THE BATMAN, SEASON FOUR (2006-07)

 

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

A MATTER OF FAMILY (F)-- Season Four launches a credible reprise of the Dick Grayson/Robin origin. The comic-book story was always weak on the motivation of the Zuccos, the crooks who kill off Robin's parents-- what self-respecting gangster would seek protection dough from a business as unstable as a circus? And the tale is not improved by positing that the Zuccos themselves are ex-circus folk-- too much like gilding the lily. But otherwise, "Family" hits the right emotional notes in forging the paternal relationship of Bruce, Alfred and Dick.    

TEAM PENGUIN (F)-- Batgirl, unofficial Bat-sidekick, gets frosted when she meets the official version. Nevertheless, though Batgirl gets sidelined in Season Five, the two teens have good chemistry here, though I prefer the older-younger vibe. It's Penguin's turn to catch a case of "team envy," as he brings together established heavy-hitters like Bane, Firefly, Rag Doll, and Killer Croc-- as well as a new goofball version of Killer Moth. Then, in the midst of assorted hero-villain fights, the Moth gets mutated into a monster. Silly fun.

CLAYFACES (G)-- The Ethan Bennett Clayface had a limited shelf-life since his good side outweighed the bad one-- and Bennett proves that here, capturing Joker and turning himself in. Bruce Wayne gets researchers working on a clay-cure, but the news comes to the attention of flop actor Basil Karlo. He doses himself on the clay-mutagen and finds himself glorying in the attention he gets as Clayface II. Bennett breaks jail and tracks down his successor for a major battle of clay-creeps. Batman dispenses a cure that seems to nullify both shape-changers, but maybe Karlo still retains some power. This Karlo combines the power of the 60s Clayface and the name and profession of the 40s version. That character was named for the two horror-stars of the 1939 movie SON OF FRANKENSTEIN, Basil Rathbone and Boris Karloff-- and oddly enough, that's what this Karlo is, the offspring of a monster.   

  THE EVERYWHERE MAN (F)-- Batman and Robin must battle a scientist who can be "everywhere" because he can generate countless duplicates of himself. Or is the scientist really the brain behind the masses? It starts as a mystery and resolves into a big fight-scene with a clever twist. The script resembles that of a 1950s WORLD'S FINEST tale, "The Duplicate Man," though that titular crook could only make a single self-duplicate.

THE BREAKOUT (F)-- Though the main foe is the skull-faced Black Mask, everything else feels like a mundane crime-thriller. Black Mask is confined to Gotham Jail, and his gang tries to break him out, which Batman, Robin and Batgirl must prevent.

STRANGE NEW WORLD (P)-- In the comics, Hugo Strange made monsters, but this tale has the BATMAN version upgrading his act, unleashing a zombie attack on Gotham. Or is he just stealing from the script of the BTAS episode "Dreams of Darkness?"  

ARTIFACTS (P)-- I guess this episode might be considered a condensation of the theme of BATMAN BEYOND: "There will always be a Batman." However, I found "Artifacts" poorly paced and uninvolving.

SECONDS (F)-- How can Batman cope with a time-manipulatitg crook who knows the hero's every move, since the thief can "reset" time and start things over again, to his advantage? Adequate but not interesting.

TWO OF A KIND (G)-- Paul Dini wrote this Harley Quinn reboot, which imagines Harleen as even more of a ditz than her original incarnation-- and this time, she's only a "doctor" courtesy of some online college. Joker spots HQ on daytime TV, dispensing bad psychological advice to her audience-- which leads to her losing her show. Joker professes himself to be her "number one fan," and the psycho-babbler thinks she can profit from his celebrity. Instead, the Monarch of Mirth unleashes her inner criminal-- though he also ends up leaving HQ in the lurch. She makes a few more support appearances in the series, and I suspect that the romantic angle of the first iteration gets played down as it does here.

RIDDLER'S REVENGE (G)-- Grimdark Riddler gets an origin, one that emphasizes some tragic aspects-- but before Batman learns that history, the two enemies have to escape a death-trap by working together. The episode's main strength is its focus upon the sustained illogic of riddles.

RUMORS (F)-- A new vigilante is collecting Gotham's supercrooks, and his name is Lockup-- oops, that was BTAS. This vigilante takes the peculiar cognomen of "Rumor," I suppose because he wears armor with invisibility gear. Rumor succeeds in imprisoning about twenty villains, so the Dynamic Ones must first defeat Rumor and then keep the vengeful villains from killing their jailer. The big battle is better than average, but Rumor's motivation is weak.

THE JOINING (F)-- The final episode of Season Four signals the direction of the fifth and last season, which uses copious DC guest-stars. Here the guest is the Martian Manhunter, who brings Batman news of an alien invasion by a force called "the Joining." The scenes with the invaders are far less compelling than the byplay between the two heroes, and the resolve of the Crusader's two sidekicks to prove their worth (since Batman's flirting with the idea of excluding them to spare their young lives).  The episode is OK if one can keep from wondering what the other DC heroes are doing during this worldwide invasion-- since at episode's end, Manhunter unveils plans for a Justice League. Four familiar figures appear at the finish, and Superman makes his BATMAN debut in Season Five's first episode-- yet somehow their presence does not weigh in the scales of the Joining's defeat.        

THE BATMAN, SEASON THREE (2005-06)

 

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

Ellen Yin gets dethroned from her tenuous position as Batman's sidekick, making room for his costumed counterpart-- Batgirl? Well, I suppose it's a twist on the standard routine, and I could imagine a scenario in which this more "human" Batman gets softened up by this distaff imitator, making him more amenable to adopting Dick Grayson. I'm not sure the showrunners gave the matter that much thought, because this version of Batgirl has no gravitas. She's like a kid sister tagging after her older brother, and not much beyond that.  

BATGIRL BEGINS, PTS 1-2 (P)-- I'm not crazy about a teenaged Batgirl, but I like even less a Poison Ivy who looks like an anime lolicon. Further, there's no payoff to making them classmates who get involved in sabotaging some pollution-making company, except that the plot-device helps the writers condense the origins of both characters. Ivy's botanical mutation comes about when she hires an earthquake-themed evildoer, Temblor, to create havoc. Ivy uses her powers to enthrall Batman, so Barbara Gordon uses her kung fu skills and a distaff costume to become Batgirl, though she's forced to fight her would-be mentor briefly. Once Ivy is corralled, Batman thanks Batgirl but refuses to take her on as sidekick.    

A DARK KNIGHT TO REMEMBER (G)-- This may be THE BATMAN's best single episode, since it's predicated on the series' notion that this Batman is as much Bruce Wayne as his alter ego. In battle with Penguin, the hero sustains a head-blow, and upon resuming his regular ID, forgets that he ever was Batman. In essence, Wayne begins acting in line with the public perception of his identity, and that includes running away when threatened by a super-crook like Penguin. Slowly, Wayne's own altruism re-asserts itself, and Alfred helps him recover his full memories-- but it's a laborious process, the obverse of the crimefighter's unshakeable sense of self in the BTAS episode "Perchance to Dream." On a sidenote, it's a pleasure to see a Penguin who can really fight: he's like a cross between Quasimodo and Sammo Hung.

A FISTFUL OF FELT (F)-- Hugo Strange still seems to be no more than an eccentric analyst, and his newest gambit is to purge the Ventriloquist of his criminal tendencies by giving the demented fellow a wacky felt puppet with no hostile personality. Of course there's no more Ventriloquist stories if he's cured, but this tale includes an epic "battle of the hand-puppets" worth seeing. 

RPM (F)-- Here's a Batmobile-centric tale for a change, and it's arguably a level up from the car just being swiped by Penguin. New villain Gearhead has some bionic abilities and can interface with a car's computer systems to usurp control. Batman loses one Batmobile but builds another to grind the evildoer's gears.

BRAWN (P)-- This is probably the series nadir. Joker gets hold of Bane's super strength chemical and becomes Super-Joker. Batman creates a power suit with which to fight the fiend, and dimwit Batgirl horns in on the action. Grueling.

THE LAUGHING CATS (F)-- Batgirl has her first throw-down with Catwoman, but both the Cat and the two Bats must make an alliance to thwart Joker's latest larceny. Batman doesn't have any response to Catwoman's overtures, aside from not trying too hard to jail her.

FLEURS DU MAL (F)-- "Makin' copies" (old SNL catchphrase) becomes Poison Ivy's new gig, as she starts replacing city officials with her version of "pod people"-- which makes a lot more sense than most of her gambits. Batgirl is understandably torqued when her father is one of Ivy's victims. The title stems (heh) from the name of a poem-collection by Baudelaire, whose own name gets worked into the story.

CASH FOR TOYS (P)-- Batman contends with a poor man's Toyman, name of Krank-- appropriately named, since the episode seems "cranked out."

THE APPRENTICE (F)-- Joker gets a case of "sidekick envy" due to Batman's mentorship of Batgirl. And though I've often liked seeing Joker as a devilish tempter, his selection of a dorky teenager seems counter-intuitive.

  THUNDER (F)-- In the comics, Maxie Zeus seems underwhelming. But BTAS did one exemplary episode with this megalomaniac and his fetish for Greek culture. The producers of THE BATMAN should have avoided Zeus for that very reason, but instead they churned out a routine programmer with no distinguishing virtues.

THE ICY DEPTHS (F)-- Alfred gets some backstory as he's obliged to cope with an obnoxious former schoolmate who drags the butler into a treasure-hunt. However, both Penguin and Mister Freeze seek the same bounty.

GOTHAM'S ULTIMATE CRIMINAL MASTERMIND (F)-- Hugo Strange finally crosses the line, creating a self-aware computer program, DAVE, that believes itself to be the ultimate super-villain. Unlike the comics' Hugo Strange, the mad scientist here seems to be something of a "villain-fanboy," even impressing the program with his own engrams. Thus DAVE is in the grand tradition of all Frankensteinian creations who act out their creators' desires. Once DAVE whips up a robot body for itself, Batman is hard pressed to best the AI on any level, except for that most Socratic necessity-- that of "knowing yourself." And so Strange ends up in his own funny farm, vowing vengeance in some future encounter.     

SPECTERS (1987), MAYA (1989)

 

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

Having been thoroughly disgusted with this inferior "demons on the loose" flick from Lucio Fulci, I promptly watched a couple more by a director I'd never heard of, Marcello Avallone. Neither was very good, but cumulatively they did cleanse my palate.

SPECTERS had nothing going for it except that all its thoroughly routine characters are at least consistent in the ways they act and react, in contrast to DEMONIA. Donald Pleasance is the only "name" actor, and he's just playing a standard "archeologist who unearths a demon from an old sepulchre." The archeological dig takes place near Rome, but Avallone and his co-writers couldn't be bothered to name the evil entity that starts knocking off cookie-cutter victims. The one slightly memorable thing about SPECTERS occurs when Avallone shamelessly rips off a scene from a Freddy Kruger film.

The flattery of imitation served Avallone better in MAYA, his second and last horror movie. This too is also a "demon on the loose" flick, but this time he's doling out gore-scenes worthy of Fulci, whom I suspect he studied before doing this film.

This time Avallone leads off with a Carlos Castaneda quote, a Mexican setting, and a demon whose name, Xibalba, is taken from the cognomen of the Mayan land of death. William Berger-- who's the Big Name this time, at least in the Euro-market-- dies early in MAYA, when his meddling unleashes Xibalba-- not a pure demon, but a once-mortal Mayan ruler who crossed over to the land of death to escape an enemy tribe. Now that he's loose, Xibalba wants to kill pretty much all the descendants of his enemies.

This dollop of mythology has no purpose save to give context to the multiple gore-killings, but that's a good in itself, given how little context appeared in both SPECTERS and DEMONIA. Further, MAYA offers two relatively memorable POV characters: Lisa, who comes to Mexico to learn how her father (Berger) was slain, and Peter, who helps Lisa because he hopes to get into her pants. Avallone also works in three other hot girls, all of whom get horribly killed by Xibalba, and even the non-gore scenes are much more vivid than anything in SPECTERS. MAYA suggests that Avallone might have been able to do at least more passable horror-thrillers-- but the movie flopped, and Avallone turned to other genres thereafter.

            
 

   

DEMONIA (1990)

 

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

Wow. I suppose Lucio Fulci may have done worse films than this one, but it's the worst Fulci movie I remember seeing.

We see a prologue set in the 15th-century, depicting a mob slaying five nuns accused of witchcraft. Then we shuttle back to 20th century Toronto, where our viewpoint character Liza (Meg Register) participates in a seance with some friends. She suffers a vision of the nuns and collapses. Evans (Brett Halsey), Liza's professor from archaeology class, upbraids her for monkeying around with such outdated notions of the supernatural, particularly since they're scheduled to travel with an expedition to Greece for a dig. When Evans asks Liza why she fools around with such things, she has no explanation whatever.

Liza's a pretty good ringer for Fulci himself. Despite being the director and co-writer of this movie, he's not invested in any of the story's narrative action, except (maybe) for setting up a few of the gore-scenarios that his eighties fans came to expect of him. Once Liza and Evans are in Greece, along with a team of archaeological redshirts, the most immediate threat seems to be that of the Greek islanders. All of them make clear that they don't approve of grave-robbing scientists, though the locals don't seem aware of any legends about demon-worshipping nuns from the 15th century. One local corners Liza when she's alone in one of the forbidden sepulchers and mentions that he's a "butcher"-- by which he means the legal kind, though he's menacing enough to suggest the serial-killer variety.

DEMONIA jerks from one stupid horror-scene to another, and I suppose the main reason Evans doesn't close up shop is his skepticism about the supernatural, meaning that he blames the deaths of his colleagues on the locals. Liza has no such excuse, given how often she begins experiencing more visions of evil nuns. The fact that she doesn't even consider hopping the first flight back to Toronto underlines the vapidity of her non-character. Since neither Evans nor Liza can think worth a damn, Fulci sticks in some nothing characters to interact with them and suggest dire fates ahead-- a police inspector for Evans (one played by Fulci himself) and a medium for Liza (played by Carla Cassoli, who contributes the only half-decent performance).

The Satanic nuns are real of course, but they have no more depth than their victims. Sometimes they kill the redshirts directly, and sometimes they lure the victims into booby-traps, but their lack of motive made me miss the complex subtleties of SATAN'S CHEERLEADERS. Near-total waste of time.                   

EXTREME MOVIE (2008)

 

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

I don't want to devote much time to this toss-off comedy, mostly a collection of blackout sketches, though a few segments are devoted to the experiences of a high-schooler named Mike as he pursues the girl of his dreams. It has a couple of skits devoted to time-travel and to a "Weird Science" situation, but neither the fantastic nor naturalistic elements are memorable enough to merit analysis. Yet I will admit that I found EXTREME more diverting than the average bad comedy, possibly just because though the producers mostly used unknown actors, they brought in a lot of hot women to justify their sex-spoofs. Also, I noted that one online reviewer with the site FILM CRITICS UNITED felt much as I did:

The good thing for this movie, despite the fact it’s not really all that funny is that it is still funnier than those Friedberg / Seltzer theatrical disasters ‘Date Movie’, ‘Epic Movie’, ‘Meet the Spartans’ and I think there’s one more that I made a conscious effort to avoid seeing.

The only thing I'll add is though the EXTREME jokes aren't as tiresome as those of the F/S "movie" series, they have the same problem: being too flaccid to generate anything like an inventive twist. One quick example: a young guy strikes up a chatroom-conversation with a woman and wants to meet with her. Though she hasn't laid eyes on him, she thinks it would be cool for him to come to her apartment pretending to be a masked rapist, who will then ravish her. Anyone watching will know that the young horndog will not be getting any, and the scripters take the most obvious route: through exigent circumstances the masked "rapist" shows up at the wrong apartment and menaces the wrong woman, who's terrified despite his fumbling approach. But there's no twist to conclude the skit and provide even fleeting satisfaction. Maybe it might have worked if the wrong woman subdued the guy, tied him up, and began indulging in some sort of "Misery" fantasy instead of the way the actual skit just petered out.

The script here was written and directed by a team best known for the theatrical release NOT ANOTHER TEEN MOVIE, which I have not re-watched for over twenty years. But I remember liking it mildly in the theater, and to my knowledge it may be the best spoof of teenage sex comedies. But then, ANOTHER was also a more high-ticket production, with a cast of solid B-level performers. So it looks like it didn't take long for the duo to slide into mediocrity-- along with most of the comedy-makers for the next twenty years.

            

FINAL CURTAIN (1957)

 

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

“I know that I must find that object, even though I don't know what it is I must seek. I also know I fear that I will find that object. This night the calling is stronger than it had ever been before. This night was to be the night I had looked forward to with fear, knowing all the time that it had to come sooner or later and there was nothing that I could do to heed that call. This was to be the night. This, the last night of our play. This night when all of the others had gone home.”

I'm as surprised as anyone else might be, knowing of Ed Wood's notorious artistic failings, to find that anything he did registers as "good." And FINAL CURTAIN boasts many of the same failings as Wood's full-length movies. But judging CURTAIN only by its symbolic discourse, it is good on those terms. This 22-minute item is like a massively clumsy version of Edgar Allan Poe-- and though I can't prove it, I suspect Poe was one of Wood's inspirations for his sometimes-rambling confessional narratives.

Long ago, SF critic Algis Budrys wrote an essay on HP Lovecraft for some SF-magazine, archly claiming that Lovecraft mastered a POV Budrys called "first person hysterical." The comment wasn't true of Lovecraft at his best, but it was true of a lot of the works of HPL's literary idol Edgar Allan Poe, whether Poe's frenzied narrators dealt with physical danger (the torture-victim of "Pit and the Pendulum") or with internal upheavals (the protagonist of "Tell-Tale Heart"). And "first-person hysterical" certainly fits the unnamed protagonist of CURTAIN, as attested by the snatch of dialogue printed above, from the very beginning of the story.

So, backstory to the project. Prior to August 1956-- the time when Bela Lugosi, the most bankable actor Wood ever worked with, passed away-- Wood had written various spec-scripts, whether original or adaptations of Wood's own prose stories, as potential vehicles for Lugosi. FINAL CURTAIN would have clearly drawn upon Lugosi's iconic Dracula image, by having Lugosi play a stage actor who had just finished starring in a play about vampires, and who remained, throughout the narrative, clad in a tuxedo because that's what his stage-character had been wearing for the play's final performance that day. (Had Lugosi played the part, an audience would have assumed that the actor had essayed the part of Dracula, though the script never says so.) After Lugosi died, Wood managed in 1957 to shoot two pilot episodes for a proposed anthology teleseries, PORTRAITS IN TERROR-- one being FINAL CURTAIN (which came about because Wood secured permission to shoot his film in an empty theater) while the other was entitled THE NIGHT THE BANSHEE CRIED. When no network bought the project, Wood subsequently re-used footage from both in his 1959 feature NIGHT OF THE GHOULS. Ironically this movie also failed to receive commercial exposure until being discovered for the home video market in 1984. Then a copy of FINAL CURTAIN was found and released to said market in 2012. 

CURTAIN's protagonist is an unnamed actor (Duke Moore) who starred in a vampire-play for "months," and now that the play's run is over, he remains in the now-empty theater because he has some unexplained intuition about finding some "unseen object." The Actor (as he's billed in the credits) never speaks out loud, but a voiceover-- the only words spoken in the episode-- purports to be the Actor's inner thoughts, though the often-frenzied mental dialogue was recorded by another Wood player, Dudley Manlove. The Actor never devotes so much as a stray thought to his past, his profession, or anything but the vague unease haunting him. He starts at every cat's yowl, every creaking board.

After ten minutes of these ruminations, the actor heads upstairs, still unusually apprehensive about everything he sees and feels in the theater. He enters the prop room and sees what he momentarily mistakes for a woman with long blonde hair. When the apparition does not move, he remembers that it's the dummy of a vampire that was used in the play. The actor fingers the dummy's dress and her long hair, and he seems to have fallen in a little in love with the image, much the way Poe's protagonists conceived sudden amours. He starts to leave the room, takes one look back-- and suddenly the "dummy" (Jeannie Stevens) smiles and beckons to him. The terrified thespian manages to blunder his way out of the room, and once he's in the corridor outside, he simply goes back downstairs. Since "the Vampire" (as Stevens is billed) does not appear again, the Actor is able to dismiss the experience. 

After more ruminations, the Actor enters the "last room" in the theater. There he discovers a coffin-- though all the audience sees is a boxy shape, like an overturned cabinet. The Actor opens the "lid" of the "coffin," which he decides is the "object" he's anticipated, and he crawls in and shuts the lid, whereon the film ends with the implication that he smothers himself to death with a figurative Premature Burial.

Frankly, I went back and forth a little regarding the phenomenality of this short tale, with respect to "the Vampire." Ed Wood certainly didn't care about making things clear, so any conclusion I make might be my personal preference alone. I wouldn't have put it past Wood to have imagined (a) a real female vampire who just happens to be the spitting image of a prop dummy used in a play, and (b) who decides to stop by the theater in which the Actor's roaming around, as she's been called to him by his "half in love with easeful death" train of thought. Indeed, the plotline of NIGHT OF THE GHOULS-- the movie into which Wood inserted scenes taken from CURTAIN-- revolves around the notion that a phony spiritualist accidentally summons real ghosts. But at least the ghosts of GHOULS actually DO something, forcing the crooked medium into a coffin, where the swindler dies just as the Actor does.

Yet, even granting Wood's capricious plotting, it might be a bit more likely that the Actor simply imagines the prop dummy coming to life and beckoning to him-- which is, incidentally, the only really scary scene I've ever seen in a Wood movie. And the scene works because, in large part, viewers half expect it. And I'm not talking about expecting the Big Reveal because any viewer can see that the "dummy" is breathing. I'm saying that, because the Actor strokes the dummy's hair and clothes as if he's thinking about making out with the mannequin, it's the perfect "revenge of the feminine" for the dummy to come to life and say, "Sure, come on, big boy" with her gestures. Therefore, the Actor conjures up his own punishment, much as the narrator of "Tell-Tale Heart" imagines that he can hear the beating heart of the man he murdered. The Vampire-scene is also a turnaround-- probably unintentional-- on the end scene from Wood's GLEN OR GLENDA, where cross-dresser Glen's wife willingly permits him to share her clothing.

The Vampire-scene also mirrors the episode's final moments, in that first we see an unliving object seem to come to life, after which a living man makes himself unliving. One online review claimed that the Actor is really dead from the first, but I think this interpretation robs the character of any empathy. Wood might not have understood how to make the Actor sympathetic to an audience, but he WANTS viewers to feel for the thespian's inner turmoil. The Actor has played a living dead man for "months," and there's the broad implication that he's been seduced by the idea of death. The setup is not unlike that of the actor-protagonist of 1947's A DOUBLE LIFE, who becomes overly invested in playing Othello, to the extent that the performer begins thinking that he is Othello, with deadly consequences. 

                    

Does Wood come close to tapping Poe's unique exploration of the dark side of human psychology? No, but I think Wood, even though he made this pilot when he was still in his thirties, showed a penchant for death-haunted characters throughout most of his cinematic career. Whatever TV-network might've watched Wood's pilot-episodes would have been entirely justifying on rejecting them as having no prime-time potential. But in some ways, the short CURTAIN does a better job than the full-length features at translating Wood's anxieties into a "personal myth"-- one with at least a little more universality than the director's passion for angora sweaters.

                                  

        

BRIDE OF THE MONSTER (1955)

 

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

Though BRIDE OF THE MONSTER is surely the second best-known Ed Wood movie to general audiences, it can't hold a candle to the lunacy of the champion, PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE, or other runners-up for the Weird-Wood Awards. like GLEN OR GLENDA and even NIGHT OF THE GHOULS. A possible reason for this lack of terminal bizarreness is that Wood collaborated on the script with Alex Gordon, who may have kept the narrative a little more linear than most solo Wood scripts. In many ways, BRIDE feels like an update of a 1942 programmer like THE MAD MONSTER, which also involved a mad scientist seeking to create superhumans to win armed conflicts between nations.

That doesn't mean that the Gordon-Wood script doesn't have some glaring goof-ups. Mad scientist Doctor Eric Vornoff (Bela Lugosi) has set up his monster-making shop in an old house near a swamp, and he apparently mutates an octopus that hangs out in the swamp and helps Vornoff clean up the leftovers of his failed experiments. Two hunters, fleeing a violent storm, try to take shelter in Vornoff's house, only to have the scientist turn them away, with the aid of Vornoff's huge bald henchman Lobo (wrestler Tor Johnson). The hunters flee, but one is seized and killed by the octopus. Lobo apprehends the other hunter and drags him back to Vornoff's laboratory, where Vornoff tries to transform the guy into an "atomic superman," but only succeeds in killing his subject-- whom he also feeds to the octopus.

This provides the first absurdity of the script: if Vornoff's perpetually on the lookout for people on whom to experiment, why wouldn't he invite the hunters into his house, and then let Lobo subdue the men, so that Vornoff would have two subjects for experimentation? I don't plan to go looking for the original Gordon script, so I'm okay with not knowing if Gordon or Wood jumped the gun by introducing the octopus before he was needed. True, the first failed experiment is all the viewer needs to see to get Vornoff's modus operandi, so the underwhelming "death by octopus" (in which footage of a real octopus is loosely juxtaposed with the hunter's underwater struggles) was clearly just a means of first providing the exposition and then getting rid of both interlocutors. 

Soon the audience learns, from police captain Robbins, that there have been ten previous victims, but it's only now that the captain decides to assign a cop to the case, young Dick Craig (Tony McCoy, whose father helped Wood finance the film). In addition, Dick's fiancee, reporter Janet (Loretta King), plans to launch her own investigation, starting with the house of Vornoff. Robbins also tells Craig to talk to a visiting scientist, Strowski, who has some observations about Famous Monsters He Has Known. But after the scientist dispenses some double-talk about Loch Ness for some reason, Strowski like Janet heads out to the Vornoff house on his own.

Janet's car goes off the road and Lobo finds her, taking her back to the lab while falling in love with her basic cuteness. Vornoff decides Janet will be his next experiment and he hypnotizes her into compliance. Strowski shows up and reveals to the audience that he's an agent from the country of Vornoff's origin. Vornoff was exiled because his government thought he was crazy, but evidently Strowski pursued Vornoff's course as he went around to various places (including Loch Ness) breeding some sort of monsters. Strowski is willing to take Vornoff back home by force-- probably a signal that it's a Communist-bloc country-- but Lobo intervenes and Strowski ends up as octo-pie.

Robbins, Craig and comical Kelton the Cop converge on the house, but for some reason I forget, only Craig breaks into Vornoff's lab just as the scientist's seeking to transform Janet into an atomic superwoman. This imo might have been more entertaining than what does transpire. Lobo kayos Craig, but decides that he doesn't want Janet to become "the bride of the atom." He frees her, Vornoff shoots the hulking henchman, and despite his wound Lobo subjects the mad scientist to his own process. Vornoff (played by a stunt man) arises, for some reason becoming a superman despite the earlier failures. Super-Vornoff flees the lab, while Lobo perishes in a fire (supposedly). Craig and Janet escape, and when the other cops arrive but can't harm Vornoff with gunfire, Craig rolls a boulder down on the scientist, casting him into the swamp. The octopus attacks Vornoff and I think they both blow up either from an atomic explosion or from a lightning-strike, depending on who you ask.

BRIDE is one of those films that's pretty much used-up the first time you see it. Like PLAN 9, BRIIDE has loads of directing mistakes, plot inconsistencies, and daffy, poorly defined characters. But once I'd seen them-- they had nothing more to offer. That's why I say Gordon may have kept the project a little too conventional, though there's no way to be sure.

And of course, one can like BRIDE sentimentally, as the last feature-film to give Bela Lugosi a substantial role before his passing. It's not a great Lugosi performance because of the limitations of the role, but he gives it his all, something that can't be said of the other, mostly undertalented performers. The script might have had some fun with the "atom-mania" prevailing in the fifties, but all one gets on that score is a brief though weird correlation between atomic fallout and juvenile delinquency. BRIDE is required viewing for anyone interested in Ed Wood. But I haven't found that it rewards repeat viewings.    

ADDENDUM: I'll modify my opening statement about the script's use of the octopus somewhat. It's true that there's no good reason, internally, for Vornoff to send away the two hunters, when he could use both of them as experiment fodder. But in terms of the overall scheme of the narrative, it is important for the audience to know that the octopus isn't confined to Vornoff's basement, and that the creature has access to the swamp outside-- because it has to be in the swamp at the climax, where both Vornoff and the octopus are mutually destroyed by something or other. So the scene in which one of the hunters is crossing a bridge in the swamp when he's killed by the menacing mollusc does serve to set up the film's conclusion.   

           

                                 

DOUBLE CROSSBONES (1951)

 

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

My justification for reviewing this pleasant if lightweight pirate spoof is similar to the one I gave for including the nominally serious CAPTAIN KIDD AND THE SLAVE GIRL: because the story touches on the unusual idea of a "pirate brotherhood." Oddly, though both movies cite assorted famous pirates who belong to the organization, both name the same three pirates that I find to be "legendary" due to their frequent use in fictional iterations: Captain Kidd, Blackbeard, and Anne Bonney (played respectively in CROSSBONES by Alan Napier, Louis Bacigalupi, and the rather bulky Hope Emerson). As a very small film-fan bonus, Glenn Strange of ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET FRANKENSTEIN is reunited with the director of that film, Charles Barton, though Strange only has one line-- the same as when he played the Monster.

CROSSBONES' plot is tighter than some of the other genre-spoofs of the period, possibly borrowing elements from the 1942 BLACK SWAN. Davey Crandall (Donald O'Connor) is a shopkeeper's assistant in Charleston of the 1700s, a harbor city often plagued by the pirates of the Caribbean. Davey's in love with Sylvia (Helena Carter), ward of the well-heeled governor of South Carolina, and she seems to return his feelings. But Governor Elden is a traitor, who sends the pirate brotherhood information about treasure-laden ships bound for Charleston and then fences the pirates' stolen goods for them. Elden first reveals himself as a rotter by proposing marriage to Sylvia, who emphatically rejects the older man. He suspects that she nurtures affection for the age-appropriate Davey, and when Elden stands in danger of having his treason revealed, he frames Davey and his buddy Tom (Will Geer) for the crime of fencing stolen goods.

Davey and Tom go on the run, shipping out on a vessel whose captain is another pirate. By some clever shenanigans, Davey and Tom trick the whole crew into deserting the ship. The guys encounter a sailing-ship on which Elden is traveling with Sylvia. To keep themselves from being taken prisoner, Tom and Davey first create the illusion of a full crew aboard ship and then tell everyone aboard that Davey is actually a pirate captain, "Bloodthirsty Dave," who only masqueraded as a shopkeeper's boy to suss out the defenses of Charleston. Davey and Tom pull off the deception, but Sylvia, outraged by her betrayal, swears to marry her guardian at the earliest opportunity.

Back on the pirate ship, Davey and Tom gain allies by releasing from captivity some men being transported to serve prison sentences abroad, but all aboard are still wanted men with no safe place to go. "Bloodthirsty Dave" decides to seek out Tortuga, haven of the pirate brotherhood, purely to find a sanctuary. Once there, Davey has to swordfight Blackbeard to prove his mettle, after which he arouses the interest of Anne Bonney. (As if to mirror the transgression of Elden, one pirate accuses Bonney of cradle-robbing, but she never makes a sexual pass at Davey. and ends up marrying Tom in the end.) Davey figures out that Elden is the anonymous benefactor of the pirates and tries to convince them to assault Charleston with their fleet to bring down Elden for continually cheating them. However, only Bonney votes to follow Captain Davey's plan, so he and Tom are back to square one.

In one of CROSSBONES' most amusing scenes, Davey sneaks into Charleston and crashes Sylvia's wedding party to dissuade her from marrying Elden. O'Connor is almost unrecognizable made up as an effete English lord, but he's able to convince Sylvia of his innocence, though he's captured anyway. Despite all the setbacks, Davey's pirate buddies come to his rescue after all, resulting in a big sword-battle between them and Elden's henchmen (though Bonny only uses her fists, not a cutlass), and Davey battling Elden for the hand of lovely Sylvia. An amusing end-scene has all of the pirates get pardons for exposing the crooked governor, but they just can't resist pirating and go back to their sinful ways-- except for Davey, who's guided to domesticity by Sylvia. 

O'Connor is extremely likable but only does one dance-routine, aside from various comic duels. He and Helena Carter have good chemistry, and Barton keeps the action rolling along. much more ably than most of the pirate-movies of the fifties. There is one "fallacious figment" that the audience isn't meant to take seriously: when Davey looks through a telescope, it comically elongates to mirror his surprise.

                                                

RESIDENT EVIL: DEATH ISLAND (2023)

 

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

Though DEATH ISLAND appeared six years after VENDETTA, the filmmakers did their level best to present this film as a rough sequel. Villains Arias and Diego from VENDETTA are referenced, while Diego's daughter Maria follows up on her quest for vengeance, established in the closing moments of the earlier film.

ISLAND is still pretty good kickass, zombie-smashing action, but it's a little disappointing in that the new Big Bad is not nearly as good as Arias. That said, Dylan Blake has clearly been designed to have a trauma-arc like that of Arias. Several years before the main action of ISLAND, he's a mercenary soldier hired by the Umbrella Corporation, creators of the T-virus, to quell the rampaging zombies. Blake, forced to kill his best friend when he's infected, decides to unleash an ultimate bio-terror upon mankind to exterminate the depredations of human beings, as well as to expunge his sense of personal guilt. The script proposes a weighty theme but doesn't manage to sell it adequately.

However, one element where ISLAND excels is the one in which VENDETTA was deficient: fighting femmes. The RESIDENT EVIL franchise became well-known in narrative cinema for spotlighting the tough-girl character of Alice-- but she was an original creation for the live-action movies. At some point, the filmmakers intended to emphasize the game-character of Jill Valentine, and though that character made one or two live-action appearances, ISLAND seems to be the first time the game-character gets a worthy adaptation. Valentine and her soldier-partner Leon Kennedy are essentially the stars of this outing, with other regulars-- Rebecca Chambers, the Redfield siblings-- in secondary roles. Valentine arguably gets more narrative attention, given that she's being "introduced" to the motion-capture series, and if she's not as superhuman as Alice usually is, she's still a formidable femme. And although Maria Gomez takes the hard fall this time, the filmmakers gave her an excellent hand-to-hand battle with Kennedy to go out on.           

RESIDENT EVIL: VENDETTA (2017)

 

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

This RESIDENT EVIL motion-capture movie came out long enough after the last in the series, 2012's DAMNATION, that someone in production termed VENDETTA a "reboot." In terms of content, it's indistinguishable from the previous two in the series, but in terms of style, VENDETTA is as impressive as the best of the live-action EVILS.

The main hero here is Chris Redfield, primarily a character known from the RPG. In the EVIL world, illicit experiments have given rise to the T-virus and its variants, which are capable of instantly mutating human beings into ravening zombies. Redfield and his counter-terrorism unit attack the domicile of a known dealer in T-virus bioweapons, Glenn Arias, who has taken captive a female undercover agent. The soldiers are attacked by zombies created by Arias, and then Redfield suffers the sort of trauma that never happened to Chuck Norris. Redfield squares off hand-to-hand with Arias, who looks like a well-dressed day-trader, and the less muscular Arias trounces the bulky warrior. Then Arias leaves his zombies-- including the transformed female agent-- to finish off Redfield, while departing in the company of hottie Maria Gomez and her father Diego, who for some reason has been transformed into one of the bulky virus-mutants called a "Tyrant." Once the villains have escaped, air support flies in and bombs the zombies, saving Redfield.

Four months later, scientist and former agent Rebecca Chambers (also a game character) has succeeded in formulating a vaccine that can keep the virus from spreading. Arias learns about this somehow, and he unleashes his virus on the research facility. Though the other scientists are zombiefied, Chambers saves herself from that fate with her vaccine, after which Redfield and his team extract her. Chambers and Redfield then seek the help of another agent with considerable counter-bioweapons experience, Leon S. Kennedy. Kennedy has some previous trauma bugging him, but he finally agrees to join another assault on Arias after Maria and Diego Gomez attack first, kidnapping Chambers.

Ostensibly Arias wants to nullify Chambers before she can make his bioweapons obsolete. However, unlike the standard Chuck Norris evildoer, Arias also has a trauma in his past, and it's actually more emotionally resonant than Kennedy's. Years ago his estate was carpet-bombed by someone who didn't like his munitions-profession, but as it was the day of Arias' wedding, his bride perished in the holocaust. Now Arias gets the nutty idea that Chambers is going to become his new bride, though he also has some demented idea of somehow transplanting part of the dead bride into the scientist's body. Fortunately, Kennedy, Redfield and a few allies storm Arias' base, resulting in the destruction of his plans and most of the villains (though Maria survives, possibly for later use). 

This is a good kick-ass film, without any great complexity but with a fair amount of emotional resonance. Oddly, though Chambers and Maria are positioned as action-girls, and there's one unnamed female ally in the big climax, this time the guys get all the good scenes (including Redfield's rematch with Arias, which has a more salutary outcome).        

                   

SHE BEAST (1966)

 

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

"Hey, we can only afford Barbara Steele for a few days' shooting on this picture!"

"Not to worry: we'll shoot her few scenes so that they bookend the main story, and audiences will be satisfied as long as they see her at the beginning and the end."

That's of course a made-up idea of what might have prompted Michael Reeves to invest his own money into this mediocrity in order to launch his directing career. Other considerations could have been simply finding out that the bankable actress was only available to Reeves for a limited amount of time, or any number of other contingencies. Nevertheless, SHE BEAST is not a Barbara Steele film just because Steele is in the movie for maybe 20 minutes, and I as a viewer resent that what Reeves and company gave viewers was the menace of an ugly old witch in place of Steel's imperial beauty. "Subverting expectations" was as much of a cop-out then as it is now.         

A prologue shows us a town of aggrieved Transylvanians lynching an ugly witch, one Vardella, back in the 1700s, by drowning her in a local lake.  a honeymooning couple named Veronica and Philip (Steele, Ian Ogilvy) trek through Transylvania and get lost. They check into the only hotel available, run by slovenly owner Ladislav (Mel Welles). The couple meets a local eccentric, Count Von Helsing, who claims to be descended from the same (non-aristocratic) doctor from the DRACULA story, which he intimates was real life. At night Ladislav peeps through a window at Veronica, and Philip responds by beating the tar out of the innkeeper.

Morning comes and the couple get in their car and drive away. They don't get far, for when they near the lake where Vardella died, an occult force seizes the car, causing it to plunge into the lake. A truck driver pulls two bodies out of the waters, a still-living Philip and what looks like the corpse of a raddled old woman. What happened to Veronica? Philip doesn't have a clue, but Von Helsing knows that if he and Philip don't complete an exorcism ritual, Vardella will come back to life in Veronica's usurped body. And then most of the movie is devoted to Philip and Von Helsing trying to overcome Vardella's curse, and the ambivalent results of their endeavors.

This is largely a paint-by-the-numbers horror flick, which was probably sufficient for a lot of viewers back in the day, though it's pretty scant of strong horror moments. Only two elements stand out from the routine. One is Mel Welles, who played his lascivious, Commie-maxim-spouting innkeeper for all he's worth, and almost certainly contributed his own lines to the script. The other-- as if to make up for the absence of the regal Steele beauty-- is a scene in which Ladislav's niece (Lucretia Love) tries to take shelter with her uncle to avoid the weirdness, and the slob tries to rape her. He doesn't succeed but the incident does serve to inject into the film some nubile flesh, thus slightly offsetting the repellent image of Vardella, who's equally ghastly both dead and alive.

                   

DEADLY SWEET (1967)

 

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

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

First off, I've long heard the name of erotic filmmaker Tinto Brass, but have only seen a G-rated 1964 film he directed, THE FLYING SAUCER, which is probably not representative of his work. DEADLY SWEET, which also used the title I AM WHAT I AM, may not be any more so.  

Second, SWEET is a hard film to classify. The poster above calls SWEET "a sexy giallo thriller," but aside from the director/co-writer's use of garish color, there's not much here to tie the movie in with the giallos as they later developed. SWEET might be deemed to prefigure the way some later giallos combined psycho-horror with crime thrillers, and indeed this film frequently seems like a sendup of a crime thriller. The only metaphenomenal element is that of a perilous psycho, but Brass approaches the genre-element of "find the killer" with a studied indifference, underscored by two separate references either to director Michelangelo Antonioni or to that director's BLOW-UP from the previous year. Since that movie also concerned a crime that almost gets lost in the protagonist's experiences in the world of Swinging Sixties London, there can't be much doubt that Brass wanted attentive viewers to pick up on his emulations-- for all that BLOW-UP became an international sensation while SWEET was essentially forgotten.

POV character Bernard (Jean-Louis Trintignant) is an out-of-work actor in London, and he's not painted as the brightest bulb, given that he's given to dropping random quotes of persons as different as Lao Tsu and Mao Tse-tung. While in a disco-- where he's been cut off for failure to pay his bar tab-- he spies four well-known upper-class celebrities: blonde heiress Jane Burroughs (Ewa Aulin), her brother Jerome, her stepmother Martha, and an older man, Leris, rumored to be keeping company with Martha since her husband passed away. This sounds a lot like the sort of nuclear family constellation that makes for dramatic explosions, but unlike most giallos, family conflicts get lost in the shuffle.

Bernard drops in on the club's owner and finds the man dead, while in the same room is Jane, who immediately claims, "I didn't do it." Does Bernard do the sane thing and call the cops? No, he decides he's going to play detective (he even wears a trenchcoat during most of the film) and try to exonerate the waifish Jane. When she introduces herself, he responds to the name "Jane Burroughs" with "Me Tarzan," making clear that Bernard nurtures delusions of being a rescuing hero. And Jane seems content to let him squire her around the sights of Swinging London-- at least, until she's seized by kidnappers (one played by a very young David Prowse). Then Bernard has to start playing detective for real, eventually linking up with Brother Jerome to save Jane.

Though in many giallos the kidnappers would be related to the murder, here they seem to be nothing but mundane extortionists. Along the way Leris, the supposed lover of Martha, is also murdered, and toward the movie's conclusion-- amid lots of psychedelia, jump cuts, pop art imagery, and brief shifts from color to black-and-white-- Bernard finally gets around to interviewing Stepmother Martha. She promptly reveals that she wasn't the one Leris was dating on the sly, and Bernard learns that a hero should never trust a blonde waif, even after she lets said hero jump her bones.

Euro-comics master Guido Crepax is credited with having story-boarded SWEET, and most of the time the movie looks like an attempt to apply the sixties' pop art aesthetic to a whole motion picture. Pop art appears in many location backgrounds, including one Batman painting not known to me and one of Lichtenstein's famous "blow-ups" of a single romance-comics panel. In two different scenes violence is punctuated with quick "sound-effects" like "SLAM," a clear shout-out to '66 BATMAN, and Bernard also has a close encounter with Alfred E. Neumann. Even Jane's enigmatic line-- "I am what I am"-- might be derived from a certain salty sailor. I don't think Brass had any particular point to make with these citations, though, any more than his conjurations with the sixties music scene. Swinging London does at times seem to dissolve into a Dionysian chaos far from anything that Humphrey Bogart, or even Jean-Paul Belmondo, ever had to cope with. Thus I classify SWEET as an irony, in that the film depicts a world where even the story's Big Reveal doesn't make things any less chaotic.

                        

 

X-MEN: THE ANIMATED SERIES, VOLUME ONE (1992-93)

 

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

Oddly, the collection I'm reviewing isn't really confined to the 13 episodes of Season One; it adds on the first three episodes of Season 2 for good measure. This does have the minor advantage of giving me more of the "Morph arc"-- that is, the disposition of the original-to-the-series shape-changer of that name. He was introduced in the first two-part of Season One with the intention of his being an "instant casualty," but though he's not a compelling character, it was interesting to see how the writers brought him back and then exiled him again, at least for the near future. This doesn't mean, however, that the faux Season One-- which I'll henceforth call "Volume One--ends without other dangling plotlines.

X-MEN '92 was a fan-favorite in its day, simply because it was the first major attempt to adapt the popular franchise to any other narrative medium. For me personally, though, the success of the adaptation is compromised at best. "My" X-MEN was the classic run from the 1970s through the early 1980s, and I lost interest for the most part in the 1990s and thereafter. But X-MEN '92 was devoted to spotlighting a number of characters and creations that were getting heavy play in the late 1980s and early 1990s and melding them with stories from the classic run.

For instance, in the comics the arc DAYS OF FUTURE PAST was an intense time-travel tale in which the future-era character of Shadowcat journeyed back to the 1980s to inhabit the body of her teenaged self, with the end of forestalling a major crisis in the past. The cartoon keeps some of the same beats as the comics-tale, but the time-traveler becomes 1990s character Bishop, whose appeal as a character I find baffling. The arc still sets up the usual anti-mutant paranoia, as in the comic, but there's no emotional kick to the plot-events. 

The "classic run" characters-- Cyclops, Jean Grey, Storm, and Wolverine-- usually receive less interesting character-moments, while another classic character, Colossus, is confined to a guest shot. The scripts instead emphasize later characters Gambit, Jubilee, and Rogue, and of those three, only Rogue is executed with a degree of charm. (Her involved history with Ms. Marvel is naturally not referenced here, but it did occur to me, as a result of viewing the first season, that there was a good reason Rogue became more popular than the Carol Danvers character.) 

The animation is very limited in the first season, and that takes away from any pleasure I might get from seeing the merry mutants kick ass against evil. I was amused by the episode "Slave Island" simply because it worked in a half-dozen mutant-cameos, many of whom had no lines, though later I had to wonder why said mutants-- all of whom were kidnapped to be slaves on the island of Genosha-- were all performing their slave-duties in their gaudy costumes. Still, given that Genosha is made into the source of the mutant-hunting Sentinel robots, this did give rise to a good line in which someone observes that the mutants are being forced to labor for the same people making the automatons who hunt their kind.

Since it's not that much fun to watch the first season, I'd rather just read the comics rather than see the classic run crossbred with the stuff I never cared much about.                   

RESIDENT EVIL: DEGENERATION (2008)

 

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

DEGENERATION was the first motion-capture animated film based directly on the popular video game, and the first time an adaptation linked up the game's protagonists, soldier Leon S. Kennedy and scientist Claire Redfield. That means that viewers like me-- who only knew the series that starred original movie-character Alice (Milla Jovavich)-- had to go Alice-less.

While the character design of Claire Redfield has a stronger vibe than I've seen in a lot of motion-capture animation, the story is a fairly dull setup of all the basics of the franchise. The viewer learns how an evil corporation designed the insidious T-virus, which has the unfortunate side effect of turning its victims into killer zombies. If one doesn't want to hear that much about the mechanics of who did what to whom, DEGENERATION fails to provide much in the way of dynamic characters or situations.

Its most positive aspect is that this film got all the exposition out of the way, so that the next in the series, DAMNATION, offered a lot more of the kickass action integral to the live-action movie franchise.      

THE BATMAN, SEASON TWO (2005)

 

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

The first season was too busy putting new wine in old bottles to trouble with crossovers, but Season Two makes up for lost time in that department.

THE CAT, THE BAT AND THE VERY UGLY (F)-- Catwoman and Penguin go after the same priceless gems and then decide to team up to take out Batman. However, while Catwoman wants the gems for reasons of mere avarice, Penguin plays a grander game, hoping to use the gems to mount an attack on Gotham. It's a very straightforward "villain teamup" story, though it's amusing that Catwoman is offended when Penguin betrays her before she can betray him. 

RIDDLED (G)-- One reason it's hard to do better-than-average Riddler stories, even in comics, is that he started out as being just as antic a villain as The Joker. BTAS tried to make Riddler over into a more intellectual type of Bat-foe, but that iteration had only mixed success. The producers of BATMAN '04 decided to cut out all the wackiness of earlier Riddlers, re-designing the malcontent to look utterly serious, his face painted so as to give him a gloomy appearance. This Riddler announces his war on Gotham with a bomb-threat, and he wants just one cop, Ellen Yin, to try to solve his riddles. In truth, this Riddler fully expects Batman to work covertly with Yin, and this grimdark Prince of Puzzlers seems more imposing due to his less humorous attitude. For a bonus, Yin gets to stomp a bunch of Riddler-goons with martial arts.

FIRE AND ICE (P)-- The script never bothers to articulate how two such unlikely partners in crime, Mister Freeze and Firefly, come to team up. Some OK action-scenes but nothing more.

THE LAUGHING BAT (G)-- This episode presents one of Joker's loonier schemes, as he dresses up in a Bat-suit and starts doling out extreme punishments to people who commit minor infractions. For good measure, he infects the Bat with a venom that causes the hero, in both his identities, to be assailed by bouts of consuming laughter, laughter that will eventually kill him. For good measure Joker-Bat crosses paths with Penguin, who's "creeped out" by the role reversals of the two enemies, and Gotham's mayor is voiced by none other than Adam West. But the episode's greatest strength is the conflation of grotesqueries in both the hero and his nemesis.

SWAMPED (G)-- In BTAS as in many comics, the reptilian rogue Killer Croc is usually just a big strong guy, able to give Batman a really tough hand-to-hand fight. But the writer of "Swamped" apparently remembered that the original Croc was a ruthless gang-boss, and in addition this Croc-iteration also imperils Gotham through his hijacking of Gotham's canal system. Croc gives Batman a good tussle, and voice-artist Ron Perlman gives Croc's dialogue an excellent Bayou flavor.     

PETS (F)-- Penguin invents a sonic device with which to control birds and make them commit crimes, but the same device allows the villain to control the monstrous Man-Bat. Again, a few decent fights, but nothing special.

MELTDOWN (F)-- When Joker launches another crime-spree, Clayface attacks the clown for having created the putty-mutagen that made Detective Bennett into a shapechanger. Batman intervenes and captures Clayface, though not Joker. Over the ensuing weeks, Bennett goes on trial and receives positive testimony from none other than Arkham Asylum's chief psychiatrist, Hugo Strange (a villain in the comics, though in Season Two he seems benign). Bruce Wayne gets Bennett released on probation, as long as Bennett refrains from becoming Clayface. However, Bennett's resentments over his hard luck, as well as his desire to kill Joker, prove his undoing. The sense of tragedy from the first-season reinvention of Clayface is entirely lost.

JTV (P)-- Joker starts his own broadcast channel. It sounds like it ought to yield a lot of lunatic fun, but it's fairly dull. Yin gets a new partner, a comically egotistical cop.

RAGDOLLS TO RICHES (F)-- I give the writers credit for revamping a DC villain not associated with Batman: Ragdoll, an unpredictable athlete with an incredibly limber, seemingly boneless body. He and Catwoman contend for a museum prize, and Batman seeks to capture them both. There's a nice sequence with Selina Kyle having a meet-cute with Bruce Wayne, followed by bat and cat teaming up to play with the doll. 

THE BUTLER DID IT (F)-- The little-used Bat-villain Spellbinder might not be a foe anyone wanted to see again, but he still turns out better than Season One's ersatz Cluemaster. And this villain has a novel plan: brainwashing the butlers of wealthy men-- including Alfred-- to commit crimes. 

GRUNDY'S NIGHT (F)-- Solomon Grundy, undead foe of Green Lantern, has only occasionally taken the role of a Bat-enemy. But "Night" does present Grundy as a Halloween legend, and in keeping with the All-Hallows tradition, the being that appears to be Solomon Grundy is not what he appears to be.

STRANGE MINDS (G)-- Joker kidnaps Detective Yin and tells everyone that he alone knows where she is, and he alone can prevent her being blown up by a time bomb. With the help of Hugo Strange, Batman is able to interface with Joker's warped mentality, seeking to make the villain reveal Yin's location. But this time the game of bat and jester takes place on the crime clown's turf.

NIGHT AND THE CITY (F)-- I have no idea why someone bestowed the name of a well-regarded film noir upon a routine villain-teamup, in which Riddler, Joker and Penguin vie for the death of Batman and the control of Gotham City. The best part is when Joker, meeting Riddler for the first time, demands to know if the newer villain is "stealing my schtick," and the Riddler haughtily replies, "I don't do jokes. I tell riddles." Yin, accused of collaborating with the Bat-vigilante, is vindicated partly because Batman captures all three super-crooks, and partly because there's a new commissioner in town, name of Gordon, who concludes the season with the first display of the Bat-signal.               

THE BATMAN, SEASON ONE (2004-05)

 

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

Like many fans of the 1990s BATMAN cartoon series, I probably was so impressed with that show's accomplishments that I didn't give this 2004-2008 program a fair shake. I didn't initially find the art style of the latter series, with its strong manga influence, attractive. However, I now think it's a creditable approach. It's true that some characters, like Bruce Wayne, seemed a little too "rounded," though this series does take place when Bruce Wayne is young and has only been Batman for a year or so. In compensation, some of the villains are drawn as less realistic, almost "bigfoot" grotesques, but the sense of their being more "cartoony" had its own attractive aspects.

THE BAT IN THE BELFRY (F)- Not surprisingly, the show led off with the debut of both the New Batman and a more demonic looking version of The Joker. In contrast to BATS, here the two adversaries have never met before, so this is Young Batman's first encounter with both the Clown Prince and his dominant weapon, Joker Venom. It's a fairly straightforward story, though Joker has an interesting observation as to how he and the crusader might be viewed as iterations of the "comedy" and "tragedy" theatrical masks.

CALL OF THE COBBLEPOT (G)-- Though both the 1992 and 2004 cartoons took considerable inspiration from the Tim Burton Penguin, both in terms of his freakish looks and a Dickensian style of attire, I now like the 2004 concept better. In the 1992 cartoon as in the comics, Penguin is generally just a weird-looking fellow with pretenses of social refinement. But the 2004 writers came up a new and valid take: this Oswald Cobblepot actually comes from old British money, so some of his affectations are rooted in family heritage. However, when Bruce Wayne first encounters the pudgy purveyor of perfidy, he finds that his social standing is just a mask for his rudeness and petty larceny-- not long before Batman learns that Penguin believes himself entitled to become a full-time criminal. Alfred provides some strong comedy relief in that his grandfather butled for Penguin's ancestor, and Alfred conveys the opinion that the Cobblepots were all rotters. Since Penguin's tics are so familiar, it's tough to do anything inventive with him, but THE BATMAN's version of the Birdman Bandit may turn out to outrate that of BTAS. An additional improvement is that this Penguin's henchpersons are a couple of identical "kabuki ninja girls."

TRACTION (P)-- The only thing I can say for the debut of Bane-- a hugely overrated Bat-foe in my view-- is that here he's no worse than the one in either the comics or in BTAS. The fight between Bane and the hero is okay, but of course there can be no direct reference to Bane's big moment in the comics: that of breaking Batman's back.

THE CAT AND THE BAT (F)-- This Catwoman-debut is no match for BATS' iteration, "The Cat and the Claw," and the quasi-romantic encounter of hero and villainess is only adequate. I wasn't a big fan of the grey BTAS costume, but I can't stand a Catwoman with huge ears on her cowl, less like those of a cat than a fennec fox. But Selina Kyle in regular clothes is arguably sexier than BTAS Selina.        

THE MAN WHO WOULD BE BAT (P)-- It's a new origin for Kirk Langstrom, Man-Bat. In the comics, the scientist foolishly injects himself with his serum in Doctor Jekyll fashion, thinking he'll develop a bat's natural sonar. There's a brief mention of his outdoing Batman, but the 2004 show gives its Langstrom a major case of bat-envy, and the scientist wants to mutate himself into a Man-Bat from the start. His character's not believable and the Man-Bat design is unexceptional.

THE BIG CHILL (F)-- Like Man-Bat, this version of Mister Freeze elides all potential for tragedy, for this Freeze is just a professional thief who gets turned into a cold-dependent freak. Since he's not a scientist, this means the script has to give the villain ice-powers. The only thing that elevates this episode to "fair mythicity" is that Young Batman hasn't grown a hard shell over his emotions, and so he's briefly traumatized at the result of his actions when he inadvertently caused Freeze's mutation.

THE BIG HEAT (F)-- This episode arguably places less emphasis on the debut of a new villain-- the fire-spewing arsonist Firefly-- than on Bruce Wayne's problems with his corporate image. This Wayne is perhaps more concerned than the BTAS version with keeping faith with the heritage left him by his parents, which proves a welcome variation.

Q&A (P)-- I'd like to grade this one higher, given that the script addresses the fact that as a child Bruce Wayne ceased to have any sense of "child's play" in his life, once he'd dedicated himself to a life of crimefighting. However, the villain is jejune and predictable, a guy who obsesses about having lose a TV quiz-show as a child, and so becomes The Cluemaster to take vengeance on those he thinks he cheated him. In the comics, The Cluemaster is just a C-list villain, but he's still better than this conception.

THE BIG DUMMY (F)-- This episode debuts a new version of The Ventriloquist, who commits crimes under the apparent "leadership" of his dummy Scarface, who represents his criminal alter ego. No better or worse than the BTAS version.

TOPSY TURVY (F)-- Joker returns with more chaotic crimes, but the emphasis is more on the two of the cops tasked by their commissioner with bringing in The Batman. Of the two, Ethan Bennett, a friend of Bruce's, is nominally sympathetic to Batman's crimebusting activities, while his new partner Ellen Yin is more a traditional cop, resentful of the hero's vigilantism. 

BIRD OF PREY (F)-- Oswald Cobblepot, having fully embraced his supervillain destiny, gets a mad-on for Bruce Wayne, so he and his taloned ninjas show up to loot Wayne Manor. But at the same time Wayne has scheduled an interview with an ambitious news reporter, the first person in the show to suspect a Batman-Wayne connection. Penguin's ego gets full display as he interacts with the reporter and tries to make the news story all about him.

THE RUBBER FACE OF COMEDY/ THE CLAYFACE OF TRAGEDY (F)-- These interlinked episodes come close to being a "villain crossover" between Joker and the new version of Clayface, though I disqualify it on the grounds that the two don't meet in their villain-forms. The commissioner-- just a fool here, rather than a corrupt Gotham cop as in many other versions-- demands that all Gotham cops bring in The Batman. Ethan Bennett gets the commissioner's particular attention, so Bennett seeks to be more pro-active, like his partner Yin. Wayne considers revealing his true identity to his sympathetic buddy, but fortunately does not, for Joker has a new game, involving a putty able to mutate people. As Batman seeks to stop Joker, the two detectives get involved, and ironically, it's the hard-ass Yin who ends up cutting Batman a break for exigent reasons. But in the battle, Bennett is exposed to the putty, and he gets mutated into the shape-changing creature, Clayface. The Clayface of BTAS was only moderately impressive, but I liked Bennett-Clayface better for the way the script captures his confusion at becoming a monster-- giving him the sort of tragic dimension the show elided from Man-Bat and Mister Freeze. As of the end of Season One, Bennett is still a victim of the Clayface curse, though he's cured in a later season. Further, while Bennett loses himself to his monster-self, Yin becomes Batman's unofficial partner.