BATTLE FOR THE LOST PLANET (1986), MUTANT WAR (1988)

 

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

These two very low-budget flicks share the same writer-director (Brett Piper) and the same lead male actor (Matt Mitler), but though they could well have been shot together to save costs, the first film is moderately competent next to the second one.

That's not to say I liked either one. But the first film gives Mitler the chance to build up his sassy hero Harry Trent as a character and gives him some lines to back up his road-company Bruce Willis act. His initial setup, while not compelling, is at least slightly memorable. In the near future, Harry's a petty thief who gets stuck in a spaceship that's programmed to pilot a course to the stars and come back to Earth five years later. And just as Harry's ship leaves Earth's atmosphere, the unwilling passenger gets a bird's-eye view of an alien armada making an unprovoked attack on Harry's homeworld. 

Five years later, Harry's back on his "lost planet," which has been reduced to the usual post-apoc simplicity. The invaders, supposedly froglike aliens named "Izags," now patrol helpless humans with drone craft. Sassy Harry promptly comes across a feisty female (Denise Coward) and the two of them seek to find some way to overthrow the alien overlords. They make common cause with a petty tyrant with "male chauvinist pig" written all over him, but after Harry manages to beat the guy in a fight, he aids Harry in locating the sole means of kicking out the ETs: a neutron bomb. 

The makeup for the aliens is horrible and there are some badly animated CG-monsters, but at least the skeletal plot makes sense. Not so MUTANT WAR. Though the aliens are gone, now Earth is menaced by mutants with equally bad makeup. Though Harry's lost what little raffish charm he had, he's once more charged with cleaning up the disordered planet, and once again he gets help from another gang of wastrels. But nobody in the movie-- not Harry, his allies, or a big-haired new girl who replaces Harry's previous squeeze-- can manage to put together even a mediocre fight-scene. Most combatants just roll around on the ground, when they're not shooting bad lasers at bad CG-monsters. The only thing of note here consists of a few minutes of a badly dubbed Cameron Mitchell delivering a typical villain's rant, but I wouldn't think that even fervent Mitchell fans would bother with this trivia. 

CAPTAIN KIDD AND THE SLAVE GIRL (1954)

 

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

Though the writers of this mediocre pirate-flick were responsible for THE MAN FROM PLANET X, and the director for THE RETURN OF THE VAMPIRE, the film's only slightly relevant to my project in providing one of cinema's few "crossovers" of famous pirates in their own pirate-society.

Rather surprisingly, the story actually has some slight historical fidelity with regard to the titular pirate captain. In real history, the governor of New York, then under English rule, gave William Kidd the duty of becoming a privateer for the English crown. Kidd was accused of having become a pirate and the governor betrayed Kidd, luring him into a trap and having him hanged.

KIDD picks up with the captain (semi-dashing Anthony Dexter) in a New York jail, about to be hanged. Evil Governor Bellomont arranges to fake the execution with the idea that once Kidd is freed, he'll make a beeline for his buried treasure, along with his hook-handed buddy Simpson (Alan "The Skipper" Hale Jr). In order to keep tabs on the pirate as he ships out for his treasure isle, Bellomont arranges for a confederate to be on the same ship as Kidd and Simpson: Judith (Eva Gabor), a woman of dubious repute but no specific background.

Naturally, during the trip Kidd and Judith fall hard for one another, though he's less than pleased to learn that she's an agent for his enemy. Once he uses his reputation to take over the ship, Kidd subjects the seductress to various indignities-- chaining her to a desk, forcing her to do manual labor-- though she's never any sort of literal "slave girl." Assorted things happen and the two of them end up on the treasure isle, which is also where a brotherhood of pirates meets. Bellomont and his henchmen show up and there's a big fight, so that unlike real life, the evil governor meets his doom and dashing Captain Kidd gets away with his lover, though not his treasure. 

Dexter's a pretty routine swashbuckler, though he's better than Gabor, who's nowhere near evincing the charm the actress showed in GREEN ACRES. She's not even interesting when she gets into a catfight with pirate-girl Anne Bonney, as played by Sonia Sorel, a minor B-actress who still shows more moxie than anyone else in this dud. Of the other "name pirates" standing alongside Kidd and Bonney, only Blackbeard (Mike Ross) has anything much to do. The names of Calico Jack, Stede Bonnet and James Avery are tossed out haphazardly and with no real characters attached, while another famous pirate, Bartholomew Roberts, gets both of his names farmed out to two separate characters, a Captain Bartholomew and a Captain Roberts. I guess the writers got a short list of famous pirate-names and ran out. Anyway, as far as crossovers of legendary historical characters are concerned, only Kidd, Bonney and Blackbeard rate. 

THE TICK, SEASON 1 (2016-18)

 

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

I never followed the successful independent comic THE TICK. The few random issues I encountered didn't strike me as funny, so I gave it a pass. I mildly enjoyed the blue-hued crusader's ventures into television, a 1994 cartoon and a 2001 live-action teleseries. But the two-season Amazon Prime series seems a thing apart.

The first episode sets up the premise of the world of POV character Arthur Everest (Griffin Newman). Superheroes and supervillains have dominated Arthur's world for at least twenty-something years, beginning with the appearance of the Superman-like Superian and the Justice League-ish group The Flag Five. A supervillain, The Terror (Jackie Earle Haley), assassinates most of the Flag Five, as well as incidentally killing Arthur's father by landing a ship on top of the man, in full view of his son. However, after a subsequent encounter with Superian, everyone believes The Terror to be dead.

Except Arthur. He grows up to be a nervous accountant whose sister Dot thinks he's obsessed with a dead man, but Arthur becomes convinced that the Terror simply faked his death. He begins videotaping underworld gatherings, trying to gather evidence, only to have his life turned upside down by The Tick.

The Tick (Peter Serafinowicz) is a huge guy in a blue tick costume-- assuming that it is only a costume-- who possesses immense strength and near-invulnerability. What he doesn't possess is the slightest idea of who he is or where he came from. His memory begins with his meeting with Arthur, and because he witnesses Arthur "fighting crime" in his fashion, the rather buffoonish hero immediately decides the two of them should be partners. In a roundabout way, the thick-witted crusader bestows on the accountant a winged costume capable of sustained flight. But the costume's the property of a criminal gang with ties to The Terror, who is, surprise, surprise, really still alive.

 Despite his reluctance, Arthur becomes drawn into the superhero world, even though The Tick is far from the ideal mentor. In addition to having no memory, The Tick utters nothing but superhero cliches and remains obtuse as to any other reason for existence. To be sure, he's not the only one. Crime-boss Ramses IV and the electrically-powered Miss Lint constantly vie for power prior to the Terror's re-appearance, but though they all know who they are, they're all less than perfect representatives of super-crime. Arthur and The Tick are obliged to accept the help of a former Flag Five member who has remodeled himself into a lethal Punisher-like vigilante, name of Overkill (Scott Speiser), but his all too human flaws make him less than a self-possessed master of ultraviolence.

Not everything in THE TICK is as funny as the combo of Arthur and his big blue buddy. I could have lived without Tinfoil Kevin, a street-person wearing the expected tinfoil hat, or Dangerboat, Overkill's sentient vehicle. But there's a joie de vivre to this superhero spoof that rarely shows up in this post-WATCHMEN era. When the first episode mentions how the Flag Five were slain thanks to "weaponized syphilis," one might suspect that the series plans to pursue the heavy dramatics of INVINCIBLE or the dark irony of THE BOYS. But in a much later episode, The Tick, despite having no memory, shows a resolute if naive moral compass, taking a dim view of Overkill's "take no prisoners" ethic. And when the blue buffoon gets the chance to forbid Overkill from killing any more, the show gets great comic value out of a murder-happy vigilante who can't indulge in gratuitous violence.

Best line in the season comes at the end, when The Terror's huge metal flight-ship (shaped like a "T") is assailed by the titular crimefighter, and Miss Lint gets to tell the Terror:

"You've got a Tick!" 

MARRIED WITH CHILDREN: "THE CAMPING SHOW" (1988)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, psychological*

MARRIED WITH CHILDREN launched its third season with this fine take on the "war between men and women." True, this season, like the previous two, hasn't yet reached the acidulous depths of the series at its best. The episode includes an opening in which Al actually expresses a desire to have sex with Peg, and she, very atypically, puts him off to assign him chores. Later in the episode, Peg even pays Bud a rare compliment-- stating "He's so cute" when Bud fools Steve with a fake high-five-- while in later seasons, Peg shows almost total indifference to her son's existence.

Steve Darcy starts the comedy ball rolling by suggesting that he and Al go on a fishing trip to a cabin in some nearby woods. But Steve, half a traitor to masculinity, intentionally brings Marcy along, and in no time, Peg, Bud, and Kelly are part of the expedition, messing up what Al hoped to be a masculine retreat from domesticity. In fact, Kelly brings along the ultimate feminine contagion-- and in next to no time, the three women are all "cycling" at the same time, making them both irritable and, in Peg's case, sexually aggressive. This strikes fear in the heart of Al, as he compares her to the black widow spider, wanting to mate before she murders. And Kelly doesn't even need sex to warm up to homicide. After the six of them pass a tense night in the cabin, the two adult males sneak away for some fishing. The three women wake up, and their ire at being left alone, with Bud the only masculine representative, leads Kelly to suggest, "Let's pretend Bud's a man and kill him." And by the way the three ladies surround the sleeping youth, they do seem like Dionysian Maenads, ready to rend him into ribbons.

Now, since scientists have validated synchronized menstruation, that part of the story, even if far-fetched, remains within the domain of the naturalistic. Not so the other factor tormenting Al Bundy: the fact that all the beasts of the forest converge on the cabin. Steve throws in some psuedoscience to justify the phenomenon, but in truth, the script is trying to play the effects of menses as if they made the human women seem to be "in heat," attracting the forest-dwellers with the pure animalism of femininity (including not only a bear and a moose, but even mosquitos). Finally, Al's unable to take being pent up with so much negative female energy-- particularly from the black widow in their midst-- and he makes a desperate attempt to gain access to their car.

Of course, Al gets duly mauled by a bear and barely escapes with his life. But that little sacrifice to Dionysus seems to dispel the female bane, for all three ladies are then cheery again. Steve gets his car savaged by wildlife, and Bud gets punched once by Kelly, but Al's sufferings, as will be the case for most of the series, are what MARRIED WITH CHILDREN most requires. By the end of the show's eleven seasons, Al will have endured more pain and humiliation than did Dagwood Bumstead in his first forty years.

THE RETURN OF GODZILLA (1984)

 

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

Often I've chosen to use American titles for dubbed Japanese movies, but in this case, I decided to go with the Japanese version over "Godzilla 1985." My rationale is that the year the movie came out, in whatever venue, is unimportant next to the fact that after almost ten years, the Godzilla franchise returned. The movie itself wasn't the greatest second act, but it led to many better performances for "the Big G."

Though later movies would contradict RETURN's main idea, the script here dispenses with the involved continuity that had grown up around Godzilla since his first appearance. RETURN posits that although the 1954 movie remained canon, the colossal dino survived being hit with the Oxygen Destroyer but lay low for the next thirty years before rising again to plague humankind. There's no rationale akin to the concept of Godzilla being able to regenerate, a la GODZILLA MINUS ONE, and the unexplained survival eventuates in one of the best lines for the American edition: Raymond Burr solemnly intoning, "They never found a body." (Well, no, Perry, because the oxygen-weapon was supposed to disintegrate the fell beast.)

Godzilla's actual rampages, done on a restrictive budget, are the least consequential aspect of RETURN. Again sorta-kinda anticipating MINUS ONE, Godzilla becomes the center of international tensions as he stalks around Tokyo, only once feeding off the radiation of a nuclear plant. The great powers favor using nuclear weapons against the menace, but Japan, representing the voice of bad experience with such innovations, somehow blocks any such action. I don't believe anyone in the American dub wonders if the atom-mutated titan might actually benefit from nuclear radiation, given that he's shown absorbing such power earlier. And when a Russian sub does shoot a nuclear missile into Japan-- accidentally in the Japanese edition, purposefully in the American one-- the fallout revives the Big G from his encounter with Japanese technology.

Though Godzilla follows the 1954 template in that he encounters no other monsters, his one combative challenge is with a flying fortress, the Super X, that would have fit right in with anything in the sequels. Godzilla is brought down for a time by the super-ship's main weapon, but in the end the monster is truly defeated by a scientist's biological observations. The scientist observes that, true to his bestial nature, Godzilla responds to signals from wildlife-- in this case, birds-- because of some distant biological entrainment. The scientists end up duplicating the signals and luring Godzilla into the volcanic recesses of Mount Mihara. This temporary "death" lasted until 1989's GODZILLA VS. BIOLANTE, which returned the colossus to his pattern of battling similarly sized goliaths.

None of the characters are memorable or worth discussing, except Burr's journalist Martin, brought in by the Americans as a consultant on Godzilla. Though he remains in America and thus loses some of the immediacy he possessed in his 1954 incarnation, Martin brings enormous gravitas to the English-language edition, and by some accounts his participation may have swayed the American studio from "camping up" RETURN. This was fortuitous since the Japanese script, as translated into English, took pains to portray Godzilla as a being as tragic a victim of the nuclear holocaust as the original victims of the Bomb. I don't recall that any G-films before or after RETURN pursued this interpretation of the monster. For better or worse, most G-films preferred to tout Godzilla as the ultimate badass-- so RETURN's main significance is that of a transition point between Old and New.

DELIRIUM (1972)

 

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

Though the story of Renato Polselli's DELIRIUM is fairly obvious-- when it's not incoherent-- it earns myth-points for being fairly "in one's face" about the "war between men and women," even when some members of one sex join the wrong side.

Main character Herbert Lyutak (Mickey Hargitay) lives in some unspecified part of Europe. Though he and his wife abide in a ritzy-looking house, Herbert's only source of income is that of a criminologist who advises police on the behavior of psychos. (This doesn't count his service in the American military during Vietnam, though this detail appears only in the American version.) But first we see Herbert plying a deadly avocation. He meets a pretty girl in a bar and offers to give her a lift to her destination, but Herbert callously murders her-- and it's not his first killing. The local cops, aware of a pattern-following serial killer in town, learn that Herbert was seen with the murder victim, so that he's briefly a suspect. But then someone commits a new murder while Herbert's in custody, so the cops drop their suspicions and never give Herbert a second look until movie's end.

The identity of the second killer remains in play until the end, but no viewer will really doubt that all the non-Herbert murders are committed by his devoted wife Marzia (Rita Calderoni). Given that she's constantly bleating about how deeply she loves Herbert, and that no one else has a motive to help him, Marzia's shared guilt in the killing of female victims is no surprise. Herbert does knock off a male victim too, but just for self-protection, not for psycho-killer reasons. Herbert is driven to kill because he's filled with remorse about being impotent with his wife, and he seems to derive some relief from murdering women, though he doesn't sleep with them either. 

Just as Polselli has no intention of creating a story of detection, he also doesn't get into the psychology of Herbert or Marzia, and I could barely figure out the identities of most of the other characters thanks to Polselli's scattershot script. Though Herbert's wife has remained technically virginal since the couple's marriage, she apparently enjoys sapphic relationships with her maid Joaquina (Christa Barrymore) to blow off steam. 

It's not the cops who bring Herbert down, but Joaquina, who attacks Herbert with a whip because he's about to blame all the killings on Marzia. The different versions give Joaquina different reasons for attacking. In the Italian, she does so because she's in love with Marzia; in the English one, it's because one of Herbert's victims was her sister. I didn't fully watch the English version, but I don't think it offered much beyond extra murder scenes, and a loose implication that maybe PTSD is partly to blame for the psycho's impotence. This add-on motive proves irrelevant, since Herbert always seems driven by intertwined passion for, and hatred of, femininity. 

The glossily-photographed murders look great, but it's hard to say that they don't implicate the director in a certain amount of misogyny. I'm not sure that the maid's brutal attack on Herbert counts as any sort of "Revenge of the Female," but it helps that I liked Barrymore better than star Calderoni. The other victims are also stone glamour-pusses, though I recognized none of the performers. Hargitary and Calderoni certainly dial the emotion up to eleven, and for good measure Polselli throws in some wild sex-dreams in which Hargitay struggles in peplum-style chains while his wife and her maid cavort in bed. But at least no one can accuse Polselli of falsification. He promises the viewers "delirium," and that's just what he gives them.

MESA OF LOST WOMEN (1953)

 

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

MESA has been a strong contender for "worst film" since the whole "so bad it's good" meme arose. It does sport a few delirious scenes mitigating a lot of tedium, so I can't say it's nearly as boring as, say, THE MARVELS. And even if there wasn't a lot of intellectual heft to the movie itself, one ought to admire all the strong detective work done by cineastes to figure out the flick's complicated genesis.

MESA began as a 1951 project for independent company Howco, helmed by one-film writer-director Herbert Tevos. This project, if it was completed, was deemed unreleasable by Howco. During 1952, the company hired Ron Ormond-- then best known for writing and directing low-budget westerns-- to shoot new continuity to make MESA more salable. Ormond brought back many members of Tevos' cast and crew for additional scenes, but a few actors shot completely new scenes, including performers Jackie "Uncle Fester" Coogan and Katherine "Batwoman" Victor. Most of the new scenes have the effect of a wraparound, as the survivor of a catastrophe narrates his experiences as the Mexican Zarpa Mesa, followed by the Tevos footage with new inserts, and then the conclusion comes back to the "real time" of the survivor. The wraparound also sports a narrator speaking some extremely wonky lines, the writing of which has been intriguingly (if not decisively) attributed to Ed Wood.

On this page of the CHFB discussion-board, Tom Weaver testifies to his having read the original Tevos script, entitled "Tarantula." This involved a madman with a gun, name of Masterson, showing up at a Mexican cantina. After shooting an exotic dancer (Tandra Quinn), Masterson forces three people-- two of whom landed in the city in a malfunctioning plane-- to help him escape justice. Two other persons, one of whom is Grant, the plane's pilot, are also taken hostage as the plane takes off. The plane crashes on a lonely mesa, apparently inhabited by some sort of unexplained giant tarantulas. The only part of the Tevos section that has any psychological substance is that while the crash victims are contending with the elements and the giant spiders, Doreen, a woman who plans to marry a rich man she does not love, falls for pilot Grant, and though she's a trifle shrewish, Tevos allowed both of the new lovers to survive. In the Ormond reworking, Grant and Doreen are also the only survivors,

Ormond attributes the giant spiders to the research of mad scientist Doctor Arana (Coogan), but his main purpose has been to produce a race of "super spider people," with whom Arana plans to rule the world. He relates all this to a Doctor Masterson, a potential colleague who visits Arana's lab on Zarpa Mesa. But when Arana demonstrates that the many hot women in his lab are actually spiders turned into mutated humanoids-- one of whom is Quinn's dancer, dubbed "Tarantella"-- Masterson repudiates Arana's plot. Arana injects Masterson with a drug that drives him mad, so that no one will believe his wild story. Thus in Ormond, Masterson has a grudge on his mind when he shoots Tarantella in the cantina (which she survives, thanks to being able to regenerate), and also when he hijacks the plane, intending to return to the Mesa for a confrontation. Then all the survival-scenes from Tevos are interpolated. Ormond then has the survivors of the crash meet Arana. Doreen tussels a little with Tarantella and then Masterson blows up the whole lab, with only Grant and Doreen winning free. However, the last shot of the film shows that one of the spider-women survived the conflagration, ensuring that humankind may yet face a Giant Spider Invasion.

Ormond probably did make the original version more coherent, but it's still a muddled mess, in which none of the characters are interesting, much less likable. The only reason I give this one a "fair" mythicity rating is because Ormond introduced the notion of "female supremacy" among the insect world, because Arana can only make formidable killers out of female spiders, while male spiders only produce deformed dwarfs. Thus Ormond's finished version joins the burgeoning company of other Female Monsters of the Fifties, whose ranks-- the Fifty-Foot Woman, Lisa of CULT OF THE COBRA, Kyra Zelas of SHE-DEVIL, and various others-- far outstrip the paltry number of she-creatures from the previous decade. To be sure, the "Lost Women" don't really DO much of anything-- though in the cantina Tarantella performs what some fans have called a "mandible dance." But when dealing with a goofy black-and-white flick with wooden performances and an insanely repetitive flamenco score, one has to take one's virtues where one can find them.

DAREDEVILS OF THE RED CIRCLE (1939)

 

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

This Republic serial, co-directed by William Witney and John English, is generally regarded as one of the best examples of "the Golden Age of Serials." I think it's very strong for its first six chapters, and then loses some momentum due to repetitiveness (and that's not counting Chapter 11, one of the notorious "clip episodes.")

That said, it's hard to beat DAREDEVILS for the simple clarity of the revenge-motives of both villain and heroes. At the opening, an escaped criminal (Charles Middleton) uses his old prisoner-number, 39013, as a nom de guerre as he pursues a monomaniacal project to destroy all the holdings of industrialist Granville. No specific reasons are given for the evildoer's grudge, except a loose allusion to Granville having helped imprison 39013. The villain and his gang of cutthroats don't care if the public gets in the way, and in episode one 39013 strikes at a Granville-owned amusement park. At this park, three superb athletes are performing, and they too have a nickname, "Daredevils of the Red Circle," for the target-like circle each one wears on the front of his shirt. 39013's thugs set the park on fire, and though the Daredevils escape death, the kid brother of one of them does not. The trio dedicate their lives to taking vengeance upon the murderers.

Each of the Daredevils is given a specialty in addition to general athleticism. Tiny (Herman Brix) is a strongman. Bert (Dave Sharpe) is an escape artist. And Gene (Charles Quigley) is a high diver with exceptional reflexes, as well the one who loses his kid brother in the fire. The trio seek out Granville's mansion to proffer their amateur assistance, and Granville's granddaughter Blanche (Carole Landis) proves instrumental in getting her grandpa to accept the guys' help. The athletes thus become independent agents who can get johnny-on-the-spot to any of 39013's sabotage operations-- at least partly because the fiend, like many a comic-book villain after him, is usually considerate enough to announce his next target.

But there's a wrinkle, for Granville is not Granville. The man whom the heroes meet is actually 39013 himself, disguised in a perfect mask (meaning that he's played in those scenes by the same actor essaying the real Granville). The industrialist is imprisoned in a cell beneath the mansion, where a Rube Goldberg device threatens to drop poison gas into the man's cell if said device is not regularly corrected by Granville's captor. 39013's sole desire is that his enemy should hear about every enterprise being destroyed in turn, so that he'll know that his entire life's work has been wrecked before he himself perishes.

The roust-and-repeat actions of the super-athletes, as they dash hither and yon foiling the villain's pawns, might have become tiresome but for an additional angle: someone inside the mansion is privy to 39013's schemes. That someone sends printed notes to the Daredevils, warning them of this or that peril, and each note is signed with the same "red circle" image as the brand used by the heroes. To be sure, there are two or three named characters at the mansion, and surely no one would have suspected the comical Black butler Snowflake (though imagine how 1939 audiences might have reacted, had Snowflake been the Daredevils' secret benefactor). I'll note in passing that aside from the butler's condescending name he doesn't perpetrate any other racial-humor schticks except for his broad accent.

Since 39013 isn't a scientist, mad or otherwise, he only used a couple of diabolical devices besides his poison-gas contraption. In one case, his thugs rig a clinic's curative radioactive device so that it will slay a patient with deadly rays. In another, 39103 executes an expendable henchman by flooding the garage at the mansion with poison gas. But was that really the most efficient way to set up hench-executions? When the heroes survive getting caught in the same trap, they do a whole detective-number on the garage's gas-apparatus, which conveniently gives the good guys a new avenue for tracking down the crooked cabal. But the script makes it sound like 39013 intended to make the gas-apparatus look like it was tampered with by agents unknown. Why would he do so, since he doesn't expect to found out, thinking he can pass off the garage-executions as carbon monoxide poisoning from the automobiles?

The action set-pieces in the first two episodes are the most thrilling in the chapterplay. After that, the rest of the episodes are mostly hand-to-hand fights, well enough done but not that noteworthy. As far as acting, Middleton takes top honors with his hiss-worthy villainy, though 39013 would not make my list of best serial-villains, just as the serial wouldn't make my twenty best of all time.

INVINCIBLE, SEASON TWO (2023-24)

 

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

INVINCIBLE Season 2 is more of the same as Season 1, so anyone who liked the first will probably like the second. I admit that I'm probably a bit more torqued at Season 2 because I thought it was the final one. But that's not a sin I can lay at the show-runners' door.

So Mark Grayson, a.k.a. Invincible, survives his brutal defeat at the hands of his father Omni-Man. He's spared because his dad, who's been masquerading as a superhero while operating as a covert agent for an alien empire, feels an upsurge of paternal feeling and deserts his post on Earth. Mark and his mother Debbie are both hugely traumatized by Omni-Man's betrayal, but Mark tries to get back to his regular activities with his girlfriend and his first year at college. At the same time, he desperately wants to validate himself as a real superhero, as against his father's falsehoods, and he accepts more assignments from government coordinator Cecil. 

One of these assignments involves investigating a secret science-facility, even without knowing that the Mauler clone-brothers are involved in its operation. The real mastermind behind the facility is Angstrom Levy, a high-minded idealist with the ability to access multiple alternate dimensions. His big "mad science" scheme involves somehow pooling the knowledge (or something) of alternate versions of himself so as to enforce absolute peace upon all dimensions. (Well, except for the dimension he's going to give to the Maulers for their help.) Invincible's interference results in that stale old trope, the Deformed Villain Out for Revenge on the Hero Who Caused the Deformity. Levy is one of the worst villains but I suppose he was brought in to reinforce another subplot, in which it's revealed that in most alternate dimensions, Invincible and Omni-Man teamed up to bring Earth under the dominion of the Viltrum Empire.

At least slightly more germane to established plotlines is an arc in which Invincible must seek to deal with Earth's impending invasion by Viltrum. However, the hero's first major interstellar adventure starts out as a hoax, as bug-aliens beseech his help with a catastrophe endangering their planet Thraxa. Once Invincible arrives, he finds that Thraxa's real peril is their own impending invasion from Viltrum. And just for a bonus, the current ruler of Thraxa is none other than-- Invincible's dear old dad. Also, during his ascension to kingship, Omni-Man has also mated with a female Thraxan, resulting in a mostly humanoid baby, Thraxa's defense against Viltrum does not go well: Omni-Man is captured to be tried as a traitor, while Invincible must take his infant half-brother back to Earth.

The soap operatics involving Mark's family and friends, and those between the young Guardians of the Globe, are also more of the same: efficient but pedestrian. Surprisingly, Invincible's closest superhero friend, Atom Eve, doesn't get much development until the last few episodes. But then, in between Season 1 and Season 2, Atom Eve was the only hero to get her own hour-long special, so I'm sure the show-runners have big plans for her. 

Season Two might not be my cup of root beer. But I admit it does an okay job of making the lives of its protagonists increasingly messy-- to say nothing of providing loads more scenes showing INVINCIBLE's patented "superhero gore."

ATTACK OF THE 50-FOOT CAM GIRL (2022)

 

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

CAM GIRL is the first in an OAV series that might be termed "Giant-Porn." About its only significance is that though it's been designed for roughly the same market that liked ATTACK OF THE 60 FOOT CENTERFOLDS and ATTACK OF THE 50 FOOT CHEERLEADER, CAM GIRL is the only one that actually borrows the primary dramatic conflict of the big-girl movie that started it all: ATTACK OF THE 50-FOOT WOMAN. To wit: as in the first ATTACK, the girl with the gigantic assets starts out as an ordinary Earth-woman whose husband is cheating on her, and she ends up using her biggitude to take vengeance. 

But it's impossible to have even the slight investment needed for a supremely slight comedy when all of the characters are terminally stupid. Popular cam-girl Ivy (Beverly Wood) has made a fortune posing for sexy videos, but she has no idea that her sleazy camera-guy/husband Bradley is boning another model, Fuschia (Christine Nguyen), whom Bradley even photographs side by side with Ivy. To diversify their wealth, Bradley has Ivy invest in a gimcrack experiment to expand foodstuffs to end world hunger. (The experiment is represented by a whole three scientists.) Ivy is too impatient to wait for trials, so she eats one of the experimental foods herself, and of course it makes her into Giant Girl. After coping with this turn of events, she finds out about the affair. Yet Bradley's so stoked about selling more videos with Ivy's titanic bod, Fuschia gets jealous and with equal stupidity eats some of the giantizing food too. Thus CAM GIRL is able to compete with CENTERFOLDS and CHEERLEADER in spotlighting a catfight of colossi at the end-- though it's the most listless of the three, thanks to Jim Wynorski's usual bad direction.

Oh, one other mildly original touch: Bradley gets punished by what might be called a "double motorboat of doom," though somehow he survives to show up for this crapfest's first sequel. 

INVINCIBLE, SEASON ONE (2021)

 

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

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

I didn't follow Robert Kirkman's INVINCIBLE series, so prior to beginning to watch the Amazon TV show, I read a handful of the earliest comics. and found them to be nothing more than a routine "decompression" comic book.

As soon as I began the first of Season One's episodes, I soon found that the show, helmed by one Simon Racioppa, was at least innocent of the charge of decompression, which would have meant that plotlines unreeled in the slowest manner possible. From that first episode, it's obvious that the producers meant to take full advantage of the animated format. INVINCIBLE fills all eight episodes of its first season with big, honking fight-scenes, which I'm sure Racioppa and his fellows think is all that superhero fans really want. And we're not talking pristine Jack Kirby punch-ups. Body parts go flying, and copious blood flows.

INVINCIBLE, on the face of things, reproduces the archetypal superhero setup of comics' Silver Age, where the daily routine of contemporary Earth is interspersed with the almost constant battles of superheroes and supervillains, with a few alien invasions thrown into the mix. But I said "on the face" because that's all INVINCIBLE replicates: the surface setup. If I were inventing thematic titles for my reviews, I'd have called this one, "No Time For Wonder." Whether it's the title hero, his faux Justice League allies, or villains with colorful names like Doc Seismic and The Mauler Brothers, all lack any emotional context. They're all just gaudy chess-pieces, and they exist to support a pedestrian, badly-structured melodrama.

The title character is Mark Grayson (Steven Yuen), teenaged son of Deborah and Nolan Grayson (Sandra Oh, J.K. Simmons). Though his mother is a mortal human, his father is also the most powerful superhero on the planet, Omni-Man. He's also an extraterrestrial, so even though the Graysons were able to interbreed, they're not sure Mark will inherit his father's super-powers. Of course, if he didn't, there would be no story. In due time Mark gets his powers, is trained in superhero-ing by his father, and takes on the persona of Invincible.

Almost as soon as Mark's made his debut, tragedy strikes. All of the Earth's foremost protectors, the Guardians of the Globe, are slain by none other than Omni-Man. Cecil Stedman, director of the Earth-agency that liases with the Guardians, suspects Omni-Man's guilt, but keeps his own counsel due to the killer's almost insuperable powers. With the Guardians gone, a group of adolescent heroes, the Teen Team, must step up and become the new Guardians. Patently, this came about partly so that Invincible would have a bunch of adventure-seeking peers, not least Atom Eve, who in her secret ID goes to the same school as Mark.

All of the characterizations of the main character and his regular cast are, as I said above, "pedestrian." The only one I liked a little bit was Teen Team leader "Robot." Though his fellow crusaders think he's just an intelligent automaton, the body of "Robot" is actually a surrogate for a genius with a deformed body, and a minor arc is devoted to how he tries to make himself a new body, and the romantic course he charts for himself.

The "badly structured" complaint applies to the whole Omni-Man arc. The scripts never give any reason as to why the false hero chooses to eradicate his former allies at that particular time, though his proximate motive is that he's actually an agent of the alien Viltrum Empire. He kills the superheroes with the general idea of softening up Earth for conquest, though there's no indication that Omni-Man's people are anywhere close to invading. Of course eventually both Debbie and Mark find out his true nature, and this leads not only to loads of emotional angst, but also a bloody battle between father and son. Invincible loses the contest, but his father can't quite exterminate the seed of his loins, so he departs Earth, though he comes back for a new arc in the second and last season.

INVINCIBLE is like a huge, intricate ice-sculpture. It looks good on the surface, but there's no heart beneath all that ice.

THOR THE CONQUEROR (1983)

 

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

I know, I know, I've said before that I'd found the absolute worst sword-and-sorcery movie. "This time for sure!"

Even with a lot of bad S&S films, I've sometimes been able to give the filmmakers a slight benefit of the doubt. I've sometimes been able to look at how the writers or directors incorporated some nugget of myth or magic from much better stories into their cheapjack, done-for-dough operations. But not here, not in this pasta tomfoolery from director Tonino Ricci (of the far more enjoyable STORY OF KARATE, FISTS, AND BEANS) and writer Tito Carpi (of several much better spaghetti westerns). Since these two men weren't utter incompetents, I have to assume they had little to no interest in the barbarian warrior genre and just did the absolute least they could get away with.

So when Thor is a child (though we don't see him as a child), his barbarian father is killed by rival barbarians commanded by a nebulous chief named Gnut. We barely even see Gnut enough to get time to boo him, and though we see the father killed we're mostly told about the situation through a narrator. Said narrator is also the wizard Etna, who takes charge of Thor and raises him offscreen until he's old enough to be played by Conrad Nichols (despite the name, also Italian, like the rest of the cast). 

We don't know anything about the wizard Etna, except that he likes to sit in trees, where he sometimes changes himself into an owl when the camera's off him. Etna claims to know the will of the supreme god Teisha, who has decreed that Thor has some great destiny to be a leader of men. Thor must find the hidden sword of his father (why didn't the father have it with him when he died?), and with that maybe-magic blade, Thor can kill his father's killer and bring peace to the land, Oh, and there's something about "golden seeds," which I think were just ordinary seeds that were going to foster the practice of agriculture in the primitive world.

This very basic setup might have been pardonable had any of Thor's fights with bad barbarians been even a little bit bracing. But they're all clumsy and poorly shot. Also, when there's some bit of barely explained magic-- some opponent somehow uses magic to blind Thor-- Etna, who barely aids Thor at any other time, shows up to cure the hero's eyes before he even has time to cope with his disadvantage. It also doesn't help that the sword Thor finds-- actually a double-bladed axe-- has more acting-ability than Conrad Nichols does.

Wrapping up as quickly as possible, Thor also perpetrates two rapes of defenseless women, both with the full approval of Etna. One female is a slave woman liberated after Thor kills the bad barbarians who hold her prisoner. Thor takes her back to his cave, and despite Etna's advice that he can do anything he wants to a slave, it's Thor's first time and he's relatively restrained before the camera cuts away. The slave girl is then never seen again. On Etna's advice Thor then trespasses into the local Amazon territory, so that he's attacked by some very short, delicate-looking swordswomen. Thor kills a couple of them and rapes a third, Ino, whom he takes back to his cave to become the mother of his children. For no particular reason, Ino falls in love with Thor and helps him in his climactic confrontation with Gnut. The validation of rape, without even the hint of a Stockholm syndrome as an excuse, is a stupid reason for any film to stand out, but that's the only aspect of THOR worth noting.

FAIRY TALES (1978)

 

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

How different would the film world have been, had producer Charles Band, instead of producing dozens and dozens of schlocky horror/SF movies, had instead kept making schlocky softcore sex movies like FAIRY TALES and its 1977 predecessor CINDERELLA? Well the film world probably would have not have been very different, but Band probably would have lost his shirt and taken up some less stressful occupation, like tax preparation.

That said, I still enjoyed the amiable stupidity of TALES years after having seen it once years ago (unlike its companion piece CINDERELLA, which I've yet to lay eyes upon). Despite a fair amount of nudity, TALES barely sets forth any erotic scenarios; even a musical number involving BDSM falls flat as the protagonist's, er, little problem. TALES' entire repertoire is just a lot of sniggering sex jokes. not unlike Jack H. Harris' MOTHER GOOSE A GO GO-- though even that one used its nursery rhyme characters to better psychological effect than TALES does.

As I mentioned before, the whole excuse for a story hinges on the fact that the unnamed Prince (Don Sparks) of an unnamed kingdom is about to turn 21 and inherit the throne. However, according to his advisors, including comedian "Professor" Irwin Corey, Prince cannot take up the mantle of kingship until he can prove he can get something else up, and thus prove his ability to sire offspring. In the version I saw-- a VHS rip on YouTube, with Italian subtitles-- there's no explanation as to why this supposed youth (who looks about forty) has been struck by impotence. But Prince happens to have a photograph of Sleeping Beauty (Linnea Quigley in one of her first roles), and he's confident that he can make babies with such a stone fox. So he girds his loins-- in this case, by belting on a sword-- and leaves his kingdom for the nearby terrain of Fairyland, where he has some reason to think he'll find Sleeping Beauty.

Fairyland in this case is more like one of the many "all-fairy-tales-sold-here" worlds, though Prince doesn't seem to recognize any of the figures he meets on his quest-- Little Bo Peep (Angela "LOST EMPIRE" Aames), Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Tommy Tucker, Scheherezade (Nai Bonet), Old King Cole, Peeping Tom, and the Frog Prince. The original version is also supposed to have some erotic schtick with Jack and Jill, but this didn't appear in the version I watched. IMDB lists actors who played the roles of "Little Red Riding Hood" and "The Little Dutch Boy," but I never spotted either one. There's one character in the mix who might be entirely original, a witch named "Aunt Le Voh," who's no fairytale creation, though her name resembles that of historical figure Marie Laveau, a 19th-century "free woman of color" and practitioner of voodoo. The role is played by singer Martha Reeves at a point when she sought (unsuccessfully) to branch out into acting. She later claimed that she didn't know she was filming an erotic movie, though in her one scene, she exchanged lines with another performer on the subject of curing Prince's impotence with her magic.

Her enchantment doesn't work, which isn't surprising since the movie sports very little any actual magic, which would have required money for effects and/or costumes. The one partial exception is the Frog Prince, but he didn't require a costume, being that the only froggy part of him is most often covered by his pantalones. 

Aside from Prince having short and inconsequential encounters with Bo Peep and the Jack-and-Jill couple, almost all the action takes place within a colossal laced-up boot, "The Shoe of Pleasure," which is Fairyland's foremost whorehouse. The woman who lives in this shoe doesn't have any children; I guess she knew what to do. The writers give the Madame Who Lives in a Shoe (Brenda Fogarty) a name culled from a separate nonsense-poem, that of "Gussie Gander." Gussie's partner is a pimp named Sirus (pronounced "Cyrus"), who's fully conversant in seventies-style jive. As played by Sy Richardson, Sirus has some weird, hard-to-follow lines when he lures Prince to the Shoe of Ill Repute; one of his raps says something like "I'll show you what made Peter Pan fly, and how Olive Oyl popped eyes." 

Once Prince makes it to the shoe, he makes a deal to give eighteen percent of his kingdom to Gussie and Sirus if they can help him solve his little problem. But nothing works, not even when Madame Gussie breaks her own rule against sleeping with customers and tries to seduce Prince. However, by some coincidence Gussie just happens to have a special treasure she hasn't shared with any other customer: a virgin who seems to be sleeping all the time. So Prince thinks his problem's solved, but oh, no, in addition to being asleep she's really ugly, so they cover her up again. Then some other customers hear about the virgin, and they all want her, sight unseen, which leads not to any good slapstick but just some lame running-about. While being chased by Gussie, Prince trips and falls upon the covered-up face of Ugly Sleeping Beauty. Apparently Prince accidentally presses his lips to his/her/its face, for when the cover is removed-- hey, it's Linnea Quigley at last! So it's a happy ending, except that the film has Tommy Tucker bore the audience with a goofy summing-up spiel.

Barely any jokes really land; most just do a big belly-flop. But I still mildly like TALES, though probably only for assembling talents who all did better work elsewhere: Fogarty, Aames, Reeves, Angelo Rossito, and Frank Ray Perilli (one of the writers, best known as "Penn" of INVASION OF THE STAR CREATURES). The one exception is that I'd never noticed Richardson in anything I'd seen before, and he's quite good, even though he reunited with Nai Bonet the next year in an even worse movie, NOCTURNA. Since Perilli and the other two writers were all Americans, I don't know how much credit to give them for the possible coincidence that some Brits use "goose" as a word for "prostitute," or even for the possible "Laveau" pun. Certainly both bits of wordplay would have gone over the heads of the audience, as opposed to all the dopey sex jokes. 

LADY WHIRLWIND (1972), THE FURIOUS KILLER (1973)

 

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

This double review started out as a single, after I viewed a streaming copy of an extremely obscure chopsocky, THE FURIOUS KILLER. But in the process of trying to think of something interesting to say about this bit of ephemera, I realized that it bore a broad similarity to an earlier martial arts flick I'd recently re-watched, Angela Mao's LADY WHIRLWIND. (The above lobby card was produced in the U.S. to take some improbable advantage of the contemporaneous adult film DEEP THROAT.) LADY WHIRLWIND and FURIOUS KILLER share a similar trope (if not a direct influence of the former upon the latter): a female martial artist seeks revenge upon a man, or men, who have wronged her, with a touch of conflict about whether her revenge is the correct path. 

WHIRLWIND begins with the backstory of a Mister Ling (Chang Yu), who meets his future wife after thugs beat him and leave him for dead. Ling recovers but nurses the idea of getting revenge on the local thugs. Miss Tien (Mao) comes to town just when Ling is being attacked by the gangsters, and she saves him. But Tien only does this because she wants to use her kung fu to beat Ling to death, rather than allowing anyone else to do so. She allows Ling to recover from his wounds at his house, explaining her motives to the man and his wife. It seems Ling jilted Tien's sister some time back, and the sister killed herself. Tien blames Ling for this occurrence, and swears to kill him when he's able to defend himself.

However, Tien's basic decency is revealed when Ling pleads that she allow him to gain revenge on the gangsters before she kills him. Tien agrees, and after a false start or two Ling learns a new form of kung fu to battle his enemies. However, he's not up to the task alone, and ironically Tien ends up fighting the thugs with Ling in order to keep Ling for her own vengeance. But as a result of her having helped Ling and his wife, Tien finally decides to forgive him and leave the man in peace.

WHIRLWIND was one of the many strong films in Mao's popular seventies cinematic run. But if IMDB is correct, FURIOUS KILLER is the last of almost forty movies for Hung Lee. I recognize none of the other titles on Hung's resume, so for all that I know, KILLER may be the actress's only kung-fu film, or at least the only one of which she was the star.

In contrast to WHIRLWIND's script, the villains of KILLER are almost all completely bad. The gangsters of Boss Shang kill an old man and his granddaughter for some reason, but Tong, the sister of the granddaughter, is away at the time. She trains in kung fu for years to take vengeance. When Tong is ready, she does what most such heroes do, starting not with the head guy, but with his lieutenants, so that she can work up to a climactic duel with the main villain.

Tong fingers Shang's henchmen with ridiculous ease, challenges them and their minions, and eventually defeats all comers, implicitly killing her main targets with her assaults. A minor supporting character tells Tong that she should practice forgiveness, but she doesn't appear to be affected. However, when she goes after a third henchman, he pleads that he's tried to abandon crime and live virtuously with his family since being complicit in the murders. Tong won't listen, so the two of them fight and Tong defeats him. But before she can take fatal vengeance, the guy's wife pleads for him. Tong agrees to forgive the guy, but continues pursuing Shang himself. Shang finds out that she spared one victim and kills the guy, for no clear reason.

After Tong wades through some of Shang's minions, the heroine and the master villain contend, oddly enough, in the vicinity of a cattle pen. This leads to the movie's one modestly original touch: that the villain ends up dying by cattle stampede. The only other indicator that Tong may have modified her desire for vengeance is a line she speaks before fighting Shang, telling him that he can live if he'll go to the police and confess his crimes. But patently KILLER's writer didn't have the strong sense of dramatic progression as the one who wrote WHIRLWIND.

As for the action elements, Mao was at the peak of her form in the early seventies, but she also had the unique ability to really "act out" her feelings of rage or frustration while fighting. Hung does not show this particular ability. She does deliver a whole lotta ass-kickings, but I had the impression that she was new to the practice of fake-fighting; that maybe she had trained with the stunt doubles for a week or two before cameras rolled. 

A final "thrust" re WHIRLWIND: I never saw it in a U.S. theater, but I very much liked the above lobby card. But probably no one who has seen the film will be surprised that neither Angela Mao nor any other female performer shows the slightest bit of cleavage in it, nor is there any sort of arcane "death blow" involved.

LUPIN III: TOKYO CRISIS (1998)

 

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

TOKYO CRISIS is one of the funniest of the often routine LUPIN III TV specials, and the thing the script does right is to invest its one-shot "guest-star" character with a lot of heart and quirkiness, so that she's fit to stand alongside the equally quirky Lupin Gang-- and with perpetual loser Zenigata.

Maria Isshiki initially seems to be a simple reporter looking for an interview with Inspector Zenigata. Her questions often embarrass the older cop, particularly when she asks about his repeated failures to capture Lupin III. While fending off questions, Zenigata is also in the process of moving a valuable item to a secure location: photographic plates owned by a millionaire investor, Michael Suzuki. Lupin shows up, having the effrontery to impersonate Zenigata, and as usual the master thief confounds the bulldog cop, despite not getting the plates. But during the fracas Maria demonstrates an odd precognitive power, envisioning Lupin's counter-measure before he takes it. Further, Maria is revealed to be working for Fujiko Mine, who's playing a lone game against her usual collaborators.

Zenigata arranges for a truck convoy, driven by Suzuki's men, to transport the plates to their next location. Lupin and Jigen intrude on the convoy, but against Zenigata's orders, the Suzuki henchmen try to kill the thieves. I forget how Maria manages to get invited to accompany Zenigata's command car, but she ends up participating in a wild car-chase. In the end, Lupin and Jigen don't get the plates, but Goemon shows up, dangling from a helicopter piloted by Fujiko, and he gets the plates. This theft causes the Tokyo police to rescind Zenigata's badge and gun, and Maria shows up at a bar to listen to him drown his sorrows.

Fujiko then holds the information that can guide her, and any associates, to the usual fabulous treasure. Goemon serves Fujiko only because someone, apparently Suzuki, absconded with Goemon's super-sword. Lupin reluctantly agrees to aid Fujiko's plot, almost certainly because he's still infatuated with her, while Jigen goes along, partly because he's distracted by the mundane menace of a sore tooth.

While the Lupin Gang tries to perpetrate another heist in a Suzuki building, Zenigata and Maria show up as well. Suzuki manages to mousetrap them all. Then we get the revelation that Maria has a far more personal reason for sticking close to Zenigata: she believes that Suzuki had her researcher-father killed so that the plutocrat could use the father's discoveries to make-- super-soldiers? But the only research we find out about is that Maria's father messed with her DNA slightly, so as to imbue her with precognitive powers. 

The mad-science part of the story is underdeveloped, but Maria remains a lively figure throughout all the craziness that transpires. With the help of Zenigata and the gang, she succeeds in bringing down her father's killer. She also "brings down" Zenigata when she reveals that she enjoys hanging out with him because he reminds her of her father-- which shoots down any romantic delusions the old cop had been harboring.

I won't detail all the cool jokes throughout CRISIS, though I will note that even the minor schtick of Jigen's toothache has a payoff. Maria never appeared again, which is appropriate for a one-shot character, but she's one of the few support-characters able to hold her own with the regulars.

LUPIN III: DRAGON OF DOOM (1994)

 

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

I believe this Lupin TV-movie, DRAGON OF DOOM, was meant to be a comedy, but in truth, it's one of the least funny ones I've seen so far.

The setup sounds like it might be fairly Lupin-centric. Crime-boss Chin Chin Chu engages the Lupin Gang to go hunting treasure in the sunken shell of the Titanic, and Lupin is particularly interested in doing so, because his ancestor Arsene Lupin had planned to rip off the Titanic at some point, only to be frustrated by the ship's destruction.

However, the Lupin part of the plot proves minor, and both Jigen and Fujiko have only nominal roles. (Fujiko's betrayal of her fellow burglars is so predictable, I just wanted it to be over quickly.) DRAGON turns out to be centered upon the background and concerns of Goemon the samurai with the blade that can cut metal.

Most of the LUPIN shows I've seen don't expatiate upon the nature of Goemon's sword, but DRAGON is explicit in claiming that the blade was forged in the early 20th century by a master Japanese blacksmith, out of some rare super-metal. However, the blacksmith also crafted a dragon-statuette of the same metal, but the statue was stolen and placed on the Titanic for resale elsewhere. Chin, who's served by a team of ninjas, wants that metal for the usual nefarious reasons. 

However, Goemon's not on the side of his homeboys this time. He's been contacted by a childhood friend, Kikyo, who's also become a ninja, though apparently on the side of the angels. She wants to keep the dragon-statue out of Chin's hands, and Goemon's nostalgic (though probably non-romantic) feelings for the young woman cause him to attempt getting the item from Lupin's group. But Kikyo's got her own agenda, and it ties in with the fact that her ancestor was the ones who stole the statue in the first place.

Goemon's scenes with Kikyo include some strong sentiment, though the vagueness about Goemon's exact feelings for her weaken the drama a little. The samurai has a good scene slicing a plane in half, but the only strong scene for the other members of the ensemble is one when Chin imprisons them in a room filled with "madness gas," so that Jigen fights with Goemon and Fujiko attacks Lupin. Lupin manages to save the day there, though. However, his defeat of a "boss ninja," ostensibly to save Goemon the trouble, is underwhelming.

THE WAR OF THE GARGANTUAS (1966)

 

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

I'm reasonably sure that when I saw WAR in a theater in the late sixties, it was an English dub that had excised all references to WAR's predecessor, FRANKENSTEIN CONQUERS THE WORLD. I also saw CONQUERS in the same period, and made no connections between the two movies.

The streaming English dub I just watched, however, includes references both in the spoken dialogue and in the subtitles, so that it's much clearer that WAR is a sequel. I don't mind that the subtitles don't always match the spoken words-- sometimes, this can be rather amusing-- but some of the spoken dialogue is simply not duplicated in any way.

A greater inconsistency arises from the use of the viewpoint characters from the first film, Bowen and Sueko-- an inconsistency particularly puzzling since WAR reunited the director and screenplay-scribe from CONQUERS. Bowen and Sueko are now Stewart and Akemi, even though the latter characters seem to have had exactly the same experiences with the Frankenstein Creature as did the former ones. Kumi Mizuno plays the role of Akemi in a manner indistinguishable from her portrayal of Sueko, and perhaps Toho hoped that new American actor Russ Tamblyn would be at least as good as Adams. Unfortunately, Tamblyn projects almost no conviction in his scientist-role and seems to be sleepwalking in search of a paycheck.

Nevertheless, the screenplay creates a palpable sense of mystery with regard to the recrudescent Monster, who now shows up as an equally large humanoid, but now covered in green fur. This creature, later dubbed Gaira, arises from the sea and immediately begins preying on human beings. Stewart and Akemi, upon learning of the giant's existence, are baffled, since New Frankenstein only ate lower animals. The green giant also seems to dwell largely in the sea, coming out at night to devour humans, and avoiding the light of day.

The mystery is solved when the army corners Gaira in the mountains. Gaira seems near destruction, but a second giant, brown in color and later named "Sanda," intervenes to guide his companion to safety. The scientists, who have almost nothing else to do in the movie, swiftly theorize that Brown Sanda is the original Frankenstein, though in the dubs I've seen they don't bother to explain why he's covered in brown fur now. As for Green Gaira, the scientists decide that he may have evolved from cells that Sanda lost while passing through the ocean, and that these cells then evolved into a seagoing, cannibalistic monster. In due time, the military is able to track down the two giants once more, but before that takes place, Sanda (who, like Frankenstein, cannot talk) discovers for the first time that Gaira's been scarfing down human beings. The giants fight, and their epic battle takes them out to sea, where the military attacks them both with laser beams. Conveniently, a dormant volcano erupts and seems to destroy both of the "Gargantuas."

Though there's not as much human interest in WAR compared to CONQUERS, Akemi is allowed to have a few "King Kong" moments with the gentle Sanda. The big battle-scenes also receive much more attention this time, with the usual excellent use of miniatures. It's of minor interest that whereas CONQUERS only showed an inhuman creature guilty of anthropophagy, Gaira is more like a reversal of Sanda's humanity, revealing in chowing down on humans-- though to be sure, he never eats enough to sustain such a titanic body!

 

FRANKENSTEIN CONQUERS THE WORLD (1965)

 

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

Honda had originally wanted to explore more of the science-gone-wrong theme, but was forced to change the story in the middle to reach a climactic monster battle

This sentence from the Wikipedia article on CONQUERS-- an article which recapitulates a lot of fun history about the movie's genesis, BTW-- explains why the film seems rather schizophrenic. The first half of CONQUERS seems intent on drawing parallels between the hubris that created the Frankenstein Monster and the horrors of the atomic devastation of Hiroshima. Then the second half places this Japanese version of the Monster in the position of a hero defending humanity from a makeshift monster-of-the-day.

In the waning days of WWII, but presumably before Allied forces invade the Reich, the German high command learns that a local scientist has custody of the undying heart of the Frankenstein Monster. and they order the organ sent to their Japanese allies because-- well, I suspect even the Japanese script doesn't give a good reason for the Germans to do so. In any case, the heart-- which may be useful in manufacturing super-soldiers-- ends up in a Hiroshima research facility, just a little while before the city is bombed. The immortal heart is lost and forgotten.

Twenty years later, American scientist Bowen (Nick Adams) is ensconced at a Hiroshima facility, conducting research on cell regeneration for the purpose of healing lost limbs, along with his colleagues Sueko (Kumi Mizuno) and Ken'ichiro (Tadao Takashima). Bowen explicitly says that he came to Japan as a sort of penance for the bombing of the city, but the research has gone nowhere and he considers leaving. Felicitously, he and Sueko encounter a feral boy with a curiously squarish head. The boy, who feeds on small game and on the pets of Hiroshima residents, is caught, but Bowen and Sueko gain permission to study him. In due time they theorize that the boy "just growed" from the Frankenstein-heart, because (they claim) he regenerates his injuries quickly and is Caucasian like the bodies from which the Monster would have been built. (In truth, the actor playing New Frankenstein doesn't look like anything but another Japanese performer.) Ken'ichio becomes somewhat obsessed with the idea of cutting off one of Monster-Boy's limbs, on the theory that this can help their cell regeneration experiments.

However, New Frankenstein saves him the trouble. As a result of the boy's getting a steady diet of protein while in captivity, he grows to a height of maybe ten feet, and so is kept in a cell with a chain on his arm. Frankenstein breaks free of the cell and inadvertently slices off one of his hands pulling free of the chain. Frankenstein escapes the city into the nearby woods, but the three scientists find the hand, still alive and crawling about. They attempt to keep the hand alive but it eventually expires. Ken'ichiro becomes more obsessed with getting a sample of Frankenstein's anatomy before he's eventually destroyed by the army.

Up to this point, this new incarnation of Frankenstein has emphasized the tragedy of the Hiroshima survivors, embodied in the form of a ceaselessly hungry feral child. And it's Ken'ichiro, not Bowen, who comes off like the ruthless scientist, willing to duplicate Frankenstein's inhumanity for the sake of personal advancement. I found this surprising, since a lot of Japanese films project all the evils of WWII upon the U.S, rather than admitting that the bombing was the result of Japan's imperial expansion.

But by 1965, Toho was certainly aware that many kaiju moviegoers loved to see big monster-fights, and thus Honda set up scenes of a second monster, Baragon. While Frankenstein continues to follow his earlier pattern of just feeding off random animals-- and thus becoming a really big kaiju-- the burrowing monster Baragon feeds upon animals and humans alike, so that Frankenstein gets blamed for the beast's actions. Mostly due to dumb luck, the two monsters cross one another's paths and immediately fight. After a lively battle of humanoid freak and reptilian predator, somewhat reminiscent of the one between Kong and a T-Rex in the 1933 film, Frankenstein conquers his foe. But as the result of Baragon's burrowings, the earth around both collapses, so that Frankenstein apparently dies-- though he would be back in altered form for WAR OF THE GARGANTUAS, while Baragon would return in DESTROY ALL MONSTERS.

At one point in the movie, a character expresses surprise that the creature that grew from the Monster's heart has lived so long as a little kid. But if everyone's so sold on the idea that the heart just produced a full body out of nothing-- given that the heart itself has no way to assimilate protein-- why should anyone be surprised that an immortal monster could live so long? This and one or two inconsistencies in the English dub make me suspect that the original idea was different. It would track better if, following the bombing of Hiroshima, some starving child found the heart and ate it, with the result that he became mutated, square head and all-- though incapable of growing unless he got a surfeit of protein. This concept would have emphasized more the human suffering of a Japanese survivor of the Bomb, victimized by two forms of Western science. It would also go a long way toward explaining why the producers cast a Japanese performer in the Monster's role, when the script claims that he's a European concoction. But probably the world will never know. 

ATTACK OF THE CRAB MONSTERS (1957)

 

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

Following the recent demise of B-movie King Roger Corman on May 9, I decided to re-watch one of his earliest sci-fi offerings. I didn't remember liking it much, but this time I noticed more content in ATTACK than in previous Corman-directed works using the trope "small cast of characters faces SF-threat in desolate location." Griffith's script is much more focused upon the terror of "nature striking back" than the four previous SF-offerings in this vein: MONSTER FROM THE OCEAN FLOOR, BEAST WITH A MILLION EYES, DAY THE WORLD ENDED and IT CONQUERED THE WORLD.

Following a faux-Biblical quote about God destroying humankind, the audience witnesses a naval plane drop off a small team of scientists, and two sailors, onto a Pacific island. Previously the island was an atomic test site, though presumably everyone thinks it safe now. An earlier scientific expedition landed on the isle some time back, but the navy lost all contact with that group, presuming them dead by misadventure. Speaking of misadventure, once the scientists have been dropped off, the plane blows up when it attempts to take off. The scientists later seek to alert the authorities via a radio in the deserted research-station, but static interferes with broadcasts, effectively stranding the expedition. This is further complicated by the fact that at times parts of the island are simply breaking off and sinking into the sea. This may or may not have something to do with the fact that the only wildlife on the isle consists of seagulls and lots and lots of crabs.

Two scientists are in a romance: Dale and Martha (Richard Garland and Pamela Duncan, who would also appear together the same year in Corman's THE UNDEAD), while two others are played by "cult-film" performers Mel Welles and Russell Johnson. In any case, the scientists begin hearing ethereal voices that seem to belong to the lost investigation team-- and when members of the current expedition also perish, they too seem able to communicate from the other world. But the island is haunted only by atomic specters. A pair of crabs were mutated by radiation, becoming huge and capable of assimilating human intelligence by devouring humans. Further, the creatures are almost invulnerable, and are responsible for the gradual decay of the island's integrity, so that even if the survivors can avoid the two monsters, the island will eventually plunge them into the sea's bosom.

Writer Charles Griffith carefully establishes a rough ecosystem for the island. Yet my favorite part of ATTACK is his pseudoscience rationale for the crab's near-invulnerability, claiming that they've been mutated into masses of "free atoms." It's nonsense, but it works to establish why most of the scientists' assaults fail, giving the last two humans just one last-ditch maneuver. (One guess which two survive at the end, to be presumably rescued once the mutant crabs are no longer messing with radio reception.) I don't consider any of the cookie-cutter scientists to have any mythicity-- though Martha is refreshingly professional and free of stereotypical feminine weaknesses-- so that only the Crab Monsters sustain a sci-fi myth.