HERCULES REBORN (2014)

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A CHINESE ODYSSEY: CINDERELLA (1995)

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BABES IN TOYLAND (1997)

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A CHINESE ODYSSEY: PANDORA'S BOX (1995)

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

STAN LEE'S MIGHTY 7 (2014)

 

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

*JOKE SPOIILER JOKE SPOILER*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE MUMMY AND THE CURSE OF THE JACKALS (1969)

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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