RAWHIDE: "INCDENT OF THE BLUE FIRE" (1959)

 

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

Like INCIDENT OF THE PALE RIDER, BLUE FIRE is one of a handful of tales from the early seasons of RAWHIDE that use uncanny scenarios to throw doubt upon the substantial and rational aspects of the world.

Gil Favor's band of hard-working drovers and the cattle they shepherd are far from civilization when they encounter the "blue fire" of the title. The electrical phenomenon is said to herald lightning-strikes, but the drovers don't need the azure discharge to tell them that they stand in peril of a stampede, if the prevalent storm clouds should panic the easily spooked "beeves." Favor assures his men that the "St. Elmo's fire" is harmless, but the fact that he, like other 19th-century cowboys, don't know what the hell it is makes the situation even more unnerving. The terminally superstitious Hey Soos makes things no better by maundering about deaths and devils.

Into the drovers' camp comes an individual who becomes a flashpoint for all the cowboys' inchoate fears: a footloose fellow named "Lucky" Markley. Markley himself is a would-be drover, as he tries to sell Favor a tiny herd of scrub cattle he's rounded up. The cows are of such inferior stock that Favor won't have them. However, because they're in the midst of marauding Comanches, the trial-boss allows Markley to work for him as a drover, at least until they reach some civilized port. Unfortunately for Favor, Hey Soos openly disparages Markley as the harbinger of bad luck, and the rest of the men are just as leery of the stranger.

 Markley (affably played by Skip Homeier) does nothing to provoke this hostility, though he makes one arguable error. While he and another drover are rounding up a stray steer, three Comanches accost them, demanding not only the steer but also Markley's horse. Markley shoots one brave, and the other two flee, but return later with a larger contingent of Comanches. The drovers resent Markley for bringing on more trouble, though the Comanches probably would have sought to plunder the herd no matter what happened. The men want Markley cast out. Favor alone defends the man, so much so that even Markley wonders why the trail-boss protects him, given that Favor owes Markley nothing. Favor tells a tale of having lost a young male companion during a round-up due to "bad luck," and it's implied that Favor believes in determining life by one's own actions, not through beliefs in good or ill fortune. It's this novel approach that keeps FIRE from being just a dime-a-dozen "it is wrong to give in to mob rule" morality play.

The stunning conclusion suggests that Favor's view is too simple. Finally, just as the Comanches move in for a raid, lightning strikes and the cattle stampede. Only a skillful maneuver has the chance to box the cattle in and quell their rampage, and Lucky Markley performs the deed-- sort of. The viewer alone sees how Markley, riding his cowpony, is struck in the head by lightning, killing him-- and yet, somehow horse and rider curtail the stampede, as well as scaring off the Indian raiders. Later the drovers find both horse and rider. The horse is dead from falling and breaking his neck, but there's nothing to indicate how the so-called "jonah" died, except slight burn-marks on the back of his neck. Was Favor's "favored son" killed, only to complete his task despite being a dead man in the saddle? The episode ends with no pat answers for anyone and thus stands as one of the very best "weird westerns" ever produced for television.         

X-MEN: THE ANIMATED SERIES, VOLUME FIVE (1996-97)

 

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

Season Four was supposed to be the final one for the 90s X-MEN, but ten more episodes were ordered, albeit without giving the production company much money. So some of the episodes were done in-house to save money-- and oddly, I like some of these better than any from the previous seasons.

I said in my first review of the series that I could never celebrate the show because it wasn't "my" X-Men. But I also wasn't crazy about the series' concentration on action-- even well-mounted action-- at the expense of characterization. (Admittedly the cartoon arguably did the soap-opera thing better than did the live-action movie series.) In any case, the last 14 episodes on Volume 4-- which of course mingles stories from both Seasons 4 and 5-- sometimes show a greater emotional tonality than I've observed before. For instance:

Most of the episodes are so action-heavy that there's no time for romance. But the two-part "Storm Front" posits a (non-canonical) hookup between Storm and the extradimensional tyrant Arkon. Here I appreciated some scenes that lingered on the bodies of the two principals, playing up their mutual visceral attraction before any sweet nothings were uttered.

"Old Soldiers" explores Wolverine's early (pre-clawed) years in WWII, when he undertakes a special mission alongside Captain America. Nice interplay between the very different characters without resorting to a hero-fight.

Another tale feels like Claremont in his more playful phases, with Jubilee entertaining some kids with a fairytale-fantasy in which unreasonable facsimiles of the X's appear.

 "Bloodlines," a follow-up to Nightcrawler's previous guest appearance, stands as the best story of all five seasons, being a very accurate translation of his abandonment by his mutant-villain mother Mystique. This version of the hero is a moody religious fellow rather than the daredevil type from the comics, but the contrast between Nightcrawler's faith and Mystique's nihilism is well handled.

Finally, the real final episode, "Graduation Day," present the heroic mutants with the strong possibility that they may have to carry on without Professor X, A last minute contrivance saves the Prof, but he's still obliged to leave Earth, and so the sense of a dramatic transition remains.            

   

  

FIVE WOMEN FOR THE KILLER (1974)

 

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

KILLER was the third directorial film for Stelvio Massi. In Italy he would become known more for hardboiled crime films than for horror, but I suspect today English-speaking film-fans mostly know Massi for his second and last giallo movie: 1989's bizarre ARABELLA BLACK ANGEL.  

Next to ARABELLA, KILLER comes as a bit too conservative, though the cinematography is always good (particularly in the generously lingering female nude scenes) and the basic situation is compelling. Writer Giorgio (English actor Francis Matthews) returns to Italy, anticipating a reunion with his pregnant wife Erika. To his horror he finds her newly dead, the victim of a miscarriage. The baby survives at a local hospital, where Giorgio consults with his own doctor, one Lydia (Pasquale Rivault), an in-law to Erika. The writer then gets a double body-blow when he steals a look at his own file, and sees that Lydia diagnosed him as infertile, incapable of siring a child.  

Erika's death then precedes (unleashes?) a serial killer who begins knife-killing women-- often pregnant women who have some connection to Giorgio. In giallos, the trope of "gotta kill all the sexy women" usually focuses upon promiscuous females who usually are not in a family way. But since no woman can get pregnant naturally without SOME promiscuity, KILLER might have offered some psychological insights on the durable "woman as virgin or whore" trope. However, most of the time Massi's pace is slow and the (subbed) dialogue is mundane. Even though the victims are just tangentially connected to Giorgio, those associations are enough to interest the police.

The slow pace allows Massi to build a better supply of red herrings than one finds in many thrillers (including ARABELLA), and the complications regarding Giorgio's infertility and the killer's identity dovetail nicely. The murderer's obsession with pregnant victims is enough by itself to propel the film into the uncanny domain, though it helps that the murdered women have strange symbols carved into their flesh. And Massi does flout convention by making the killer's glove grey rather than black.  

STARFORCE (2000)

 

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

Short review: STARFORCE, though weak in the plot department, is a much more serviceable example of a low-budget "space military" flick than nine-tenths of similar films in the same price range.

In yet another routine space-opera future, the ruling council of the united planets is protected by the Starforce, an elite cadre of test-tube bred soldiers. Space-pirates devastate the population of a colony world before being driven off by Starforce. One officer, Temetrian, crash-lands on the planet but the other Starforce soldiers don't find him right away. While stranded, Temetrian finds one survivor, a young boy named Zeb Lucene and protects the child until rescue comes. By that time, the soldier and the kid have bonded as surrogate father and son, and when Zed grows to maturity (and is played by Michael Bergin), Temetrian uses his clout to get Zed inducted into the Starforce, despite his not being genetically engineered. The first 15 minutes sets up a pretty good scenario re: Zed's need to prove himself despite opposition from his teammates.

However, then the plot proper begins, and that's where STARFORCE ceases to make sense. Zed is ordered to deliver medical supplies to a colony world, but his ship malfunctions so that he crashes. Back at Starforce, the absent Zed is accused of having stolen a ship, and his alleged orders are disavowed. So someone's got it in for Zed.

Zed survives the crash and is succored by Dahlia (Amy Weber), one of the denizens of the world-- which turns out to made up of criminals who had their sentences remitted for becoming colonists. However, apparently the authorities did a rotten job of surveying the planet, for the colonists have learned that their adopted world is rich in priceless tridium. The colonists have been debating the best way to profit from their discovery, but Zed has happened along just as some secret killer starts knocking off some of the residents.

There's no logic to why the murderous agent and his sponsors, a renegade unit of Starforce, needed Zed to be on the scene, except that there's no story if he's not there. However, if one can turn off one's awareness of the plot's failings and just focus on Zed and Dahlia fighting off nasty stormtroopers for the rest of the movie, STARFORCE provides tolerable diversion.            

STATIC SHOCK, SEASON TWO (2002)

 

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

My review of Season One was fairly long, purely because I was recapitulating some of the basics of the series' concept. But given that hardly anything changes between Seasons One and Two, this time there's hardly anything to say about this overly vanilla show.

The writers introduce a smattering of new, entirely routine villains, and one of the "independent" villains, Hotstreak, joins the gang masterminded by shadowy evildoer Ebon. Virgil's buddy Richie gets superpowers briefly, and there's an episode that amounts to an "anti-gun" PSA, which would be fine with me if I thought it had any persuasive power. I suppose the standout episode involved the villain Rubberband Man trying to become a good guy and coming into conflict with his brother, the aforementioned Ebon.

The season's "big event," as well as the opening episode, is STATIC playing host to Batman, Robin and The Joker. Though the voice-talents of Kevin Conroy and Mark Hamill remain excellent, the story is ordinary in every way.          

ELLA ENCHANTED (2004)

 

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

Wiki informs me that ELLA ENCHANTED is only a loose adaptation of its source novel, which I have not read. But though ELLA may be loose in one sense, in one sense this simple, tongue-in-cheek fantasy is tighter than two recent overbaked retreads of famous fantasies: 2024's WICKED PART ONE and 2025's SNOW WHITE. 

All three of these "magical-era fantasies" use fairytale-tropes to comment on perceived real-world injustices. The two later movies, though, construct sloppy scenarios, with WICKED imagining that Oz is "species-ist" towards its alleged talking-animal population, and SNOW supposing that its princess grows up in a non-hierarchical kingdom that would warm the heart of any Socialist. ELLA utilizes (but did not invent) an idea similar to that of WICKED, in that heroine Ella of Frell (Anne Hathaway) grows up in a world where human royalty has exiled most of the non-humans-- elves, ogres, and giants-- to the forests, if not turning them into abject slaves. There's no real depth to ELLA's politicized fairytale either, but since it only involves simple expropriation, the base scenario is not as stupid as those of WICKED and SNOW WHITE.

Ella also grows up more beleaguered than many fairytale heroines, for in a storyline derived from "Sleeping Beauty" and "Cinderella," Baby Ella receives a bad birth-gift from an extraordinarily stupid fairy godmother: that of obeying any verbal command. I don't know how the book justifies the godmother's whim, but the movie shrugs off any justification in order to get the story rolling. Ella manages to keep her vulnerability secret until she's a young woman, but when her mother dies, her father (barely a character in the film) remarries, saddling Ella with a cruel stepmother and two nasty stepsisters.

The script gets a lot of comical mileage out of Ella's predicament, but her wish to protest the marginalization of magical beings brings her into a meet-cute with the wryly named Prince Charmont (Hugh Dancy). She brings the injustices to the attention of the gullible, not-yet-crowned prince, and the script makes it eminently clear that all the bad stuff has been orchestrated by his evil uncle Edgar (an unrecognizable Cary Elwes). Ella is also occupied with a search for the addled godmother in the hope of getting the obedience-spell reversed. In the end, Ella is the one who figures out how to undo her compulsion, which was a fresh approach.

Ella also accrues various supporting characters, including a talking book and an elf who wants to be a lawyer (!), but the story's main romantic thread is always the focus, and the script manages a good balance of humor and drama. There are no established fairytale characters in the story, and characters frequently make anachronistic references, mostly to modern pop music. Ella is the sole eminence here, and a big concluding fight-scene demonstrates that for no clear reason Ella can both swordfight and do kung fu. ELLA isn't a deep film, but it executes its simple scenario with a decent sense of style and moderately amusing jokes.      

STATIC SHOCK, SEASON ONE (2000-01)

 

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

Full disclosure: I've never read a single issue of the STATIC comic book, and only a smattering of other titles in the 1990s DC/Milestone line that spawned the Static character. Therefore I don't know in what particulars the TV show differs from its source material. However, given that the show STATIC SHOCK was trying to play to a kid-audience above all else, one can certainly countenance a lot of changes for the sake of that target-group. However, a lot of kid-vid adventure-shows have been capable of being entertaining even if they had to "work clean"-- and so there's some irony that a cartoon about a hip 14-year-old superhero should be one of the most vanilla shows in this category I've ever encountered.

In the fictional city of Dakota, a chemical weapon is unleashed, resulting in an event called "the Big Bang." What's created is a sub-universe within the greater domain of WB Animation; a city inhabited by instant mutants called "Bang Babies." Most of these individuals-- replete with the usual range of super-powers (freezing, flying, stretching) -- become menaces, so that they're ripe to become the rogues' gallery of the titular hero. Static-- originally high-schooler Virgil Hawkins-- gains an assortment of electrically-related powers, and being a stand-up guy, he becomes Dakota's defender, and (says Wiki) the first African-American hero to star in his own solo cartoon series. Only Richie, Virgil's white buddy at school, knows his secret; both Virgil's strict father and sarcastic sister remain clueless.

All that said, everything in STATIC SHOCK remains incredibly pedestrian in terms of plot and characterization. Of Season One's 13 episodes, only one, "Sons of the Fathers," deserves some comment. It's an "anti-racism" episode, but without the righteous virulence seen in many cartoons 20 years later. (I'm looking at you, PROUD FAMILY.) Virgil decides he wants to meet Richie's family and wangles an invitation to Richie's house. Richie's dad, however, makes no secret of disliking Black people, so Virgil takes his leave. Richie runs away from home and is captured by a gang of super-villains. But before Static can come to the rescue, Richie's father grudgingly accepts the help of Virgil's dad to find the lost kid. Given the many ways the story might have gone in depicting any character who doesn't automatically like Black people, I appreciate the meliorist approach, showing that Richie's dad is an Archie Bunker type who resents cultural/societal change. But that one episode, and various decently animated fight-scenes, don't add up to much.