DORORO (1969)

 

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

Back in 2024, I wrote a review of the 2019 remake of the 1969 adaptation of Osamu Tezuka's DORORO. At the time I cross-compared the 2019 anime with some of the manga available to me, because I didn't think there was any possibility of the 1969 anime coming my way. But then thirteen episodes showed up on streaming, which led me to find the other 13 on YouTube.

My main takeaway is that the series is very episodic, while the animation is crude without being as charming as that of Tezuka's most famous TV-anime, ASTRO BOY. Like all versions, Hyakkimaru starts out as a paraplegic child, deprived of most of his major bodily organs by a spell sent by his evil father.  A genius gives the child mechanical enhancements and trains him to attack the demons who now possess the hero's stolen organs, for he can recover one organ for every demon killed. Hyakkimaru's joyless mission is given an injection of human feeling when war-orphan Dororo, perhaps eight years old, attaches herself to the crippled samurai and follows him throughout his twenty-six adventures.

Since I've seen most of the stories twice before, I can't help feeling most of them lack verve, much less concrescence. The overall theme is that in the same way that both mortal samurai and demons prey on ordinary people, and deserve to be extirpated, but there's no elaboration of this conceit. A lot of weird Japanese yokai appear here, but the animation can't really capture their grotesquerie, and Hyakkimaru's climactic encounter with his father is given no buildup.

The gender identity of Dororo is not referenced until the very last episode too, so that I wondered if the showrunners just decided to make Dororo a boy. In one episode, Dororo beats up five kids her own age, which I thought was quite a feat for a child with no real martial training, especially a female child. But in the last episode Hyakkimaru reveals that he always knew, throughout all their adventures, that Dororo was female-- which is not true of the original Tezuka manga. Indeed, there's even a scene in the cartoon where Dororo is bathing nude within Hyakkimaru's line of sight, and she does nothing more than facing the other direction to conceal her femininity.

I'm glad I got a chance to see these early B&W cartoons, but the best any of them get is just fair. The 2019 incarnation is superior in all respects.

                    

     

LADY FRANKENSTEIN (1971)

 

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

Despite the high-toned diction and philosophizing in Mary Shelley's most famous novel, FRANKENSTEIN is more than a little perverse in its psychology. The titular experimenter grows up with his adoptive sister Elizabeth (his cousin in the first edition) and they plan to marry when they come of age. Yet Frankenstein's ambivalence is reflected in a weird dream of his mother coming back to life. When he decides to create a patchwork man, guided by old alchemical texts, it's in defiance of his father's scorn for such a project. And when his creation gets loose-- largely because Frankenstein had no plan for what he'd do with his "offspring"-- the monster devotes himself to killing off most of the people in the scientist's orbit.

Going on the account of director Mel Welles, who said that he wrote it with fellow American Edward de Lorenzo-- LADY FRANKENSTEIN was conceived from the start as being a sleazier version of a Frankenstein film. Yet to some extent Welles gets closer to the core perversities of Shelley's novel than most movies about the erring scientist.

In LADY, Baron Frankenstein (Joseph Cotten) has been experimenting on transplant surgery for twenty years since he was expelled from the medical academy for his radical ideas. Only his slightly younger colleague Dr. Marshall (Paul Muller) knows that for the past three years, while Frankenstein's daughter Tania is away at medical school, he and the Baron have been working on assembling and rejuvenating a patchwork man. They use a corpse-thief named Lynch to provide them with body parts, and once he provides them with the fresh brain of a hanged man, they're ready to proceed. However, the same day they plan to bring the dead form to life, daughter Tania (Rosalba Neri) returns to Castle Frankenstein.

Initially Tania seems nothing more than a loving daughter, one who spied on her father's early experiments and who has emulated him by finishing her training as a surgeon. There's no sense of improper emotions between Tania and her father, though Marshall, who nurtures a concealed affection for Tania, might be viewed as a father-surrogate, though actor Marshall was only about ten years older than actress Neri. We know nothing about Tania's sexual history, but the first hint of her perverse nature is slightly suggested by her lingering interaction with studly stable-boy Thomas (Peter Whiteman), though he can barely speak coherently due to a past bout with fever. 

On the night of the experiment, Marshall warns Frankenstein that damage to the creation's brain could make it dangerous. Tania learns about the experiment and wants to assist. Initially Frankenstein doesn't want her to risk getting in trouble with the law, and then he changes his mind for no stated reason. Frankenstein and Marshall revice the body with lightning, but as Marshall feared, the resulting Monster is a mindless berserker and kills Frankenstein without provocation. The deformed creature then stalks off into the countryside and begins knocking off nearly everyone he meets-- though he does forego mudering a young boy after killing his parents. How the unthinking beast-man knows to hide itself after getting the local constabulary on his tail, the film does not say. The creature also kills Lynch and other corpse-thieves but does not seem to know them.

Tania formulates the idea that the only way to take vengeance on the superhuman ravager is to make a second monster to fight it. Prior to Lynch's killing, Tania approaches the reprobate for new body-parts, but he will only accept sexual payment. Though Tania declines, the encounter possibly gives her the idea to use her beauty to make a monster in a different manner. Aware of Marshall's suppressed passion for her, she tells him that she loves his mind but must have a beautiful male body to love as well-- and proposes that the two of them murder the hunky Thomas and swap out Marshall's brilliant brain for Thomas's impaired consciousness.

                        

Tania then lures Thomas to her bed and seduces him, so that Marshall can smother him to death with a pillow. Tania makes some mention of giving Thomas the chance to be a "whole being," but it's pretty clear that she wants to indulge her desire for father-substitute Marshall, but within a youthful body like her own. Significantly, she does marry and bed Marhsall before they kill the stable-boy, so if all she wanted was sex with an older man, that inclination would have been voided. But making a new "child" to kill the creation of her father-- her symbolic "brother," if one goes by the logic of SON OF FRANKENSTEIN-- seems to be the means of both avenging and surpassing her father. So Tania completes the experiment and births her second monster. "New Monster" is not deformed like the first one and could pass for an ordinary man. But since all the story-pieces are now in place, the "Old Monster" wanders back to the castle for no particular reason, and soon the two super-strong beings duke it out. As monster-fights it's just adequate, and the Old Monster seems the more powerful until both Tania and "Charles" stab him to death. Then some convenient villagers burn the castle down, and Tania and "Charles" have sex amid the flames. Yet "Charles" decides that it isn't a Frankenstein film without a monster turning on its creator, so he strangles her before the flames get him.

By assigning high psychological mythicity to LADY FRANKENSTEIN, I'm not saying any character is psychologically complex, even on the level of Robert Bloch's PSYCHO. It's only the total pattern formed by all the characters that has a certain complexity that taps some of the original Shelley perversity. Also, while I often class mad scientists as being just as monstrous as their creations, here I felt Tania had more of the "villain" vibe.          

THE FINAL SACRFICE (1990)

 

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

Now THIS-- unlike that boring MERLIN'S SHOP OF MYSTICAL WONDERS I recently reviewed-- is the sort of "bad penny" that MST3K was great at turning up. The hosts had a lot of fun tearing it down, BUT-- SACRIFICE had its own dippy lack of logic that made it entertaining (in a pathetic sense) in its own right. It's a very low-budget horror film shot mostly out in the wilds of Canada by film-students, with actors who gave lackluster performances, but its redeeming merit is that the director/co-writer clearly had no grasp of what story-elements he needed even for basic drive-in fare.

I tick off the oddball points of interest:

Out in the forest, a well-dressed man (later named Satoris) supervises the killing of a man by his hooded henchmen. Then the scene cuts to a farmhouse where a young man, Troy, lives with his aunt. After we watch him thumb through a book with some vague occult illustrations, his dialogue with his aunt establishes that his father is deceased.

Then an intertitle declares that it's seven years later, though nothing much changes. Troy is still at the farmhouse, though the aunt is not seen, but somehow the hooded henchmen know he's doing something they don't like, so they invade the house. Troy escapes on a bike, but because the hoods have a car, he later hides in a stranger's truck to get away.

The stranger, with the weird name of "Rowsdower," finds Troy but lets him hitch to whatever his destination may be. However, the cult-members somehow track Troy in this new vehicle and give chase. Troy and Rowsdower elude them, but Rowsdower suddenly reveals that he knows exactly who the cultists are and what their aim is. They're the surviving members of an archaic cult whose power was destroyed by a vengeful god, but if they can make a "final sacrifice" to some idol, their long-lost city of evil will be reborn. And Rowsdower knows this because-- he used to be a member of the cult! Holy Crazy Coincidence!

The two fugitives hide in another farmhouse, and though the cultists search the house, they fail to find their quarry. Then the duo run into the house's owner, a garrulous old man (whom the MSTies compare to Yosemite Sam) -- and guess what? He ALSO knows all about the cultists, thus providing more exposition.

It all wraps up with the cult trying to execute Troy before the idol. There's a dull, skill-less fight between Satoris and Rowsdower. Satoris is defeated, the cultists scatter, the idol falls -- and the evil city is born anyway. But nothing happens as the film just peters out, having shown utter incompetence at creating suspense-- and yet, being entertaining because of that incompetence.    

          

 

DETECTIVE DEE: DEMON CURSE (2022)

 

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

Long ago I read a handful of the mystery novels of Robert Van Gulik, who brought the exploits of medieval Chinese magistrate Judge Dee to Western audiences. I've also seen one of Tsui Hark's high-ticket "Detective Dee" films, and this later film follows Hark's pattern of stressing supernatural adventure over mystery. The Dee here is younger than in the traditional tales Van Gulik used as his template, and so is known only as "Detective Dee."

The Empress of China is due to arrive at a particular city, but as there have been strange murders therein, Detective Dee (Benny Chan) and his aide come to town to sort things out. Dee does not believe in ghosts or demons, but despite his acumen and martial skills, he can't keep others from being killed. What he eventually finds is a cult of humans planning to sacrifice the Empress for an "ascension rite," and though they're not demons, they do seem to command some sort of ill-defined magic.

Though the settings and costumes are sumptuous the script seems rushed, and I wondered if it had been done for TV. The action-scenes looked as if the photographers had "undercranked" the film-speed to make it look as if the actors were moving faster than in real life. I can't say I followed all of the details of the story, partly because the voices used for the dubbing were rather peculiar. This isn't actively bad, just underwhelming, so it probably shouldn't be anyone's first Detective Dee film.  

THE NAKED WITCH (1964)

 

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

Initially I meant to give NAKED WITCH a quickie review, because it was a chore to watch director/co-writer Larry Buchanan pad the already short film with enervating tracking shots of the Texas wilderness. But upon re-examination, I must admit that the script is probably the best original writing by Buchanan, eclipsing even the risibly titled MARS NEEDS WOMEN.

To be sure, Buchanan gives off mixed signals. The main script centers upon a witch who comes back to life to take vengeance on those who maltreated her in life. Yet Buchanan begins the film with a tedious prologue-- a voiceover lecture accompanied by illustrations from Bosch-- talking about the long history of evil witches making compacts with Satan-- even though the Naked Witch is never said to have made any such pact. Padding is the usual suspect here too.

An unnamed student goes to Luckenback Texas to research the folklore of witches. Most of the German-descended townsfolk won't talk to him, but a pretty young blonde, Kirska, takes him to the house she occupies with her grandfather. She gives the student a guest bed, in which an unnamed witch of the 19th century, referenced only as "The Widow," slept a century ago. The fellow opines that all witches were just scapegoats for societal troubles, so Kirska also offers to loan him a book on local folklore. He's not overly flirty toward Kirska, but he pays her a compliment, so when she returns with the book, she wears a sexy black nightgown. The student, perhaps feeling out of his depth, declines to make a pass, so she leaves him to his reading.

The book chronicles more real history than a latter-day writer could have possibly known. Sometime in the 1800s, the Widow (Libby Hall), an unmarried and unpopular woman in Luckenbach, sleeps with a rich married man, one Schoennig, with the idea that he means to divorce his wife and marry her. Schoennig-- who is also Kirska's ancestor--  not only reneges on promises, he accuses her as a witch to get her out of his hair. The community duly executes the Widow via burning (not shown) and then nails down her corpse in a grave with a metal stake. The execution's imagery slightly resembles the one in Bava's 1960 BLACK SUNDAY, but since that film wasn't released to the US until 1961, Buchanan might not have seen SUNDAY before completing the film in the same year, only to have it sit on a shelf until 1964.

Night falls, and the student goes chasing after the Widow's grave. He unearths it with ease, finds the corpse nailed down by the stake, and pulls out the stake, his voiceover telling us he has some idea of exhibiting it. He wanders back to his lodgings-- it's still not entirely sure that he hasn't been under a spell-- and falls asleep. Behind him, the Naked Witch resuscitates, though her film-nudity is confined to side-boobs. She follows the student to the house and takes the stake from him while he sleeps. Then, to save Buchanan the trouble of more angled shots, she seeks out Kirska's room, rips the black nightgown right off the girl's body and flees. Clothed now, she goes after the few surviving descendants of her seducer, killing two men by using the stake as a dagger.

Since the Witch never has dialogue-- not even being quoted within a voiceover, as occurs with the Widow in the book-flashback-- there's no explanation as to where she got her supernatural powers. During the flashback the Widow prays to be avenged on her accuser's family, but she does not pray to Satan, so for all the audience knows, she was granted her powers by a vengeful Heaven. The student tracks her to a pool, where she mesmerizes him and has sex with him. Then she goes after Kirska, also using remote hypnotism to pull her out of her house. The student recovers his wits and intervenes, though his "struggle" with the Witch is so desultory, it's obvious to the viewer that the actress intentionally falls down so as to be killed by the stake, this time for good.

One source claimed that WITCH was the first cinematic use of a recrudescent witch anywhere. Obviously BLACK SUNDAY puts the lie to this claim, though offhand I don't know of any American feature films in which a dead witch comes back to malefic life.

This is a clansgressive film with respect to both the sex and violence that the Witch doles out to 20th-century persons born outside her natural timespan.              

MERLIN'S SHOP OF MYSTICAL WONDERS (1996)

 

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

The above VHS cover is a total lie as to the content of MYSTICAL WONDERS, but it might be the best thing to come from this misbegotten pile of crap. It didn't even yield a very good episode of MST3K, which is the only way I would have ever screened it.

I'll be brief because the project is so pedestrian, it's not even worth ranting over. The shop of the title is actually a little shop of two horrors, in which unwitting victims are brought into contact with cursed items thanks to a modern-day venue run by the magician Merlin and some fat chick.

First story concerns the fate of a hot-shot newspaper columnist (the "demihero" of my subject line) who acts obnoxiously toward the greybeard proprietor. In retaliation the sorcerer gives the unbeliever a book of magic to eff around with. The guy almost kills his wife but a magic spell from the book backfires on him. There's no particular "ironic justice" to his fate though the actors are competent.

The second story is a cut-down version of the director's feature film THE DEVIL'S GIFT, about a cursed cymbal-playing monkey (the "monster" in my subject line). I saw GIFT many years ago and though it was nothing special, at least it was an adequate cursed-object horror flick. But it becomes lame thanks to being cut down for time and interpolated into the frame story of Merlin's shop. The original film had an unhappy ending, but here Merlin saves the imperiled victims. 

The only MST3K joke I remember was a line about DENNIS THE MENACE's Mister Wilson exposing himself while watering his lawn, or something like that.   
    

  

THE WAR OF THE NINJA MONSTERS: JARON VS. GOURA (2024)

 

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

At the end of my review for GOD REIGA VS KING OHGA, I wrote:

Happily, there have been no sequels to this embarrassment, and IMDB claims that writer-director Hayashiya is now working on a project with two new monsters. I'd like to think it could only be an improvement, but that's probably just wishful thinking.

Well, this 2024 movie must be the one alluded to, and it is a small improvement, though one has to parse out what screenwriter Shinpei Hayashiya had in mind. It helped me that I think he borrowed, in a roundabout way, from the 2016 film COLOSSAL, about a young American woman who finds that she has the ability to control a giant kaiju-like creature.

First, in the Japanese town of Chichibu, we meet two young guys who work for a gym, though they're only at the gym for a few minutes. At the same time they're listening to their manager complain, a Shinto priestess goes on a local TV show and proclaims that Chichibu is in danger from an archaic ninja cult, the Jirai.

The two guys-- unnamed according to the subtitles-- wander out into the nearby forest. They enter a cave and faint-- and the next thing they know, both of them are gigantic versions of themselves, looming over Chichibu. However, the locals don't see two giant humans: they see two reptilian monsters, one looking like Godzilla and the other a four-footed critter loosely like Gamera. An additional curiosity: when newspeople try to take video or photographs of the creatures, they don't appear visible in any form. Yet the two "monsters" have tangible effects on the buildings they hit, though there's very little building-bashing, since that would have been overly expensive.

There are some comic scenes of receptionists at the Self-Defense Public Relations office, who don't know what to make of calls about monsters. However, one female supervisor seems to know what's going on, for she references the Jirai, just as the priestess did.

Soon, it's evident that a Jirai ninja, a bald guy with an eyepatch, is controlling the monsters, hoping to unleash chaos for some vague purpose. His control may be lacking, because a couple of times "Jaron" and "Goura" attack each other, which would seem to be counter-intuitive. But Supervisor Girl turns into Ninja Girl and goes into the forest, where she finds Bald Guy and a few other ninjas. She defeats all of them, and around the same time, some citizens come across the same cave the two guys entered. They find the two guys comatose, but they become conscious when the evil ninjas are beaten. The huge monsters disappear, and all's right with the world.

There are many comic bits that probably play much better in Japanese, but they're not overly painful, as they were in GOD RAIGA. This is a curiosity among monster mashup because this time the giant monsters are not the focal icons, and though all the characters are flimsy, I suppose the main menace here is really "the Jirai" as a whole, since they unleash the kaiju, and the good ninja is too routine to be the star.