A KNIFE FOR THE LADIES (1974)

 

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

*SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS*

I saw a cut-down version of this film, running about sixty minutes, under the title JACK THE RIPPER GOES WEST. The version under this title runs a little under 90 minutes, and until I saw that, I couldn't be sure if there was any justification for the "Ripper" allusion-- which indeed there is none. Yet, going by the above poster, the lack of a genuine "Saucy Jack" in the story didn't prevent someone from claiming that the psycho-killer in the story was "The Ripper." The hyperbolic ad even attributes a Jason-like invulnerability to the lady-killer, and it highlights his alleged "blood lust for ladies naked and dead." All of this ballyhoo proves very ironic when one finds out the true nature of the character whose pustule-covered face is implied to be the referenced "Ripper."

There had been a small number of movies or TV shows about psycho-killers in the Old West before KNIFE. However, neither the three credited writers nor the director had any facility with the horror-genre, and KNIFE spotlights those limitations. Of the three writers, one has no other IMDB credits, the second went on mostly to cartoons and variety shows, and the third, Seton Miller, had distinguished himself in Hollywood Classic films, not least a favorite of mine, THE BLACK SWAN-- but Miller passed right around the time of KNIFE's release. Director Larry Spangler never worked on another horror film before or after this one, and one can see that he barely knows how to build suspense or display gory effects. In fact, at its heart KNIFE is a revisionist western, not unlike the two "Nigger Charley" films Spangler completed before it. The horror-plot is just an excuse to present a conflict of "the old generation and the new"-- though the film's handling of the theme is jejune at best.  

 

The mining-town of Mescal (named for its long-dead founder) was once prosperous, but with the mine's failure Mescal is a dying burg. Out of this poverty a serial killer arises, knocking off three ladies of the evening, one of whom is slain for an opening scene. In contrast to the governmental indifference to the fate of prostitutes in many Ripper-films, Mescal's banker wants the killer caught right away. Having no confidence in Jarrod (Jack Elam), the town's old, drunken sheriff, the banker hires a big-city detective, Burns (a big-haired Jeff Cooper). Burns never really does much detecting. He does interview a few people, notably the widow of the founder, Elizabeth Mescal (Ruth Roman), who provides the tossed-off info that she also had an adult son, Travis, by her late husband, and that he too has recently died. But Jarrod hates Burns at first sight, and eventually the two end up proving their mutual manhood with a fistfight. But because there aren't that many more murders during the film's second act, Spangler makes up the difference with a side-plot about finding the men who lynched an innocent suspect.

Both the main plot and the side-plots are dull and poorly acted, but these were apparently what grabbed Spangler and the writers, because when it comes time to deliver on the premise, they rush through it. The big reveal is that Travis Mescal-- who's been mentioned as having been a big man with the ladies in life-- never died. Elizabeth faked the story of his death and kept him in a cage within her mansion, allowing him to become both physically and mentally disfigured by a "social disease." So Travis hasn't actually been lurching around displaying his blood lust for dead, naked ladies; his momma done did it all. Elizabeth, then, is really the centric icon whom the two dull crime-solvers pursue. But the script doesn't have the stones to explore Elizaeth's maternal version of the Oedipus complex. One can guess that she resented Travis's dalliances with prostitutes, and that resentment, as well as community reputation, led her to fake her son's death and deny him whatever care might have been available in the 1880s. Yet she also blamed the whores for her son's decay and started killing them-- only to decide at the last moment to give Travis a "virgin bride," Jarrod's niece. A better script could have subtly alluded to Elizabeth's incestuous nature, as was done in the 1962 MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE. But as I said, it looks like none of the principals cared about getting the horror-story right. Once the crazy mother and her spawn are both dead, the film ends with Burns, Jarrod and Jarrod's niece leaving Mescal to its decaying fate-- which doesn't seem like a very happy ending for the townsfolk.

                    

DEMON FIGHTER KOCHO (1997)

 

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

Here's another one of those one-shot anime OVAs. KOCHO seems to have been released in Japan alongside a couple of live-action movies that same year, all of which adapted a manga of the same name. The manga only endured about two years and is not well known today, so it's likely that both the anime and live-action projects were a quick cash-grab for a franchise winding up in the same year as the videos. As for the American market, it was much easier to place a translated 30-minute anime into video stores than any of the full-fledged serial shows.

Only a couple of translated manga-adventures were available to me online, but they were enough to give me a sense as to how ordinary high-school boy Kosaku gets mixed up with a ditzy girl exorcist named Kocho. These are almost the only continuing characters in the series' first two episodes, but the anime clearly jumps forward in time to introduce two or three other characters, one being Kocho's sister, who competes with the titular heroine for Kosaku's heart. The demons with which Kocho contends are not especially imaginative, so it's quite possible that the anime is not a direct adaptation of any story. The action takes a back seat to sexy fanservice, with Kocho's persona being that of a ditz who's often not aware of her own pulchritudinous charms, but who can also deal out a few hard slaps to any male caught ogling her. The use of traditional Japanese exorcism methods provides the only hint of symbolic complexity here, but I doubt that the full series ever got much better than this offshoot.

       

      

TERMINATOR: DARK FATE (2019)

 

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

Though FATE is indubitably one of the many films affected by Hollywood's version of DEI, it's not nearly as entertainment-free as many others from this unfortunate period. To be sure, the only entertainment stems from the abilities of director Tim (DEADPOOL) Miller and the FX-crew, and not from the script cobbled together by three writers swiping as much as feasible from TERMINATOR 2.

Like other films in the TERMINATOR franchise, FATE seeks to ignore later films in the series, in the case choosing to proceed as if it takes place a few years after the second film. Yet the script, presumably to suit the demands of producers, perversely cancels out the audience's good will by reversing the events of T2. Eight years after Sarah Connor and a T-800 Terminator (Linda Hamilton, Arnold Schwarzenegger) saved Sarah's son John from death by a T-1000, another Terminator (also Schwarzenegger) ambushes Sarah and John, kills John, and escapes. The time-travel paradoxes of this event are not explored, for the script's priority is to introduce two new female presences to this iteration. 

One of them, Dani (Natalia Reyes), is meant to provide a XX savior-figure in place of the slain John, for somehow his death simply changes the future so that Dani will be the great military leader who defeats Skynet. (The script initially fakes out the viewer with the implication that Dani's going to be the mother of a female savior, but the revelation is profoundly dull.) The other new woman warrior is Grace (Mackenzie Davis), a cyborg enhanced with mechanical implants, and who deals herself into this struggle even though-- she's from a totally different future with a different cyber-intelligence, Legion? Yeah, I didn't even try to follow the logic here. But Legion follows the same basic pattern as Skynet, sending back a metamorphic "fluid metal" Terminator (Gabriel Luna) to kill Dani. And somehow both aggrieved Sarah and the T-800 sign up to protect Dani and defeat the time-traveling assassin.

The crappy "dramatic" arcs of Dani and Sarah are worthless, hollow imitations of the superior John and Sarah arcs from T2, and the one for the T-800 is only minimally better than either, mostly because one suspects that this derivative film marks Schwarzenegger's farewell to his signature character. But though new faces Reyes and Luna are dull, and Hamilton returns to do nothing but scowl and glower alternately, Mackenzie Davis proves a much more charismatic presence than the other newbies, and Miller gives her plenty of demanding stunts that keep this otherwise dull pot boiling. The one good thing about this bad script is that because of it, FATE bombed at the box office, and it's to be hoped that at long last this franchise, which peaked with the first two films and never really blossomed again, will be allowed to fade into the past.        

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.