THE INVINCIBLE IRON MAN (2007)

 

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

Everyone knows that the 2008 IRON MAN proved to be not only the dark horse that came in first, but the initiator of an entire "Marvel Cinematic Universe." The various animated OAVs that came out before and after the live-action movies didn't make up any sort of consistent universe, and most of them were forgettable, though I found the DOCTOR STRANGE video superior to the Cumberbatch film.

INVINCIBLE IRON MAN was probably completed while the 2008 IRON MAN was finishing up production. But though the scriptwriters probably had access to some or all of the live-action film's storyline, the only strong likeness is that INVINCIBLE duplicates the film's characterization of Tony Stark, prior to his taking up the superhero mantle. Tony, despite being a scientific polymath, is also an irrepressible ladies' man, with INVINCIBLE even suggesting outright sexual intercourse. Also duplicated is the characterization of Tony's secretary Pepper Potts, who loves him and is sardonically jealous of his hookups. But everything else is changed, both from the original comics and the MCU version.

The 1960s comic-book Iron Man sustains injuries while issuing new munitions to American troops in Vietnam. The 2008 adaptation advances the military setting to Afghanistan, but with the same outcome for the hero. In order to deal with both his life-threatening wounds and with his tyrannical captors, Tony invents the armored suit that leads to his becoming Iron Man. But INVINCIBLE avoids the military angle completely, except to state early-on that Stark Industries was a munitions industry under Tony's father Howard but converted to more humanitarian activities thanks to Tony's genius. The sense of the son having exceeded the father is here the root of estrangement between them, whereas the conflicts of the same characters in the live-action series is vague and unsatisfying.

The crucible in which Iron Man is formed does still take place in "The Orient," however. The live-action series never got the character of The Mandarin right, choosing to view him only as a facile Fu Manchu knockoff. Yet to be sure, the comic-book Mandarin didn't fulfill his potential. There was at most the suggestion that the villain represented the tyranny of the pre-industrial world, while his opponent symbolized the rise of rational democracy. Ironically, INVINCIBLE does a better job with the Mandarin character by keeping him largely offstage-- which was actually the case with the prose version of Fu Manchu.         

Tony Stark's rational, scientific view of life is shaken when he uses his tech-genius (with the aid of chief engineer James Rhodes) to unearth the palace of The Mandarin, a mass-murdering emperor from the prehistoric era of China. Tony's archeologists and engineers are challenged by a dissident group, the Jade Dragons, who in part duplicate the function of the Vietnamese troops who captured Comics-Tony. The inventor flies to China, gets near-fatally wounded by the Dragons, and is pressed into their service-- but principally to consign the unearthed palace back to the depths of the earth. One of the Dragons, the beauteous Li Mei, seems willing to help Tony and Rhodes, possibly because she like Tony has had conflicts with a paternal unit. Even she doesn't suspect that the charming genius has long had the idea of Iron Man armor in mind for a long time, and he uses it to escape. However, in contrast to the other versions, Tony gets back to America and faces a frame-up by political schemers-- and then must return to the Orient to banish the evil he unleashed there.

Both the animated action and the dialogue are far better than most such OAVs. As mentioned, the Mandarin is kept mostly offstage, while Iron Man engages in combat with various super-powered pawns of the evil emperor, including a giant dragon given no name in the script, but obviously modeled upon a Marvel Comics monster, name of "Fin Fang Foom." Li Mei's destiny turns out to be implicated with the Mandarin's recrudescence, which follows through on the parallel of Tony's conflicts with his father. To be sure, the being called The Mandarin is only "on stage" for a few minutes, with a handful of lines voiced by Fred Tatasciore. Yet the sense of the villain's pervasive menace is far more compelling, as I said, than in any previous adaptation, and in most of the original comics. Since the two live-action IRON MAN movies that followed the 2008 flick weren't all that great, maybe the MCU would have done better to have emulated the better aspects of INVINCIBLE.        

THE BLACK CAT (1981)

 

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

Since it's almost impossible to make Edgar Allen Poe's famous short story into a feature film without adding elements to complicate the plot-action, it's not a slight to say that Lucio Fulci's take on THE BLACK CAT isn't totally faithful to the story. In fact, in one thematic sense, it duplicates some of Poe's ambivalence as to the origins of evil. In some tales, Poe seems to feel that evil is the result of bad human choices, as seen in "Metzengerstein" and "William Wilson." In others, evil just erupts out the human soul with no choice involved, as in "The Imp of the Perverse" and "The Tell-Tale Heart." 

Fulci starts CAT in a small English town, as an evil black tabby gets into some random citizen's car and does some sort of hoodoo on the driver, so that he crashes and is killed. An American tourist, a professional photographer named Jill (Mimsy Farmer) gets drawn into investigating this and other strange deaths to help Scotland Yard Inspector Gorley (David Warbeck). She soon meets local eccentric scientist Robert Miles (Patrick Magee) and learns that he's been conducting experiments in talking to the spirits of the dead. In fact, early on he shows that he's less than a self-sacrificing ideologue, for he briefly tries to hypnotize Jill, implicitly to take advantage of her. But the young woman snaps out of the spell and runs away.

While the narrator of Poe's story kills a real cat and brings down on himself the vengeance of a possibly supernatural feline, there's no doubt that this Black Cat is some demonic spirit from the beginning, possibly called forth by Miles' messing with spirits. Sometimes the cat knocks off local victims in relatively naturalistic ways, but whether its methods are naturalistic or marvelous, Miles thinks the creature manifests from his own hatred toward the townsfolk-- which takes the emphasis off of his transgressions in the spirit world and puts the evil of Miles more in the realm of subconscious perversity rather than objective actions. 

There are some good shocks along the way, particularly as the Black Cat begins performing more overtly demonic acts. At one point, Miles duplicates the act of the Poe-narrator and hangs the nasty pussy, and for some reason this causes EXORCIST-style shenanigans to occur in Jill's apartment. Nevertheless, the cat is the star of the show, and Miles is doomed from the get-go. For all that, BLACK CAT sports Magee's best performance in a horror-flick, while everyone else is reduced to support-status.