SANTO VS. DR. DEATH (1973)

 

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

Even though the title sounds like this Santo film will be a total throwback to the wacky mad scientist flicks of the sixties, Doctor Death isn't exactly a world-beater. Under his real name of "Doctor Mann," the villain (played by Argentinian actor George Rigaud) aspires to amass a collection of stolen great masterworks of great art, and part of his very involved art-theft scheme involves making a special chemical derived from-- get this-- inducing tumors in the bodies of beautiful women. 

Well, I guess it's more original than the usual "capture beautiful women to steal their glands/faces/et al."

DEATH is a Mexican-Spanish co-production, taking place in Spain and helmed by Spanish director Rafael Marchent, so it's a definite change of pace for the Silver Mask. That said, aside from the Spanish museums in which the thefts take place, there's not a lot of "local color" here, not even when Santo wrestles in a Madrid ring. 

Santo is also totally in "Interpol agent" mode here, though it's still jarring to see him investigating art thefts that don't appear to involve any super-science elements. I don't remember what factors lead the hero to seek out Doctor Mann (and his gorgeous lady sidekick, played by Euro-babe Helga Line). But aside from noting that the doc has lots of comely female models hanging around his castle, Santo isn't able to learn much. So Interpol sends a female agent (Mirta Miller) to infiltrate Mann's castle, and also gives Santo a male partner (played by the director's brother).

After a slow beginning, Doctor Death begins to retaliate against the investigators, sending henchmen to batter Santo and using creepy-crawlies to torment victims. However, the only outstanding scene takes place at the very end. Death is escaping the law via speedboat, presumably trying to reach the coastline. Santo pursues by clinging to a rope ladder hanging from a helicopter, and hoping that the pilot can get him close enough that he can jump into the boat and pound the villain. This is probably the best stunt in the history of Santo movies, and makes up for a lot of shortcomings.

SANTO AND THE TIGRESS (1971)

 

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

As the above lobby card shows, the movie possesses a longer alternative title, but the short form works well enough for describing what happens in it: the peripatetic Silver Mask makes his way into a "ranchera movie," where he meets a character played by popular Mexican singer Irma "The Tigress" Serrano.

There's not much else to the film. Santo is summoned to the ranch of La Tigresa to find out who's plotting to kill her. In between mostly mundane murder attempts, Santo has a minor romantic dalliance with the ranch-woman and there are a lot of songs, as ranchera films tended to display. Santo has a few fights with hired henchmen, and with one fellow who almost seems like one of the monsters of the wrestler's more mind-bending flicks: a hulking fellow with a deformed face.

There's also a more mundane "monster" in the story, but at first he seems to be a down-to-earth specimen, for he's hunchbacked ranch-servant Alejandro. Since there aren't a lot of candidates for the murder-mastermind, it's no big surprise to learn that Alejandro is the culprit. In fact, he's been raising the big deformed brute in hiding for twenty years in order to await just the right opportunity, for the brute is actually La Tigresa's half-brother. Alejandro brings the hulk along to strangle his half-sister, but the big guy can't do it, turns on his master, and is shot to death. Santo shows up for the finale but has little to do.

TIGRESS is distinguished only by being the dullest Santo film I've ever seen. I certainly hope there's nothing worse.

NATIONAL LAMPOON'S LOADED WEAPON 1 (1993)

 

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

In my review of the three NAKED GUN movies I noted that all of the "extra diegetic" nonsense-elements had to be disregarded when judging the phenomenality of the films. Once one excludes all the outright nonsense, the question becomes: do the diegetic elements fall into one category more than the others?

The closest thing to a coherent plot in this broad spoof of the LETHAL WEAPON films is the idea that evil mastermind General Mortars (William Shatner) is plotting to flood the country with Girl Scout cookies laced with cocaine. I consider this a "bizarre crime" along the same lines as non-comical films about villains unleashing Black Plague germs on an unwitting populace. So though Mortars' plan is given an absurd tone, its content aligns with the uncanny.

Emilio Estevez and Samuel L. Jackson play inspectors Colt and Luger, modeled loosely on the characters from the WEAPON films, though Luger seems to suffer from some of the PTSD of the Mel Gibson figure. (Something to do with a crossing guard incident.) Strangely, the one element of the WEAPON films that LOADED doesn't copy is that of adverse feelings. Here the two buddy-cops hardly ever utter a cross word to one another, much less being "mismatched." Maybe director/co-writer Gene Quintano was too busy trying to figure how many celebrity cameos he could shoehorn into the story (close to twenty by Wikipedia's count). Not that one expects deep characterization in a silly farce. But sometimes the irreverent imitation of high seriousness can yield good jokes.

Are there any good jokes in this farrago? A few, but in most respects it seems like a predecessor to the lazy spoof movies of the 21st century, with the main exception being that LOADED made fair money in 1993-- though not enough to garner a real sequel. Kathy Ireland plays a henchwoman for General Mortars who's patterned after the Sharon Stone character in BASIC INSTINCT, but the script fails to do anything with the idea and defaults to the "good girl" schtick. Tim Curry probably comes off best emulating the "Mister Joshua" character from the first WEAPON film, though F. Murray Abraham does nicely with his spoof of Hannibal Lecter. The pseudo-Lecter, being a cannibal like the original, is the only reason LOADED includes the trope "perilous psychos."

WER (2013)

 

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

I'm not all that enamored of "found footage" films, but WER is a different sort of animal. There are some werewolf films in which the diagnosis of the monster's nature can take the better part of the film. But this movie, directed by William Brent Bell and co-written by Bell and writing partner Matthew Peterman, keeps the audience guessing as to how far it will go in the depiction of the monster, who's almost constantly under the scrutiny of videocameras for the majority of the story.

Living in France as an expatriate American, defense attorney Katherine (AJ Cook) takes the case of Talan Gwynek (Brian Scott O'Connor), an exceptionally hairy fellow accused of having savagely attacked three tourists. Katherine, along with her aide Eric (who may have some romantic interest in her), commissions the aid of animal expert Flemyng because there's some doubt as to whether the tourists were killed by a human or by an animal. Katherine and Flemyng had a romantic encounter years ago but they broke up, so that some tension remains.

French police captain Pistor liases with Katherine's team, and reluctantly gives them permission to interview Talan under extreme security. The almost unspeaking man responds to Katherine's empathy, but gets a little too grabby and is restrained by police-- though Talan inadvertently scratches Flemyng with one of his "talons." Eric researches possible medical irregularities about the client and brings up the possibility that he suffers from porphyry, which induces excessive hairiness. In addition, Katherine suspects that Pistor is anxious to convict Talan for the murders because the cop has some link to a land-scheme involving the Gwynek family.

Most werewolf films don't allow anyone but the viewing audience to witness the creatures' transformations, but Talan not only transforms in front of numerous witnesses, he slaughters several police with displays of super-strength and escapes. Later, when the fugitive is cornered in a hotel, he again repels a dozen or more French cops, seeming almost immune to gunfire. But the manhunt for Talan is complicated by a new wolf in town, for now Flemyng begins to suffer from the werewolf disease-- and he ends up fighting the other animal-man at the climax.

The script's broad implication is that the werewolf condition is some rare disease triggered by moonlight, though no rationale for all the superhuman abilities is presented. But the action and gore scenes are well-realized, and I didn't really mind that there wasn't a lot of character development. WER is a good basic werewolf movie with talented performances by the principals and a fresh angle. As in many "found footage" movies, there's some suspicion about the process of making any definitive conclusions based on the nature of filmed evidence, and this translates to a general uncertainty about the validity of governmental power.

SMALLVILLE 2:15: "PRODIGAL" (2003)

 

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

Usually the showrunners did a decent job of smoothing out the possible bumps between episodes, whenever the script for one episode didn't completely line up with the next in line. "Prodigal," though, fails to follow up on one of the main subplots of "Rush." In Episode 14, Lana becomes wroth with Clark because she sees him suck face with Chloe, a thing he can't explain, though Lana declines to fill Chloe in on her adrenalized misadventures. But in Episode 15, she greets Clark like nothing's happened between them. He asks for a job at her bistro, and she gives it to him, though with only a little reluctance due to his habit of mysterious disappearances. 

No doubt the writers of "Prodigal" back-burned all Kent-family subplots while concentrating on the main Luthor story-- though it ends up not having much impact on the season, much less the series. Following up on the plot set up in "Lineage," we meet Lucas, the grown son of Lionel Luthor and his crazy mom Rachel. Lucas was paid off to keep his distance from the Luthor hierarchy, so that the young man grew up as a gambler and risk-taker. 

Lex seeks out his half-brother and brings him to Smallville, amid copious myth-references to the Biblical "prodigal son." Lex's real purpose is to use the Lexcorp shares Lucas owns against Lionel, but Lionel foresees this strategy and brings in the old double-cross. Lionel also delivers on his threat to disenfranchise Lex and to kick him out of house and home. Lex seeks sanctuary with the Kents, which doesn't lead to his harvesting any new info about the Mystery of Clark, though Jonathan does feel a bit more kindly toward Lex due to the association. 

It all leads to a confrontation in which Lucas tries to implicate Lionel in a crime that will put his father under Lucas's thumb: the rather Abrahamic crime of slaying Lex. This fails, of course, and Lucas is ushered out of the Small-verse, never to return. Oh, and Lionel's blind act, which was never good for anything but a few minor developments, comes to an end. I grad the episode "fair" just because the trope of quarreling brothers is symbolically important to the series, though mainly with respect to symbolic siblings Clark and Lex.

THE HAUNTED WORLD OF EL SUPERBEASTO (2009)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical, psychological*

I'm happy to add the TV-film adaptation of SUPERBEASTO to the short list of movies that "are better than the book." I reviewed the TPB collection of Rob Zombie stories here, and while Zombie's original concept had some merit, he blew it by reeling off his list of transgressive jokes with no more style than Stephen Colbert reading Trump routines from his teleprompter.

The big change seems to be that for the STARZ-financed movie Zombie collaborated on the script with his friend, comedian Tom Papa (who also voices the titular Superbeasto). In essence, HAUNTED follows the rough outline of the first story from the TPB. But the sheer quantity of jokes has been roughly quadrupled, making it a lot more likely that the viewer won't see all of them coming. Further, some of the plot developments of the original story have been finessed in a way one doesn't often see in stories devoted to lots of blood and guts and T and A. I can't necessarily credit Papa with all of the improvements, but that's what I tend to believe anyway.

I confess I've never read Jarry's famous play UBU ROI, but I thought the main character sounded a bit like Superbeasto. So I looked the play up on Wiki, and found a critic who called Jarry's world "a domain of greedy self-gratification." That applies to the HAUNTED WORLD as well. El Superbeasto is a vain, self-centered ex-wrestler who dwells in a world of weird monster-people and spends most of the time looking for bimbos in bars. He has a sexy sister, Suzi X (Sherri Moon Zombie), who's some sort of patch-eyed superspy (think Nick Fury with tits). I suppose she's the closest thing to a standard hero in HAUNTED, though I'm not sure her heroics aren't just an excuse to unleash her bloodlust. She sometimes tries to get her brother to help her on missions, and he usually blows her off because he's busy screwing around, in one way or another.

This time, though, Superbeasto hears the clarion call to heroism while engaged in pursuing a particular piece of trim, exotic dancer Velvet Von Black (who's a white girl, despite spouting ghetto lingo and being voiced by Rosario Dawson). Velvet is kidnapped to become the bride of Doctor Satan (Paul Giamatti), the ultimate shrimpy scientist desperate to prove his manhood. Superbeasto isn't much better, since he's mainly concerned with earning some carnal gratitude from Velvet. When all the principals converge, lots of sex and violence ensues. Oh, and the climax-- the storytelling climax, I mean-- is made much better by giving the evil doctor the power to change himself into a Godzilla-sized devil-man. 

Other improvements include Suzi X having to fight off a horde of Nazi zombies to keep them from saving Hitler's brain. I'll give away a funny scene in which another horde of zombie soldiers are thwarted by the conundrum of whether a new Nazi regime would be the Third or the Fourth Reich. Papa and Zombie together also get a lot more mileage out of Suzi's robotic aide Murray, who's modeled on the frowny-faced automaton from the serial THE PHANTOM CREEPS. Other celebrity voices include Dee Wallace, Geoffrey Lewis, Rob (DARKWING DUCK) Paulsen, Laraine Newman, Sid Haig, Cassandra Peterson, and Tura Satana. With respect to Satana, the few lines she reads for a cartoon character-- quite logically named "Varla"-- provided the actress with her next-to-last role before she passed.

SANTO VS. BLUE DEMON IN ATLANTIS (1970)

 

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

Yes, Santo and Blue Demon have some real fights (as opposed to wrestling-bouts) in this film. No, there is no "Atlantis" in the film; just an island with a big installation on it that gets blown up at the climax, yet doesn't even pretend to sink beneath the sea. One review claims that the installation was built on the ruins of lost Atlantis but I don't remember any dialogue to that effect, and even if it's true the fact has zero relevance to the story.

The installation is the center from which the madman Achilles threatens to destroy civilization with nuclear devastation if the civilized countries don't yield to him. For some reason the united nations can't strike back at his island fortress, so they need Santo to contact a good scientist to counteract the schemes of the bad one.

But Achilles-- actually an ex-Nazi genius who keeps himself young with a unique de-aging treatment-- anticipates the intervention of Santo and Santo's Blue Demon. While the two heroes are engaging in a ring-bout (one which Blue Demon seems particularly stoked to win), the agents of Achilles try to drug them both. But the henchmen only manage to drug and abduct the Demon. Once the Demon has been transported to the Phony Atlantis, Achilles first subjects him to a wrestling-contest against a big plug-ugly. Then the madman enslaves Blue Demon with hypnosis, so that the former hero joins with Achilles' minions in seeking to destroy Santo.

This Mexican production is pretty much on the same level as the Eurospy programmers that reigned in the late sixties: a few decent production values but also some rinky-dink technology. Only one aspect of the script shows a little imagination, in that Achilles gives all of his acolytes the names of Greek myth-figures. The narration explains, correctly, that German Nazis rooted their idea of eugenic perfection on the model of idealized Greek heroes. Having tossed out that nugget, however, the film does nothing with it. There are also a few good-looking female characters but they don't have enough to do to make them stand out, and that includes the one who dresses in lingerie in an attempt to seduce the Silver Mask.

ATLANTIS is a decent time-killer, nothing more. One of the two scriptwriters also worked on about half a dozen other Santo films and two Blue Demons.

DRACULA'S WIDOW (1988)

 

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

Somehow I don't think it speaks well of the talents of Christopher ("nephew of Francis Ford") Coppola that his first film, both as director and co-writer, seems the only one in the repertoire that most film-fans are likely to recognize. All the more pity then, that this late-eighties anticipation of RENFIELD is such a slog.

The biggest problem WIDOW displays is that the script has no idea what its titular character wants to accomplish. The beginning of Coppola's film slightly evokes that of ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET FRANKENSTEIN. In both cases crates containing a monster, or monsters, are shipped to the U.S., and in both cases these stratagems don't stand up to much logical scrutiny. But once the action of the A&C film begins, the script quickly establishes Dracula's intentions and resources.

Not only does the viewer not know why the coffin of Vanessa, Wife of Dracula  (Sylvia Kristel) ends up being delivered to a Hollywood wax museum, there's never a clue about the vampire-woman's goals. She seems not to know how she ended up being sent to Hollywood, but her shipping to America seems to have come about by accident, given that the script establishes that the original Van Helsing slew her husband about two generations ago. Once she awakens, she takes control of the museum-owner Raymond (Lenny von Dohlen) with a bite and informs him that he's now her slave and must renounce his girlfriend Jenny (who has the mostly coincidental surname of Harker). Vanessa-- who despite her antiquity is always clad in a skirt-suit that conveys a contemporary appearance-- at first wants to return to Romania to be with her lord. Informed that he's dead, she wants vengeance on Dracula's slayer, and by an amazing coincidence, Van Helsing's elderly grandson just happens to live in L.A. Vanessa gets her vengeance, but all the scenes relevant to that subplot probably don't amount to twenty minutes.

Vanessa does feed on male victims at night, and in one puzzling incident, she drags Raymond to a satanic club, and despite the reverence shown her by the Satanists, she transforms into a beast-woman with a raddled face and claws them all to death. Naturally the Hollywood cops investigate the various murders, and one sympathetic officer eventually believes Raymond's wild story of a vampire mistress. Van Helsing, before he's killed, does inform Raymond that he can only be free of his thralldom if he kills the one who vampirized him, which leads to an unsurprising and unexciting conclusion.

In theory, Raymond's plight ought to move viewers, but both the script and Von Dohlen's flat acting generate only tedium. Frankly, even the most derivative FRIDAY THE 13TH knock-off usually does a better job of creating empathy for both inevitable and possible victims. As Vanessa, Kristel has almost nothing to do but to stalk about menacingly, holding her hands in clawlike posture even when she's not in full monster-form. Her rampages are the closest thing WIDOW has to a high point, since the budget did allow for some quality gore, and even a decent prosthetic for a sort of "were-bat" creature. But it's a weird, strangely dispassionate film, which can't even muster a sense of irony that Raymond, a devotee of vampire movies and owner of a wax museum, has been forced to experience the reality of monsters.

SMALLVILLE 2:14: "RUSH" (2003)

 

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

Dull episodes like "Insurgence" and "Suspect" have one virtue, for one appreciates how they provide support for the more ambitious stories. "Rush" is surely one of the few SMALLVILLE tales that makes the show's cultivation of "teen angst" relevant in general human terms, for teens are not the only people who can feel like "spectators in their own lives," as Lana puts it.

The episode opens on the juxtaposition of flaming youth and ancient Indian secrets, when a group of Smallville high-schoolers hold a "cave-rave" in the Kawatche tunnels. Chloe and Pete both attend, so they're on the scene when, for the first time, a centuries-old menace arises to avenge teenaged profanation. A small number of teens are infected by parasitic worms that have remained in suspended animation within the cave-walls, and Pete is one so infected. Chloe doesn't get infected until later, though one of the infectees boldly kisses her, which symbolically sets her up to be the next person to unleash "secret desires."

The next day, Pete begins acting the part of an adrenaline junkie, endangering himself with wild adventures. Yet his daredevil antics inspire Clark to screw up his courage and to ask Lana for a date, which she accepts. Later she expresses a little reluctance to Chloe, not entirely sure the young journalist will be okay with it. Naturally, this sets up the eventual infection of Chloe, who immediately begins obeying the lesser angels of her nature. 

Clark uses his X-ray vision to discern the presence of the parasite inside Pete. But Pete has prepared himself for Clark's interference, though I don't recall where he would have got hold of chunks of both green and red kryptonite. After using the green variety to give Clark pause, he gets with Chloe and generously invites Clark to join them in more youthful antics by exposing the virtuous teen to the red variety. Clark's superego takes a nap and he enthusiastically makes out with Chloe so as to ruin Clark's chances with Lana. Chloe's make-out session with Clark backfires, for she dislodges the kryptonite, making it possible for the super-teen to get the danger junkies to a hospital to have their parasites removed. Conveniently, neither Chloe nor Pete remember any of their adrenal-ized experiences, not least the way Pete revealed Clark's Big Secret.

In subplot territory, Lex institutes security around the caves and invites a master linguist (Chloe calls him "cunning") to analyze the pictographs. The linguist will have two more appearances in the Second Season before disappearing. Despite Clark's base suspicions of Lex in "Suspect," Lex proves the bigger fellow, inviting Clark to visit the caves when he pleases, over the linguist's objections. But Lex tells his pet scientist that it's best to let Clark have his head, on the possibility that he may help them solve some mysteries-- showing that the apple of Lex hasn't fallen far from the Lionel-tree.

The Adrenaline Parasites, as an online wiki calls them, are the weakest part of "Rush." Given how often green kryptonite had caused Earthlings to act out their worst desires, I speculate that maybe the writers' original idea might have been to have the Smallville teens similarly affected by the red version, only to discard the idea for Reasons. At the time of the rave only a few worms have survived their long hibernation in the caves, and it's not clear what happens to the two or three that aren't removed from Chloe and Pete. Lex's scientist freezes some others in nitrogen, which evidently kills them, so they don't seem to have Kryptonian powers, though that's not an absolute necessity in the Small-verse. The best guess is that they're incredibly long-lived creatures that hitched a ride back when the Kawatche's savior Naman visited Earth and that they're non-Kryptonian in nature. They never appear again in the series.

The writing is quite clever in this episode, and Pete gets to speak what may be my favorite SMALLVILLE line, just as he exposes Clark to his crimson nemesis: "I figured it out. In your world, green means 'stop.' And red-- red means 'go.'" I don't think that before this story anyone had ever managed to associate green and red kryptonite with those jolly opposites Thanatos and Eros.

SMALLVILLE 2:13: "SUSPECT" (2003)

 

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

The SMALLVILLE honchos decided to follow up "Insurgence," a bad heist-story, with a bad "juvenile detectives" story. 

Someone shoots Lionel Luthor, and while he's recovering in the hospital, Sheriff Ethan arrests Jonathan Kent, who's found in possession of the murder weapon. Clark and Pete get their Hardy Boys groove on. 

"Insurgence" derailed whatever plans Lionel had in mind for secretary Martha, since she severed her employment with him. Though he sent her an expensive present-- enough to rile her jealous husband, giving him a motive to quarrel with Lionel-- his main focus in the episode is to finally shut down Lex's independent operation. The methods he uses to do so are the proximate cause of the murder attempt, rather than his quarrel with Jonathan. The fact that Lex was slammed by his dad before the attempt causes Clark to suspect Lex, which tests their friendship but does not provide a major rift.

The mystery is nothing special, and there's really only one suspect possible once the red herring is disposed of. The only notable thing about the episode is that it continues to develop Lionel's status as an uncompromising "heavy father." The insertion of a line from Nietzsche-- "That which is done out of love always takes place beyond what is good and evil"-- is a nice touch.

OUT OF TIME (1988)

 

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

OUT OF TIME is a cheaply-shot telefilm that was supposedly a set-up for a TV series, though the premise seems largely exhausted by the execution of the time-paradox storyline. Surprisingly, given the molasses-slow pacing and routine setups, the director was Robert Butler, who'd shown himself capable of much better cinematic storytelling with the first episodes of both BATMAN and STAR TREK.

The script, by three writers mostly known for series-TV, took a little time to establish some characterization for future-cop hero Channing Taylor (Bruce Abbott). Born in the futuristic era of 2088, he feels that his department relies too much on fancy crime-fighting devices and not enough on human instinct. (Patrons of sixties TV will recognize this as The Mannix Trope.) Channing also has a conflict with those devices because many of them were invented by Channing's own great-grandfather Maxwell Taylor, so the cop tend to reject high-tech because his contemporaries idolize his ancestor so much. In fact, Channing's gut-instinct approach to tracking down master criminal Marcus (Adam Ant) gets him suspended from the future force.

However, rule-breaker Channing tracks Marcus to a hideout where Marcus is making use of a time-machine to travel back to 1988. The two are separately transported back in time, and "out-of-water fish" Channing has to leap over a bunch of piddly hurdles to figure out how to cope with the transition. He manages to capture Marcus temporarily, but also runs into a young cop, who is none other than a young Maxwell Taylor (Bill Maher), still just a beat cop who has yet to invent any dazzling inventions. (When Maxwell sees some of the future-devices he will later invent, he comments, "What; did Buck Rogers have a garage sale?") So what evolves is yet another buddy-comedy, in which Channing gets Maxwell to assist in his efforts to foil Marcus's plans-- which, frankly, I never figured out myself. The pilot ends with Channing stuck in 1988 because he needs fuel for his time-machine, but the script leaves open the possibility that Maxwell may be able to invent something to send Channing back to-- you know.

As I said, it's a very dull-looking, dully-paced time-travel tale. Bruce Abbott doesn't have much to work with, Bill Maher does okay with a semi-straight role, and Adam Ant's villain is shamefully bland. This loser deserves its place in the dustbin of TV history.

SON OF THE MASK (2005)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical, psychological*

At the risk of honking off the orthodoxy of the Golden Raspberry crowd, SON OF THE MASK is not that bad. It was probably a doomed effort given how enthusiastically audiences embraced the original MASK as a prime Jim Carrey vehicle. There's probably no way that any other actor could have made the MASK-franchise fly with a totally different character-- and IMO there really wasn't anything more to say about Stanley Ipkiss (though SON arose from an attempt to get Carrey to do just such a sequel).

I suppose a sequel with Ipkiss could have taken roughly the same course as SON. Ipkiss would be happily married to the woman he won in the first movie, and anticipating a new addition to the family when Loki, God of Mischief, came around looking to re-acquire his mask of multiple metamorphoses. But I prefer the approach taken in SON. Again a dog gets hold of the abandoned artifact, and he brings it to his master Tim Avery (Jamie Kennedy). The last name, by the way, is a shout-out to the famous animator Tex Avery, whose rapid-fire gags were sedulously imitated in the first MASK. Tim is married to Tonya (Traylor Howard), a successful sales rep, and though at present he only holds down a crappy job he has ambitions to be a great animator and sell a cartoon series to television. But because he isn't really pulling down the big bucks, he doesn't want kids yet, and Tonya does. 

Meanwhile, Loki (Alan Cumming) has been commanded to retrieve the mask by grumpy Norse all-father Odin (Bob Hoskins). Loki runs around Edge City (location of the original comic book stories) following up false leads and getting intensely frustrated.

Through various complications Tim gets hold of the mask, which adheres to his face and makes him The New Mask. In this wild and crazy persona he shows off all sorts of wild magic-- though onlookers mistake the transformations for special FX-- at a party attended by a studio executive. Said exec is so impressed with Tim's new jam that he lets him make a pitch for a series. Tim runs home, still in the Mask, and has baby-making sex with his wife.

Making a baby with the mask on sends out an alert to Odin, and he passes on to Loki the fact that wherever the mask is, it's associated with someone's new infant. But Loki has to go through various hoops to find the Avery house, and while he's looking, Tim becomes aware that his newborn son is a little miracle in more ways than one. To further complicate things, Tim's dog Otis gets hold of the mask and hides it.

The rest of the plot amounts to a lot of short tug o'war struggles between Tim and Loki, with tons and tons of wild CGI animation. culminating in a boxing match between New Mask and the God of Mischief. But the various character moments, while not profound, aren't bad-- Otis being jealous of Alvey, Tim trying to bond with his freaky son, and even the dysfunctional relationship between Loki and Odin. ("I'm never going to be like Thor, Dad!") While re-watching it I even thought that SON's script exhibited some of the dynamic between the child's mind, which contains both (1) an ability to embrace all sorts of lunacy and impossibility and (2) a need to form bonds with its parental units in order to mature.

But was it funny? Well, Kennedy did some good acting as put-upon Tim, but it's no putdown to say that he didn't have Carrey's manic energy. The effects were critiqued for being too frenzied, but they're not any worse in that respect than ROGER RABBIT. I was mildly amused but confess I didn't laugh out loud, though I might have liked it better as a kid. Howard and Cumming supply good support work, but they're the only other actors with much to do, though Hoskins has good presence in his few scenes as the All-Father (who even has only one eye, as in the old myths).

THE FRENCH SEX MURDERS (1972)

 

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

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

For a guy who worked mostly on westerns, Ferdinando Merighi did all right with his one sleaze-filled giallo. THE FRENCH SEX MURDERS. It could have been a lot better script-wise, but at least it's never dull.

One often sees the more mystery-oriented Italian thrillers establish two seemingly unrelated social domains: one reputable, one not so much. The disreputable domain is an upscale French whorehouse run by Madame Colette (a still glamorous Anita Ekberg) and staffed by such beauties as Marianne (Rosalba Neri) and Francine (Barbara Bouchet). Petty thief Antoine has been banned because of previous bad behavior with Francine. Yet because the lusty young fellow brings a large wad of cash with him, Madame Colette allows him to have a session with his obsession. The two quarrel, Antoine slaps Francine around and then leaves. Moments later, an American named Randall-- a writer who's talked the Madame into letting him hang around and gather material for a sleazy expose on French prostitution-- finds Francine dead from bludgeoning.

The reputable domain is comprised by the representatives of the law who condemn Antoine despite his protestations of innocence. Antoine swears that he'll kill everyone who sent him to the guillotine, though he doesn't lose his life that way. Apparently just to give the movie a little more oomph, Antoine escapes jail but gets his head cut off in a motorcycle accident. In the view of Judge Tesch (William Alexander), the man who sentenced Antoine, justice has been served. When his close friend Professor Waldemar (Howard Vernon) makes the unusual request to collect Antoine's head for study, Tesch makes it happen. 

Tesch, though, is not the important part of the reputable world, for the story places far more emphasis upon the eccentric scientist, his laboratory aide Roger (Franco Borelli), and Waldemar's sexy daughter Eleanora (Evelyn Kraft). Patently some mystery-element's being set up when the script repeatedly informs us that Waldemar doesn't like anyone messing around his daughter, and that Eleanora isn't willing to challenge his authority and openly date Roger. 

Then Madame Colette is killed. Maybe her death wouldn't be enough to launch a continuing investigation, but then Judge Tesch is slain as well, and people start wondering if Antoine is really back from the dead. Inspector Fontaine (Robert Sacchi, a well-known Humphrey Bogart lookalike from the period) takes over the case, but he can't seem to prevent more murders, including the decapitation of Marianne. The mystery killer is never clearly seen and his murder-methods are basic, though Merighi tries to soup up the killings with rapid-fire repetitions of the murder-frames, but it's dire rather than exciting.

To absolutely no one's surprise, Antoine's not back from the dead. Weird Waldemar suddenly confesses a deep and abiding love for his own daughter Eleanora, and reveals that he killed Francine at the whorehouse because the prostitute (blonde like Eleanora) wouldn't play along with Waldermar's incest-fantasy. (She may have also triggered him by suggesting the daughter's unavailability, as Francine's last words include the phrase, "I'm a dirty whore, yet you can't have me!" Supposedly Waldemar commits all the other murders to "cover" for the original killing, though it's one of the later murders that allows Fontaine to solve the mystery. I suppose one might have said that Waldemar's true motives was to kill off other young women because the violence stimulated him, but then how does one explain his gory slayings of two men as well? And although Madame Colette's very comely, there's not much chance that Waldemar could imagine her to be his "forbidden fruit."

So as a mystery the film is mostly BS, but the hot women are well photographed and events move along nicely, despite the unimpressive murder-methods. 

SO SWEET, SO DEAD (1972)

 

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

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

I saw this film under the title THE SLASHER IS THE SEX MANIAC. For once an exploitative and inaccurate English title is derived from an Italian title that's equally inaccurate though a little less exploitative (see above). I prefer the alternate English title for this film, the only giallo by director/co-writer Roberto Bianchi Montero.

SO SWEET SO DEAD comes damn close to rating "good mythicity" by the way the script utilizes tropes of misogyny. I'm not talking about the penchant of giallos to depict more female killings in disproportion to male ones. Due to the strength discrepancy between men and women, there's a degree of physical logic when a male serial killer-- or even a female one-- preys more on females than on males. Even the depiction of female deaths in spectacular visual terms is arguable in terms of its misogynistic content.

But in SWEET, we have a killer who incarnates a social form of misogyny, rather than killing because he's a "sex maniac." Perhaps because the murderer dresses in the standard black giallo attire with a stocking mask and uses a mundane knife all the time, the press doesn't give him a snazzy nickname. Thus I'll anticipate the film's Big Reveal by calling him "the Professor" (yes, that's why the spoilers are there), and he earns that name by showing a professorial level of research ability. All of his targets are all glamorous, upper-class married women who have cheated on their husbands, and the Professor first kills the women and then leaves behind photographic evidence on their indiscretions. He also very considerately scratches out the faces of the men with whom the unfaithful women dallied, as if he were avenging the husbands who were sinned against and yet excusing the men who made the indiscretions possible. In hands more capable than those of Montero, this could have been a searing indictment of Italian double standards toward male profligacy. But one of the big flaws of SWEET is that the Professor's psychosis is never really justified. Yes, there's some last-minute BS about how he lost his beloved wife because she died in an accident while in the company of her lover. Yet the weak script makes no attempt to grapple with his reasons for protecting the male transgressors. Ironically, when the Professor in his civilian ID is trying to lead the cops down the garden path, he suggests that the killer effaces the photos because he's homosexual-- which is also BS.

The Professor's main adversary, Inspector Capuana (Farley Granger) is a little better drawn. He and his beautiful wife Barbara (Sylva Koscina) moved from a small Italian city to a bigger one for the sake of social advancement. But because the Professor targets only rich people, Capuana constantly finds himself between a rock and a hard place: rich people constantly demand that he arrest the malefactor preying on their class (even if the killer IS knocking off unfaithful wives), but at the same time the cops have to treat all the rich people with kid gloves. After three or four women die, Capuana gets a break, of sorts. Gastone is a somewhat dotty mortician (played by Luciano Rossi as if he were channeling Klaus Kinski). Gastone, though not a suspect, seems to have a fetish for making dead bodies look flawlessly preserved. Out of nowhere the mortician confesses to the killings. Capuana and his fellow cops don't believe Gastone for a moment, but they tell the press they've caught the killer, in the far-fetched belief that this will offend the killer's pride.

This stratagem shouldn't work, but it does. The Professor calls Capuana and announces that he'll make the inspector pay for insulting the killer's holy mission, for the Professor then tells Capuana that he intends to slay Barbara. Apparently the killer's annoyance allows him to deviate from focusing on the upper classes, but he stays true to his main obsession, for he also tells Capuana that Barbara's been cheating on him.

Even though Capuana never actually sees any evidence against Barbara, he implicitly believes everything the murderer tells him. (And how convincing are a bunch of photos with the male faces scratched off, anyway?) But though Capuana still has no way to track the Professor, he has a sudden realization of just who Barbara's lover could be. He rushes to Barbara's rendezvous point.

I'll omit the movie's final twist, which could have been a Hitchcockian masterpiece if Montero hadn't saddled SWEET with such cardboard characters and unbelievable motivations. Frankly, the Professor is such a weak-sauce monster that I really wish Gastone had been the culprit. His obsession with making women look beautiful in death-- and thus incapable of refusing any attentions-- could have been a nice comment on the way the better giallos use the female body to portray a union of eros and thanatos, of "the sweet" and "the dead."

TRICK OR TREAT, SCOOBY DOO (2022)

 

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

TRICK OR TREAT, SCOOBY DOO is so bad, it made me yearn for the sublimity of 2020's SCOOB. Whatever the various failings of that DTV flick, at least there were indications that the writers had some regard for the history of the Scooby franchise specifically and for Hanna-Barbera generally.

I have no idea how director/co-writer Audie Harrison finagled this assignment. His credit to fame thus far is that of writing and producing several episodes of the Cartoon Network show UNCLE GRANDPA, which I didn't care for but which did enjoy five seasons. But he and his co-writers were clearly out to "deconstruct" the Scooby Gang, and some dumdum in management let them indulge themselves.

The main plot follows a trope seen in early comic books: the Big Reveal that a bunch of completely separate villains actually share some common history: a mystery mastermind, or a supplier of weapons-- or, in this case, costumes. After many years in which Mystery Incorporated exposed dozens of monster masqueraders and put them in prison, Velma suddenly comes across enough clues to deduce a common maker of monster-costumes: the fiendish fashionista Coco Diablo. The Scoobies put her away as well, despite the way Velma forms a near-immediate crush on the imperious, glasses-wearing mastermind.

The Scoobies go through lean times now that there's no one to make monster-outfits for devious dastards. But then they're attacked by spectral beings that seem to be 19th-century parallels of all five Scoobies. Are they real monsters, or more phonies? The only way the mystery-loving teens can cope is to talk the warden of Coolsville Prison to parole Coco Diablo in order to help them solve the conundrum. But does Coco have her own agenda?

The answers to all these questions are uniformly boring, like the minor arcs of the characters. Daphne doesn't know what purpose she serves in the group. Fred's life is fundamentally empty if he can't trap monsters. Shaggy and Scooby just want to binge on Halloween candy. 

And then there's Velma. The lesbian do-over of her character is banal, but the script's one virtue of the script is that this schtick doesn't get built up into some vast endorsement of toxic feminism, as one can find in the Meretricious Cinematic Universe. So it's silly, but harmless. 

The animation and voice-work are OK, but nothing special. One odd aspect of TRICK is that the teens visit the Coolsville Prison a few times, which seems to be wholly occupied by all of their old foes, attired in orange jumpsuits. At the end of the flick, all of the villains get loose, but they don't get to re-assume their costumed identities-- which is the only thing that might have injected a small treat into this boring trick-show. 

HELL COMES TO FROGTOWN (1988)

 

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

In my latest viewing of this prime cut of delicious pulp meat, I noticed that at the end of the credits, the filmmakers pay homage to four directors. All were veterans of the Golden Age of Serials, and all four worked on one of the three FLASH GORDON serials. 

In the last interview of FROGTOWN's late co-director Donald G. Jackson, he mentions his affection for serials generally and the character of Flash Gordon as one of the many "superheroes" he likes. The director doesn't mention the credit-sequence, so it could just as easily have been the contrivance of his co-writer Randall Frakes. Jackson does mention that Frakes tended to inject much more sexuality into his scripts than did Jackson, and so it may be that the homage was code for FROGTOWN's continuity with both the lusty tone of the early Alex Raymond comic strip and at least the first of the Gordon serials.

I don't think many SF apoca-flicks are as obsessively focused on sex as FROGTOWN. Even MAD MAX FURY ROAD, which also uses the same trope of trying to re-populate the decimated world with a coterie of fertile women, is positively abstemious by comparison. In fact, I prefer the way Jackson and Frakes represent their hero Sam Hell (Roddy Piper) as a raffish, self-interested "thief and scavenger" who just happens to have the devil's charm with respect to seducing women AND a high sperm count. So the remnants of the American government (never seen) empower Medtech, a unit of all-female military physicians, to bring Sam together with as many fertile ladies as possible.

However, the apocalypse spawned a race of bipedal, intelligent frog-people, who inhabit the titular Frogtown. The froggies' leader Commander Toty (strangely, not "toady") has taken a group of fertile women prisoner. One might think Medtech would not risk their sperm-bearing prisoner by making him join a mission to liberate the breeding stock, but one would be wrong. Further, they also place Sam's gonads in peril by outfitting him with a shock-codpiece to ensure his obedience to the unit-commander, Lieutenant Spangle (Sandahl Bergman).

Of course the entire rescue-mission farrago is designed to force a tough hero and a tough heroine into constant propinquity. Every time Sam gets out of line, Spangle plays the ultimate "punishing female" by zapping his balls-- though, not paradoxically, she wants them for her own use, even though implicitly she's not able to breed like the women she's rescuing. The trip to Frogtown is so rife with tongue-in-cheek foreplay between the two that it's as much fun as the main adventure.

Since Frogtown is male-dominated, Spangle is obliged to reverse her "domme" status and to become the subservient property of her "owner" Sam. This plan goes south when Commander Toty takes Spangle prisoner for some interspecies intercourse and consigns Sam to a torture chamber. Sam, even after escaping the torturer, also has to deal with a female froggie who's warm for his manly form. Sam rescues Spangle-- who, in fairness, does her share of ass-kicking-- and in due time the fertile girls are saved as well. There are some minor plots with a traitor-human selling arms to the batrachian "Indians" and Sam meeting an old friend, a prospector named Looney Tunes (western actor Rory Calhoun), but they're adeptly handled, never slowing down the main plot, which is the romance of alpha-dogs Sam and Spangle. 

FROGTOWN provides both Piper and Bergman with their best acting-roles, in large part because it gives them so much opportunity for comedy. Bergman even gets to show up a little of her terpsichorean talents as Toty makes Spangle execute the "Dance of the Three Snakes." Even the crappiness of the costumes for the mutant frog-people-- not believable in any way-- contribute to the humor. I suppose fans of Piper's wrestling-career might be disappointed that he mostly fights with guns in FROGTOWN, but that lack didn't bother me. I've seen the movie's two sequels and found them utterly forgettable, which is a testimony to the strength of the Jackson-Frakes script. 

TOTALLY SPIES!: THE MOVIE (2009)

 

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

One year before Disney issued its "high school spy-girl" TV series KIM POSSIBLE, Television Francaise got there first with the antic adventures of Alex, Sam and Clover in TOTALLY SPIES. When the French series reached American shores in translated form, it enjoyed a good measure of popularity. Allegedly the show still may come out with more episodes, but in 2009 the studio released this movie, which serves as something of an origin for the comic spy-girls.

The three teen girls don't know each other as they're due to enter their freshman years at a Beverly Hills high school. However, they just happen to cross paths in a shopping mall when the super-secret agency WOOHP decides that the three untrained teens need to have their superspy potential tested. Without even intending to audition, Sam, Clover and Alex pass the test, which involves the girls having to "log roll" atop a colossal sushi roll.

WOOHP commander Jerry Lewis, an older balding man, strongarms the teens into accepting membership in the agency, which includes their getting trained in martial arts and donning colorful spandex uniforms. Jerry alludes to a mission involving "mysterious disappearances," but the script spends over half an hour acclimatizing the young women to their double life as superspies and as high school freshmen. The good girls have their first run-in with "mean girl" Mandy, their continuing school nemesis from the series. The heroines also meet a domineering principal, Mrs. Skritch, who harasses the girls but must be written out at the movie's end because she's not in the series proper. (Skritch does contribute to one of the few funny high-school jokes, when the girls avoid her while dancing to "Walk Like an Egyptian.") 

Finally the main plot gets going, and it concerns a mysterious mastermind who is brainwashing young people with a device called "the Fabulizer." The spy girls track their enemy to his orbiting space station and learn that the evildoer is failed fashion-model Fabu, who plans to eliminate most of Earth's population to promote his "fashion paradise" of brainwashed subjects. The girls get initially trounced by Fabu's henchman Yuri and captured. A male WOOHP agent also sneaks aboard the satellite, but he's willing to let the girls go hang so that he can get the credit for taking down the mastermind. However, in a surprising development, wimpy looking Fabu outfights the WOOHP agent. However, the teen spies break free, clobber both Yuri and Fabu, and save the world before returning to their usual school routine.

I grade the mythicity in SPIES "fair" just because the writers keep the silly situations focused on the fads of 21st-century youth culture. A fair number of jokes land, and the animation is colorful and lively given its TV-level origins, so SPIES is worth a look if one is in the mood for this sort of farce. 

INTERZONE (1987)

 

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

There's so little dialogue in the first hour of INTERZONE that next to this post-apoc serving, MAD MAX comes off like a Woody Allen talkfest. Did director Deran Serafian lose his sound equipment during part of the shoot?

Regardless, the basic conflict has practically been xeroxed from Apocalypse Moviemaking 101. Once again there's one society of vicious savages (though for once they're all on foot, with no exotic vehicles) and another society of peaceniks (though for once the society's leaders can defend themselves fairly well). This is shown in an early scene when the raiders of muscle-bound leader Mantis (Teagan Clive) attack the peaceniks with heavy gunfire, and the peaceniks just sneer at the bad guys from behind a psychic shield.

Nevertheless, the peaceniks need the help of a macho dude, one Swan (Bruce Abbott), to help them acquire a legendary treasure in the forbidden terrain of the Interzone. The raiders want it too, because they think the treasure is some great weapon from the era before nuclear destruction. I'm going to flagrantly spoil what is one of the worst "reveals" in the history of movies, because the "treasure" is a recording that-- tells the characters how the war happened. In other words, the "big reveal" is the sort of thing almost every post-apoc flick reveals to the viewers in an opening monologue.

Bruce Abbott brings a breezy charm to his tough-guy role despite the fact that Swan is a nothing character, much like his bland love interest, a slave girl employed by the peaceniks, but who barely has anything to do. Only Teagan Clive's scenes provide some spark, as Mantis first seduces Swan and then forces him to fight an underground monster. The climax includes a hand-to-hand fight between Swan and Mantis, and Swan gets the worst of it until the villainess, after nearly knocking Swan's block off, obligingly walks away from the fight to do something else, allowing the hero to blow her away. I must admit that this one scene makes INTERZONE a bit more memorable than a lot of humdrum apoca-flicks, but not until 1990 would director Serafian produce a decent action-movie in the Van Damme vehicle DEATH WARRANT. Amusingly, INTERZONE's other two writers were the terminally awful team of Claudio Fragasso and Rosella Drudi, who would also have one great cinematic moment scripting the "so bad it's awesome" TROLL 2, also in 1990.

VAMPIRE KNIGHTS (1988), GIRLFRIEND FROM HELL (1989)

 

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

Some journeymen directors manage to work out reasonably long careers in the business without distinguishing themselves. Others enjoy much shorter careers, but somehow manage to grind out one interesting film before taking their talents elsewhere. Obviously, the latter are much easier to sum up due to fewer flicks to analyze. For instance, it didn't take me long to run through the four metaphenomenal films of Richard Cunha on this blog, but the three I didn't care for take on a little luster from the one I did like (which was, to be specific, the pulpy SHE DEMONS).

Unlike Cunha, Daniel Peterson is still alive and working, and I've no information on his post-1980s work, which includes shorts, TV episodes and some very obscure films. So I won't do any sort of overview on Peterson's career, but just compare and contrast his two 1980s films-- one bad and one good,

VAMPIRE KNIGHTS looks much like a botched student film. There aren't but four sets and a little driving around in a car, and only two or three of the performers had anything like professional movie careers. As the title slightly suggests, this is a vampire comedy, but the script, solely credited to director Peterson, includes only one or two decent jokes. The whole package suggests no talent whatever.

Two young guys, Tom and Bobbie, hope to score at a local party, and they try to talk their buddy Ken from going along. Ken would rather sit at home and watch some direct-access show in which the host shows horror movies and tries to sell memberships in a "Vampire Knights" club he sponsors. Ken (played by one of the few actors in the film with a modest career, Ken Abraham) apparently believes vampires are real, but eventually his friends talk him into partying.

On the way to the party, the three guys pick up a good-looking female hitchhiker. After a little badinage, she turns into a blue-faced wolf-ghoul, but just as she does, the driver hits the brakes for other reasons, causing the monster-woman to fly out the van's back door-- without any of the guys noticing what happened to her. This remains the general level of the humor.

The guys attend the party, see one girl displaying a little boob, and meet three chicks from Transylvania who just "flew in." The girls-- two aggressive vamps and one rather passive one-- target the trio for blood-bags. But even though the lady vamps have already killed a couple of victims at the party, they become apprehensive because Ken boasts about being a Vampire Knight. This apparently causes the girls to decide they'd better suss these guys out, even though the guys convey no impression of being anything but simple goofballs on the make. The girls meet the guys back at their place, and soon Bobbie and Tom get turned into vamp-chow. Ken inadvertently charms the shy vampire, and she ends up helping him kill the other two. 

There are only two points of interest here. One concerns vampire-movie mythology, in that it's standard to picture male vampires as super-strong, but not so much the female of the species. Peterson does have a scene in which the lead vamp-girl (Robin Stille, who also appeared in a handful of pro films) beats up Ken twice, only to die because she doesn't kill him right away. The other point is the movie's one good joke, wherein the guy on Ken's TV tries to wheedle money out of viewers after the fashion of Oral Roberts. But all the rest is tedium.

Yet, within the next year, Peterson came out with a wholly professional effort, GIRLFRIEND FROM HELL, which as one might guess is the film on his resume I consider a standout.

Is GIRLFRIEND a great film, even as a wacky supernatural comedy? No. But the improvement after VAMPIRE KNIGHTS is positively exponential. The main actors are all professionals. The sets, while limited, don't look repulsively cheap, and the wardrobe is more impressive. And there's actually a tiny psychological motif related to "the war between men and women."

Whereas KNIGHTS just had three random vampire girls killing victims, almost all of the female characters have an unusual aggressiveness. As in KNIGHTS the activity coalesces around a party being given by teens Alice and Rocco, a couple best described by Rocco's line to Alice; "You've been hitting me a lot harder lately." Diane (Lezlie Deane) talks a shy friend, Maggie (Liane Curtis), into attending the party, where Diane will meet with her boyfriend and introduce Maggie to a blind date. 

However, two supernatural entities choose to attend as well. The first is billed only as "The Devil," though this devil is innately feminine. The Devil possesses Maggie, turning her into a "Miss Hyde" who drags Diane, Diane's boyfriend and the blind date into dangerous situations, like almost running down a bunch of nuns with a van. (The nuns respond by pulling out heavy firearms and shooting at the vehicle.) Returning to the party, Demon Maggie begins using her powers to wreak weird transformations on the unfortunate young people.

Then the second entity arrives, in pursuit of the Devil. This is Chaser (Dana Ashbrook), a goofy "angel" who's in charge of trying to chase down the Devil and exorcise her when she possesses people. Chaser however is far from angelic; he's a horndog who'll make a pass at any nubile woman he sees, including Diane and Demon Maggie. To further complicate things, Chaser and the Devil had a fling before he knew who she was. Thus the ensuing slapstick violence that dominates the film is mostly about women getting furious at dorky guys.

Though Curtis and Deane are both good, Ashbrook holds the flick together with his energetic portrait of an oversexed would-be lothario who only carries out his exorcism duties because that's his heavenly assignment. Most of the jokes land well enough for this type of film, even though the very inferior KNIGHTS almost provides a plot-template for GIRLFRIEND. (Like KNIGHTS, this movie has just one short booby-shot.) Unlike KNIGHTS, Peterson does work in an amusing sequence wherein Chaser and Diane get bounced around to different time-frames by Chaser's malfunctioning teleport-device. This stunt helps to distract from the majority of scenes taking place in and around one big house-set. 

The film ends with Maggie getting safely exorcised, remembering nothing of her walk on the wild side. The Devil escapes into the ether again. Chaser is obliged to pursue her again, though not without getting one last sock in the schnozz from Diane, who irrationally sympathizes with the Devil after hearing how Chaser mistreated her. There were a lot of goony comedies in the 1980s, but this one, while no classic, deserves to be better known.

RING OF DARKNESS (1979)

 

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

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

An alternative title for this Italian demon-tale is SATAN'S WIFE. But the story's true focus is actually the devil's daughter, and there are four "wives" in the story, though three of them are minor support-characters. Writer-director Piero Carpi adapted RING, one of just four cinematic works he worked on, from his own novel, UN' OMBRA NELL' OMBRA. The title has been translated as "The Shadow Within the Shadow," and this in turn begat the alternate name for the film, RING OF DARKNESS. I find this title the more appropriate one. Unlike a lot of Italian EXORCIST rip-offs, RING's low-key horrors seem to suggest a Manichean world, where good and evil are locked in constant battle. An early scene features an agnostic professor prating about how the white and black pieces in chess represent just such a struggle, and he sounds by no means totally committed to the "white" side.

The film opens on a Satanic sabbat, with nude men and women having an orgy, and four of the women have sex with Satan himself. There's a brief mention that they do so with the idea of gaining some temporal power, but when we see them twelve or so years later, the women just seem to be middle-class wives of no particular distinction. All are still glamorous, being played by Irene Papas, Marisa Mell, Valentine Cortese, and Anne Heywood. While other children are mentioned, only the daughter of Heywood's character Carlotta is central to the plot. Said scion is Daria (Lara Wendel), and though she's been raised to think herself the daughter of Peter Rhodes (whom Carlotta's divorced at the opening of the main story), it's clear that Daria intuits her true heritage somehow.

Daria shows contempt for everyone she encounters-- Carlotta, her teacher (the Cortese character) and fellow middle school students. She doesn't perform any EXORCIST-style magic early on, but she predicts that an airplane carrying her false father Peter will crash, and it does, though it's never definite that Daria causes the crash. But a little later Daria responds to a male student's attentions by searing her hand-print in his chest-- though for some reason this doesn't kill him.

Carlotta enlists the aid of her fellow Satanists to find some way to purge Daria of her Satanic nature, which marks a contrast with THE EXORCIST in that Daria's never literally demon-possessed. The Middle-Aged Satan-Society also calls upon the services of a young Catholic priest (John Philip Law). Despite the holy man's doubts about his calling (paging Father Karras) he helps the women create a strange artifact that I *think* is supposed to look like a blood-colored wafer. (Combining both the blood and body of Christ, perhaps.) 

Carlotta then uses the wafer in a ritual of exorcism, one that Carpi almost certainly whipped out of his own imagination. At the home shared by mother and daughter, Carlotta creates a mystic circle and begins reading magical incantations. Daria sneers at her mother's efforts, but they work at first, forcing the young girl to enter the circle. Carlotta almost gets her daughter to eat the wafer, and for some reason the spell also causes Daria's clothes to disappear. But the devil-daughter's power ascends and nude Daria struggles over the wafer with Carlotta in her ceremonial robes. It's not much of a "fight," even assuming that the females are still battling on some occult level. Daria burns Carlotta's hands but does not kill her mother, and that's the last we see of injured Carlotta. Then, in one of the most anti-climactic climaxes in horror flicks, Daria simply hails a taxi and mesmerizes the driver into taking her, sans pay, to the Sistine Chapel. Daria then just stand there, dreaming a demon's dreams for the fate of Christianity, at least in its Catholic manifestation-- and the film ends.

Returning to the question of influence, Carpi claimed that he wrote his novel before the 1971 publication of Blatty's EXORCIST, and that's at least possible, though sources assert that OMBRA wasn't published until 1974. However, Ira Levin's ROSEMARY'S BABY was published in 1967, and Carpi didn't expressly say he took no influence from that work. In some ways, RING seems more like a response to the Levin work, but altered so that the lady Satanists willingly enter into their Satanic bargain. Without access to the novel, I can't be sure, but he might have simply imported a few EXORCIST tropes into his original schema.

One of the more anti-EXORCIST motifs is Carpi's concentration on feminine power. Though the Blatty novel and subsequent film adaptation begin with a conflict between a mother and her demon-possessed daughter, the true battle takes place between two male Catholic priests and the implicitly male demon. In RING, Lucifer spreads his seed to create Daria and possibly other offspring, and the script actually states that none of his mortal "wives" enjoys sex any more, though without specifying why (at least in the dubbed version). But he never appears in the main story. None of the other male figures except the priest have any real agency, and even the priest's use of his holy power is directed by the magical knowledge of the Satanic sisterhood. Not that I'm claiming Carpi was any sort of feminist. His proximate reason for concentrating on the female characters may have been motivated by selling glamour and a little nudity. But there is a school of Christian thought that equates femininity with primeval, even pagan darkness, so perhaps the barely articulated theme of RING is that women unleash the ultimate darkness on humankind by their intercourse with the Devil.

On a minor closing note, Carpi wrote a lot more prose novels and Italian comics than he ever did film scripts. And one of the comics he allegedly wrote for was DIABOLIK-- which in 1967 got an outstanding film adaptation starring two of the performers in RING: John Philip Law and Marisa Mell.