their bounties. On some level they're adrenaline junkies who always end up benefiting society by capturing bad guys, though they'd never think of themselves as "heroes."

It happens to be future-Halloween when the Bebop crew goes after Volaju, a terrorist who threatens all of humanity with a nanotech virus. The season allows for some supernatural images along with those of the mundane western and the noir thriller, but I didn't think any of the story-tropes were developed enough to form epistemological patterns as such. Even the name of the terrorist's sometimes lover, "Elektra," doesn't seem to connect to anything about the classical Greek character-- or even the Marvel superhero, aside from the fact that both are martially skilled females. Both Volaju and Elektra are castoffs of past space-battles, and both get involved with ruthless designers of bio-tech weapons, which is how Volaju gets access to the nano-virus. There is some good tech-talk about how these artificial microbes operate, and some "traumatized soldier" tropes, but none of these receive much development.

Though all four regulars get things to do, Spike is clearly the focus of the story, since he handles most of the leg-work and ends up engaging in battles with both Elektra and Volaju. This "cowboy," as bounty hunters are termed in this future-verse, even loses a shootout with Volaju and takes a tumble into a river. Yet the river deposits Cowboy Spike into the hands of what appear to be a tribe of future-Indians-- the only ones I ever recall seeing anything resembling a Native American in this "space western."

The longer run-time allows better staging of both the violent interludes and the character-study scenes, making BEBOP THE MOVIE a worthy conclusion to a cult anime series.

PUNISHER: WAR ZONE (2008)

 

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

It's hard to believe, but this hard-R PUNISHER movie-- sadly, a box office bomb-- came out the same year as the much less violent IRON MAN, which of course became the cornerstone of the MCU. Further, two of IRON MAN's writers are credited on the ZONE script, and while producer Gale Ann Hurd (famed for both ALIENS and two TERMINATOR films) did not work on the Robert Downey Jr movie, she did produce the previous PUNISHER flick and both of the two HULK movies. ZONE is thus far director Lexi Alexander's only feature film in the "superhero opera," though she did also direct an episode apiece for ARROW and SUPERGIRL.

While the 2004 PUNISHER was bland action fare, the director and writers serve up the best action set-pieces seen in all three films starring ruthless vigilante Frank Castle. The script even suggests some of the ambivalence toward Castle's obsession seen in the 1989 PUNISHER, though there wasn't enough symbolic discourse to justify my calling ZONE a "myth-film."

The continuity of the 2004 movie is ignored as the script boots ZONE back toward the Marvel origin, in that Castle (Ray Stevenson) becomes Punisher after mobsters kill his family in a park. Further, the writers work in two allies from the comic books, Castle's armorer Microchip and policeman confidante Martin Soap, as well as recurring Punisher villain, Jigsaw (Dominic West). The story, however, seems to be independent of any established comics narratives.

This version of Punisher has been preying on underworld scum for at least four years, and has racked up a huge body count, in part because a handful of police officers abet his vigilante activities. Alexander opens the movie with a visual tour-de-force of eye-popping violence, as Punisher invades the home of a Mafia capo and slaughters almost everyone there with stabbings and shootings. (He shows himself a gentleman when a woman tries to stab him, merely snapping her neck.) One gangster, Billy Russoti, escapes and hides out in a glass-recycling plant, but the obsessed hero tracks him there and consigns Billy to a glass-crushing machine. Cops enter and save Billy's life, but he's so badly scarred that he renames himself Jigsaw. He gathers a few loyal hoods, who help him break into an insane asylum and break out Jigsaw's psychopathic brother, Looney Bin Jim (Doug Hutchison), apparently an original movie creation. 

Meanwhile, the Punisher learns an unpleasant truth: one of the men he killed was an undercover cop named Donatelli. This version of the crusader is a little less monolithically obsessed than the usual one, for he considers dropping his mission because of having slain a "good guy." He attempts to make amends by contacting Donatelli's widow Angela (Julie Benz) to present her with monetary compensation. But even though the agent's daughter Grace seems to like the solemn vigilante, Angela refuses the money and threatens to shoot Punisher, but can't do it even though he's willing to let her do so. However, he later realizes that because Jigsaw survived, he and his hoods will seek vengeance on the surviving Donatellis. Further, the late agent's partner Budiansky (Colin Salmon) has a strong jones for capturing/killing the vigilante, though Budiansky is inconvenienced by being saddled with the "help" of Detective Soap.

It's a foregone conclusion that the two main detractors of the ultraviolent hero, Angela and Budiansky, will end up becoming the Punisher's allies. What makes ZONE enjoyable is not any extraordinary originality, but the elan with which the scripters and director bring to the skull-chested hero's mayhem, not to mention a heaping helping of black humor. There's never any serious doubt that Punisher's targets (except for the slain agent) totally deserve killing, and that's the essence of the vigilante fantasy in all its escapist glory.

The heavy kevlar of this Punisher's outfit detracts from the iconic costume, but it's certainly preferable to, say, the black T-shirt of the 1989 movie. The late Stevenson, as I said, is a trifle too emotional to provide one with the ideal Punisher, but his performance, both in terms of emoting and performing stunts, is solid across the board, and the overall cast is equally fine. Lexi Alexander (who is, if one can't tell from the name, female) deserves another shot at a big-budget action-movie as soon as possible, and hopefully the 2024 production ABSOLUTE DOMINION will provide her with another such opportunity.

THE PUNISHER (2004)

 

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

Though the marketing for the second PUNISHER film places considerable emphasis on the Marvel hero wearing the skull-costume denied him in the 1989 movie, Thomas Jane doesn't really spend a helluva lot of time in said costume. Without that "outre outfit" and the one "diabolical device" in the story (a ballistic knife), I might still categorize the movie as "uncanny" thanks to the protagonist's mission to take down all criminals.

I've not read any of the comics-stories on which the film is ostensibly based. However, I tend to doubt that Marvel did a version of Punisher that deviated so sharply from his established origin. In the original tale-- which may have been "borrowed" partly from the first Don Pendleton EXECUTIONER paperback-- ex-Marine Frank Castle and his family witness a mob execution in Central Park. The mobsters shoot them all, but Castle survives to become the Punisher, warring on all criminals.

This time out, Castle is an undercover FBI agent. His imposture of a gangster eventuates in a raid on a smuggling operation headed by one Bobby Saint. Bobby dies, and his mafia-boss father Howard Saint (John Travolta) moves heaven and earth to learn the identity of the agent who caused his son's death. Saint's minions, led by enforcer Glass (Will Patton), assault a family reunion and kill a few dozen people, including Castle's wife. But despite the agent's formidable gun-skills Castle is shot and thrown into the sea.

He survives, and weeks later rather remarkably reveals that he's still alive to the police, apparently to shame them for not catching the killers. Even more remarkably, the cops don't try to take Castle in for questioning-- which shows that the scripters just wanted a dramatic scene no matter how improbable. Said scripters are director Jonathan Hensleigh, who had peaked in the nineties with the silly but amusing ARMAGEDDON, and Michael France, whose only good piece of writing was his partial contribution to GOLDENEYE.

After holing up in an abandoned apartment building, where he ends up forging unwanted bonds with the three quirky residents, Punisher lays his scheme of revenge. Rather than making a frontal assault, the hero decides to repay the loss of his family by alienating Saint from his various allies and family members. This operatic plot does give Travolta and Patton a lot of dramatic moments, but it takes some of the expected punch out of the hero's usual ultraviolent pattern. When Hensleigh does finally unleash some action set-pieces, they're watchable, but nothing to write home about.

Jane makes a decent hero, and he does pull off the affect-less persona of the Punisher fairly well. He's a little too Hollywood-handsome to fit the role, though I suppose he fits this overall project, which is just adequate action-movie fodder and nothing more.

ALICE IN WONDERLAND (1931)

 

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

The first sound version of ALICE'S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND was an independently-made feature whose performers are all unknown to me. According to the Wiki article on the movie, its producers were seeking to exploit a wave of "Alice-mania" that had inspired the early thirties, but this ALICE was not a success.

It is, however, a generally accurate adaptation, aside from excluding any scenes that might require expensive FX, such as Alice's size-changing exploits. Still, most of the events follow the book's chronology fairly well, and occasionally the script throws in a few new jokes. Alice, told that the Queen of Hearts intends to cut off her head, remarks that they're only cards, and she can "cut" them.

The actress playing Alice may be the film's biggest deficit, and not just because Ruth Gilbert was roughly 19 years old. Possibly because she was mainly a stage actress, Gilbert plays the role a bit too broadly. The script does have her show some of the character's moments of egotism rather than making her too nicey-nice. 

Most of the other performers wear heavy costumes, and the outfits are at least decent if not memorable. After seeing the film today, the one scene that sticks with me takes place at the Duchess's house. In the book, the Duchess only vaguely orders the cook to cut off Alice's head, prefiguring the same obsession in the Queen of Hearts. But in this film the Duchess actually comes at Alice with a cleaver, forcing the girl to flee with the Duchess's baby-- which, as in the book, simply makes a pig of itself. The line-readings are faithful but the script doesn't tap into Carroll's universe of lunacy.

As ALICE curios go, this one is tolerable.

MACABRE LEGENDS OF THE COLONIES (1974)

 

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

Here I was complaining a few weeks ago about the slightly lame name of one 1972 Mil Mascaras flick, and now I come across this one, which may be one of the poorest titles ever in terms of "hooking" an audience looking for cheap thrills. The movie's plot, co-written by the film's director Arturo Martinez, is no better. Not even the fact that this was the first of his three luchador films excuses the eccentric rambling of what ought to be a basic piece of pop entertainment-- particularly since Martinez had acted in all three of the Aztec Mummy films of the late fifities.

The time-travel plot was better handled by THE THREE STOOGES MEET HERCULES, and I wouldn't rule that out as a possible influence on MACABRE. Tieneblas, the biggest of three wrestlers working together at a match somewhere in Mexico, wanders into a curio shop. He takes a fancy to a weird painting, even though the proprietor tells him that it bears a curse from the days of Spain's early colonization of Mexico. He buys it, and then the film drops the main plot for about twenty minutes, as Tinieblas and his two partners, Mil Mascaras and the White Angel, take on various opponents in the ring.

Later that evening, after Tinieblas's partners warn him about making eyes at ladies in the audience too often, the three of them assemble at Tieneblas's home, along with two comely woman, the dates of the homeowner and the White Angel respectively. No sooner does the rather thick-headed wrestler show off his new acquisition than smoke boils from the painting. In the blink of an eye, all five of them are transported back to Conquistador times.

While the three stooges and their two dates wander around dodging the locals, Martinez reveals that the source of the time-travel magic is the painting in its 16th century incarnation, Said painting is in the possession of a well-dressed aristocrat, Lady Luisa (Lorena Velasquez). Despite looking very well-to-do, various remarks establish that Luisa is a social outcast for being a mestiza, and this has played a role in Luisa taking up the practice of witchcraft to punish the white invaders. At the same time, this message of cultural defiance is vitiated by the fact that Luisa keeps the mummified corpse of her mother in her house and makes sacrifices to it, so it sounds like the apple didn't fall far from the witch-tree.

Martinez wastes a lot of time in empty exposition scenes, particularly with the Inquisition authorities out to squelch Luisa's influence. Eventually the wrestlers and their dates fall into Luisa's clutches. She doesn't seem to expect their advent, so maybe the painting just grabbed the 20th-century quintet to pile up a few more sacrifices. The wrestlers have a few fights with Luisa's Indian minions, and then the two girls hit Luisa from behind-- and for some reason, this returns them to their own time, and Tinieblas destroys the painting. However, just for one last dose of muddled Mex-horror, Luisa somehow sends some Indian warriors to the 20th, where the luchadores easily trounce them in the ring. The End.

Since the fights are all dull, MACABRE's only virtue is giving lots of scenes to the gorgeous Lorena Velasquez. She made one more luchador film with Martinez as director, and that seems to be her swan song in the genre, though Velasquez continued to act and was still undertaking roles as recently as 2020.

LINDA LOVELACE, SECRET AGENT (1974)

 

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

Before I knew the alternate title of this dopey spy comedy, my main comment was going to be that it was about the *softest* softcore film I'd ever seen, given that it displays only scattered scenes of upper-body nudity, while the simulated sex scenes are as off limits as they would be in a Doris Day film.

And then I found out that LOVELACE was originally marketed as DEEP THROAT II, making it a cash-in on the famous hardcore sex film, which also starred the titular Miss Lovelace. It's even weirder that unlike the original THROAT, this extremely tame flick was directed by another big name in both hard-and-soft sex flicks, Joe Sarno. 

There's no doubt in my mind as to how this movie came about. DEEP THROAT began to make big money, and so distributors wanted a follow-up, tout suite. So some producer gave Sarno a few thousand dollars and a week to churn something out. I won't pretend that a lot of the sexploitation movies of the sixties and seventies were produced under much better conditions. Yet in my review of a 1966 spy-sex comedy, THE GIRL FROM SIN, I remarked that it at least had a rough plot, which LOVELACE does not.

Nurse Lovelace (guess who) works in the office of sex therapist Doctor Jayson (Harry Reems, the only other graduate of the previous THROAT job). When Lovelace and Jayson aren't getting it on with each other and with the receptionist (Tina Russell, another big name in seventies hardcore), the nurse administers tender loving care to all male patients while the doctor takes all the females. The sex clinic becomes the focus of various American and Russian agents because Dilbert, one of the male patients, is employed by the American government. The Americans ask the nurse to be their "inside girl," while the Russians prowl around, not doing much of anything. Chris Jordan plays a sort-of Natasha Fatale type who threatens Nurse Lovelace with a knife and whacks Jayson in the balls.

Most sexploitation flicks have a vaudeville-like structure, with just one aimless gag after another, and LOVELACE is the same, but with a lot fewer nude scenes. In one nonsense-scene, an American spy follows the Russians to a scrap-yard, hides in an old car in order to listen to them, and then a crane tosses the car and its occupant into a crusher. The crushed car emerges with the spy's head poking out, just like in a Jerry Lewis film, but a dozen times less funny. There's also a silly pie fight at the end, and it doesn't even use any double entendres.

Sarno does work in one slightly nasty touch. Dilbert lives with his aunt (Russell in a granny-getup). Nurse Lovelace thinks Dilbert's got an Oedipal problem that inhibits his sexual activity, so her solution is to dress up like his aunt and encourage Dilbert to rape her. I guess that's why they call her "therapist."

Aside from the dubious fantasy-sequence of the agent surviving the crusher, the only metaphenomenal content is that Dilbert works on a supercomputer with the capacity to assimilate new levels of information, which makes said computer a "diabolical device," albeit a really dull one. Two other names in the cast are Jamie Gillis, another hardcore veteran, and (in a tiny role) Judy Tenuta, who went on to become a mainstream comedienne.

CASPER: A SPIRITED BEGINNING (1997), CASPER'S HAUNTED CHRISTMAS (2000), CASPER'S SCARE SCHOOL (2006)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: (1) *poor,* (2,3) *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *psychological*

Despite the substantial box office of the 1995 CASPER in its theatrical release, the next two live-action iterations of the franchise were both DTV films, of which the first, CASPER: A SPIRITED BEGINNING, was the most formulaic.

SPIRITED is a prequel which purports to tell how Casper ended up living with his non-uncles The Ghostly Trio. The story ignores the details of his origin from the 1995 movie and just starts with Casper boarding the "Ghost Train" to go to some training center for unquiet spirits. He ends up in a human town, where he does his friendly ghost thing and gets rebuffed by fearful humans. In the same town, the Ghostly Trio have taken up residence in a condemned mansion, Applegate Mansion (no relation to the house seen in CASPER). Local real estate entrepreneur Tim Carson (Sreve Guttenberg) is seeking to have the mansion razed over the protests of townies who want to keep their heritage. One of the opponents is schoolteacher Shiela (Lori Loughlin), who has "romantic interest" written all over her, and another is Tim's own son Chris. In fact, after the Ghostly Trio drive away both the townies and Tim's construction workers, weirdness-loving Chris tries to ingratiate himself with the three specters, but to no avail. 

Casper is pursued by Kibosh (James Earl Jones), a training-ghost who resents the escape of one of his charges. As it happens, Kibosh is also looking for the Trio, who aren't doing their fair share of scaring. Kibosh has little effect until film's end, for most of the movie is taken up with Chris's problems with bullies and his negligent father. Chris is of course that rare individual willing to become friends with an undead shade, and so the Friendly Ghost gets mixed up in the problems of the boy, his dad, and the woman being set up to be Chris's new mom.

Only Loughlin manages to project some sincerity into her unrewarding role, while everyone else-- including such guest-stars as Rodney Dangerfield and Sherman Hemsley-- just does the bare minimum. In the end, Kibosh changes his mind and decides Casper can continue to haunt the house with the Trio. The second DTV film, reviewed here, kept the same director but received a superior script from one Jymm Magon, and also benefited from a cast of bigger names.

CASPER MEETS WENDY was followed by two computer-animated films, one released to the DTV market and one to television. 

First in 2000 came the more inventive of the two, CASPER'S HAUNTED CHRISTMAS. Despite the events of SPIRITED, the Warm-Hearted Wraith once more gets in trouble with Kibosh for his lack of intentional scaring. Therefore Kibosh exiles the Friendly Phantasm to the town of Kriss, Massachusetts, where people seem to celebrate Xmas all year round. It's not clear why Kibosh sends Casper there, but he also sends along the Ghostly Trio because (a) they don't like Christmas, (b) he doesn't like them,  and (c) they unlike Casper are forbidden to scare people, because he takes away their haunting licenses. Kibosh, who's more gratuitously sadistic in this outing, hopes Casper will fail so that he can consign all four ghosts to the fearsome dimension known as "The Dark."

As soon as Casper arrives in Kriss, he has a "meet-non-scary" with middle-schooler Holli Jollimore, who gets the idea that he's a talking snowman rather than a spirit. Holly enjoys taking to the "snow ghost" because she gets sick of her parents' mania for all things Christmassy. (The script works in both a George Bailey joke and one about "yellow snow.") 

The Trio try to teach Casper how to scare the Kriss citizens, but he's a hopeless case. But they get an inspiration: they can fake a Casper-scare by calling in his almost-lookalike cousin Spooky (an invention of the CASPER comics). They hope to deceive Kibosh's lieutenant, who's watching their every move, into thinking Casper scared someone, thus saving them all from the Dark. Spooky shows up with his girl Poil (both sporting heavy Bronx accents) and the Trio make him think impersonating Casper is an initiation stunt he must pass before joining their esteemed ranks.

Perhaps needless to say, Spooky's endeavors don't bear much fruit, except to mess up the friendship of Casper and Holly. Clever references to SCREAM, PSYCHO, SAY ANYTHING, and HOW THE GRINCH STOLE CHRISTMAS make up somewhat for a couple of very treacly songs. Eventually Casper is able to both mend fences with his living friend and to put the, uh, kibosh on Kibosh's plans for him and his uncles. Of the five Casper films, HAUNTED is easily the funniest Casper film, and far superior to any of the repetitive cartoon shorts that gave birth to the Affable Apparition. It joins CASPER AND WENDY in being one of the few media creations to adapt any of the Harvey Comics characters that crossed paths with comic-book Casper. 

CASPER'S SCARE SCHOOL is novel in that the Friendly Ghost spends only minimal time when a human friend named Jimmy. Tough spectral overseer Kibosh, making his third appearance, decides that Casper needs to build up his "scare skills" at an academy for apparitions. This plot development also leads to a much reduced screen time for the increasingly tiresome Ghostly Trio.

Once Casper's on the way to Scare School aboard a ghost ship captained by a pirate wearing two eyepatches (and guided by his talking parrot), he meets his fellow students, all mini-monsters like himself. The friendly phantasm bonds with a boy mummy and a girl zombie (whose body parts fall off all the time), but he also makes an enemy in an arrogant vampire kid, Thatch. At Scare School Casper encounters various weird teachers, though only one is consequential to the plot: a two-headed headmaster named Alder-and-Dash, though they're distinct in that one head is smart and the other stupid. 

Assorted school escapades transpire, many which involve Thatch trying to undermine Casper. The friendly ghost also learns that there's supposed some cosmic order maintained by monsters scaring humans, and that the consequence of a monster not scaring a human is that he/she must be banished to the Valley of Shadows. Casper finally decides to seek out the Valley, only to find that it's inhabited by other pacific spirits. It's a place Casper would like to stay, but duty calls him back to Scare School, where the evil headmaster plans to nullify Kibosh and place the Underworld under his (their?) control. James Belushi and Bob Saget portrayed the two heads of the headmaster, and Phyllis Diller's character was one of her last roles before she passed into that other valley of shadow.