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.            

MY DEAR KILLER (1972), WHAT HAVE THEY DONE TO YOUR DAUGHTERS (1974)

 

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

Here are two police-thrillers that just barely make it into the domain of "the giallo" thanks to killers who sometimes employ unusual murder-methods.

KILLER's director/co-scripter Tonino Valerii had written a couple of scripts for metaphenomenal films in the 1960s, but this was his only giallo. He brings to the film decent but not outstanding visuals, and so the story seems far more concerned with the heroic policeman's mystery-solving and not with the nature of the serial killer.

KILLER certainly starts off with a bang. The first murder victim is seen standing beside a country swamp, one surrounded by excavation equipment. Some unseen person takes control of a "claw" machine and uses it to slice off the victim's head. Detective Peretti (George Hilton) is assigned to the case, and as he seeks to make sense of the peculiar killing, others begin dying as well. This leads Peretti to delve into a cold case that involved the kidnapping of the little daughter of a rich man. The kidnapper collected his ransom but killed off both the little girl and her father. 

I must confess here that for some reason I decided to read the summary on Wiki, as I usually do not, because I found it a little hard to follow who was who-- even though most of the possible suspects consisted of the rich man's family and their servants. It soon becomes evident that the unknown killer is assassinating everyone whom he thinks might possess a clue to his dastardly deed. Because I read the summary, it seemed to me like Valerii barely made an effort toward implicating the other suspects. But I can't claim this time that I pegged the killer in advance.

I liked Hilton and other members of the cast, which includes Helga Line (in a very brief role), William Berger, and Marilu Tolo (who has a brief upper-body nude scene). But even though the photography looks good the mise-en-scene is pretty slow. The killer's only other atypical weapon is a rotary saw, but in other scenes he just uses a knife or a club. No competition for Argento here.

  Massimo Dallamano's DAUGHTERS is much more effective, for all that the killer is really just a mob-enforcer (mostly seen in a motorcycle-outfit) who occasionally uses very bloody methods of rubbing out targets. He's also working to eliminate all potential witnesses to a crime that involves an older range of victims: high-school age girls who, overconfident of their own abilities to suss things out, get pulled into a sex ring. 

The story centers upon two investigators: Inspector Silvestre (Claudio Cassinelli) and female district attorney Stori (Giovanna Ralli). Though there are one or two moments where Stori's gender is raised as a dramatic problem, both characters are seen to be forthright and conscientious in the efforts to expose the conspiracy. Dallamano, who had previously contributed a decent giallo in WHAT HAVE THEY DONE TO SOLANGE?, focuses almost exclusively on the "police-thriller" aspects of the story. I found Dallamano's narrative drive far more compelling that it was in SOLANGE, as well as the way the script (co-written by Dallamano) develops the insidious operations of the corrupt sex ring, run by ambitious men who get off on their ability to control their underage victims absolutely. If it weren't for the presence of the bloody-handed assassin, DAUGHTERS wouldn't be a giallo at all.         

THE HYPNOTIC EYE (1960)

 

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

Someone said that artists are like sorcerers who can be bound by their own spells. Certainly this is true of those creators who become so enraptured by certain themes that they repeat them obsessively. That said, obviously there are also creators to whom spell-casting is just a job, and they use magic after the fashion of Mickey Mouse’s junior magician in FANTASIA. -- THE CURSE OF THE MUMMY'S TOMB review.

Look, I told you the history [laughs]-- I had an idea, a wacko idea about the line, then instead of making a film for 45 bucks with a line in a loop and a voiceover, we're into 365,000 bucks. It was cast badly, and it wasn't a very good movie by any stretch of the imagination [laughs]. I went on to do better things. This was an early, quick effort. I must tell you, I never took it very seriously, it was all just sort of a lark.-- ASTONISHING B-MONSTER interview with HYPNOTIC EYE screenwriter William Read Woodfield. 

It's easy for a critic to wax philosophical about the complexities of a famous filmmaker like, say, Alfred Hitchcock. Not only was Hitchcock embraced, due to his superb directorial skills, by major film-companies, he was one of those creators who came back to favorite themes over and over. Hitchcock gave interviews that repeatedly testified as to his personal erudition. Thus, if a critic noticed that a character in an original script written for AH was named "Justine," the critic might feel himself justified in asking Hitchcock if this was a calculated reference to the most famous literary character by that name, the one created by the Marquis De Sade.

I don't know how educated William Read Woodfield, the architect of THE HYPNOTIC EYE, was at the time he wrote the movie with his wife (who has no other writing-credits on IMDB). Woodfield was known principally as a Hollywood photographer, and IMDB only testifies to his having written two episodes of the TV show SEA HUNT before he wrote EYE. In the excerpt above, Woodfield claims to have gone on to "better things," by which he presumably meant high-prestige TV shows like COLUMBO and MISSION IMPOSSIBLE (and not so much for his scripts for TIME TUNNEL and LOST IN SPACE). 

I can't discount Woodfield making light of his work on EYE. At the same time, the Woodfield giving the interview is not necessarily identical with the Woodfield of 1960. Who can say that the writer didn't tap some deeper part of his consciousness back then, when he was desperate to be something better than a writer on SEA HUNT? He claims in the interview not to have been aware of William Castle's theatrical gimmicks, but any film boasting the fake come-on of a non-existent process called "Hypno-Magic" makes that claim pretty dubious. Similarly, was a guy trying to break into the world of low-budget horror-films, if only temporarily, necessarily ignorant of trends in the genre? The late 1950s are marked by an escalation of the violence in horror movies, and EYE certainly fits that trend as well.          

 

Further, one need not assume that 1960 Woodfield followed the same critic-approved creative process as Alfred Hitchcock. Woodfield may have testified to his own process as being loosely associative in nature, through the barely necessary EYE character Philip Hecht, a police psychologist of some sort. We first meet Hecht showing off the way his mind works by tossing darts at a bunch of newspaper clippings on the wall, constructing a "sentence" out of his having hit, in succession, Sigmund Freud, a Valentine's Day card, and the derriere of Jayne Mansfield. That sort of process resembles the way Woodfield talks about putting EYE together out of his fascination with stage hypnosis acts.

But EYE isn't really all about sex, as per Freud's own obsessions; it's first and foremost about violence. Like this famous scene:

Within the film's first ten minutes, we see this scene and learn from dimwit cop Dave Kennedy (Joe Patridge) that the girl who sets her own hair on fire is just one of many curious self-mutilations that have been taking place in recent times. Possibly they've all occurred on Dave's beat, since he's been assigned to divine what seems to be a serial-assailant mystery with no assailant evident. Yet Dave, though he seems too dumb to know how to spell "psychology," finds his way to the mystery's solution by random association, for he tells Hecht that he and his girlfriend Marcia (Marcia Henderson) plan to take in a new hypnotist act that night. 

 The film-viewer will solve the mystery long before Dave does, once said viewer sees the Great Desmond (Jacques Bergerac) working his magic on stage. Oddly, we first see Desmond tormenting four seated men with illusions of being extremely hot or cold, etc. But once he calls three pretty young women up on the stage for a routine, the viewer easily deduces the hypnotist's complicity in the unsolved acts of violence.

 To be sure, there's the strong suggestion that the women in the audience are very anxious to have the charming Desmond exert his power over them. Marcia almost volunteers to be one of the hypnotist's subjects, but her friend Dodie takes Marcia's place as Sacrificial Lamb. Later, Dodie is the next self-mutilation victim. Does Dave start to suspect Desmond then? No, but Marcia does, and then she puts herself in harm's way, dating Desmond in order to learn his secret.

But Woodfield has a twist on the usual formula of the sexually-repressed male serial killer-- one of whom. Norman Bates, would make his cinematic debut that same year. Desmond's stage assistant Justine (Allison Hayes) might wear the costume of The Pretty Girl who's supposed to distract audiences from an illusionist's tricks, but she's the one in control of everything Desmond does. She's also evidently his superior in hypnotism, in that she personally commands Marcia to enter a scalding shower and almost succeeds in another mutilation except for Dave's timely arrival on the scene.    

The unexpected appearance of Justine somehow triggers Dave into doing actual police work, like interviewing all the mutilation victims (which one would have thought he'd have already done). Admittedly, this time he's seeking to learn if any of them encountered Desmond before. Hecht helps Dave figure out that all of the victims, including Dodie, have been hypnotically commanded to forget their encounters with Desmond. To be sure, none of this detective-work proves relevant. A post-hypnotic command forces Marcia to return to the theater, where Desmond is using his powers (enhanced by a mechanical strobe-light eye held in one hand) to enthrall his entire audience. Dave and Hecht arrive on the scene, Marcia is saved, and the two evil hypnotists die.

I don't know if Woodfield ever read anything about Sigmund Freud outside of some Sunday-supplement article, and I don't know if he was aware that the name Justine is attached to a character created by Sade-- though in fairness, that character was a victim of sadism, not a perpetrator. Woodfield may not have thought that much about his twist on the male-predator trope. He may have been thinking of famous folk tales about feminine jealousy like SNOW WHITE. Another model that comes even closer to EYE's plot is one version of the Medusa story. In this iteration, Medusa starts out as a gorgeous mortal woman. She's pursued by the god Poseidon, and despite her taking shelter in the temple of Athena, he rapes her there. Then, to add injury to injury, Athena (who apparently has no power to curse Poseidon) avenges the pollution to her honor by cursing the mortal woman to become the grotesque Gorgon with the petrifying visage.

There's no way to know precisely what 1960 William Woodfield had on his mind when he (and maybe his wife with him) wrote EYE. But even if he later thought of the movie as junk, he didn't write it as indifferently as most junk of the time was written. The movie is lurid, but it's preoccupied not with a male predator killing women as a sex-substitute (paging Norman again), but with a ruthless queen determined to make sure no mortal woman could outshine her without suffering for it. Even a last-minute "motivation" for Justine's actions-- she whips off a facemask to reveal that she too is scarred like her later victims-- bears some resemblance to the way the Greek goddess Athena carried around the image of a Gorgon's head, either on her shield or her clothing, with which to terrify her enemies. I think it's eminently possible that Woodfield, thinking more in terms of free association than in terms of studied metaphors, formulated a story in which women lose their beauty due to feminine jealousy-- and at the risk of sounding misogynist, that just might be a theme to which female horror-fans might warm more than would males of that species.                             

FRECKLED MAX AND THE SPOOKS (1987)

 

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

Well, at least FRECKLED MAX can lay claim to being the best German cut of a Czech TV series adapted from a book, FRANKENSTEIN'S AUNT, by a Swedish author.

I usually don't review compilations, but given that the seven episodes of the Czech (I think) series FRANKENSTEIN'S AUNT probably won't ever come my way intact, I thought I might as well give this hour-and-a-half smorgasbord a look.

However, aside from noting MAX's place in the history of monster mashup movies, there's not a lot I can say. Often compilations can be incoherent because they leave out a lot of establishing elements. However, here there were only seven episodes, and it still seems incoherent. I think it's unlikely the show had regular scripts, but rather that the makers just jammed a lot of goofy incidents together and let the actors have fun performing them.

The "Max" of the title is an orphaned circus kid who resents the adults exploiting him after his parents' deaths. So he runs away from the circus, and to the Castle of Doctor Frankenstein, where he becomes the roving viewpoint character for some or all of the absurdities. Henry Frankenstein is gone, but both his monster, named "Albert" after Einstein, and his aunt Hannah (Viveca Lindfors) are still around. The main plot, such as it is, seems to be the quest of Albert-- who just looks like a big dumb guy-- to marry a local human girl, Klara (sexy Italian actress Barbara de Rossi). While Albert courts Klara, other monsters hang around the castle doing silly things for who knows what reasons-- the ghost of Erzebeth Bathory, called "The White Lady," and Dracula, played by Ferdy Mayne of FEARLESS VAMPIRE KILLERS fame. The IMDB page says that Eddie Constantine played some sort of water spirit in the TV show, but I didn't see him in the compilation.

Though MAX is about as plotless as a movie can be, I must admit all the actors and their costumes looked good, so I was moderately entertained once I gave up expecting anything but pretty pictures.    

VIOLENCE JACK (1986, 1988, 1990)

 

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

If people say you can’t do something, then you want to do it even more. Things that are considered forbidden, means other people aren’t doing them yet! -- Go Nagai

From what spotty English-language reviews I found online, I don't get a sense that all, if any, of these three OVAs were totally faithful to Go Nagai's manga VIOLENCE JACK. But I have no doubt that they had total fidelity to Nagai's aesthetic of transgressive sex and violence. 

Before watching these productions, I read a few months' worth of the manga online, just to get a sense of its parameters, and I got the sense that it's a fairly loose concept. Such looseness was probably ideal for an OAV series, in that it wouldn't be expected to adapt an accepted continuity, and to date the original JACK material has proved too hardcore for even the Japanese to adapt fully into an anime series. In addition to being far more violent than even a lot of Nagai's other works, JACK is alleged to be the first manga/anime to delve into the post-apoc disaster genre-- which had been around a long time but was not usually melded with the genre of high-octane adventure. (Roger Zelazny's DAMNATION ALLEY was one predecessor.)  But this mainly allowed the protagonist-- a ten-foot-tall giant capable of brutal retaliation to protect the innocent-- to wander from situation to situation as he pleased. So I don't believe the original manga followed a strict continuity, and neither do the OVAs.

       

HAREM BOMBER was the first-released OVA in Japan, but it doesn't make any concessions regarding introducing Jack, and it only provides a sketchy backstory for its world. It all takes place in the Kanto region of Japan, which was so devastated by a meteor strike that it became a pocket world of ravaged human cliques. What happened to the rest of Japan, or the rest of the world? You'll never learn from the anime. As in many later genre-pieces, roving gangs of plunderers comprise the only authority, and the most powerful gang-leader is a warlord, Slum King, who comes into conflict with Jack. The two fight a bit, get separated, and the rest of the film concerns Jack protecting a young couple from the motorbike-riding looters. Slum King steals women to sell to sex slave-rings, and he's an equal opportunity employer, given that he has a whip-wielding lesbian henchwoman who sorts out the new acquisitions. Since Nagai probably intended to have some more climactic clash between the hero and Slum King down the line, the story's big fight concentrates on Jack vanquishing one of the warlord's henchmen, the titular Harem Bomber. In a twist of expectations, the girl lives and the boy dies, and there's a fuzzy reference to some Nagai concept about Jack has some sort of link to an ethereal bird-creature.

EVIL TOWN, the second OVA, feels more like an intro to Jack. A huge section of a Kanto city is swallowed by an earthquake, with the result that several humans are confined to the sunken area, unable to get back to the surface. The survivors break into three groups-- A, B and C-- and A's citizens are the ones who unearth Jack from a pile of rubble, where he's apparently been comatose. Jack at first tells the A-guys that he has no name but then dubs himself "Violence Jack" because he happens to have a huge jackknife with him. Though at first the taciturn hero defends the A-group from the freakish and malevolent denizens of the B-group, eventually Jack turns on both when he learns that the C-group is totally made up of women who have been abused and preyed upon by both groups. Though some of the women can fight-- particularly one muscular babe-- Jack defends them and makes it possible for them to return to the surface. TOWN seems to state a key tenet of Nagai's creative philosophy: that the "freaks" are not intrinsically less moral than the "straights," given that the latter group is willing to descend into rapine at the drop of a hat. TOWN is unquestionably the most extreme of the three OVAs, barraging the viewer with scenes of nudity, rape, bloody slaughter, cannibalism and even a little necrophilia.

HELL'S WIND, as well as being the name of a predacious gang of bikers, is the weakest of the OVAs. The gang menaces a small town seeking to get back to normal civilization, but the bikers, who report to the warlord Slum King, continually prey on the innocents. Long before Jack makes the scene, Hell's Wind assaults a young couple, killing the man and raping the woman, one Jun. She trains herself to become an Action Girl so that she can take revenge, but Jack more or less saves her the trouble, so that Jun doesn't have a satisfactory arc. Jack, though never demonstrative, seems to have a special liking for a young boy, and based on what little I read of the manga, I think that the two characters were intertwined in some way, though this never becomes explicit.

EVIL TOWN has the strongest sociological motif, implying that when men and women are confined together in a figurative prison with no outside contact, the men will become inveterate rapists. But though this is an intriguing idea, it's just a side-dish to the main course, which is loads and loads of sex and violence.

                       

SNOW WHITE (2025)

 

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

A funny "inverse parallel" struck me when I thought of this revisionist remake alongside the 2024 movie WICKED PART ONE.

The story of Dorothy in Baum and at MGM is "Us Us Us" (i.e., Dorothy needing and finding friends/allies) but WICKED transfers the story to the Witch, whose story is all "Me Me Me."

The story of Snow White both in fairy tale and at Disney is "Me Me Me" (Snow finding her own identity) but the 2025 revision makes her story about "Us Us Us."

Of the many complaints I heard about the 2025 SNOW WHITE, none of them mentioned the strange insistence on altruistic motives for Snow (Rachel Zegler) throughout the script. I don't discount the other complaints. I'm sure the filmmakers thought the de-emphasizing the original's romance elements would be in line with feminist thought. And I don't doubt that they shifted the meaning of the "Snow White" name so that the film wouldn't seem to be trumpeting the virtues of Whiteness. But I was quite surprised that the film opens with a long musical number telling the audience how from childhood Snow was taught by her royal mother and father to serve the people rather than ruling them. In expansive scenes showing kid-Snow working in the kitchen with the plebes, we're told via song that "the bounty of the land belonged to all who tended it." This redefinition of Snow White's character arc away from personal wish-fulfillment and toward a super-altruism becomes particularly ironic given the much-excerpted scene regarding Snow's interaction with the dwarfs.

Online pundits made much of this scene, in which Snow seems to be ordering the dwarfs, in their own house, to clean things while she sits back and supervises. Admittedly this was a change from the attitude of the 1937 Snow White, who industriously cleans the house herself to repay the "little men" for their kindness to her. But in fairness, the exact connotation of the 2025 Snow-scene is that she's discreetly telling the dwarfs to clean up a big mess that they just made-- and without even mentioning that the rough talk from six of them hurt Dopey's feelings. The rather mild commandments from 2025 Snow are not that different from 1937 Snow being a little strict with the dwarfs as she becomes their surrogate mother. 

Further, the cleaning-scene is nowhere near as egregious as all of the instances in which 2025 Snow is constantly worrying about the fate of her precious people, under the tyrannical rule of the Evil Queen (Gal Gadot). Even her alleged "romance" with the handsome bandit Jonathan (Andrew Burnap) is predicated on her trying to persuade him to help her free her people instead of doing things for the benefit of himself and his fellow forest-thieves. In a duet between Jonathan and Snow, he accuses her of focusing on "princess problems" (are those like "white people's problems?"), but there's no real suggestion that this Snow is entitled in any way. 

In contrast, the Queen is selfhood personified, and her competition to be "fairest in the land" has less to do with feminine beauty and more to do with their differing definitions of what is "fair." For Snow, "fair" signifies the total social equity she raised to believe in, and which she never questions for a moment. (Presumably she believes in "inclusion" too, since she inhabits a multi-racial medieval kingdom.) For the Queen, "fair" means whatever gets her what she wants. Her big solo number, "All is Fair," is a terrible song with awful doggerel lyrics. But the song gets across the script's labored point: the Queen only uses the word "fair" ironically, as in the saying, "All's fair in love and war." And the Queen would amend even that only to "self-love," because she's incapable of any other form of love. Additionally, this means that her command of the kingdom is founded on the Hobbesian idea of "the war of all against all," endless competition for self-gratification. This is certainly an atypical script from credited writer Erin Cressida Wilson, best known in cinema for erotic/psychological thrillers like CHLOE, SECRETARY, and THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN. In all likelihood, she just took the money and wrote what some Disney functionaries told her she had to write.

Nothing else in SNOW WHITE is as interesting as the battle of Snow and the Queen as representations of altruism and selfishness, respectively. The script's treatment of this important theme is both jejune and naive, particularly when it suggests that the only good reason for having a love affair is to get your "non-aristocratic prince charming" help you promote the cause of equity. But it's at least a better theme than anything in WICKED PART ONE, with its endless self-pitying "me me me" refrain.  

What else? The CGI dwarfs, I guess. If I'd seen the film as a kid-- not knowing any of the backstage rumpus brought about by Peter "Dickhead" Dinklage-- I would probably have found the animated little people reasonably entertaining, assuming I'd never seen the 1937 original. They're not horrible, but they would have been better played by costumed dwarfs.

Performances? Zegler sings well but as an actress she's bland, and I for one can't tell if she could do better with a better script. Burnap tries harder to bring charm to his good-hearted rogue so I think he probably can act. Gadot looks great as the Evil Queen, but she's also utterly one-note in terms of character. The entire significance of Snow's "death-by-apple" is bungled with some extraneous stuff about rescuing Snow's lost father, who's not really alive anyway yatta yatta yatta. When the reckoning comes between Snow and her adversary, the Queen manages to snuff herself in a scene that I found reminiscent of the climax of 2005's THE BROTHERS GRIMM. Given the context, I guess Disney could have found worse sources to steal from.

There's no question that Leftist politics informed the decision of 2025 SNOW to downplay romance in favor of group ethics. But I have seen far, far worse examples of ideological distortion than this one. SNOW WHITE probably wouldn't even crack the Top 50.