STAR PILOT (1966)

 

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

In the sixties director Pietro Francisci wasn't getting big important assignments like 1952's QUEEN OF SHEBA, and STAR PILOT was probably his career low point, even though PILOT reunited him once more with SHEBA star Leonora Ruffo.

PILOT roughly resembles one of those captivity-narratives by Jules Verne, like MASTER OF THE WORLD, but with a lot more sex and violence. A UFO lands in the wilds of Sardinia. An Italian professor, accompanied by two hunky assistants and his dippy actress-daughter Luisa (Leontine May), sets up a small expedition to investigate the supposed landing. 

The explorers enter a deep cavern and find an alien construct, but don't know what to make of it. Leaving, the Italian quartet get ambushed by three gun-toting "men in black," who are Asian spies of some sort. (In the movie's only memorable bad line, the spies are very careful to specify that they are "Oriental" but "not Chinese.") The two assistants get into a brawl with the spies, in which the smaller Asians hold their own pretty well, However, the occupants of the alien spaceship-- the buried construct in the cavern-- choose this moment to emerge and capture everyone with their ray-guns. 

Kaena (Ruffo) is the captain of the ETs, consisting of just two hunky males, one of whom is played by former peplum-hero Kirk Morris. She tells the Earth-people that her ship came to the planet to monitor the humans' usage of nuclear power, lest they threaten Kaena's people. But the ship had mechanical difficulties, and Kaena needs the professor's help to repair the craft. She and her men hold Luisa hostage while the prof and his assistants do whatever they need to do. 

Francisci, one of the credited scripters, was clearly not interested in making up fake science to put across the sci-fi illusion. His main interest is in "the sexy," for Kaena is somewhat attracted to one of the assistants while Luisa has the hots for the Morris-alien (whose name is rendered both as "Belsy" and "Balsy.") The version of PILOT I watched fortunately interpolated some Italian subtitled dialogue left out of the American dub. Otherwise, I would not have known that Balsy tells Luisa that in his culture, the rulers' procreation is strictly monitored to keep their breed strong, while only the lower classes mate as they please. Luisa does not find this proposition romantic.

After repairs are completed, Kaena decides to abduct all of the explorers and to take them back to her world. During the trip, the Earthmen fight the hunky aliens and gain control of the spaceship. However, when they return the ship to Earth, they learn that in their absence nuclear war has decimated the planet. Having nowhere else to go, the whole troupe goes to Kaena's world. Surprise, surprise: nuclear radiation has compromised that globe too, though not as badly. The elitist rulers have deserted the world, leaving the hoi polloi to breed as they please, and the two groups of travelers realize that joining with this savage but egalitarian race is now their destiny.

Clearly Francisci didn't know how to properly build up to the sort of "philosophical reveal" that characterizes many of the best sci-fi films, and so his cross-mating scenario seems less than profound. I suppose Leontide May is the only performer who comes off well, but only because she's playing a sexy clown. However, if I had to decide what character occupies the centric role of Francisci's dull space-ride, I suppose it's Kaena, who represents her people and the "wrong turning" they took vis-a-vis eugenics.  

THE PHYNX (1970)

 

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

THE PHYNX (the name of a four-man musical group created by the U.S. government to function as spies) is one of the weirdest attempts of a producer from an older generation trying to profit from the 60s "youth movement." It just barely qualifies as a metaphenomenal movie, mostly by virtue of one gimmick: the musician-spies briefly use "x-ray specs" that can see through women's clothes but not through their undergarments. 

The plot of this movie-- unreleased by Warner Brothers in its own era, and unavailable until the era of DVDs-- claims that for reasons not revealed until the last half hour- the Communist country of Albania has abducted or lured away about thirty or forty performers, mostly from the 1940s and 1950s. The U.S. is unable to infiltrate Albania, so they induct four ordinary civilians, teach them to be a band, and arrange for that band to play in Albania in order to liberate the prisoners. Perhaps unnecessary to say, but eventually the spy-guys succeed in getting all the American celebrities back to their own country. 

All of this folderol is aggressively unfunny, not to mention slow and lacking in even basic slapstick, and even the various attractive women aren't played for maximum sex-appeal. The architect of this mess seems to be producer Bob Booker, collaborating on the original story with a guy who barely had any IMDB credits, and it seems like they were channeling an old forties cameo-fest like HOLLYWOOD CANTEEN.  It's like Booker and his crew watched a few episodes of THE MONKEES and crossbred that format with CANTEEN, without even figuring out how to give the majority of the old timers anything interesting to say or do. The long list of aging celebrities included such "happening" people as Xavier Cugat, George Jessel, Edgar Bergen (with the inevitable Charlie McCarthy), Rudy Vallee, Johnny Weissmuller and Maureen O'Sullivan, the two best-known Bowery Boys, and "The Lone Ranger and Tonto" (John Hart and Jay Silverheels, possibly their only reunion since they worked together on the 1950s LONE RANGER teleseries).

By the way, the flimsy reason they've all been brought together is because the Albanian President's wife is an American (Joan Blondell) wanted to be surrounded by people from her own culture-- including, supposedly, "the original Golddiggers."  But Booker and crew weren't referencing the Golddiggers of Dean Martin's sixties TV show, but ostensibly a bunch of performers from the 1930s "Golddiggers" films. None of these performers were billed, so they were in actuality probably just a bunch of sixty-something ringers, not any real 1930s actresses-- although the script calls attention to the fact that the dictator's wife, played by Joan Blondell, was in one of the original "Golddiggers" movies. (I think she might be in all of them, but I'm not checking.)

Bob Booker was born in 1931, and it would appear that PHYNX was mostly his attempt to enshrine all the cultural icons he'd enjoyed in his youth, with only the most nugatory head-nods toward sixties youth-culture. Strangely, writer-producer Carl Reiner was almost ten years older than Booker, but Reiner's DICK VAN DYKE was pretty damn successful at finding a way to bring together the culture of his formative period-- and maybe many of his writers, though I haven't checked-- and making the older content blend in with sixties touchstones like Beatles, Man from Uncle.

Oh, and there's also a goofy moment where the Phynx and a bunch of other people use electric guitars to shatter a confining Albanian wall, but this feels more like an excursion into cartoon-logic.  

SUPERVIZED (2019)

 

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

Past a certain point in the lives of sentient human beings, age becomes strongly associated with being a time of suffering, regrets, and tragedy. And for those very reasons, old age is immensely funny, though different viewers will have different mileages in that regard.

Yet, though I've seen or read thousands of superhero narratives, I've never come across an overly laugh-worthy take on the trope of "old superheroes." It sounds like it ought to be a winning combination: icons of vitality and sexual attractiveness, being humbled by the ravages of Father Time. But most "old superheroes" I've seen have been lame and obvious when played for comedy-- not that the list of good superhero comedies, in any medium, is all that long either.

SUPERVIZED is the exception to that tendency. I won't say that every age-related joke lands, for exactly the mileage-reasons mentioned above. Yet I'm surprised that the story is so focused, because when I look at the credits of the three writers, nothing I've seen by any of them strikes me as noteworthy. As for director Steve Barron, who's not credited with scripting duties, his best-known comedy in the U.S. would be the dismal 1993 CONEHEADS, though he scored rather better with adventurous fare like 1990's TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES and 1998's MERLIN teleseries.

Like most superhero stories, this one's set in a modern urban world akin to the one occupied by the audience. We don't see much of that world, though, since extra sets cost money, and this project, shot in Ireland and the UK, ponied up for three actors who were, in their respective days, fairly well known for action-roles: Tom Berenger, Louis Gossett Jr, and (to a lesser extent) Beau Bridges. Most of the story takes place at Dunmanor, an Ireland-based "old folks' home" for former superheroes, where heroes in their "golden years" have to deal with infirmities physical and mental and with being forgotten by the public. 

The three major characters are Ray (Berenger, formerly "Maximum Justice"), Ted (Bridges, formerly "Shimmy," kid sidekick to Maximum Justice), and Pendle (Gossett, formerly "Total Thunder"). They and numerous other retired superheroes still remember their glory days fondly, but their powers don't always work as desired, and it's strongly implied that Dunmanor may be the government's means of keeping tabs on these hyper-powered individuals-- though the government is not expressly involved. All the authority devolves to the home's manager Alicia (Fiona Glascott). Alicia seems the epitome of the cheerleader for the superannuated, but eventually the audience learns that she holds a Damoclean sword over the heads of the occupants. If any of these ex-supers misuses powers, the administration can have those powers artificially removed.

Ray, however, sees some things going on at Dunmanor that don't track for him. All of his friends think he's merely paranoid, as does a late entry to the institution: Madera Moonlight (Fionnula Flanagan). An extra irritant to Ray is the presence of a former Russian super-villain, known only by the name of "Brian" (Elya Baskin), who received special treatment for having narced on a bunch of other super-villains. All these roadblocks aside, Ray can't let his conspiracy theories go, even though he puts his own super-powers in danger by his actions.

Is there a real conspiracy going on? If you think the answer is going to run counter to the film's continued refrain of "Sympathy for the Geezers," guess again. But the Big Reveal is just an excuse for a wealth of clever old-age jokes, many of which stem from the ultimate absurdity: getting old. What I particularly like is that SUPERVIZED never looks cheap. It looks inexpensive, but that's not the same. The various super-stunts are naturally more limited in scope than in a comparable superhero comedy like the 2006 ZOOM. But the stunts often capture, in comedic terms, the appeal of having super-powers like Total Thunder's super-speed or Moonlight's "power to warp reality." Ray is more or less the linchpin of the ensemble-- we become acquainted with Ted, Pendle and Moonlight through their interactions with Ray, because he's the representative "cranky old man" that the script wants you both to laugh at and laugh with. Nevertheless, it's a good ensemble, with Flanagan's white-haired warrior-woman standing out as one of the best comedic superheroines.

Up to this point, if I'd had to choose the best live-action superhero comedy, I might have gone with 1994's amiably goofy BLANKMAN. But sorry, Damon Wayans-- the Really Old Guard has taken away your pride of place.

GENLOCK: THE FIRST SEASON (2018-19)

 

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

The first eight episodes of this series (and four short teasers) are organized on this DVD as one continuous feature, as opposed to episodes separated by opening theme song and end credits. After the animation company that produced the show went under, HBO completed a second season, which I've not seen.

I'm not a big fan of mecha-shows, but this American effort rates with most of the Japanese programs I've seen in terms of characterization. As in many other shows, a futuristic Earth lies in peril from a menace that's mostly unseen except for antagonistic mecha and a handful of enemy soldiers. In this case, the Earth-government known as The Polity is coming close to destruction at the hands of The Union, whose origins are never discussed. Only a new breed of mecha, "Holons," stands a chance to beat back the superior forces of the Union. But only a handful of individuals can successfully mind-merge with the Holon-mecha, allowing GENLOCK to focus on a small ensemble of five defenders.

Of the five, four are given various character schticks but don't particularly come alive as characters: Japanese Kazu (who unlike the others never speaks anything but his native language, always helpfully subtitled), Russian Val (the "gender-fluid" one), Iranian Yaz (who, despite having defected from the Union, never says much about the goals or nature of her former allies), and Scottish Cammie (who supplies most of the comedy relief). The scripters put much more effort into the group's leader, American Julian Chase (voiced by Michael B. Jordan). Chase loses both his body and his family in a Union attack, but the genius of GenLock's creator Doctor Weller (David Tennant) preserves a portion of Chase's body in a tank and manages to translate his mind into an entity capable of merging with a Holon. For the remainder of the first season, Chase can only interact with others by projecting a holograph of his normal body. When his survival is made public, his former girlfriend Miranda, who's believed Chase to be dead for the past four years, is more than a little ticked off.

Though the four newbies to the Holon program have to be shepherded into doing the right thing for the sake of their world, the scripts don't create much interpersonal conflict, probably because that sort of thing would have distracted from numerous training-scenes with the giant robots. The CGI animation for all the mecha-action is lively if a bit (heh) mechanical, but the various speedbumps encountered by the trainees doesn't make up for the amorphousness of the opponents they're training to fight.

In the latter half of the series, though, the Union steals a march on the Polity. They manage to steal a Holon and make a copy of Chase's mental pattern, and through a process of brainwashing they make the rogue Holon's pilot into a deranged spirit called Nemesis. This attack-mecha not only can counter the five defending robots of the Polity, it can also track them thanks to being on Chase's mental wavelength. Nemesis's status as a dark reflection of Chase gives this villain much more heft than any of the anonymous Union minions. The scripts raise the question-- without answering it-- as to what sort of identity Chase actually has as a mental construct, given that he's said not even to be the first copy of Chase's brain-patterns, but "a copy of a copy."

All the business about the necessity of merging minds with mecha also creates a dynamic that requires the five combatants to share mentalities in order to up their game against Nemesis. This is accomplished a little too easily and introduced pretty late in the game, so that the GenLockers' success isn't very compelling.

The first season has a tidy conclusion but includes a teaser for the second and probably last season.

THE LODGER (2009)

 

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

Though I'm not a big fan of Hitchcock's 1927 LODGER, I succumbed to curiosity as to whether this 2009 psycho-killer flick would build on any of Hitchcock's conceits-- though I knew from the outset that this contemporary film wasn't about Jack the Ripper, only a modern-day imitator.

I'm not spending a lot of time reviewing this boring dud of a thriller. As quick as possible then: a serial killer starts menacing Hollywood by murdering hookers in such a way as to closely duplicate the crimes of the Ripper. For some reason, the crimes are linked to a perp who was executed seven years earlier on evidence compiled by experienced police detective Channing (Alfred Molina), so this raises the likelihood that Channing sent an innocent man to his death. Channing is therefore monomaniacal about tracking down the new killer, but as the script has things, the cop isn't particularly guilty about his bad call. He's more preoccupied with his personal problems-- a wife sentenced to an asylum after attempting suicide, a daughter who hates him-- so his fervor seems more like overcompensation. He also flagrantly accuses his rookie partner of being a homosexual, which turns out to be another unfounded accusation.

Parallel to Channing's plotline is one about a mysterious lodger, Malcolm (Simon Baker), who rents a room from a couple with a troubled marriage (Hope Davis and Donal Logue). This is the only part of the film resembling any part of the Hitchcock film or its source material, but it generates zero suspense. Is the killer Malcolm or one of the two unhappy spouses? Who cares?

One irony is that I partly decided to watch the film because I admired Alfred Molina. But his Channing character is repugnant without any redeeming qualities, and Molina doesn't bring any special touches to his lead role. If anything, Hope Davis gives the standout performance as the fragile, possibly unstable wife, who forms a romantic attachment to the mysterious stranger. But Davis's performance didn't justify slogging through this turgid, pointless mystery.

RIDDICK (2013)

 

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

Though I've given this sequel to 2008's CHRONICLES OF RIDDICK the same mythicity rating as the earlier film, RIDDICK is definitely the superior of the two in terms of kinetic thrills. Though I never read/heard any commentary from writer-director David Twohy, I feel sure that the underperformance of CHRONICLES moved Twohy to go back to the original template of PITCH BLACK.

To Twohy's credit, he quickly got rid of the mediocre menace of the Necromongers, which I assume other reviewers liked no better than I did, and had some conspirators abduct Riddick (Vin Diesel), dump him on a savage planet, and inform some mercs as to where the wanted fugitive could be picked up. From then on, the rest of the movie follows Riddick as he battles both the indigenous creatures of the planet and two groups of mercenaries. In the process, Riddick, who fears he's "losing his edge" due to his sojourn in civilization, gets the chance to build on his rep as an "animal" more savage than real animals-- though in point of fact, this dark hero does possess a code unique to him alone.

The two groups of mercenaries provide much of the tension, given that one group, led by Santana (Jordi Molla), is afraid that the other one is trying to seize the bounty on Riddick's head. However, the leader of the second group is Johns (Matt Nable), introduced in the two previous films as a guy with a grudge against Riddick. In this film it's specified that this Johns is the father of the merc who had made Riddick his captive in PITCH BLACK, so he and his crew don't care about the bounty, only about interrogating Riddick. Nevertheless, the two merc-groups still get in each other's way, all of which benefits Riddick.

Twohy attempts to duplicate PITCH BLACK's use of hostile life-forms and a ticking-clock menace, but these secondary menaces aren't compelling, and neither are the mercs, except for Dahl (Katee Sackoff). Dahl, during some violent altercations with a rape-happy Santana, Dahl implies that she may be a lesbian. Riddick nevertheless predicts that he's going to have sex with her, which led me to expect something of a "GOLDFINGER moment." However, though by movie's end Dahl doesn't seem entirely opposed to a hookup, Twohy doesn't take Riddick's prediction to its logical, men's fiction conclusion. 

Overall, RIDDICK proved an okay thriller with a few high points, but nothing special.

THE DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS (1963)

 

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

In my recent review of the source novel for this movie, I noted that author John Wyndham had essentially reversed the pattern used by H.G. Wells in WAR OF THE WORLDS. Wells pictured an Earth radically transformed by the invasion of aliens, but his emphasis was less on the viewpoint protagonist or any other humans and more on the nature of the Martians. Wyndham reverses this template. His story deals with two perils that devastate Earth, independent of one another but implicitly created by Earthmen as bio-weapons to be used against particular opponents. The Triffids, despite getting their name in the title, are not the stars of the narrative, and they're not even as devastating to human culture as the other bio-weapon, a plague that spreads blindness to the majority of the world's population.

DAY, directed by Steve Sekely with additional scenes by Freddie Francis, isn't a classic monster movie. Still, I like the fact that the Triffids get upgraded to be the stars of this show, allowing them to share mental space in my brain with the Martians, the Saucer Men, and others of that ilk. Writer Bernard Gordon, best known in sci-fi circles for his work on 1956's EARTH VS. THE FLYING SAUCERS, expressly states that his Triffids are spread across the globe by alien spores, and that these invaders have something to do with the phenomenon that caused humanity's blindness. This connection isn't worked out very well, for at no time does Gordon make it seem like the walking plants are operating on anything but killer instinct. 

Gordon borrows various events from Wyndham and juggles them to suit his narrative, which include, for one thing, moving out of the British Isles and into Spain. A large part of the novel deals with viewpoint character Bill Masen-- not blinded like the majority of humans-- taking a young woman under his wing, whom he eventually marries. Gordon instead has Masen succor a girl of middle-school years, with the same name as the novel's character Susan, not encountered until late in said novel. Movie-Masen does not meet a potential romantic interest until late in the movie, and that arc is an exceedingly small one.

The movie has some fine scenes at the start, creating great empathy with the occupants of both a cruise-ship and an airplane, doomed when everyone on board goes blind. However, the narrative too quickly devolves into just another "fight-and-flee-the-monster" conflict, as various minor characters are introduced, only to be quickly knocked off by the rampaging Triffids. Sekely also does a good job making these killer veggies seem imposing despite not having the budget to do more than imply consistent movement. 

According to fan-accounts, Gordon's original idea of a climax for the movie was to have Masen lure a contingent of walking trees into the ocean, which provided a literal "solution" when it was revealed that the monsters dissolved in sea water. From there, one assumes that this information was disseminated to the rest of the world, despite the destruction of international communications. However, for one reason or another, Sekely's climactic footage was unusable, making the movie too short for commercial release. 

Therefore, the producers hired Freddie Francis to insert various scenes of a couple confined to a lighthouse-island, Tom and Karen Goodwin (Kieron Moore and Janette Scott). Marine biologist Tom doesn't have the skills needed to analyze the Triffids on the island, but he eventually stumbles across the Big Solution, allowing for the same Wellsian wrap-up of the alien menace. I like the lighthouse-scenes for the same reason I like Masen traveling outside the British Isles, because one gets a better sense of the worldwide threat. Still, both the humans and their monstrous enemies aren't well developed, so that TRIFFIDS remains just one more basically entertaining alien-monster movie. 

INVADERS FROM MARS (1953)

 

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

Despite my grading INVADERS with high mythicity, this won't be one of the reviews where I examine the plot in excruciating detail. That's largely because, as many before me have noted, that this seminal fifties SF-film doesn't have that much of a plot. From first to last, director and production designer William Cameron Menzies created an alien-invasion film with the semblance of a fever dream. And many critics have chosen to believe that the story of grade-schooler David (Jimmy Hunt) was intended to be no more than a dream, which in my phenomenality system would place it in the domain of the uncanny, like Carroll's ALICE books and the 1939 WIZARD OF OZ.

To quickly sum up what plot INVADERS does have, Young David is the son of George (Leif Erickson), a suburb-dwelling scientist and his wife Mary (Hillary Brooke). One night David, who shares his father's interest in astronomy, hears noises outside his window. Looking out, he sees a flying saucer land some short distance away, in a nearby sand pit. He apprises his father of this incident, and George goes to check things out. George later returns, his friendly demeanor altered to a cold, ruthless persona. Cops sent to investigate George's initial disappearance are seen being swallowed by the sand pit, after which they, like George, become emotionless pawns of the saucer beneath the sand. More and more citizens of the unnamed town become Martian zombies, including David's mother. However, David makes new allies, with a good new "mom" and "dad" to help him-- the maternal psychiatrist Doctor Blake (Helena Carter), and a renowned astronomer, Doctor Kelston (Arthur Franz). With their help, David is able to convey his story to the U.S. army, and the pride of the military invades the underground sanctum of the invaders, apparently consisting of a hyper-evolved Martian brain and about a half-dozen brawny "Mu Tant" flunkies. Just as the military sets a bomb to destroy the underground saucer-complex, Jimmy experiences a vertiginous replay of all the things that happened to him and wakes up from a very long dream. But does he wake to reality, or to a new nightmare?

 Before addressing the quixotic ending, I want to stress that I didn't look up any details about the production of INVADERS except to compare its official budget to that of other sci-fi flicks in the early 1950s. So far as I can tell, this decade was the first one to start putting real money behind some prestige projects, as opposed to B-movie budgets. Two of the first critically heralded movies of the decade, THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL and THE THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD, edged close to $2 million budgets, and that figure was the precise amount estimated for the 1953 WAR OF THE WORLDS. WORLDS was the movie that INVADERS sought to beat into theaters with an excursion into full-color extraterrestrials. 

But director Menzies had a much more limited budget-- a little higher than the really cheap entries of the period, but still, only roughly $300,000, about fifteen percent of the WORLDS budget. I hypothesize that this might have played into his decision to associate himself with a project whose script took a "maybe it's all a dream" tack. Professionally, Menzies was an art director first and anything else second, and so INVADERS gave him a chance to work out all sorts of visual experiments with extremes of color, forced perspective, and other effects too numerous to mention here. The rationale that all or most of David's "close encounter of the third kind" was just a dream gave Menzies the chance to picture most of the images as being filtered through a child's mind.

However, the denouement doesn't actually validate the "all a dream" solution in that Dorothy Gale manner. During the first part of what seems to be a dream, when David first witnessed the saucer's descent, the craft is accompanied by an eerie humming. But, as a poster on this CHFB thread pointed out, at the film's end David wakes up, assumes all that transpired is a dream, and then sees the saucer in reality again-- but this time, the saucer is accompanied by the sound of an ordinary airplane.

Did someone, be it the screenwriter or Menzies, mean to suggest that in reality, David saw a mundane airplane but imagined that it was a flying saucer? I think that's meant to be a possibility, but not a definite one. If the intent was to say that David was merely projecting, Menzies could have started with the image of a real plane, and then superimposed the image of a saucer-- in which situation the audience would have been certain that David's visual sighting was not veracious. But the audience only sees what David sees, and that allows for a countervailing possibility. If the saucer is real, and the airplane-noise is not, then David has experienced a premonitory dream of extreme complexity-- albeit still filtered through a child's perceptions-- much like that of the central protagonist of the 1945 horror-anthology, DEAD OF NIGHT.

Since I assume Menzies was in charge of all the visuals of INVADERS, I tend to credit him with these competing sensory tropes, where an image tells the viewers one thing, and a sound tells them another. Given that Menzies allows for the possibility that everything in the dream will soon come to pass in reality, I judge INVADERS to be dominantly marvelous. 

BATMAN: YEAR ONE (2011)

 

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

Though Frank Miller's BATMAN: YEAR ONE was published the year after his classic work THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS, I've never thought that the second Bat-project held up as well. ONE dealt with Batman in his youngest crimefighting years, just as RETURNS dealt with him returning to the fray in his more advanced years. I respect ONE for accomplishing its fairly limited aims, but to this day I've not reviewed it, since I don't have much to say about it.

The DVD adaptation of ONE is arguably stronger than the DVD of RETURNS, given that the earlier graphic novel was packed with many convolutions and bits of business that the adapters felt constrained to omit. In contrast, the storyline of ONE was very straightforward and so required less tailoring.

Miller's careful parallelism between Bruce Wayne (Ben McKenzie) and James Gordon (Bryan Cranston) is maintained from the start, in that both characters arrive in Gotham at the same time. For Wayne, his advent is a return to the painful site of his parents' murder after 12 years' absence, during which he has been training himself to become a scourge of the underworld. For Gordon, Gotham is a refuge after some unspecified departmental conflict at his previous position as a police lieutenant Somewhere Else. 

While Wayne's only contact in Gotham is his butler Alfred, who knows of and abets his master's plans, Gordon brings with him his pregnant wife Barbara. Gordon hopes to build a new life for his wife and future child, but he's almost immediately dismayed by the unremitting corruption of the Gotham police department. He encounters this corruption mostly in the form of the present commissioner Loeb and his flunky Arnold Flass, both of whom are deep-dyed villains from start to finish. Slowly, over the course of Year One, Gordon carves out his own niche in Gotham as a honest cop who gets some of the police force and the local newspapers on his side-- though this means, in part, beating the hell out of Flunky Flass.

By contrast, Wayne knows what he wants to do, but not how to do it. He's not yet had his "I shall become a bat" moment. This transpires only after he's made a disguised foray into Gotham's red-light district-- a foray which bombs spectacularly. But once he assumes the role of Batman, Wayne's ability to handle crises seems to expand exponentially. Inevitably, even honest cops regard this caped vigilante as a lawbreaker, so that Batman spends a lot of time dealing with cops of all types, particularly the corrupt ones who work hand in glove with organized crime. He uses a number of low-level uncanny gimmicks most of the time, but at one point activates a sonic beacon that calls dozens of bats to help the hero confound the police-- the only marvelous element in the narrative.

Gordon not only tries to bring down Batman in, he comes close to discovering the masked man's double identity. But Gordon also succumbs to temptation, cheating on his pregnant wife with an attractive policewoman. This plot-thread helps to humanize Gordon but doesn't add much to the overall story.

The least cohesive element in ONE is a subplot about Selina Kyle. The DVD plays down her status as a hooker, though she still "meets" Bruce Wayne when he's still in his pre-Batman phase-- a meeting in which the two of them exchange kung-fu blows in the street. The series didn't explain why a prostitute possessed superlative martial arts skills, and did even less to account for why, upon beholding the costumed vigilante, Kyle should suddenly decide to dress up in a cat-costume and commit cat-burglaries. This was the weakest part of the original comic, so it's also just as ill-conceived in the adaptation.

If the actual story is just adequate, the voice-work by Cranston, McKenzie and Eliza Dushku (as the future Catwoman) is extremely good. (Three years after this DVD, McKenzie would take on the role of a Young Jim Gordon for the 2014 teleseries GOTHAM.) The animators successfully duplicate the spare, clean artwork of the series-artist David Mazzucchelli. It's a good basic adaptation of a basic story with some narrative problems, and nothing more.

DARK PLANET (1997)

 

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

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

DARK PLANET has received a number of critiques for director Albert Magnoli's having shot too many scenes in partial darkness. I've had similar criticisms of other films, but Magnoli's use of partial-dark scenes didn't bother me, since I think he was pretty good at highlighting the faces of the four main actors-- even if they weren't given very many good lines by the three writers, one of whom was Buzz Dixon, famed for various cult cartoon-shows.

The setup had potential. On a far-future Earth, but one which has not yet managed to colonize any planets despite mastering space-travel, two factions have been fighting for decades. One faction is comprised of humans who have been genetically modified, the Alphas, while the other group is unmodified. Curiously, the latter group is termed "The Rebels," as if the non-modified types at some time might have been ruled by the enhanced Alphas. But the underwritten script never elaborates on the genesis of the Rebels' group cognomen, any more than it's at all clear about what sort of things the modified humans can do, with the exception of one character, a telepath. 

For reasons not outlined until the last half hour, the Alphas and Rebels institute an armistice. The authorities on both sides designate a joint task force to make a landing on the so-called "Dark Planet," which implicitly is known through artificial probes. Said world can theoretically be reached by piloting a spacecraft through a wormhole, and that's never been accomplished before-- except by one man.

Though the task force is roughly ten soldiers from both sides, only four characters are important. The Alphas are represented by the conscienceless military commander Winter (Michael York) and his telepathic subordinate Salera (Maria Ford), while the only Rebel of consequence is an officer named Brendan (Harley Jane Kozak). Standing between these uneasy allies is Hawke (Paul Mercurio), a non-enhanced human who was arrested by the Alphas for weapons smuggling. While fleeing pursuit, Hawke drove his spacecraft into a wormhole and managed to emerge with his life, though another crewmember, Hawke's wife, perished for unexplained reasons. The Alpha-Rebel alliance drafts Hawke to be their navigator in order to reach the Dark Planet, though no one speaks as to why this mission is so important.

I'll give the Big Reveal away now: the Planet Earth is due to become uninhabitable in two years, thanks to bioweapons unleashed by both factions. Winter and Brendan both know that they must colonize the one human-friendly world in order for humankind to survive, and yet both officers have contingency plans to ace out the other group, which doesn't make a lot of sense given that the allied authorities back on Earth would still be in charge of who gets to emigrate to the new world. 

Hawke, in theory, is the random element. Despite Paul Mercurio's weirdly downplayed performance, Hawke professes a belief in the primacy of human instinct, and he attempts to win over the repressed Salera with rather ham-handed advances. Hawke more or less throws in with the sympathetic Brendan rather than the despicable Winter, but all three characters are too sketchy to provide much drama. The action isn't strong, though Winter has both a brief throw-down with the rebellious Salera and an end-battle out in space, with Winter and Hawke fighting one another in spacesuits. By virtue of such scenes, PLANET is a combative film.

Despite playing a flat character, York is the only actor who's a pleasure to listen to even when the dialogue is bad. Kozak, Mercurio and Ford, whatever their talents in other productions, are incapable of transcending the banal script. 

Keith Bailey's site not only reviews the movie, but also conveys the experience of a writer, Bill Vellaly, assigned to the project but excluded from the final credits. (Actually, the aforementioned Buzz Dixon is only credited on the movie's IMDB page.) I don't know if Vellaly's concept for the script would have made a better film, but PLANET remains damned underwhelming in its final form.

HERCULES REBORN (2014)

 

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

I haven't seen most of the productions of the mockbuster studio known as The Asylum, but HERCULES REBORN-- which sought to profit from not one but two big-budget Hercules pictures that came out in 2014-- may be the best thing the company ever did. To be sure, REBORN is still no more than an adequate time-killer, but most Asylum titles, if they garner any fan-favor at all, do so only by becoming known as "so bad they're good."

It's never absolutely clear that the Hercules of this movie is the son of the heaven-ruling Zeus (though the hero says that he's the real thing). Certainly, this Hercules doesn't inhabit a world of magical (and expensive) monsters. In addition, this strongman (played by a wrestler billed under various names, John Hennigan being the one IMDB uses) doesn't perform any supernatural feats of strength. Yet REBORN earns some points at the start by adapting one of the most consequential stories in the joined canon of Greek Heracles and Roman Hercules: the story of how madness overtook the hero, causing him to slay his wife and children. REBORN opens with this scene, not too much less horrific even though the deaths are more suggested than shown. Some archaic stories blame the goddess Hera for this calamity, but director Nick Lyon foregrounds a human plotter, face unseen, who's evidently slipped Hercules a potion that made him go crazy.

The scene shifts in time and place, years later in a kingdom called "Enos" (possibly a misspelled reference to an archaic Greek city, "Aenus"). The young ruler of the city, Arius (Christian Oliver), anticipates about to wed his royal bride Theodora (Christina Wolfe). However, one of his allies, General Nikos (Dylan Vox), lusts after Theodora, and to gain the young beauty, Nikos betrays Arius and invades Enos with his forces. Theodora is captured but Arius and a small retinue escape.

Arius has no other allies to draw upon, but he happens to have heard tales that Hercules, Son of Zeus, has taken refuge in a neighboring town. Over the objections of his followers, Arius leads them to seek out the demigod. Though the process of hooking up with Hercules proves fairly tedious, inevitably Arius finds his quarry, who's been drinking himself into a stupor for the past few years, trying to forget what he did to his family. Just as inevitably, Hercules agrees to lend his uncanny might to Arius' cause, at least partly because the hero bears some grudge against the usurper Nikos.

The middle part of the film is fairly boring, since the two scriptwriters-- whose other projects I did not recognize-- don't use the trip back to Enos as any sort of bonding-time between the remorseful demigod and the young prince, desperate to rescue his lady love. The two heroes just more or less use one another for their separate ends, even though the astute viewer may well suspect that Hercules' grudge against Nikos will somehow tie into the mysterious malefactor who slipped the hero a madness-mickey. (The subtitling says that the evildoer got the madness-potion from "Hera," though the actor pronounces the name "Har-ra," and it's impossible to tell if this "Hera/Harra" is supposed to be the deity Hera or not.)

Though the script's characterizations are nothing special, REBORN also earns some points for its semblance of a gritty, primitive reality. The movie was filmed in Morocco, so that the settings look a little arid for Greece, yet they still carry a convincing Mediterranean vibe. More importantly, Lyon-- a director with several other Asylum-credits-- stages battle scenes that aren't shy about bloodletting, unlike a lot of comparable takes on Greek mythology. And though Lyon doesn't show Nikos having his way with his captive Theodora, the director makes it quite clear that the villain doesn't deny himself the pleasures of the young woman's body. Theodora also takes several knocks in the course of the film, though she does manage to escape prison by tricking and stabbing a guard.

Hennigan makes an okay Hercules, playing him as a fierce brute with glimmers of sentiment. Oliver as Arius gets to show more dimension, but in the end he's nothing but the sum of his parts. The only aspect of REBORN that justifies a fair mythicity rating is the way script and direction capture the sense of a rude, primitive society where life is often all too cheap. Because the movie doesn't depict any overt signs of magical phenomena, it doesn't qualify for the category I call "the reign of wizardry," which exclusively concerns magical-fantasy stories.

DARKSTALKERS (1995 ), NIGHT WARRIORS: DARKSTALKERS' REVENGE (1997-98)

 

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

DARKSTALKERS started out as a fighting-game from Capcom, who attempted to expand on the franchise twice, first with an American series aimed at kids, and then with a Japanese OVA series. Neither was overly successful and the franchise seems to have languished, apart from the occasional nostalgic comic book revival.

The 1995 show, lasting 13 episodes, quite naturally cut out any sexual or ultraviolent content. The game's original concept was that of an Earth which now harbors diverse monsters because the Earth-dimension began to merge with a demon-world, which wasn't a particularly good explanation for the existence of simple science-anomalies like the show's resident "Frankenstein," the bolt-necked "Victor von Gerdenheim." The TV show alluded to a panoply of elder races on Earth, which at least explained the super-hirsute people of the character Bigfoot and the ruins of Atlantis, inhabited by mer-folk and ruled by their king Rikou (named for Ricou Browning, the performer who did all or most of the swimming for The Creature from the Black Lagoon). But the other characters had occult origins: European vampire Dimitri, Chinese vampire Hsien-Ko, succubus Morrigan, werewolf John Talbain, cat-woman Felicia, mummy Anakaris, zombie rocker Lord Raptor, cursed samurai Bishamon, and monster-hunter Donovan Baine. For good measure, the American writers worked in a couple of Arthurian characters. Morrigan was descended from Morgan Le Fay and new insert-character Harry Grimoire was descended from Merlin. And all twelve characters were, in one episode or another, were pitted against the forces of the alien fire-being Pyron, who wished to press-gang the monsters-- i.e., "Darkstalkers"-- into becoming his soldiers in a plan to conquer Earth. Pyron did enlist Dimitri and Morrigan into his service, but the other Darkstalkers were so much trouble that Pyron probably would've been better off just going forward with his Earth-conquest schemes.

It's faint praise to state that I've seen many worse cartoon-shows than DARKSTALKERS, but I can see why the series flopped. In the first episode Felicia bonds with teenaged Harry, and they're usually the viewpoint characters through whose eyes the audience watches the latest designs of Pyron and his allies. But twelve characters, even though usually only four or five appeared per episode, were probably too many for kid-audiences to identify with, particularly since one could not "play" them as one could in the fighting-game. 

All the characterizations are one-note, though occasionally the writers threw in nuggets of sprightly humor to compensate for flat characters. (At least three times, different characters comment that Rikou, unlike his Gill-Man model, is uncannily handsome for a merman.) The show kept at least some sense of shifting loyalties, for the samurai Bishamon starts out serving under Pyron's general Dimitri but splits off when Dimitri acts without honor. The monster-hunter Baine takes an early dislike to Felicia, despite her being the least "monstrous" of the Darkstalkers, and to his last episode he still wants to duel her to the death.

The animation was rudimentary, though I did notice that the animators did come up with some good choreography for the many fight-scenes, and that they sometimes gave the characters interesting new powers. But the characters simply couldn't move well enough to impress even an audience that didn't have high expectations. The show's most interesting aspect was that in my opinion all the titular Darkstalkers, whether allied with or opposed to Pyron, form the ensemble of the series, instead of the "heroes" being the stars to whom the "villains" are subordinate.

Though there's not a lot to like about the 1995 TV show, I still preferred it to the OVA series. Once again, Pyron is the invader who puts the Earth in peril, though, as if seeking to confuse the narrative, the script also claims that the vampire Dimitri has somehow occluded the light of the sun so that it does not reach Earth. Neither the Pyron-plot nor the Dimitri-plot really contributes much coherence to the narrative. As if the writers sought to emulate the game, most of the sequences are just setups for different fight-scenarios: Felicia vs. Lord Raptor, Dimitri vs. Morrigan, and so on. Even after I listened to a podcast by a reviewer who liked the four OVA episodes more than I did, I still felt that nothing about the story hung together properly. The animation was many times better than that of the American show, but there was next to no attention paid to making even one character interesting. 

Ironically, both American and Japanese comics did better renditions of this grab-bag of monster-mash characters, so it's probably for the best if the franchise stays confined to that medium for the duration.

A CHINESE ODYSSEY: CINDERELLA (1995)

 

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

Well, Part 2 isn't nearly as good as Part 1, particularly with respect to the trope of "love vs. higher duty." But the second film exceeds the first one in one respect: the folkloric reference in the subtitle makes ever LESS sense. 

So at the conclusion of PANDORA'S BOX, Joker, the 500-years-later mortal reincarnation of Monkey King has been caught between a rock and a hard place, consisting of two demon-sisters who want from him information on his earlier self. Joker falls in love with one sister, Jing Jing, while his associate Pigsy accidentally impregnates the other sister, Spider Woman, though the whole topic of this demon-mortal pairing just gets dropped in Part 2. Jing Jing commits suicide, but the goddess Kuanyin gives Joker a time-travel box that might save Jing Jing's life. But after a couple of misfires, the box hurls Joker back 500 years. Though the audience sees many of the same myth-figures that existed in this time-- Monkey's allies Pigsy and Sandy, and enemies Bull King and Princess Iron Fan-- Monkey himself does not appear, perhaps having been banished or confined by the goddess. Monkey's absence will eventually open the door for Joker to eventually retro-incarnate himself, re-assuming his godlike identity in place of the mortal one.

Jing Jing and Spider Woman both exist in this time period as well, though neither has ever met Monkey's mortal form before. So does Joker get to approach Jing Jing and seek to convince her of the true love they share?

Ah, no, Joker meets a totally different woman, the fairy Zixia (Athena Chu). She knocks Joker around, takes his time-travel box from him, and declares him to be her slave. Joker keeps trying to recover the box, and over time Zixia begins to show evidence of the Takahashi Rule: "knowing that the guy belongs to someone else makes him interesting." It helps that she has a special sword that only her true love can pull from its sheath, and guess who unsheathes the sword without even knowing he's doing something special?

So there's no impediment to Zixia falling in love with Joker, even though she like Jing Jing has a mean sister who shares the same body (nothing interesting is done with this). But why does Joker fall out of love with Jing and in love with Zixia? Writer-director Jeffrey Lau utterly fails to sell this new relationship, even though he once more has the services of the two actresses who played the demon-sisters in the first film. 

Meanwhile, Bull King is still around in this archaic period, but his current project is to put aside his first wife Princess Iron Fan and to get married to the fairy Zixia. Joker, who's not yet conscious of his having fallen for Zixia, gets pulled into this comedy of errors. This includes the development that Iron Fan recognizes Joker as the reincarnation of Monkey, and since she once "dated" Monkey, she tries to get Joker to rendezvous with her.

Longevity Monk is around too, and Bull King wants to devour his flesh in order to become immortal, just as he will 500 years in the future. Joker finally becomes resigned to the fact that in order to save the Monk and defeat Bull King, he must retro-incarnate and become Monkey King once more. However, that means subsuming his later identity so that he once more assumes all the historical duties of Monkey King, such as protecting the Monk on his journey to the west. He must also don a special metal ring around his head that causes him pain when he tries to return to his old romantic habits-- which doesn't exactly sound like the idea of Buddhist enlightenment to me.

Though there's a cool battle between Monkey and Bull at the climax, the ending is very confusing. I think Monkey journeys back to the future, where Jing Jing and Spider Woman have become mortals and are married to the descendant of Pigsy (maybe the baby got erased by time-alterations?) and a mortal version of Zixia is married to a descendant of Joker. Sad, sad, sacrifice for the hero of the story, roll credits.

Stephen Chow is uniformly good even acting through the monkey-makeup, and glamorous Athena Chu provides strong support even though her character is underwritten. But whereas Part 1 benefited from its similarity to the popular "White Snake" narrative, Part 2 doesn't hold together. I still give it a fair mythicity rating because the story touches on the trope of "love vs. duty," but it isn't as affecting this time around. 

BABES IN TOYLAND (1997)

 

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

As my review of the 1934 BABES IN TOYLAND should show, I'm not overly enamored of that film, and the same goes for every other adaptation I've seen of the 1903 operetta. However, I have to give the original story some credit for being one of the first crossovers of the 20th century, even if the crossover-characters are all figures out of fairy tales and Mother Goose rhymes.

Aside from charting the similarities between original and adaptation, this 1997 film has little to recommend it beyond an assortment of celebrities voicing the characters (Christopher Plummer, Bronson Pinchot, Jim Belushi and Charles Nelson Reilly, the latter voicing "Humpty Dumpty," who might not have appeared in any TOYLAND iterations before this). And to be sure, no movie adaptation has faithfully adapted version of the operetta, either in its original or revised form. TOYLAND '97 mostly copies the plotline of the 1934 film, except that it brings in two kids as viewpoint characters to the wonders of Toyland, as well as being the niece and nephew of their cruel uncle Barnaby (Plummer). That, and one song by Victor Herbert (the redoubtable "Toyland"), are probably the only elements taken from the operetta.

In the absence of comedic stars Laurel and Hardy, the centricity shifts to the young couple, with Mary (of Little Lamb fame) acing out Little Bo Beep, though Tom Piper is still the male lead. The script does away with a fatherly Toymaker, but Mary, in deference to girl-boss models, runs the toy shop for her late father, and Tom is her employee. There's a slight attempt at characterization, as Mary is briefly seen as officious and Tom as scatterbrained, but little comes of it. Tom arguably is melded with 1934's "Stannie Dum," since the Piper's Son constructs the same troop of giant toy soldiers-- though apparently this time, it's not a misinterpretation of an order put in by the shop's major client, Santa Claus.

Barnaby's motivations are more envy-driven this time. He doesn't want to marry Mary; he just wants to take over her toy shop in order to keep children from having toys, since he never had any as a child. This time around, he's given the surname "Crookedman" to align him to the old poem, but as far as denoting his characterization, his last name should have been "Grinch."

Tom, Mary and Humpty are the only major nursery-rhyme crossovers here; others just appear in background scenes, like the Three Blind Mice and the Gingerbread Man. Barnaby's two comic henchmen (modeled on the imagery of Laurel and Hardy) from the 1961 adaptation are shoehorned in to provide some alleged comedy. Their only important action is obeying Barnaby's order to deliver the two kids (who have witnessed their uncle's schemes) to the cannibalistic goblins, but the kids and the two henchmen are rescued by Tom and Humpty.

Since I didn't think Barnaby's climactic action in the '34 movie-- somehow drawing the goblins into attacking Toyland-- made a lot of sense, I might argue that in this movie, the villain is a little better motivated to destroy Toyland, in that he's been frustrated of his scheme to take over the toy shop. I've also argued that the conflict in the '34 film between the goblins and the giant toy soldiers was too brief and desultory to sustain the combative mode, but this cartoon provides a few more spectacular scenes of soldier-goblin combat. Barnaby's given one more opportunity to demonstrate his black heart by threatening his niece and nephew again, but he ends being chased out of Toyland by a horde of aggrieved goblins. In some versions Tom stabs Barnaby at the end, but since Tom made the soldiers, the combative victory still goes to him, albeit indirectly.

One last note is that the two kids are named Jack and Jill, but they seem to have come to Toyland from the real world, and nothing indisputably connects them to the Jack and Jill of nursery rhymes.  

A CHINESE ODYSSEY: PANDORA'S BOX (1995)

 

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

I'll dispose first of a bit of business about the subtitle: this film has nothing at all to do with the Pandora's Box of Greek mythology, even in a metaphorical sense. In this first part of a two-part project, the box doesn't even appear until the last hour of the movie, as a magical time-travel device, and doesn't have a big impact on the narrative. The sort of instantaneous temporal jaunting it provides contrasts strongly with the only kinds of time-travel seen in pre-technological stories: the "Rip Van Winkle method" and the "reincarnation method," both of which appear in the source material being adapted here.

I have never read any translated version of the 16th-century Chinese fantasy-novel JOURNEY TO THE WEST, but I've read assorted summaries and seen a fair number of secondary adaptations. Thus, even before re-watching ODYSSEY's second part, I think it's a given that writer-director Jeffrey Lau was only using the general plot and characters of JOURNEY as a springboard for his own story. In fact, given that the main narrative focuses upon two demon-women and the mortal men who get involved with them-- which doesn't seem a major trope in JOURNEY-- ODYSSEY seems a little closer in structure to the many cinematic versions of another Chinese classic, "Legend of the White Snake." It may not be coincidence that the 1990s premiere hot-shot Hong Kong producer Tsui Hark had previously done one such serpentine adaptation a year or two before ODYSSEY.

There's a short set-up in some vague archaic period in China's history, focusing on Monkey King (Stephen Chow) being sentenced to a punishment by the goddess Kuanyin: to be reincarnated as a mortal until he learns the importance of the Buddhist truths, as represented by his erstwhile master Longevity Monk (Kar-Ling Yaw). Some generations later, Monkey King is reborn as a common mortal bandit, Joker (also Chow). 

Joker and his fellow bandits hang out in some small rural village until a beautiful woman, Jing Jing (Karen Mok) makes the scene. All the men try to peep on her at her toilette, but out of nowhere a giant spider appears and many gross hijinks result. The spider turns into another beautiful female, Spider Woman (Kit Ying Lam), and Joker finds out to his regret that both females are sister-demons. They've come to the village on some vague notion of looking for the reincarnation of Monkey King, on the theory that he can lead them to the reincarnation of Longevity Monk. If the sisters can find the Monk, they can devour his flesh and so gain immortality. Joker not only doesn't know that he was once the fractious hero Monkey King, he also doesn't suspect that his Number Two bandit-buddy, billed as "Assistant Master," was once "Pigsy," another humanized animal who ended up serving under the original Longevity Monk. I'll just call the bandit Pigsy for sake of potential clarity.

The sisters don't seem to have any means of figuring out where their intended victim is, but their quest is rendered somewhat moot by the arrival of an even more powerful demon, the minotaur-like creature Bull King (Shuming Lu). The demon-sisters take Joker and Pigsy to a secluded cave, which becomes the main set for the rest of the film's action. While in the company of Jing Jing, she and Joker fall in love. Spider Woman doesn't feel quite so intensely toward Pigsy, but thanks to one of those unplanned metaphysical interactions that just kind of happens, Pigsy impregnates Spider Woman (not, to be sure, the old-fashioned way). Spider Woman is so mortified at getting knocked up by a common mortal that she forbids him to tell anyone that he is the father of their child (which gets birthed super-quickly in a big comical scene). Later Spider Woman tells her sister that Joker fathered the child, which breaks Jing Jing's heart. She commits suicide, after which Joker seeks to use Pandora's Box to go back in time and prevent Jing Jing's death-- a plotline that will then bleed into the second part of the story.

Though I haven't liked a lot of Chinese comedies, most of the zany stunts and grossout jokes here work pretty well, and even though the sets aren't as opulent as the best Tsui Hark fantasies, the fight-scenes are more than adequate, particularly a magical battle between Jing Jing and Bull King. In a scene destined for Hong Kong immortality, Jing Jing shrinks herself to insect-size, zooms down into the bull-man's stomach and starts slicing up organs, leading to the memorable line from Bull King: "Bitch, don't step on my intestines."

But I wouldn't give ODYSSEY PART 1 a strong mythicity if I didn't think it succeeded in drawing some intriguing opposition between the world of Buddhist self-renunciation and the cosmos of sublime romance-- again, possibly more like the "White Snake" fable than like the 16th-century novel. Though the Buddhist precepts are "true," the romantic entanglements have their own, arguably lesser truths, and the first part of the story essentially leaves them at odds with one another, just as they are in human culture and consciousness. 

STAN LEE'S MIGHTY 7 (2014)

 

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

*JOKE SPOIILER JOKE SPOILER*

MIGHTY 7 was one of various superhero projects produced by Stan Lee's company POW Entertainment before the famed comics writer-editor passed in 2018. I have not become acquainted with all of these would-be franchises, but it's fair to state that none of them caught fire with the public. 

In the case of MIGHTY, this direct-to-TV feature was preceded by a magazine issued by POW and two other merchandizing partners (one being Archie Comics). The MIGHTY comic was supposed to come out for six issues but only three appeared, all written by the team of Tony Blake and Paul Jackson, presumably with input (but probably not an actual script) from Lee. (Blake and Jackson are also credited for the script of the video in the end credits.)

Comic book and video present the setup for the Mighty 7 in nearly identical fashion. Stan Lee drives out in the Mojave Desert, seeking to brainstorm some new superheroes for Archie Comics (a company for whom Lee never actually labored). A spaceship crashes, and the nonagenarian writer meets seven humanoid aliens from the planet Kring. All seven have super-powers, for reasons that are not sufficiently explained in either version, but like the original Avengers, they're something less than a knitting-circle. Two are "star marshals," and they're hauling the other five Kringians back to face justice for various crimes. Now, with their ship destroyed, the aliens have to settle for hanging out with the first Earthman they run into, even though his dominant desire is to market them all as "real-life superheroes."

I won't dwell on the seven aliens-- almost all of whom are voiced by celebrity performers. They patch up their differences really quickly and join forces in being Earth's real superheroes-- admittedly, the better to keep from being turned into lab animals. In the comic they all get weird alien nonsense-cognomens, but I think I prefer these to the "superhero names" that the script for the video almost exclusively uses. ("Laser Lord?" "Kid Kinergy?" Ugh.) But if the assembly of the heroic group is pedestrian, at least visually they look pretty good, and their diverse powers complement one another in three big fight-scenes. The animation is much more fluid than two rather stodgy cartoon-films I reviewed here, MOSAIC and THE CONDOR. 

One big change from comic to video is that in the comic, the first threat that the Mighty 7 must face is essentially a mad-scientist supervillain. The video improves on the comic's setup in that, early in the story, the aliens and their Earthling cheerleader discover that Earth has already been infiltrated by other aliens, a race of marauders called the Taegon. There's nothing memorable about these bargain-basement boogiemen, but had this pilot-movie spawned a series, the alien marauders might have made a better long-term threat than "the villain of the week."

Yet in a broad sense, the attraction here is not the heroes or the villains, but what the story does with the Legendary Stan Lee, who is of course voiced by the real celebrity. Naturally in neither medium does the script reference anything about Lee's real history, particularly with regard to his former employer Marvel Comics. The video presents Writer Lee loosely along the same lines as Lee's persona in vintage Marvel Comics: bombastic, self-centered, and egotistical, but still possessed of enough verbal style to make him charming. Most of the humor in MIGHTY is mighty ordinary, but the video does boast one joke I'll proceed to spoil.

The government is trying to locate the Mighty Seven, so they use a high-powered mind-reading device on Lee, to find out what he knows. But for some reason, even though the device can project Lee's memories on a handy TV-screen for the interrogators' review, all the memories come out in chronological order. And the only memories of which the audience learns are Lee's memories of creating hundreds and hundreds of superheroes, thus causing the interrogators no end of aggravation. I know it's not a great joke, but for me it carries a little added resonance. When I was reading Marvel Comics in my teens, I naively believed that the credited writer alone conceived all the characters in the stories. I certainly don't believe that now, knowing how important most of Lee's collaborators were to those many conceptions. But I still think that those hundreds of characters would not have been given what life they possessed without some partial creative input from Stan Lee.

THE MUMMY AND THE CURSE OF THE JACKALS (1969)

 

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

The above art, showing a fight between the titular mummy and a jackal-man, is far better than anything in the movie, particularly the film's climactic fight, where one can hardly see the two fighters in prevalent darkness. But now that I mention it, CURSE might have been better had everything been filmed in prevalent darkness. 

Director Oliver Drake had definitely seen better times. He'd written and/or directed a few dozen B-films in the forties, including the last of the Lon Chaney Jr "mummy movies," THE MUMMY'S CURSE. Most of the films he worked on were quickly forgotten, but five years before the 1969 CURSE, he wrote a psycho-thriller that might be his best scripting work: LAS VEGAS STRANGLER. He wasn't responsible for writing this feeble mummy-flick-- that honor went to a writer with only two other credits on IMDB-- but Drake may've contributed a little input, since the names of the two mummies in the film are "Akanna" and "Sirakh," re-arrangements of the doomed Egyptian lovers from the Universal series, "Ananka" and "Kharis."

But though the Universal mummy-films are mostly formula-fodder, the writer for CURSE didn't seem to have any awareness of what formula he was trying to emulate. Back in ancient Egypt, Princess Akanna (Marliza Pons) is informed by her dying Pharoah father that he's received a message from the gods. Rather than living out her life in ancient Egypt, the gods want Akanna to be entombed under a magical spell that will preserve her for centuries, until the time is right for her to rise again. Along for the ride is Sirakh, a low-ranking Egyptian who's in love with Akanna and attempts to steal her body from her special tomb. For this he's punished in the usual way-- the bandage-wrapping, the tongue-uprooting-- and made into a sleeping sentinel meant to serve Akanna when she next awakens.

Cut to modern Las Vegas: in a small house there, David Barrie (Anthony Eisley) shows off his two mummy-sarcophagii to a couple of friends. I'm not sure if Barrie is some sort of "Egyptologist manque" or what. Barrie claims that he simply found the caskets in a downed plane and took them with him. He claims to have some notion of exhibiting Akanna and Sirakh but doesn't seem to know how that would work. The conversation with Barrie and his friends is just there to set up Barrie's entrancement with the perfectly preserved non-mummified body of Akanna. He also mentions an Egyptian legend about a "bite of the jackal," which is also confusingly referenced by the Pharoah, and Barrie plans to test the legend by locking himself in the room with the opened caskets.

Sure enough, at some hour or other Akanna wakes up (Sirakh takes a little longer) and somehow inflicts the bite of the jackal on Barrie. I think this whole jackal-thing was the writer's dim attempt to bring Anubis into the mix, but it's never justified. The spell, or bite, or whatever it is works its magic, and Barrie becomes a raging Jackal-Man. He gets free and assaults a few Vegas residents, goes back home, re-transforms, and then gets his new instructions from Akanna.

After lots of talky, badly-lit incidents, Akanna finally reveals the plan of the Egyptian gods: they want her to conquer the modern world in the name of the ancient deities, with only a walking mummy and a Jackal-Man to aid her. How she would accomplish this, the audience never learns. But a real Egyptologist, Professor Cummings (John Carradine), hears about the Jackal-man killings and shows up on Barrie's doorstep, having implicitly figured out who got hold of the two missing mummies. Cummings, who doesn't have more than fifteen minutes in the movie, provides the info a local cop needs to put down this ancient threat: strike at a certain time, when the moon's no longer full, and Akanna's power will be weaker. The upshot is that Akanna loses her youth and the two monsters, each of whom is jealously possessive of his mistress, perish after fighting one another, I guess because Akanna's power wanes.

Only John Carradine's scenes justify watching this pile of dreck. He actually looks better here than in some of his earlier sixties films, and his speaking voice is as resonant as it was when he played roles like "High Priest of Kharis" in the 1940s. All of the other actors, whether experienced thespians like Eisley or dabbler-types like Pons, convey nothing but sheer boredom.