ANGEL WITH THE IRON FISTS (1967)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny* 
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*

If you know in advance that ANGEL is primarily a modern-day superspy flick, you may think that the title suggests a blend between that genre and the nascent genre of the Hong Kong chopsockie. What the viewer gets, though, is a pretty low-wattage effort, even if it's one of the few 1960s secret agent flicks to focus on a female hero.

Lily Ho plays Luo Na, alias "Agent 009," and her assignment is to infiltrate a gang of crooks called the Dark Angels. They really seem to be nothing but crooks, with no ties to international espionage and no plans to conquer the world. Nevertheless, even though Luo is doing the job of a police undercover agent, she has a smattering of uncanny spy-weapons, like a metal-edged card that can be used to disarm enemies or a perfume-spray filled with knockout gas. 

 I have no information on the films that director Lo Wei helmed before ANGEL, so it's not impossible that this was one of his first movies that needed strong action sequences. Lily Ho does project pretty good authority in her few fight-scenes, but the only one that catches fire is a battle with a mobster's jealous girlfriend (Fanny Fann). Later Lo Wei would distinguish himself with entries like Bruce Lee's big success FIST OF FURY and my personal favorite of the works I've seen, VENGEANCE OF A SNOW GIRL. But ANGEL is no more than a period curiosity, made risible by the repeated use of musical passages from the library of 007 cinema.       

SEVEN MEN OF KUNG FU (1978)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny* 
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*

I can only echo this online post that this misbegotten chopsocky, by a writer-director who only made four films in his career, is the most atrociously edited film the kung-fu genre has ever produced. It's yet another take on the old "Chings vs. Mings" quarrel, and I think main villain Chang Yi (seen above with red-dyed hair) is one of the Mings, also called "anti-Chings" by the subtitles on the streaming copy I watched. In addition to Chang Yi, the other three top-billed performers are the redoubtable diva Lung Chung-erh, Chang Ying-chen (billed elsewhere as Emily Chang Ying-chen), and Lo Lieh. I didn't see the name of Chan Sing in the barely-Anglicized credits, but I think he, along with Lieh and Emily, are the "good Chings" of the story, one of whom gets the honor of fighting the evil potentate played by Chang Yi.

Hong Kong chopsockies aren't models of exposition at the best of times, but this director Cheung Hang is the worst of the worst. He barrels past any setup that would familiarize viewers with who the characters and what they want, and he seems in a tearing hurry to get to the really important scenes, where characters stand around and recite sententious aphorisms. This is perhaps the talkiest chopsocky ever made. There's a brief sense of romance between Chan Sing and the actress I believe to be Emily Chang, but it comes to naught when she's killed. I admit that I'm not sure I've correctly ID'd the girl wielding her sword beside Chan Sing, but that's my best guess.    

         

So what the hell does "Doris" Lung-Chung-erh play? If the cited review is correct, she plays some sort of weird witch-being who's seen intermittently throughout the film (via repetitions of the exact same scene), in the company of a white-faced guy later called a "zombie." But her actual participation is to show up at the end to harass Lo Lieh over some unclear grievance. She sics her zombie on him, which he defeats with ease. But then she hits Lo with something like a fire-spell, wounds him with a wire-weapon, and then just beats his ass with kung-fu, which Lo can't seem to counter. There's a quick voiceover about honor and duty, and then the film just ends, leading me to the conclusion that the witch-woman killed Lo. It wouldn't be the first time in a chopsocky that a hero died at the end, but viewers usually know what the hell he's dying for.

Only the sight of Lung beating up Lo Lieh gives this turkey even mild curiosity value. 

    

BRAIN ROBBERS FROM OUTER SPACE (2004)

 

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

Why would anyone make a schlock-movie tribute to PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE that lasts THREE AND A HALF HOURS, and why would anyone watch it? I can't answer the first question, but I have a partial answer to the second. In my case, I was looking for something mindless to play in the background while I worked on a fairly involved couple of blogposts. So I checked out the first few minutes of BRAIN ROBBERS FROM OUTER SPACE, whose title is a callout to PLAN's unused original title, "Grave Robbers from Outer Space. As soon as I heard director/co-writer Garland Hewitt trying to finesse his story of invading, zombie-making aliens with faux-learned references about HP Lovecraft, Aleister Crowley and the Illuminati, I knew I'd found my ideal timewaster.

I can also guess at the reason why Hewitt undertook the project: in the hope of garnering publicity for his career (which from looking at his credits on IMDB does not seem to have gone anywhere much). If one appreciates the degree of work it takes to put together just an average hour-and-half DTV flick, one has to give Hewitt some credit for persistence. The most detailed online review of this turkey asserts that Hewitt spent TEN YEARS compiling almost four hours of shot-on-video scenes with amateur actors, while IMDB estimates that his budget might have been about a thousand bucks. IMDB also carries a publicity line about how all of the assorted "actors" had "one degree of" links to Ed Wood. More like "one degree of links to COPS." That's what ROBBERS looks like; endless scenes of people sitting around tacky houses or trailers having meaningless conversations, occasionally interrupted by aliens, who also have a lot of meaningless conversations. The very tenuous connections to PLAN are that (a) head alien Morphea, who seems to be a fellow in drag, claims to be the granddaughter of the original two aliens, and that she's again reviving corpses in order to conquer Earth, and (b) one of the humans opposing Morphea is supposed to be an older version of "Officer Jamey," a support-character from PLAN. He's played by the only professional actor in the troupe, Conrad Brooks, who turned his reputation for having been in six Ed Wood movies into a long-term career of "so-bad-they-might-be-good" DTV movies. To say that he's the best actor in this movie, though, is no compliment. Brooks had about as much competition from the other players as he did from pieces of inanimate furniture.

Here the highlights that I bothered to scribble down:

At one point, some fishermen find a canister on a downed flying saucer. They take the canister for examination to a scientist, who analyzed it with what sounded like a "morphic resonance" machine. Hey, it's one thing to pick on the long-dead Aleister Crowley, but Rupert Sheldrake is still alive!

Since Hewitt must've felt the film needed someone to be his sequel's "Vampira," Morphea takes it into her head to change an ordinary Earth-girl named Lilith (Lara Stewart) into a bloodsucker. This she does with some mumbo-jumbo about a serpentine spirit related (I think) to the Lilith of Jewish legend. Later this action bites Morphea (is her name another Sheldrake reference?) in the ass because Lilith turns on the head alien, beats her down and kills her near the climax.

Aged Officer Jamey (who has in his house a framed photo of a younger Brooks with Bela Lugosi) is joined by various forgettable allies, one being a young policewoman, Mary (Raye Ramsey), whose big scene consists of bitch-slapping some guy-- which was more action that we get from all the desultory zombie-killing moments.

A gypsy fortuneteller utters lines from both THE WOLF MAN and GLEN AND GLENDA.

And finally, Hewitt tries to come up with a few Wood-like malapropisms, the chief one being, "prostitution may be the world's oldest profession, but grave robbing probably runs a close second."

But in truth, Hewitt's homage has nearly nothing in common with the oeuvre of Ed Wood. Wood had a fetish about female clothing and was only able to grind out his dimestore movies thanks to a cast of eccentrics. But in truth his most famous works are very "Hollywood" in the TYPE of stories he told, as opposed to his ability to tell them. To be sure, I've seen none of Wood's porno work, but it looks to me like he did those films to pay his bills, and that he'd much rather have been directing B-westerns. If Hewitt's messterpiece resembles any low-budget auteur's movies, ROBBERS resembles a much longer version of a Ray Dennis Steckler flick. But even this comparison fails to some extent, for the partisans of Steckler (not me) sometimes argue that all the people in his films look like they're having a good time with their schlock. Maybe that was true of the multitudinous members of the ROBBERS cast, or at least of a few, like the two dudes aping the Tarantino hitmen from PULP FICTION. But if so, the performers don't transmit any of their glee to the lens of the camera.                                     

        

LUPIN III: STEAL NAPOLEON'S DICTIONARY! (1991)

 

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

For a LUPIN III TV special, DICTIONARY certainly has an interesting angle. It's one thing to begin with the premise that the family of Lupin has rumored to have hidden away some fabulous lost treasure. From this notion stems the inventive development that several world powers decide that they're going to hijack the treasure to solve their fiscal problems. (The dialogue doesn't mention that this is a reversal of the usual situation, where the Lupin gang is usually stealing from the powerful and the prosperous.) And the key to finding the rumored bounty is Napoleon's dictionary, which only became a part of history because the ruler supposedly said, "The word 'impossible' is not in my dictionary."

I don't remember how the world powers learn that the dictionary contains a treasure-clue, but even Lupin III doesn't know where it is, until a novelty car-race offers the item as a first prize. Since all the cars in the race have to be antique restorations, Lupin promptly rigs up an old flivver with special technology-- including the power of flight-- and takes part in the race, accompanied by a reluctant Jigen and later, a Goemon who unleashes his super-samurai skills in the name of "duty." (Duty as a thief?) The dogged Zenigata knows that Lupin will seek to win the race, so he too acquires an old car to participate, accompanied by Chieko Kano, a pretty young Japanese intelligence agent. Also joining the race is flirtatious Fujiko, though initially she seemed more concerned with seducing a handsome young millionaire racer-- at least until she decides she might make more dough by cutting in on Lupin's big score. Assorted agents of the world powers make the scene, though they don't join the race and seem to act erratically, sometimes trying to capture Lupin to pick his brain, sometimes trying to kill him. One such effort involves the Americans sending a tracker-missile to wipe out Lupin and Jigen, which the crooks only escape thanks to Lupin converting his car into a submarine and hiding from the missile in a lake.

The covetous agents are not particularly strong villains, but this allows the story to devote a lot more time to the comically obsessed Zenigata. He briefly captures his quarry, but disguise-master Lupin not only assumes the cop's likeness but makes up Zenigata to look like himself. This eventuates in one comic scene where the beleaguered cop has to pretend to be Lupin while in the company of Lupin's gang-members, and also an interlude in which "Zenigata" spends time in the company of Chieko. Unlike Zenigata, who's totally devoted to his quest for capturing super-thieves, Chieko has begun to have doubts about her dedication to serving a faceless intelligence agency. By the movie's end, Chieko does decide, with Lupin's help, to give up law enforcement, which decision stands in contrast to Goemon's dedication to peerless lawbreaking.

Goemon's big sword-feat here involves being attacked by several small tracker-missiles, which he carves up like sashimi. This LUPIN emphasizes comedy more than adventure, particularly in the revelation of the nature of the "treasure."

                                    

THE BLACK BELLY OF THE TARANTULA (1971)

 

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

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

Here we have another giallo with an animal-name, testifying to a minor Argento influence on director Paulo Cavara. Cavara's only well-known giallo (this being the better known of two) lacks Argento's focus upon seamy psychology and aesthetic murder-scenarios, and often Cavara's pace has more resemblance to fast-paced polizitteschis. 

World-weary police inspector Tellini (Giancarlo Giannini) is thinking about a career change, maybe one that would allow him more time with his sexy wife Anna (Stefania Sandrelli). Then a serial killer with a unique murder-pattern gets dropped in Tellini's lap. Beautiful women with no known social connections begin dying at the hand of a madman who's unusually sadistic. The killer utilizes a special poison derived from that of a tarantula hawk-wasp: venom with which the wasp paralyzes a spider in order to lay its eggs in the spider's flesh. Used on the madman's victims, the venom paralyzes them so that they remain conscious as the killer eviscerates them.

Tellini isn't intellectually intrigued by the murders as some detectives might be, and indeed, despite his training he seems disgusted by the case. And after the maniac has preyed upon such victims as Barbara Bouchet and Barbara Bach-- he decides to go after the inspector's wife as well.

Though the killer's method is very inventive, and he's the star of the story as the murderer usually is in such dramas, TARANTULA is noteworthy for the ambivalent ending (that's why the SPOILER warning is there). In short, Tellini finds the madman, and after a violent battle-- simply kills him. Cavara's last shot is of the guilty officer leaving the scene of the murder and disappearing into a crowd of regular citizens. The strong implication is that Tellini will get away with the crime, but whether he regrets playing executioner, the viewer can only guess. Not many ambivalent conclusions work well in the giallo subgenre, but Cavara's is one of the best.

        

    

QUEEN OF OUTER SPACE (1958)

 

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

The phrase "tongue in cheek" not infrequently comes up in reviews of QUEEN OF OUTER SPACE. But no matter how many tongues are lodged in how many cheeks, QUEEN's not a comedy because it isn't structured around the production of jokes and funny situations. Despite all the risible elements of the movie-- not least the presence of top-billed Zsa Zsa Gabor, the Venusian with a Hungarian accent-- the plot is structured like a drama. The essence of the story is yet another reprise of the War Between Men and Women, in which the men win the contest by killing a monstrous incarnation of femininity.

The usual backstory routine: Ben Hecht, writer of many Classic Hollywood movies, either composed or inspired a ten-page treatment about a planet ruled by inept females. Allied Artists bought the treatment for one of their low-budget sci-fi productions, such as 1956's WORLD WITHOUT END, as well as hiring that movie's director, Edward Bernds, for QUEEN. The credited screenwriter was Charles Beaumont, who has scored some success in SF-magazines but in 1958 had only successfully sold three television scripts before this job. What Beaumont and any uncredited collaborators produced was almost certainly compromised by QUEEN's low budget, recycling costumes and props from three or four other SF films, including a giant spider-puppet from WORLD WITHOUT END. 

Though Beaumont had yet to make his Hollywood bones, he does establish his gender-conflict fairly clearly in the opening scenes, at least as well as the best-known "babes in space" movie of the 1950s, CAT WOMEN OF THE MOON. Unlike that 1953 flick, QUEEN's space voyage is manned by an all-male team of four astronauts. Three of them, Captain Patterson (Eric Fleming) and two other young guys named Mike and Larry, express a desire to take on an exploratory mission in space, but they're obliged to do a "milk run" to an orbiting space station, escorting its architect Prof. Konrad (Paul Birch) to that destination. Even being told that they're to investigate anomalous signals to the station doesn't satisfy these seekers of glory, none of whom have any strong ties to females of the species (though Larry is constantly portrayed as the facile ladies' man of the bunch.)

However, when their spaceship approaches the station, a mysterious ray destroys the orbital and everyone aboard. Patterson and his three-men crew seek to avoid the ray, but it must not be the same one, for the ship is transported all the way to a jungle-planet. Despite an initial sighting of snow-- poetically described as "angel's hair"-- the four astronauts find that both atmosphere and gravity allow them to leave the ship and wander through a potted-plant jungle. Konrad theorizes that they've reached Venus, even though it doesn't look anything like established theories about the planet's nature.

Beaumont doesn't waste time on the discrepancy, for the viewer instantly gets proof that the planet MUST be Venus, since the guys are taken prisoner by a gaggle of love-goddesses. Okay, they're just a lot of cute girls in short skirts, but they're armed with disintegrator rays, so the guys have to go along. The astronauts see no men of any age (or women who are extremely old or young), and a tribunal headed by mask-wearing Queen Yllana (Laurie Mitchell) accuses the Earthmen of plotting an invasion of Venus. Yllana announces that the men are to be executed, but then she simply has them confined in some room together.

While under "cathouse arrest," the Earthmen meet Talleah (Gabor), allegedly a scientist, though she never says anything remotely technical. She gives the guys a quick and dirty summary of Venusian history. Ten years ago, Venus engaged in a war with another planet (whose name sounded like "Mordor"). Venus won, but the planet suffered radiation bombardments. Yllana and her all-female coterie somehow overthrew all the Venusian males and exiled them to a neighboring "satellite." Yllana and her allies are apparently fine with never enjoying male company again, but Talleah has assembled a gang of rebels planning to end the Queen's rule. Also, the Earth-guys learn that Yllana is responsible for blowing up the space station, and that she plans to do the same to the planet Earth.

However, everyone thinks that Patterson ought to try making out with Mask Maiden, so he vows to take one for the team. Unfortunately, Yllana takes off her mask and reveals that her real reason for hating men is because nuclear radiation ravaged her facial features (though the rest of her is perfectly fine). She wants to make an exception of Patterson, so that he becomes her consort on Venus. But not only does the captain have "butterface" issues, he's already got the come-hither from Talleah, so he turns Yllana down.

One might think that Yllana now has no reason to keep any of the Earth-dudes, and I don't think she even says anything about letting them live long enough to watch Earth die. Bernds must have insisted on re-using his damn fake spider from WWE, because the Earthmen briefly escape with Talleah and a couple of random girl-buddies, but only long enough for Mike to get attacked by, and saved from, the unconvincing arachnid. So Talleah fakes apprehending the fugitives and takes them back to their previous set. Beaumont kills a little more time by having Patterson capture Yllana and letting Talleah don the Queen's mask to impersonate her-- but this gambit also fails. Yllana escorts all of her enemies to the site of the long-range disintegrator ray, which looks like a giant easy-bake oven. Then Yllana presses what she calls a "red button" (actually black) -- and the machine simply doesn't work. Talleah's rebels attack Yllana's guards in a half-hearted battle, while Yllana runs inside the machine to make it work. Instead, the ray-machine blows up and finishes off the Ugly Duckling. Talleah becomes queen and orders the return of Venusian men from exile. The world has been safe for the return of heterosexual coitus, so the astronauts conveniently receive orders that they can stay on Venus for at least a year of humping.

Beaumont's best movie/TV work was ahead of him. But though he crafted a sloppy script, that's probably helped the movie in its claim to "so bad it's good" status. Ironically, there are some major tropes in QUEEN that could have made for a decent formula-movie, along the lines of Bernds' equally cheap WORLD WITHOUT END-- and not just the trope of the male-female war. Yllana "coulda been a contender" for good villainy, given that she holds warring males responsible for her disfigurement, and thus for her exclusion from hetero happiness. During Talleah's mask-masquerade, Patterson comments that she could be Yllana's "twin sister" (despite the accent), and the idea of heroes and villains mirroring each other is another rich trope, even though you'd have to make Talleah interesting for the trope to work at all. It's interesting that Patterson refers to the ship's attackers as "deadly neighbors," and what better justifies regime-change than finding out that your neighbors are already plotting against you? But all of QUEEN's tropes are as stillborn babes. Zsa Zsa wouldn't have been selected for a good script at all, so her casting is another of the movie's "tongue-in-cheek" aspects. And wouldn't most actors prefer to be known for a notorious dog than for an efficient formula-film remembered only by a small coterie of nerds?

    

                        

 

LUPIN III: TACTICS OF ANGELS (2005)

 

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

I'm by no means a Lupin III expert, even where the animated films are concerned. But it's pretty evident to most of the feature films/TV specials usually involve three groups in conflict. The primary conflict is most often the Lupin Gang of superlative thieves with some other criminal gang, who are always more ignoble and destructive than the "honest thieves," and there's a secondary conflict in which Inspector Zenigata, accompanied by whatever law-enforcement agents he can draft, pursues the Lupin Gang but has to be satisfied with the defeated villains Lupin has left behind. It's a corollary tendency that if Fujiko Mine sees any advantage in betraying the gang to the villains, she usually will, but she always gets welcomed back to the fold when the evil guys seek to off her.

TACTICS starts out like a lot of Lupin adventures (though overall this TV special has better comedic elements than many of the others). Zenigata has received a challenge from Lupin to the effect that the master thief's going to raid the US installation Area 51. As Zenigata learns from head scientist Emily, the installation holds a bonafide alien artifact, a sphere called "The Original Metal," apparently because it's so hard nothing can cut it. Lupin and his associates succeed swimmingly. Jigen and Goemon are disgusted, however, when Lupin informs that he didn't steal the artifact in order to fence it and make a lot of cash. He plans to turn the metal of the sphere into a unique finger-ring for Fujiko, the better to steal her heart. Unfortunately for Lupin, not even Goemon's peerless samurai blade can cut the metal, and Goemon must leave to seek some way to repair his chipped sword. So then Lupin begins trying to figure out some way to penetrate the metal-- though even at the movie's end, it's not a sure thing that Lupin really intended just to make the Original Metal into a ring for Fujiko.

But other forces also want the Metal. The viewer meets "The Bloody Angels" before the Lupin Gang does, as this all-female fighting force practices for the coming conflict by killing four fighters dressed up like Lupin's people. The four Angels are Lady Jo (a kung fu expert who usually dresses up as a man), Poison Sophie (a poisons expert), Bomber Lily (an expert in both explosives and stage magic), and Kaoru (a samurai whose skills are a close match to Goemon's). The Bloody Angels (whose name always sounds like that of the "Lovely Angels" of the DIRTY PAIR franchise) seek to find out which of the gang has the metal sphere. But clever Lupin has made copies, so that not even devious Fujiko can be sure of stealing the right object when she tries to sell it to Lady Jo, who almost kills Fujiko.

The four main Angels, who are the forefront of an all-female army, provide the gang with good opposition, but the best comes from Kaoru, whose sword Goemon believed to be "cursed." It's not certain whether this is the case or not, but if so it would be a very rare instance of the supernatural existing in Lupin's sci-fi world. Because Goemon's sword was chipped by contact with Original Metal, he even has to flee Kaoru in the first encounter, though of course the second face-off turns out very differently. Lupin is faced with an intriguing puzzle: if no Earthly force can scrape off a shard of the sphere, what good is it to the Angels, or to any foreign government they might sell it to? As it happens, there is a good solution to this puzzle, which involves using the sphere in conjunction with something else to create a death-ray that no government should be trusted with.

Though the Angels are initially portrayed as terrorists, one of them, Sophie, claims to have an altruistic reason to want the sphere. Since she becomes somewhat simpatico with Lupin during their clashes, she reveals to Lupin that she carries a major grudge against the US due to having lost her brother, a member of the US military forces, due to incompetent commanders. It's rare for stories in the LUPIN canon to be very critical specifically of US practices, given that America is a big market for the franchise. At the same time, Sophie's grudge is loosely demonstrated to be sophistry in that she believes she can built a new, better country out of the ashes of devastation-- something Lupin opposes for purely practical reasons. Then Sophie is killed by one of her own, and the gang has no further sympathies for the other three angels or their small army of lady soldiers.

TACTICS is certainly one of the bloodiest productions in this franchise that I've seen, with lots of characters getting shot or sliced up. The animators don't linger upon the after-effects of the violence, but the carnage is a real factor in giving TACTICS a harder edge than many similar works-- though, oddly, it's also one of the funniest LUPINs in my experience. The viewer never learns anything about the ET science that formed the sphere, and no aliens make the scene. But there's a stronger sociological theme here than in most LUPINs. (Also, Fujiko does get a chance to be more of an action-girl than in many other productions.)